Elliott Brown

Elliott Brown is the founder and executive director of Springboard Forward, an award-winning nonprofit organization on a mission to transform the lives of entry-wage workers and the workplaces around them. Springboard Forward has twice been recognized with Fast Company-Monitor Group's Social Capitalist Award and featured in Fast Company magazine as a prime partner, uniquely paired with for-profit research and evaluation company, Kenexa. Elliott was elected to the prestigious group of Ashoka Fellows in 2005 for his innovative work in changing the way poverty is being addressed in the United States.

Elliott founded Springboard Forward in 2002 with his model for social change that aligns lower-wage workers and businesses in an unprecedented way. The model advances workers' careers while addressing chronic business challenges of low retention, poor employee performance, and unsatisfactory customer service. It creates bottom-line incentives for business to play a critical role in changing the landscape for the working poor. Springboard Forward has continued to refine its model and has more than tripled its client base and number of business partners in the past two years.

Elliott began to explore the root causes of our society's most urgent problems as a student at Stanford University, where, inspired by the commitment to public service of Stanford University President Don Kennedy, he decided to devote his life to creating new solutions for economic prosperity.

He began his career in Corporate Giving at Sun Microsystems, but soon left the corporate environment to start the Bayshore Workers youth employment program in East Palo Alto, CA. He then started a consulting practice to focus on new models in workforce development and examine the organizational success factors of the nonprofit sector. Convinced that current solutions and institutions were not adequate to truly move the needle on poverty, Elliott began experimenting with alternative models. He developed a corporate-based workforce model in the mid-1990s in partnership with Silicon Graphics. In 1997 he founded a for-profit staffing agency—the precursor to Springboard Forward—that combined a business mission with a social mission to increase employment opportunities in low-income communities.

Often a presenter at Stanford University, Elliott was also featured in the national Mobility Agenda tour in 2007 and presented to 150 mayors and civic leaders from across the country at the CEOs for Cities national conference. Elliott is a frequent speaker at national and local conferences and a thought leader on poverty and in the burgeoning social entrepreneur space. He is passionate about the need for innovation in solving our most chronic societal problems.