Nancy Roob is Founder and Executive Chair of Blue Meridian Partners.
As Executive Chair, Nancy oversees Blue Meridian’s board and advances the organization’s capital aggregation and strategic business development priorities in partnership with CEO Jim Shelton and the Board of Directors.
Nancy founded and served as CEO of Blue Meridian Partners from its start-up in 2016 until March 2025. Under Nancy’s leadership, Blue Meridian has become one of the largest philanthropic intermediaries advancing economic and social mobility in the United States. Its innovative partnership approach – bringing philanthropists together to aggregate resources, share risk, and achieve greater impact – has become a widely studied model for collaborative philanthropy.
Previously, Nancy was President and CEO of The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF), where she played a major role in developing and implementing a grantmaking strategy of large, long-term investments in building the organizational capacity and evidence base of nonprofits whose programs have the potential to lift the life prospects of greater numbers of America’s most disadvantaged youth.
She also pioneered a form of coordinated, collaborative investment, called growth capital aggregation, which in eight years leveraged $155 million of EMCF’s funds to help 16 grantees secure nearly $487 million in additional private and public funding. The lessons from this work led to the launch of Blue Meridian Partners in 2016, opening a new chapter in the evolution of this investment approach. (Nancy Roob and Chairman Stan Druckenmiller discussed Blue Meridian Partners in the Nonprofit Quarterly.) In 2017, Nancy spoke to TedX about her hope that Blue Meridian’s performance-based investments of up to $200 million will revolutionize giving and create “a new normal” for philanthropy. In 2021, Forbes included Nancy in its list of 50 women over the age of 50 who are forging a more innovative and inclusive financial future.
Before becoming EMCF President in 2005, Nancy was Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. Before that, she developed EMCF’s Program for New York Neighborhoods, which launched community-building and neighborhood-stabilization projects in the South Bronx and Central Harlem. One of the projects this program supported evolved into the Harlem Children’s Zone, whose success has inspired legislation to create “Promise Neighborhoods” throughout the nation.
Before she joined EMCF, Nancy worked for the Boston Persistent Poverty Project, a program of the Rockefeller and Boston foundations; the Fund for the Homeless, a project of the Boston Foundation; and the Child Care Resource and Referral Center, also in Boston.
Nancy is a graduate and trustee of Hamilton College and holds a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.