NEW YORK—The Open Society Foundations announced today that Georgia Levenson Keohane, a leading proponent of responsible investment strategies for social and environmental impact, will assume the role of chief executive of the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF) on November 14, 2022.
With over $400 million in investments around the world, SEDF is the impact investing arm of the Open Society Foundations, supporting private sector projects where it can catalyze transformative change in alignment with Open Society’s program priorities.
“Georgia joins us at a crucial moment when the meeting of mission and markets, as she so thoughtfully puts it, is growing more essential by the day,” said Mark Malloch-Brown, president of the Open Society Foundations. “She brings with her a lifetime of experience tackling challenging and complex problems and working with partners across the private and public sectors. This experience is invaluable as SEDF utilizes the power of the private sector to advance our priorities.”
Keohane has more than twenty years of leadership experience in the private and nonprofit sectors at the intersection of the capital markets, innovative philanthropy, responsible business and investing, and public policy. She has both led and advised private philanthropies on their impact investing strategies and worked with a range of public and private investors to develop both environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) investment policies.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City in 2020, Keohane was brought in by a group of finance industry executives to launch and oversee the Emergency Cash Assistance Program for New York City, an emergency relief fund and public-private partnership. The fund raised and distributed over $17 million to over 30,000 low-income New Yorkers facing difficulties due to the pandemic.
“I am immensely excited to be joining SEDF, whose investment approach is rooted in the principles of partnership that I have been working to promote for over two decades,” said Keohane. “At a time when we collectively face so many urgent challenges, from the climate crisis to ever-widening economic inequalities, I believe SEDF can fundamentally strengthen Open Society’s capacity to provide paradigms for progressive change.”
Keohane also teaches at Columbia Business School, where she hosts the Capital for Good podcast. She speaks and writes regularly on social and economic policy, philanthropy, stakeholder capitalism, and the role of business in society, and is the author of two award-winning books, Capital and the Common Good: How Innovative Finance is Tackling the World's Most Urgent Problems (2016) and Social Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century: Innovation Across the Nonprofit, Private and Public Sectors (2013).