Jacob Harold is a social change strategist, author, and executive. He wrote the acclaimed book, The Toolbox: Strategies for Crafting Social Impact, which lays out a new multi-dimensional framework for social change strategy. The Toolbox bridges disciplines from community organizing to mathematical modeling to storytelling to complexity science. Jacob’s story parallels the intellectual arc of The Toolbox: he’s traveled from farm to monastery to jail to laboratory to boardroom, all in search of the best ways to do good.

From 2012 to 2021, Jacob served as President & CEO of GuideStar and co-founder of Candid. Fast Company called Candid “the definitive nonprofit transparency organization.” Each year, more than 20 million people use its data on nonprofits, grants, and social sector practice. Candid was formed in 2019 by the merger of GuideStar and Foundation Center. Jacob co-led the $45 million capital campaign to launch Candid, wrote Candid’s guiding strategy document, Candid 2030, and served as EVP during post-merger integration.

During his tenure leading GuideStar, Jacob oversaw a financial turnaround, a tripling of GuideStar’s reach, and major partnerships with organizations ranging from Google to the Gates Foundation. In 2013, Jacob launched the Overhead Myth campaign to shift attention from nonprofits’ financial ratios to their programmatic results. Since then, GuideStar’s Profile Program has been used by more than 200,000 nonprofits to tell their full story to the world.

Harold joined GuideStar from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where he led a $30 million grantmaking initiative to build a 21st century infrastructure for smart giving. Before that, he worked as a consultant to nonprofits and foundations at Bridgespan and as a climate change campaigner and strategist with the Packard Foundation, Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace USA. He began his career as a grassroots organizer with Green Corps.

Harold earned his AB summa cum laude in ethics and intellectual history from Duke University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations and has further training from MIT, Bain, the Chinese Academy of Sciences/Santa Fe Institute, and the SIT Tibetan Studies Program, where he did the first translations of newly-discovered poems by the Sixth Dalai Lama.

The NonProfit Times named Harold to its Power and Influence Top 50 list seven years in a row. He has written extensively on climate change and philanthropic strategy and his essays have been used as course materials at Stanford, Duke, Wharton, Oxford, and Tsinghua. Harold has been quoted in media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal. Harold serves on the boards of the U.S. Climate Action Network, Rewiring America, and the Duke University Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship and as an advisor to investors, startups, foundations, and government agencies.

Harold spent his early childhood on a corn farm in rural North Carolina. When he was 10 years old, his family moved into Winston-Salem where his parents led small, community-based nonprofit organizations. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife Carolyn Sufrin—a physician- anthropologist at Johns Hopkins—and their two sons.