Rebecca Brown, MA, CFA, CFRE

Fiercely committed to both equity and excellence, Rebecca Brown seizes opportunities to build better justice wherever she can. Noted for an uncommon ability to forge effective partnerships among highly diverse (and sometimes divisive) stakeholders, Rebecca has proven capacity to design progressive, effective, transformative, and fundable initiatives that significantly shift collective premises, policies, and practices.

In all of her work, Rebecca is deeply committed to understanding the multiple and complex perspectives, skills, and insights of people connected to adult and juvenile justice systems, and she regularly calls on just about every tool in her skillset toolbox. With her academic education, she has tremendous capacity to learn, research, and synthesize information. As a trained facilitator, she helps groups build collective knowledge, develop unexpected new solutions, and surprise themselves. With her expertise in financial analysis, budgets don’t scare her, and she uses the budgeting process to advance stakeholders’ decision-making. With her wide-ranging understanding of the roles, challenges, and functional operations of both public agencies and nonprofit organizations connected to justice systems, she is as comfortable discussing evidence-based practices for sexually exploited youth as developing operating protocols for custodial programming or designing a community-driven, collective-impact reentry center.

Rebecca earned a Bachelor’s Degree with Highest Distinction from UC Berkeley; as a Mellon Fellow, she earned a Master’s Degree at Stanford University, where she is now completing her PhD. Committed to ongoing professional development, Rebecca holds certifications in nonprofit management, restorative justice processes, Technology of Participation (ToP) facilitation, participatory decision-making processes, community organizing, and pretrial justice.

In her former life, Rebecca was first a professional ballet dancer and later an institutional money manager on Wall Street; she is a Chartered Financial Analyst and Certified Fund Raising Executive. A mother by birth, adoption, and foster care, Ms. Brown is part of a multiracial family with direct experience with child welfare, juvenile justice, and criminal justice systems, including incarceration.