Lukas Haynes

Lukas Haynes spent twenty years as a grant-maker with small, medium and large foundations, developing strategies and evaluating grants to promote national security, climate solutions, justice system transformation, democracy protection and community development, beginning at the MacArthur Foundation in 2002 and continuing with the Mertz Gilmore Foundation for 9 years. From 2015-22, he worked with 15 Rockefeller family trustees as CEO of the David Rockefeller Fund in New York.

Haynes is a board member of Rihanna’s Clara Lionel Foundation , a former trustee of the LCU Fund for Women’s Education and a board director of the Sepsis Alliance, where he advocates for sepsis mitigation through Lulu’s Law, named after his late daughter and introduced in the United States Congress in September 2022.

He is a graduate cum laude of the College of William & Mary; he earned a master’s degree in International Relations from Oxford University and he served as a Harvard University Kennedy School Fellow in 2001 after serving on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department.

Haynes has published in The New York Times, The Economist, The Boston Globe, Comparative Strategy and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He has guest lectured at Princeton, Harvard and West Point and addressed donors in Shangri-La, Sun Valley and Jackson Hole about best philanthropic practice.

As a visiting distinguished fellow at Stanford PACS/EPLI since 2022, he is researching, speaking and writing about the blending of charitable, political and mission-related investments by donors to protect democratic institutions and norms. He is also the founder of Leveraged Philanthropy.