Will Nelligan has spent more than a decade in the field of social enterprise — helping cultivate, build, and capitalize sustainable innovations that strengthen democracy and drive progress in domains ranging from media to education.
Will is currently Chief Growth Officer at the National Trust for Local News, where he is responsible for a $15 million annual fundraising and investor relations function — up from $5M when he started — as well as all corporate development activity (M&A, partnerships, strategy). The Trust’s 65 newspapers in Georgia, Colorado, and Maine are the primary source of local news for more than five million Americans.
Will’s interests are eclectic; the sprawl of his board service, independent projects, and (para)professional network has always been both hugely gratifying and slightly stressful. He began his career in politics and has worked in venture capital, film finance, and every kind of charitable organization from grassroots non-profits to multinational foundations. His partners and collaborators have ranged from Blackstone and the Rockefeller Foundation to Rap Genius and San Diego’s public workforce system.
Before the National Trust, Will was a managing director at JFI, the social skunkworks built by hedge fund manager Bobby Jain. He oversaw JFI’s fundraising and strategy work, contributing to projects on concessionary investing, universal basic income, and AI governance. Will also led JFI’s flagship initiative on student loans, combining breakthrough empirical research with the first large-scale effort to pilot a new financing model. Under his leadership, JFI launched pilots with 11 education organizations in seven states, incubated an asset servicing company, and raised more than $20 million.
Before JFI, Will was Chief of Staff at the Robin Hood Foundation. He helped launch Robin Hood’s first major grassroots campaign, dedicated to massively increasing enrollment 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 pivotal collaboration 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.
Will is enormously proud that his first job was for the U.S. Senate’s HELP Committee and its chairman, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa — where he organized over 350 binders of 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.