Elana Wien is a respected advisor and social impact leader with over twenty years of experience. Elana brings a global and community-based lens to her thoughtful, creative approach to philanthropy.

As a philanthropic advisor with over two decades of experience, including over a decade of nonprofit leadership experience, Elana specializes in supporting individuals, families, community foundations, and private foundations to enhance community outcomes through targeted and strategic philanthropy, using both a community-based and global lens. Her work focuses on social ventures, start-up initiatives, next gen donor engagement, family philanthropy, women's leadership, and collective giving, with a commitment to fostering equity and sustainability. Currently, Elana provides advisory services to a diverse portfolio of clients, enabling them to align their philanthropic goals with meaningful social impact.

Elana’s expertise spans program design, scaling of operations, capacity-building and stakeholder collaboration, addressing diverse fields such gender equity, youth, social enterprise, workforce development, workplace culture best practices, education, environment, health, housing, and arts + culture.

Over the course of her professional career and volunteer service, Elana has contributed to the distribution of multi-million-dollar grant portfolios supporting local and international causes and facilitated leadership transitions for regional and North American nonprofit organizations. She has conducted masters level field research on binational collective giving models (Mexico and United States) and has facilitated community investments across the United States and Israel as well as grassroots community projects in Mexico and Brazil.

Elana graduated magna cum laude from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in geography and received a master’s degree in anthropology from the Universidad de las Americas as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar to Mexico.

Elana has a Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy (CAP)® designation from the American College of Financial Services, a Certificate in Behavioral Philanthropy from Daylight Advisors, and is a full member of the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Elana is currently based on the Central Coast of California, having previously lived in the Bay Area, Washington D.C., New York City, Brazil, Mexico and Spain.

She is bilingual in English and Spanish.

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