Rebecca Brown, MA, CFA, CFRE

It was as an institutional money manager on Wall Street that I learned to read an income statement and a balance sheet, and as an academic studying early American history that I learned to build an argument from the record and write it so it makes the case. Since founding Further The Work in 2001, I’ve put the two together, first in nonprofit program design and then in justice reform.

Ten years in, alongside my client work, I started Reentry Solutions Group, a public civic education project. From 2011 to 2019, it brought Contra Costa’s justice agencies and community members together, in public, every month, using my research and analysis to look hard at the County’s justice system. Four foundations funded it over those years: The California Endowment, the Y & H Soda Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation, and LISC. They recognized it as public infrastructure serving the common good: the only forum for examining and challenging the County’s justice system as a whole.

I also know what it takes to run things. I’ve written protocols for in-custody programming, built the budget and operating plan for a reentry center, built analytic dashboards that show agencies, from their own records, who they arrest and jail again and again, and set up the finance systems, workflows, and funder relationships organizations depend on. And I’ve written proposals that have won more than $116 million in grants in the past decade alone.

I graduated with highest distinction from UC Berkeley and, as a Javits and Mellon Fellow, earned my master’s degree and completed my doctoral studies at Stanford. I’m a Chartered Financial Analyst and a Certified Fund Raising Executive, and I hold certifications in nonprofit management, restorative justice processes, Technology of Participation (ToP) facilitation, participatory decision-making processes, community organizing, and pretrial justice.

Before Wall Street, I was a professional ballet dancer. A mother by birth, adoption, and foster care, I am part of a multiracial family with direct experience with child welfare, juvenile justice, and criminal justice systems, including incarceration.