The National Trust for Local News is one of the nation’s largest non-profit news organizations; its 65 newspapers in Georgia, Colorado, and Maine are the primary source of local news for more than five million Americans.
Will’s work at the National Trust follows ten years of experience building, backing, and scaling social enterprises -- helping create sustainable solutions to important social problems. He has been involved in many realms of financial innovation and impact investing, where he is well known for designing catalytic applications of contingent lending programs in education, consumer, and small business finance.
Will was previously a managing director at JFI, the think tank built by legendary hedge fund manager Bobby Jain and modeled on DARPA. Will led a sprawling initiative on higher education finance, combining empirical research on lending and outcomes with the first large-scale effort to pilot a new financial product. Under Will’s leadership, JFI launched income share agreement pilots with 11 education organizations in seven states, developed of the first financial modeling infrastructure for ISAs, incubated an asset servicing company, and raised more than $20 million in grants and investments. Will also oversaw all of JFI’s fundraising and public policy work, contributing to projects on financial engineering, guaranteed income, and machine learning governance.
Will came to JFI from the Robin Hood Foundation, where he served as Chief of Staff. Will helped launch Robin Hood’s first major grassroots campaign, dedicated to dramatically increasing the number of eligible New Yorkers who enroll in SNAP, WIC, and the EITC; built a $50 million fund aimed at improving early learning resources for poor children; and devised No City Limits, a partnership with the Gates Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation that pairs breakthrough research on poverty with the practitioners who can implement it in their communities.
Prior to Robin Hood, Will had an eclectic career that took him from motion picture development and production to financial technology investments. He is enormously proud that his first job was for the U.S. Senate’s HELP Committee and its chairman, Senator Tom Harkin — where Will organized over 350 binders of legislative recommendations during the (attempted) reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, and drafted forceful but restrained letters to for-profit colleges and student loan servicers.