Shawn Dove

Managing Partner

Ecosystem Building

Shawn Dove

In his roles as Ecosystem Building Co-lead and Managing Partner, Shawn is a leadership team member and advisor to social entrepreneurs across New Profit’s portfolio of grantee-partners. Building on his deep experience in community organizing and building, Shawn also co-curates New Profit’s efforts to bring together a multiracial, multicultural, multigenerational coalition pursuing a new era of justice, opportunity, trust, and collaboration in America.

For more than a decade, Shawn led the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, an initiative he helped launch at the Open Society Foundations that has become the largest national movement to improve the life outcomes of Black men and boys. The Campaign built a network of more than 3,000 organizations from across sectors as partners, reaching millions with storytelling and research, and leveraging over $320 million in national and local funds to advance the Black male achievement movement. Shawn also served as a key advisor and organizer for the launch of President Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative and created the nation’s first Black Male Achievement fellowship for social entrepreneurs in collaboration with Echoing Green.

Earlier in his career, Shawn worked at the Harlem Children’s Zone, where he was the founding editor-in-chief of Harlem Overheard, an award-winning youth-produced newspaper; spearheaded the recruitment and training of a team of adolescents who launched the Harlem Children’s Zone Fitness & Nutrition Center; and was Program Director of one of New York City’s first Beacon Schools, the Countee Cullen Community Center in Central Harlem. Dove also served as Director of Youth Ministries for First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, NJ; as Vice President for MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership; and as Creative Communities Director for the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts. Dove holds an undergraduate degree in English from Wesleyan University. He is a graduate of Columbia University Business School’s Institute for Not-for-Profit Management and a 2014 recipient of the Prime Movers Fellowship for Social Impact.