Lee Davis

Lee Davis is a social entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the international development and social enterprise fields. He is co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer (CIO), and served for 15 years as co-CEO, of NESsT. With a team of 50 and operations in 10 countries across Eastern Europe and Latin America, NESsT has pioneered the field of social enterprise in emerging markets, has supported over 2600 social enterprises solving critical social problems, and is a 2004 winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

Along with NESsT co-Founder Nicole Etchart, Lee is co-author of several books on social enterprise and venture philanthropy, including: All in the Same Boat: An Introduction to Engaged Philanthropy, End of the Rainbow: Increasing the Sustainability of LGBT Organizations through Social Enterprise, Risky Business: The Impacts of Merging Mission and Market, and Profits for Nonprofits. He is the author of The NGO-Business Hybrid, a seminal study on social enterprise in 13 countries, completed while a Research Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Davis also served as a Professorial Lecturer in Social Change and Development at SAIS, developing and co-teaching the first graduate-level course on social enterprise in the developing world. Lee is also a member of the International Steering Committee of the Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF), the premiere global event focused exclusively on social enterprise, and is leading NESsT's efforts to host the SEWF 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in October 2012.

Lee holds an MA from the Institute for Policy Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, and a BA magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Connecticut College, and was a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation fellowship in 1988. He is a native New Yorker, has lived and worked in Europe, Latin America and Japan, and currently resides in the San Joaquin Valley of California while also dividing time between NESsT’s offices in San Francisco and across Europe and South America.