Paul Grogan
Founder, CEOs for Cities and CEO and President
Boston Foundation

Paul S. Grogan became the President and CEO of the Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest and largest community foundations, on July 1, 2001. With assets of almost $900 million, the Foundation distributed grants of more than $92 million to nonprofit organizations throughout the Greater Boston community in 2007. The Foundation’s grant making is designed to respond to the critical challenges of our constantly changing community by supporting high-impact, innovative programs. Grogan joined the Foundation from Harvard University, where he served as Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs from 1999 to 2001. One of five vice presidents of the University, he oversaw all government relations for Harvard, relations with Harvard’s host communities of Cambridge and Boston, and the Harvard news office. He was also a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School. From 1986 through 1998 he was President and CEO of the nonprofit Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the nation’s largest community development intermediary. In Mr. Grogan’s term as president, LISC raised and invested more than $3 billion of private capital in inner-city revitalization efforts across America, all channeled through local nonprofit community development corporations. Before joining LISC, Mr. Grogan served Boston Mayors Kevin H. White and Raymond L. Flynn in a variety of staff and line positions. He headed Boston’s Neighborhood Development and Employment Agency in the early 1980s, where he pioneered a series of public/private ventures that have been widely emulated by other cities. These included the Boston Housing Partnership, which steers private dollars into the financing of affordable housing, and the Boston Compact, a partnership between the city’s corporate community and public school system. Mr. Grogan was graduated with a degree in American History from Williams College in 1972, and earned a Masters degree in Administration from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1979. He is a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; a director of the for-profit company, the Community Development Trust, which he helped found; a director of New Profit, Inc.; and a former trustee of Williams College. Mr. Grogan is the author, with Tony Proscio, of the book Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival, published in October 2000 by Westview Press, which Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times has written is “arguably the most important book about cities in a generation.” He and his wife, Karen Sunnarborg, have three sons and live in Boston.