Seen & Heard
THERESA ELLIS connects nonprofits with corporate talent.
While serving on the board of Literacy Volunteers of America in the late 1990s, Ellis watched operations improve dramatically after a friend volunteered to design a database for the organization. Convinced that other nonprofits would benefit from similar volunteer efforts of civic-minded professionals, Ellis founded Common Impact ih 2000. Since then the Boston-based nonprofit has connected more than 100 nonprofits with corporate volunteers and been lauded as a leader in skills-based volunteerism by the Boston Business Journal and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
"Corporate volunteers like helping because it gives them a way to offer their professional skills and make a really profound difference in their communities," says CEO Ellis. "A lot of these folks are really talented senior people who don't want to stuff envelopes for a nonprofit."
Ellis founded Common Impact at the urging of the late Dartmouth president James Freedman, for whom she interned. "He had a sensibility about public service and why public service is important in a broadly defined sense," says Ellis, who serves on the Tucker Foundation's board of visitors. With a staff of 10 in Boston, including co-founder , Common Impact opened a New York office in late 2007. "Over the last seven years we've leveraged about $10 million in pro bono resources," says Ellis. "Over the next 10 years we'd like to grow to about a billion dollars."
