Carol Welsh Gray
Executive Director

Carol Welsh Gray is the Executive Director of Thrive Foundation For Youth.   Carol brings 20 years of experience as a senior executive and entrepreneur in nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. Carol has transitioned to Thrive Foundation after ten years as a leader in the community foundation field, first at Peninsula Community Foundation and then the newly merged Silicon Valley Community Foundation in 2007.  Within her community foundation role, Carol was the founding Executive Director of Raising A Reader®, a national nonprofit that scaled, under her tenure, an award-winning early literacy and family bonding program across thirty-three states and 175 communities.

As one of the earliest pioneers of "venture philanthropy" practice, Carol managed the 21st Century Education Initiative of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a partnership of business and K-12 education that began in 1995. In the volunteer sector, she initiated Daybreak Shelter for Homeless Youth, a program that has transitioned 86 percent of its graduates from the streets into productive lives.

In 1995, Carol founded the Center for Venture Philanthropy at Peninsula Community Foundation. During her eight-year tenure developing the Center's mission, she crafted new avenues for community investors to engage in philanthropy with an emphasis on measurable return on civic investment. Carol designed the highly acclaimed Venture Van, a series of "tours-on-wheels" of the nonprofit world, and she launched five multi-million dollar social venture funds-award-winning initiatives to help low-income families develop assets, to promote early literacy, to build local environmental stewardship and to address the crisis in the foster care system.

Carol designed a national template for applying venture philanthropy strategies to the individual development account field, helping the Center win the Innovation Award from Washington D.C.'s Corporation for Enterprise Development, for its social venture fund, Assets for All Alliance. Raising A Reader, three-time winner of the Fast Company Magazine Award for Social Entrepreneurship, has grown into a $3 million nonprofit business with twelve independent evaluations demonstrating results.

Carol has won the Robert J. Koshland Award for Community Service, the J.C. Penny Golden Rule Award, the 100 Volunteers of Distinction Award at the 100th anniversary of the Association of Junior Leagues International, and she was twice named by San Jose Magazine and the San José Business Journal as one of the most Influential Women of the Year. Named a 2002 German Marshall Fund fellow, Carol was an ambassador to European communities building local community foundations. She holds a B.A. and M.S. from Stanford University.

Carol is the proud parent of six thriving young adults.

July 1, 2008 - Press Release

Thrive Foundation Staff

Carol Welsh Gray
Lauren Johnson
Lisa McNamara
Koreen Piazza
Julie Warren

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