Danielle Goonan, Managing Director, U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative, The Rockefeller Foundation
For fifteen years, Danielle Goonan’s work has been guided by the core goal of increasing pathways to opportunity for all Americans, improving the systems that serve them, and getting resources to communities that need them most to ensure meaningful and lasting change. Currently, she is the Managing Director of Economic Policy for The Rockefeller Foundation’s U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative (EEO) where she oversees a team of four that has invested ~$90 million in 3.5 years to reshape domestic state and federal economic policy to improve the lives of our low-wage workers. Most recently, Danielle was responsible for a philanthropic grant portfolio at the Walmart Foundation that focused on issues of employment technology, place-based systems change and employer practice change and served as an internal advisor to Walmart U.S’s People team. Danielle was an appointee of the Obama Administration where she led strategic partnerships for the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education. In this role, she worked with stakeholders in the corporate, labor and philanthropic sectors on behalf of the US Department of Education. She was also led the Clinton Global Initiative’s domestic education and skills development team with responsibilities that included managing the CGI U.S. Youth Employment Action Network in partnership with the Office of Secretary Clinton’s JobOne program, overseeing the strategy of CGI America’s education and skills Working Groups, and leading the growth of the workforce development portfolio of Commitments to Action.
Danielle sits on the Board of Humanity in Action (and was a 2009 Summer Fellow), the Forum for Youth Investment, and was a Fulbright Scholar to Italy where she had previously studied abroad. She serves on the Council on Foundation’s Public Policy Advisory Committee, the Steering Committee of the EITC Funders Network, and the Executive Committee of the Families and Workers Fund. She was on the Hillary for America Education Policy Working Group and a member of the Biden Victory Fund Young Professionals Finance Council.
She received her MSc in International Relations from the London School of Ecoomics and her undergraduate degree in American Studies summa cum laude from Dickinson College where she was a Posse Foundation Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.