Marcia Dawood

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Marcia Dawood is challenging the idea that investing is a world reserved for people with deep pockets, finance degrees, or insider access.

After discovering angel investing in 2012 following a career in sales, marketing, and operations, Dawood went on to build a portfolio of more than 50 early-stage companies and funds. Today, she chairs the SEC’s Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee, serves as a venture partner with Mindshift Capital, is chair emeritus of the Angel Capital Association, and is a member of Golden Seeds. She is also the author of Do Good While Doing Well and, most recently, Unapologetic Wealth: Rewrite Your Money Story From Any Beginning, a TEDx speaker, and host of The Angel Next Door podcast.

Across these roles, Marcia has made early-stage investing more approachable and visible, particularly for women who may not have seen themselves as investors before. Her message is that investing is a skill that can be learned and is not a privilege reserved for those who inherited wealth or grew up in finance.

She is shifting the culture around who gets to participate in investing. By giving women the language, knowledge, and confidence to see themselves as potential investors, she is helping expand the number of people who can build wealth, back entrepreneurs, and have a voice in where capital flows.

Rachel Robasciotti

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Rachel J. Robasciotti leads Adasina Social Capital, a firm she built to serve as a bridge between financial markets and social justice movements. 

She founded her first investment firm at 25 and later grew its strategy into Adasina in 2020 — a firm majority-owned and operated by women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ team members. She is widely credited with coining the term “social justice investing” and driving its adoption across the finance industry; Adasina’s public campaigns have named companies tied to prisons, surveillance, and immigrant detention, and its social justice ETF gives everyday investors a concrete way to put those values into a portfolio. Her leadership is rooted in her own experience as a Black, queer woman raised in a community that struggled for financial security.

Rachel didn’t just build a firm — she helped name and define an entire category of investing, giving the finance industry, and everyday investors, shared language for what it means to put money behind justice.

Rebecca Roseme Obounou

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Rebecca Roseme Obounou has spent nearly two decades challenging the idea that Haitian and Caribbean communities should be seen primarily as recipients of aid rather than as economic partners with the capacity to build, invest, and shape their own futures.

Rebecca watched her mother build a low-cost health clinic that both served a Haitian community and created local jobs—an early lesson in the power of building capacity rather than dependency. 

In 2008, she founded Communities for Haitian Entrepreneurs and Startups (CHES), a nonprofit that funds, educates, and mentors entrepreneurs in rural Haiti. She later worked at Babson College and MIT Sloan, advancing entrepreneurship and social innovation, before turning more of her attention to values-aligned investment across the Caribbean.

Today, she is working to shift how capital flows to the region, helping women of the diaspora see themselves not simply as supporters or beneficiaries, but as investors with the power to direct resources toward the communities and futures they care about. 

Through Invest for Better’s Shifting Wealth, Shaping Futures Circles, she has helped bring that vision into the IFB community, creating space for women to explore how their financial decisions can move wealth across generations and borders.

Julia Johannsen

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Julia Johannsen is challenging wealthy women to think differently about what their financial power can and should make possible.

As founder and executive director of The Impact Collective, Julia works to activate people of privilege, particularly white women of wealth, to use their influence and resources to help close the racial wealth gap. 

With a master’s degree in counseling psychology, she brings a deeply personal and often candid approach to conversations about race, wealth, and power, encouraging people to examine not only the systems that shape inequality, but also their own relationship to those systems. Her work helps move wealthy women beyond awareness and toward concrete financial action, from how they give and invest to how they use their broader economic influence.

Julia has also brought this work into the IFB community, creating and leading a Deep Dive centered on racial equity. She also helped increase momentum for the OurSheconomy movement. Her approach aligns closely with IFB’s community-driven model, bringing women together to learn, share, and support one another as they put their values into action.

Sarah Haacke Byrd

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Sarah Haacke Byrd is a philanthropy and social impact leader, serving as CEO of Women Moving Millions. Under Sarah’s bold leadership, the organization has surpassed $1.5 billion in new funding for women and girls globally. In 2025, Sarah was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Philanthropists, honoring her transformative impact on gender equity and her efforts to build a more connected and strategic funding ecosystem for the women’s rights movement. In 2023, Inside Philanthropy named her one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in U.S. philanthropy for her “catalytic” leadership.

With over two decades of experience in the nonprofit sector, Sarah has a deep understanding of the complex issues facing women and girls globally and a strong commitment to driving large-scale social change. Sarah has built, guided and led nonprofit organizations in Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York dedicated to strengthening democracy, expanding human rights, and advancing gender equality. Previously, Sarah worked for notable organizations, including the Joyful Heart Foundation, founded by Mariska Hargitay, where she led the campaign to eliminate the backlog of hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits in the U.S.

Sarah has been recognized throughout her career for her ability to build and lead high-performing teams and drive strategic growth in mission-driven organizations. She has been an advisor to various philanthropic initiatives and is known for her ability to mobilize and inspire the public and private sector to make significant investments in social change.

Jill Johnson

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Jill Johnson has spent nearly three decades challenging who gets access to capital—and who gets to decide where it goes.

In 2002, Jill co-founded the Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership (IFEL), building a nonprofit that now serves thousands of small businesses and hundreds of investors each year, with a focus on Black and Latinx entrepreneurs who have historically been excluded from traditional funding pipelines. 

In 2023, she led IFEL’s acquisition of Pipeline Angels, the investing network created to bring more women and gender-diverse people into angel investing. By bringing the two organizations together, she expanded the work beyond increasing access to capital for underrepresented founders to changing who has the power to deploy it. Her Making of Black Angels initiative pushes that work further, helping create a more diverse pipeline of investors and decision-makers.

By changing who gets to participate in the capital system, Johnson is helping expand the circle of people who can build wealth, fund ideas, and shape the economy. Her work reflects the kind of structural change that makes greater economic power possible for women and communities too often left out.

Emily Scott

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Emily Scott believes that our relationship with money is about far more than numbers and that understanding that relationship can change what we do with our wealth.

As the founder of EmilyScott&, she built her practice around a gap she saw in traditional financial planning: the emotional and psychological dimensions of money, particularly for women, were often left out of the conversation. Rather than treating financial decisions as purely technical, she serves as a guide and thought partner through legacy planning, financial prioritization, and philanthropic decision-making. 

Through her “Power of AND” approach, she helps clients bring their financial plans together with their principles and passions, showing that they don’t have to choose between financial strategy and what matters most to them. She also works alongside other financial professionals to help ensure a client’s broader advisory team is aligned around that same human-first approach.

Emily brings this same perspective to Invest for Better as a member of our steering committee, helping advance a shared vision of women using their financial power more intentionally and confidently.

Jes Wolfe

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Jes Wolfe believes the stories girls grow up with can shape the lives they believe are possible, and she has built a global platform around changing those stories.

Wolfe joined Rebel Girls as the company’s first independent board member in 2019 and became CEO in 2020, helping transform it from a single bestselling book into a global empowerment brand spanning books, audio, an app, live events, and storytelling centered on women’s sports. Today, Rebel Girls reaches tens of millions of girls across more than 100 countries, intending to reach 100 million by 2030. 

Before joining Rebel Girls, Jes worked in emerging-markets finance at the International Finance Corporation and served as COO of the media company Hoodline. She also invests as an angel in women-founded companies, putting her own capital behind the women and ideas shaping the future.

Through Rebel Girls, Jes is helping shift the narrative around what girls can be, do, and become. By putting women’s stories, leadership, ambition, and achievement in front of a new generation, she is challenging the cultural messages that have too often defined the boundaries of girls’ possibilities.

As part of the OurSheconomy movement, Rebel Girls helped amplify stories of women and bring the power of representation in showing the next generation what is possible for women.

Shelley Zalis

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Shelley Zalis decided gender equality belonged on the same stage as revenue and growth, then built the room to put it there.

After launching the research firm OTX in 2000 and growing it into one of the fastest-growing companies in its field before selling to Ipsos in 2010, Zalis pivoted fully to advancing women in the workplace. As founder and CEO of The Female Quotient, known widely as its “Chief Troublemaker,” she created the Equality Lounge® – a gathering space now embedded at the World Economic Forum, Cannes Lions, and CES, where business leaders are pushed to treat gender equality as a competitive necessity, not a side conversation.

Today, The Female Quotient works directly with Fortune 500 companies to build cultures where women’s advancement is the baseline, not the initiative. Shelley and The Female Quotient also helped activate OurSheconomy, helping bring greater visibility to women whose contributions have too often gone unseen.

By moving gender equality from the margins of business conversations to the center of decision-making, Shelley is helping redefine what inclusive economic power looks like. She is changing not only who gets a seat at the table, but what the table is expected to talk about. Her work is helping make space for a future where women’s economic power is not questioned, but expected.

Reshma Saujani

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Reshma Saujani has never waited for permission to challenge the systems holding women back. She has built the movements to change them.

In 2012, while running for Congress, Saujani saw the gender gap in computer science classrooms and founded Girls Who Code to help close it. Over nine years as CEO, she grew the organization into one of the country’s most recognized nonprofits, helping hundreds of thousands of girls see themselves as part of the future of technology. She later turned her attention to another barrier to women’s economic participation: the unpaid and underpaid labor of caregiving. As founder and CEO of Moms First, she has championed paid leave and affordable child care, advocating for the policies that allow mothers to remain in the workforce and build economic security.

From expanding girls’ access to technology to challenging the systems that undervalue mothers’ work, Reshma has helped reshape the conversation around what women deserve and what becomes possible when society invests in their potential.

Her message is clear: women’s economic power depends on more than individual determination. It requires changing the systems, policies, and cultural expectations that shape their opportunities.