Directors

Paul Sagan, Chair

Paul Sagan is a senior advisor to and an executive in residence (XIR) at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm, where he served previously as a managing director until July 2020.

He was elected chair of our board effective Jan. 1, 2017, succeeding the late Herbert Sandler, our founding chair.

Mr. Sagan is also a director of two public companies, VMware Inc. and Moderna, Inc., as well as several private businesses.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Sagan worked at Akamai Technologies, Inc., a company he joined as employee #15 and chief operating officer in 1998, and then became its president in 1999. He was appointed CEO and elected to the Akamai board of directors in 2005. He served as chief executive through 2012 and as a director until 2019.

Mr. Sagan also served as senior advisor to the World Economic Forum from 1997 to 1998. In 1995, Mr. Sagan was named president and editor of new media at Time Inc., a division of Time Warner, Previously, he served as managing editor of Time Warner’s News on Demand project and was a senior member of the team responsible for the development of the company’s online business activities. He was a founder of Road Runner, the world’s first broadband cable modem service, and Pathfinder, one of the early Web properties that pioneered Internet advertising.

Mr. Sagan joined Time Warner in 1991 as senior vice president of cable programming to design and launch NY 1 News, the cable news network based in New York City. His career began in broadcast television news. He joined WCBS-TV in 1981 as a news writer and was named news director in 1987.

President Obama appointed Mr. Sagan to the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee in 2010, and he served until January 2017. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker appointed Mr. Sagan to chair the Commonwealth’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from 2015 until 2019.

He is a three-time Emmy Award winner for broadcast journalism in New York, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008, and the 2009 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the technology category. The World Economic Forum named him a Global Leader for Tomorrow in 1996.

Mr. Sagan is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He was a member of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

Claire Bernard

Claire Bernard is the President of the Mariposa Foundation, a private family foundation. She oversees grant making and operations, supervises the endowment’s investments, and is a Mariposa trustee. The foundation gives anonymously, concentrating on humanitarian, environmental, and New York City organizations. Claire’s dedication to better serving grantees has led her to conduct site visits around the world, including such places as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, Bangladesh, Liberia, and Colombia. Nationally, she has worked closely with those affected by Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and Hurricane Sandy. Claire speaks and writes about the nonprofit world and has written for Vogue, The Huffington Post, and Vanity Fair, where she had a column on vanityfair.com sharing 1-Click tips of how readers can get involved and detailing her visits to mountaintop mining removal sites in Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill site, and lobbying in D.C.

Claire has been a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) since 2013, where she chairs the Development committee and serves on the Executive, Finance, Investment, and Governance and Nominating committees. She has also served on International Rescue Committee's Children's Committee, the Global Fund for Women's Philanthropy Committee, the advisory board of Narrative Magazine, the Friends Committee of New Yorkers for Children, and most recently as an Oxfam GB Ambassador and their Programme Review Board.

Claire received a BA with honors from Brown University and holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary research across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts and professions. She is also the Daniel P.S. Paul professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a professor of history at Harvard University.

An award-winning legal historian and an expert in constitutional law and education law and policy, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute and the American Philosophical Society; a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Brown-Nagin has published articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, including the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence, civil rights law and history, the Affordable Care Act and education reform. As a frequent lecturer and media commentator, she is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine.

Brown-Nagin’s latest book, “Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality” (Pantheon, 2022), explores the life and times of the pathbreaking lawyer, politician, and judge. Her 2011 book, “Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement” (Oxford), won the Bancroft Prize in U.S. History, among other honors.

In 2019, Brown-Nagin was appointed chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, which is anchored at the Radcliffe Institute. The Committee issued a landmark report detailing the University’s direct, financial and intellectual ties to slavery, which resulted in the Harvard Corporation’s allocation of $100 million to redress harms to descendant communities in the United States and in the Caribbean.

Mark Colodny

Mark M. Colodny is the co-head of U.S. Private Equity, the Head of the Technology Group and a member of the Executive Management Group of Warburg Pincus.

Mr. Colodny began his career at Fortune Magazine, where he was a journalist. Prior to joining Warburg Pincus in 2001, Mr. Colodny served as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Primedia from 1995 to 2000, where he ran the Mergers and Acquisitions Group. Mr. Colodny is a member of the board of directors of Helix, ProPublica, and The City, and is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Colodny received a B.A. from Harvard College, an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Steve Daetz

Steve Daetz is the President of the Sandler Foundation. He has overseen grantmaking, operations and investments for the Foundation since 2007. He previously was vice president and deputy general counsel at Golden West Financial, advising the Board and senior management on corporate and securities matters, regulatory compliance, and governance and public policy issues. He earlier had a business law practice at the San Francisco law firm Cooley Godward, representing companies and venture investors in strategic and financing transactions. A Bay Area native, Mr. Daetz received a JD from Berkeley Law, a masters from the London School of Economics as a Rotary Foundation scholar, and a BA magna cum laude from UCLA. He has served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations.

Angela Filo

Angela Filo co-founded and leads Yellow Chair Foundation, a family foundation established in 2000 that gives grants in the areas of civil liberties, public interest journalism, climate change, educational equity, global women’s movements, and US maternal health.

Angela is an advisory board member of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she is an alum. Her photography projects examine how economic cycles transform the landscape and are in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and have been exhibited there and in other museums, galleries and public art installations.

For almost a decade she taught journalism and photography at Eastside College Preparatory School, in East Palo Alto, California. Previously she worked for nonprofits focused on women’s issues and was an intern at Ms. magazine.

Angela serves on the Board of Trustees of Stanford University and on the Stanford Graduate School of Education Advisory Board. She currently co-chairs the American Civil Liberties Union’s national centennial campaign and is a former board member of the Student Press Law Center and the YWCA of the USA.

Anu Khosla

Anu Khosla is a brand strategist and next generation philanthropist who marries analytical thinking and science literacy with empathy-driven decision making to drive social impact. Anu is committed to addressing inequality and strengthening civil society through her work. She holds a BA in Human Biology with a concentration in Global and Public Health from Stanford University and a MPS in Branding from the School of Visual Arts, where she was a recipient of the 2016 Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for Exceptional Achievement in Branding.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-four books and created twenty documentary films, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Faces of America, Black in Latin America, Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise, Africa’s Great Civilizations, and Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy series now in its fifth season on PBS. His six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award. Professor Gates’s latest project is the history series, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War (PBS, 2019), and the related books, Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow, with Tonya Bolden (Scholastic, 2019), and Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Random House, 2019).

Having written for such leading publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time, Professor Gates serves as chairman of TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine he co-founded in 2008, and chair of the Creative Board of FUSION TV. He oversees the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field, and has received grant funding to develop a Finding Your Roots curriculum to teach students science through genetics and genealogy. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published.

The recipient of fifty-five honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He was named to Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans list in 1997, to Ebony’s Power 150 list in 2009, and to Ebony’s Power 100 list in 2010 and 2012. He earned his B.A. in English Language and Literature, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979. In 2018, he was one of 15 alumni of African descent honored in the exhibition, Black Cantabs: History Makers, at the Cambridge University Library. Professor Gates has directed the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research—now the Hutchins Center—since arriving at Harvard in 1991, and during his first fifteen years on campus, he chaired the Department of Afro-American Studies as it expanded into the Department of African and African American Studies with a full-fledged doctoral program. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and the Brookings Institution. In 2017, the Organization of American States named Gates a Goodwill Ambassador for the Rights of People of African Descent in the Americas.

Carrie Lozano

Carrie Lozano is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. As director of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film and Artist Programs, she helps serve hundreds of filmmakers each year with funding, labs, fellowships and intensive artist support.

Prior to Sundance, she designed and directed the International Documentary Association’s Enterprise Documentary Fund, where she supported filmmakers with funds and professional development on projects at the intersection of documentary and journalism, including “Welcome To Chechnya,” “A Thousand Cuts,” “Through the Night,” “Always In Season” and “One Child Nation.” At IDA, she also led the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund, which supports U.S.-focused social issue and environmental justice films.

Lozano was previously a documentary executive at Al Jazeera America and a senior producer of the network’s investigative series “Fault Lines,” where her team garnered numerous honors including an Emmy, a Peabody and several Headliner Awards. Lozano also led BAVC Media’s MediaMaker Fellowship and was a lecturer in the Documentary Program at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Among other work, she produced the Academy Award-nominated documentary “The Weather Underground,” the live cinema piece “Utopia In Four Movements” and produced, directed and edited the Teddy Award nominee “Reporter Zero.” Her most recent film, the 2016 documentary “The Ballad of Fred Hersch,” is a portrait of one of today’s foremost jazz pianists. Lozano serves on the advisory boards of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and PBS Frontline, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Claire Hoffman

Claire Hoffman works as a magazine writer living in Los Angeles, writing for national magazines, covering culture, religion, celebrity, business and whatever else seems interesting. She was formerly a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a freelance reporter for the New York Times.

She has a masters degree in religion from the University of Chicago, and a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University. She serves on the board of her family foundation, the Goldhirsh Foundation, as well as the Columbia Journalism School. Claire is a native Iowan and has been meditating since she was three years old.

Katie McGrath

Katie McGrath is Co-CEO and Chief Strategy Officer at Bad Robot Productions. She oversees the company’s corporate culture, philanthropy, communications and ancillary businesses. Prior to joining Bad Robot, Katie was a founding Partner at First Tuesday Media, a political media firm based in Los Angeles. Earlier, she served as Director of Communications at MTV Networks and as Vice President at the strategic communications consulting firm Robinson Lerer Sawyer Miller. Katie began her professional career in Washington, D.C. as a legislative assistant to Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Katie and her husband, JJ Abrams, and three children live in Los Angeles.

Bobby Monks

Robert C.S. Monks is a serial entrepreneur and real estate developer who has founded, led, and grown 19 businesses in the financial services, real estate, technology, and communication sectors. He is highly regarded for creating strategic partnerships that promote shared ownership and tether profitability to economic and social development in communities across the country. Mr. Monks is a proponent of the belief that active ownership is the key to successful ventures.

In 2011, Mr. Monks became an owner and Chairman of Spinnaker Trust, a Maine based trust company managing over $1 billion in assets. Spinnaker Trust provides personalized and integrated financial services primarily to high net worth families, individuals, and private foundations. Spinnaker Trust’s mission is to deliver first class stewardship and wealth enhancement strategies with a global perspective.

From 2001 to 2007, Mr. Monks was Chairman of Institutional Shareholder Services, the world’s leading provider of proxy voting and corporate governance services. With more than 1,000 institutional and corporate clients, the company analyzes proxies and produces research and objective vote recommendations and handles electronic voting for more than 28,000 companies across 102 markets worldwide.

Mr. Monks currently serves on the boards of Maine Today Media, T3i, Mediant Communications, Maine Fiber Company, Spinnaker Trust, and the Black Point Corporation. He is also a founder and owner of the Eagle Point Companies, Dirigo Management Company, Monks O’Neil Development, The Signal Group, Maine Workforce Housing, and Headwater Capital Management. He was previously a founder and Director of Atlantic Bank.

Mr. Monks serves and has served on many non-profit boards including: Maine Center for Creativity, University of Southern Maine School of Business, Maine for Obama Steering and Finance Committee, Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Natural Resources Council of Maine, Maine Employers Mutual Insurance Company, Children’s Museum of Maine, Spurwink Foundation, Waynflete School, and the Portland Performing Arts Center.

Ronald Olson

Ronald L. Olson is a name partner of Munger, Tolles & Olson whose practice involves a combination of litigation and corporate counseling. Mr. Olson counsels individual executives and boards of directors in a wide range of matters, including transactions and corporate governance. He has also been the lead partner in numerous high-profile litigation matters. Mr. Olson is ranked among Chambers USA’s Senior Statesmen in California litigation.

Mr. Olson is a director of Berkshire Hathaway and Western Asset Trusts. He serves as a director of several nonprofits, including the California Institute of Technology. He was chairman of the American Bar Association’s Litigation Section (1981-1982) and the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary (1991-1992). He was also chairman of the board of trustees of Claremont University Center and Graduate School (1984-1994), founding chairman of the board of trustees of Southern California Public Radio (1999-2004), a trustee of the Mayo Clinic (2004-2016), a trustee of the RAND Corporation (1994-2016 and formerly chair), a director of Edison International (1995-2014), a director of City National Corporation (2001-2014), a director of Graham Holdings Company, formerly the Washington Post Company (2203-2017) and a director of the Council on Foreign Relations (2002-2010).

Mr. Olson received his B.S. degree from Drake University in 1963, his J.D. from the University of Michigan in 1966 and a Diploma in Law from Oxford University, England, in 1967, at which time he was the recipient of a Ford Foundation fellowship.

James M. Stone

James M. Stone was educated in the public schools of Pelham, New York, and at Harvard University. At Harvard, Mr. Stone received The Allyn Young Prize for the best undergraduate economics thesis and the Goldsmith Prize for the best research paper presented to the Graduate School in Economics. He graduated with Highest Honors in economics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1969. Mr. Stone received his Ph.D. in economics in 1973 and was appointed Lecturer in Economics by the Harvard faculty, teaching a course on the economics of securities markets.

In 1975, Mr. Stone was appointed by Gov. Michael Dukakis to be the commissioner of insurance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Mr. Stone served in that position for four years. Mr. Stone was appointed chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. The CFTC is the federal agency vested with principal regulatory jurisdiction over derivatives trading in financial instruments and physical commodities.

In 1983, Mr. Stone concluded his term in Washington and returned to Boston, where he founded The Plymouth Rock Company. He currently serves as CEO of the Plymouth Rock group of insurance companies, with automobile and homeowners premium writings in excess of $1.2 billion annually. Mr. Stone was a co-founder of Cat Limited, a Bermuda-based reinsurer; a founder of Homesite Group, which writes home insurance nationally with annual premiums of over one billion dollars; and a founder of Response Insurance, a direct-to-the-consumer auto insurer. He is also a founding member of the Administrative Committee of Lindsay Goldberg, a New York-based private equity investment firm.

Mr. Stone served on the board of directors of The Boston Globe Newspaper Corporation from 1998 to 2006, and from 2012 to 2015 as vice chairman of Global Post, a web-based international news service. Mr. Stone served for 10 years as a director and chairman of the Board of Management Sciences for Health, a leading provider of humanitarian health infrastructure support in over 40 countries around the world. He is the chairman of the Academic Affairs and Commercial Relations Committees of the board of directors of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a nonprofit genetics institute; and he is the chairman of the School on the Move prize panel, which provides an annual cash award to the most improved Boston public school.

Mr. Stone is the author of “Five Easy Theses” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), and an earlier book on the securities industry, as well as numerous articles on insurance, finance and economics. He has served as an adviser to governments in three developing countries. Mr. Stone is married, with two children, and lives in Boston. He is a member of the Finance Committee and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a member of the Trust and the Finance Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Paul Steiger, Founder Emeritus

Paul E. Steiger was the founding editor-in-chief, CEO and president of ProPublica from 2008 through 2012, and part-time executive chairman from 2013 through 2020.

Steiger served as the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 2007. During his tenure, members of the Journal’s newsroom staff were awarded 16 Pulitzer Prizes. In addition, ProPublica reporters received Pulitzer Prizes in May 2010 and 2011.

He is a senior adviser to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, based in Arlington, Virginia, which provides free legal assistance to journalists. He was a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, based in Miami, that funds efforts to enhance journalism and the functioning of American communities. He is a board member and treasurer of the Global Editors Network, based in Paris. From 1999 to 2007, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, serving as its chairman in his final year. For six years, from June 2005 to June 2011, Steiger was the chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for press freedom around the globe.

Awards include the Columbia Journalism Award, the University of Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center, the Gerald Loeb Award for lifetime achievement from the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, the William Allen White National Citation from the University of Kansas's White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, the University of Arizona's John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Award, the Dean’s Medal for Distinguished Leadership from Brandeis University, the Fourth Estate Award from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the National Press Foundation’s George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award, the Decade of Excellence Award from the World Leadership Forum in London, the Freedom of the Press Award from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the American Society of News Editors Leadership Award.

Steiger worked for 15 years as a reporter, the Washington economics correspondent, and the business editor for the Los Angeles Times, and for 26 years as a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale University in 1964. In 2013 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Columbia University.

In Memoriam

Herbert Sandler, Founding Chairman

Mr. Sandler and his late wife, Marion, founded Golden West Financial Corporation in 1963. They were Golden West’s chief executive officers and chairmen of the board from 1963 until 2006, when the company was sold to Wachovia Corporation. Under the Sandlers’ leadership, Golden West became the second-largest thrift institution in the United States and was considered to be one of the best managed financial institutions in the country by many industry observers. Fortune magazine ranked Golden West as the nation’s most admired mortgage services company, and on seven separate occasions named Golden West America’s most admired savings institution. Morningstar, a leading provider of investment research, named the Sandlers CEOs of the Year in 2004. Mr. Sandler was president of the Sandler Foundation.

Journalism Advisory Board

Jill Abramson, Former Executive Editor, The New York Times

David Boardman, Dean, Temple University School of Media and Communications

Raymond T. Bonner, writer living in London

Robert A. Caro, historian and biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson

Sheila Coronel, Director, Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, Columbia Journalism School

L. Gordon Crovitz, Former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, partner, Journalism Online

David Gergen, Professor of public service, Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Center for Public Leadership

Tom Goldstein, Director, Media Studies Program, University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Isaac Lee, Executive Chairman, Exile Content Studio

Shawn McIntosh, Public Editor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Priscilla Painton, Executive Editor, Non-fiction, Simon & Schuster

David Shribman, Executive Editor Emeritus, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Allan Sloan, Senior Editor at Large, Fortune magazine

Kerry Smith, Senior Vice President for Editorial Quality, ABC News

Cynthia A. Tucker, Columnist, Universal Press Syndicate

ProPublica Leadership Council

Mark Colodny, Chair, Managing Director, Warburg Pincus LLC

Tim Andrews, President and CEO, Advertising Specialty Institute

Kelly Bavor, Educator and community volunteer

Dror Bar-Ziv, Managing Partner, Blue Sparrow Partners

Ann Blinkhorn, Founder, Blinkhorn LLC

Christopher DeLong, Principal, Taconic Capital Advisors LLC

Janice L. Feinberg, PharmD, JD, President, The Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation

William Gee, Director, Manaaki Foundation

Maria Gotsch, President & CEO, NYC Investment Fund

Michael Hansen, CEO, Cengage Learning

Joanna Stone Herman, Managing Director, DeSilva+Phillips

Sarah Kammerer, Principal, Nimbly LLC

William Pollak, CEO, Gordian Group

Lawrence Rand, Executive Chairman of Kekst and Company

Hugh Rogovy, Founder and President, The Rogovy Foundation

Michael Rothman, Co-founder and CEO, Fatherly

Bruce Sagan, Chairman of the management committee of the Hyde Park Herald Newspaper, Chicago