Lee Davis  
Co-Founder & CEO, NESsT

Lee Davis is a Co-Founder and CEO of NESsT, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting social enterprise in emerging market countries. The NESsT Venture Fund is the first venture philanthropy fund to support social enterprises (i.e., for-profit businesses owned and operated by nonprofit organizations) in emerging markets in an effort to increase their long-term financial sustainability and social impact.

Along with NESsT partner Nicole Etchart, Lee is co-author of several books on social enterprise and venture philanthropy, including: Get Ready, Get Set: Starting Down the Road to Self-Financing, Risky Business: The Impacts of Merging Mission and Market, and Profits for Nonprofits. In 1997, he authored The NGO-Business Hybrid, a seminal study on nonprofit enterprise in 13 countries, while a Research Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Davis also served as a Professorial Lecturer in Social Change and Development at SAIS, developing and co-teaching the first graduate-level course on social enterprise in the developing world.

Mr. Davis holds an MA from the Johns Hopkins University, and a BA from Connecticut College; and was a recipient of the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Foundation fellowship in 1988. He was born in New York and currently divides his time between NESsT’s offices in Chile, Hungary, and California.

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