Susan Wolf Ditkoff, MBA

Partner and Co-Head of the Philanthropy Practice at The Bridgespan Group

Susan Wolf Ditkoff is a partner and co-head of the Philanthropy Practice at The Bridgespan Group. Since 2001, she has advised philanthropists leading planning and design teams with leaders who are implementing large-scale social change initiatives. She has been a long-standing advocate for solutions that engage and are owned by the people and communities they are intended to benefit, and identifying and dismantling the many tentacles of structural racism embedded in our current systems. In addition to advising clients, recent authored publications include: When Philanthropy Meets Advocacy (Stanford Social Innovation Review 2018) and Audacious Philanthropy (Harvard Business Review 2017, Forbes India, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and 15-casebook compendium). Selected interviews and podcasts include: Philanthropy and Advocacy in a Democracy (Business of Giving with Denver Fredrick podcast 2018); A Field Guide to Audacious Philanthropy (Fast Company 2017); Successful Social Change Takes Patience (TinySpark with Amy Costello podcast 2017); Audacious Philanthropy (Bloomberg Radio 2017); Large-Scale Social Impact Requires Decades-Long Effort (Philanthropy News Digest 2017); The Art of Saying No as a Philanthropist (New York Times 2016).

Outside of Bridgespan, Susan has been an elected local official for ten years, most recently as chairman of her town’s school board and co-chair of a ~$200m building project. She was formerly a Vice President of the Harvard Business School Alumni Board of Directors; Co-President, HBS Social Enterprise Alumni Association; Leadership Coach in the HBS Executive Education program; the Co-Founder of the HBS Social Venture Competition, and Visiting Lab Fellow, Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. Before 2000 she helped launch new subsidiary of Merck & Co. which doubled in its first three years to more than $1 billion in revenue; was a financial analyst and nonprofit fellow with McKinsey & Co.; and a bilingual public school classroom paraprofessional. She graduated from Yale (BA in Linguistics, thesis on bilingual education and training in anthropological ethnography) and Harvard (MBA).