Lara serves as a Chief Portfolio Officer of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, a global venture philanthropy firm supporting early-stage, high-impact social enterprises. She plays a lead role in sourcing new investments and working with the leadership of those organizations as an operating partner and board member as they grow to build capacity and to achieve their maximum impact. As a member of the Foundation’s senior leadership team, she also helps to execute the Foundation’s strategy and goals and contributes to its thought leadership and external outreach.
Lara brings over 30 years of senior leadership experience across traditional finance and impact investing, most recently as a Managing Director and Venture Partner at The Social Entrepreneurs’ Fund. Ironically, it was Lara who originally discovered CB through an article in The New York Times, a discovery that sparked our eventual partnership with DRK.
Lara currently serves on the board of DRK grantees Collective Energy, Common Coal, Open Supply Hub, Reboot Rx, and Community Builders. External to DRK, she serves as guest lecturer on impact investing and startups for MIT, Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Kennedy School and on a variety of advisory boards. She is a graduate of Boston College and Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She recently completed her Corporate Directors Certificate at Harvard Business School.