Jonathan Greenblatt Biography

Jonathan Greenblatt is a serial social entrepreneur and successful corporate executive, a member of the faculty at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, and an acknowledged thought leader on corporate social responsibility, ethical branding and social entrepreneurship.

Greenblatt is president and a board member of Our Good Works, the nonprofit organization responsible for All for Good. All for Good is the open source, web based platform developed to enable American to serve. Greenblatt started the project during his service on the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team in December 2008. The product was built by a dedicated group of volunteers from Google, Craigslist Foundation and a range of other organizations. It is supported by a coalition of companies and nonprofits who are committed to a shared vision of increasing the number of Americans that participate in service and volunteerism.

Jonathan formerly served as CEO of GOOD Worldwide where he oversaw its growth from a magazine publishing company into a diversified media company and lifestyle brand. Founded in 2006, GOOD creates media at the intersection of entertainment and relevance. Its products currently include the award-winning print title, GOOD Magazine; GOOD.Is, an online destination updated daily with fresh editorial and short-form video features; and a series of custom publishing products including The GOOD Sheet distributed exclusively in Starbucks locations across the US.

Prior to his appointment to GOOD, Greenblatt co-founded Ethos Brands, the business that launched Ethos Water, the premium bottled water that helps children around the world get clean water. In 2005, Starbucks Coffee Company acquired Ethos Water, making it one of only a handful of non-coffee businesses the company has purchased in its 30-plus year history. Greenblatt served as vice president of consumer products, scaling Ethos through more than 6,000 Starbucks stores across the US. Greenblatt also co-founded Ethos International, the nonprofit arm of Ethos, and served on the board of directors of the Starbucks Foundation where he developed Ethos' global investment strategy that has invested millions of dollars to bring clean water to communities in need around the world, including Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Honduras, India, and Kenya.

A former government official specializing in international economics, Greenblatt recently served on the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform Working Group of the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team. In this role, he helped to shape the agenda for the incoming Administration on issues related to civic engagement, national service and social entrepreneurship. He also served as an aide in the Clinton White House and US Department of Commerce, focusing on economics and commercial trends in emerging markets in Asia and Latin America as well as post-conflict economies. This work took him around the world where he saw firsthand the world water crisis and how this issue impacts the lives of millions of people in the developing world. Before joining the Clinton Administration, Greenblatt worked in Little Rock, Ark. on Gov. Bill Clinton's first successful presidential campaign in 1992.

Along with his public service and work in private industry, Greenblatt has been an innovator in the non-profit sector. He has served as a senior advisor on global development and water issues to international institutions and nonprofit organizations. He developed the strategy for the United Nations Foundation's Global Water Challenge, the landmark cross-sector initiative developed to create interdisciplinary models to address the global water and sanitation crisis. He also led the effort to design a worldwide prize to break the cycle of global poverty for the X PRIZE Foundation, the leading nonprofit organization in the world specializing in prize philanthropy. In this work, Jonathan focused the on the design of a global competition that would inspire teams to create sustainable delivery of essential services such as power and water to isolated and impoverished communities.

Greenblatt participates on several corporate and nonprofit boards, including RESTORE Products, the African Leadership Foundation, KaBOOM!, and water.org. Greenblatt was appointed to the UNICEF Global Water and Sanitation Task Force in 2006 and serves as chairman of the Equitable Globalization Committee of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Greenblatt can be found on Twitter and in the blogosphere where he serves as a contributor to the award-winning blog, Worldchanging.com and writes regularly for The Huffington Post, SocialEdge, USAService, and others. He has been interviewed and profiled in diverse media including Business Week, Chicago Tribune, Conde Nast Portfolio, Investor's Business Daily, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Business Journal, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, The New York Times, TechCrunch, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. He recently co-hosted Collaboration Now, a CNBC special on corporate social responsibility, with television personality Donnie Deutsche.

Greenblatt is a member of the faculty at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA where he developed and currently teaches coursework on social entrepreneurship. A frequent speaker on issues of branding and sustainability, Greenblatt has delivered remarks at numerous high-profile events including the 2006 Aspen Ideas Festival; the 2007 Social Entrepreneur Summit of the World Economic Forum; the 2007 Hilton Foundation Humanitarian Symposium, the 2008 PUSH the Future conference, the 2008 Sustainable Brands International Conference, and the 2009 MIT/Caltech Enterprise Forum.

Greenblatt earned a Master of Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Arts cum laude from Tufts University.

He lives with his family in Los Angeles, Calif. He is a proud member of Red Sox Nation (West) and considers his greatest professional achievement to be his work as an umpire for the 1989 Little League World Champions who hailed from his hometown of Trumbull, Connecticut.

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