Originally from Ethiopia, Yordanos Eyoel is a Managing Partner at New Profit and the founder of the organization’s Civic Lab, a leading nonpartisan initiative that invests in and grows innovative solutions building civic trust and a multiracial democracy in America.
As Managing Partner, Yordanos leads the vision, strategy, and management of New Profit’s Catalyze Investments portfolio. Under her leadership, the portfolio has grown 3x and has supported ~100 early-stage organizations. Eighty percent of the investments are in organizations led by social and democracy entrepreneurs of color.
After becoming a U.S. Citizen in 2016, Yordanos co-founded and served as the International Spokesperson of the Sister March Network that mobilized over 4 million people for the 2017 Women’s March. Yordanos has served as an Aspen Institute Women World Leaders Fellow in South Africa and a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar in Venezuela.
Yordanos’ work and writings have been featured in Fast Company, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, WBUR/NPR, and the book We the Possibility by Harvard Business Review among others. In 2019, Yordanos gave the Tedx talk, “Why voting isn’t Enough” to address the need for continued investment in our democracy to unlock our civic power and create a 21st century civil society.
Yordanos is the interim Board Chair of PushBlack, the largest nonprofit media organization for Black Americans and an Advisory Board member of the Institute for Contemporary Art Boston.
Yordanos holds a B.A. in Economics and Political Science, Honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Florida, where she was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame. She also has an M.P.P. in Business and Government Policy from Harvard Kennedy School.
A 2020 City of Boston Spark Impact Award winner, Yordanos is a Fellow Civil Society Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University.
