Jessamyn Shams-Lau

Jessamyn is a secondary/high school dropout turned MBA, currently co-creating and stewarding the Peery Foundation's Grantee-Centric approach to philanthropy. She's an advocate for inter-disciplinary approaches, thoughtful risk taking, bold ideas developed through patient, deliberate apprenticeship, and is very frustrated with the status quo of philanthropy so she's trying to do something about it. Jessamyn lives in the Bay Area with her ridiculously funny husband and two defiant house rabbits. She used to have a mohawk haircut, she met her husband on Tinder, and her favourite (with a ‘u’, because she’s British) Christmas film is Die Hard 2.

Jane Leu

Known for strong vision and execution, Jane has more than twenty years of entrepreneurial leadership of social sector organizations. Jane founded Smarter Good to help global social sector organizations start, sustain, and scale their impact. Smarter Good believes that by making a skilled team available to nonprofits and social enterprises to support their fundraising, marketing and accounting and finance functions, they will have more time to focus on their missions, and that will lead to more global impact. With offices in the US and the Philippines, the Smarter Good team has worked at the intersection of thousands of funders and more than 80 nonprofits working in 30 countries, across a diverse range of issue areas from youth development to poverty alleviation. 

Lesser-known facts about Jane include: she spends a lot of happy hours talking to her dog, she never cooks, and as a legacy of her Midwestern roots, she would eat entire meals comprised only of corn-on-the-cob if it was deemed socially acceptable. She lives in San Francisco with her husband Ted Levinson, a social finance professional.

Vu Le

Vu Le (“voo lay”) is a writer, speaker, vegan, Pisces, and the Executive Director of Rainier Valley Corps, a nonprofit in Seattle with the mission of developing and supporting leaders of color to strengthen the capacity of communities-of-color-led nonprofits and foster collaboration between diverse communities to effect systemic change.

Vu’s passion to make the world better, combined with a low score on the Law School Admission Test, drove him into the field of nonprofit work, where he learned that we should take the work seriously, but not ourselves. There’s tons of humor in the nonprofit world, and someone needs to document it. He is going to do that, with the hope that one day, a TV producer will see how cool and interesting our field is and make a show about nonprofit work, featuring attractive actors attending strategic planning meetings and filing 990 tax forms. 

Known for his no-BS approach, irreverent sense of humor, and love of unicorns, Vu has been featured in dozens, if not hundreds, of his own blog posts at nonprofitwithballs.com.