Philanthropy Innovation Summit 2025 | Salon Sessions

Tegan Acton founded Wildcard Giving, a family of philanthropic entities created following the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014. Tegan serves as the principal at each of the sister entities, which work together to further civic values, collective responsibility and our common humanity. Prior to establishing Wildcard Giving, Tegan served as the Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives for the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She additionally held positions at Yahoo! and the Sundance Institute, and graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a BA in English and Political Science. Tegan’s personal commitments include serving on the Executive Committee for the Collaborative for Gender and Reproductive Equity, Chairing the Board of Trustees of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and investing in independent films through her production company, Good Gravy Films.

Nicole Taylor is the president and CEO of Silicon Valley Community Foundation – the world’s largest community foundation with an average of $2 billion in annual grantmaking and a deep commitment to solving its region’s toughest challenges through advocacy, research, policy and grantmaking. 

Nicole brings together a rich background in Bay Area philanthropy, nonprofit and higher education administration and fundraising with extensive experience in both the private and public sectors. 

Since joining SVCF in 2018, Nicole has led the organization to renew its focus on the challenges facing residents of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. She has championed efforts to increase local giving from SVCF donors and offer donors new avenues for working with the community foundation so they can be effective philanthropists. During the pandemic, SVCF raised $64 million for funds to meet the needs of individuals, families, nonprofits, small businesses and education systems across 10 counties in the Bay Area. 

Prior to SVCF, Nicole served as vice president of the ASU Foundation. She previously served as deputy vice president and dean of students at Arizona State University. Prior to that, Nicole was the associate vice provost of student affairs and dean of community engagement and diversity at Stanford University, after serving as president and CEO of Thrive Foundation for Youth in Silicon Valley. 

Nicole also spent more than 15 years with the East Bay Community Foundation, eventually serving as its president and CEO for six years. Nicole received both her M.A. in Education and A.B. in Human Biology from Stanford University, and she began her career as an educator in Oakland public schools. She served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and is currently a board member for Common Sense Media, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Top Hat. She is on Stanford University’s Advisory Council for the Graduate School of Education and served on the university’s 2022 Visiting Committee for the Computer Science Department.

Nicole was named to the Forbes 50 over 50 list in 2022 and recognized by Inside Philanthropy as “Community Foundation Leader of the Year.” 

Dimple Abichandani is a nationally recognized philanthropic leader, lawyer, and author of A New Era of Philanthropy: Ten Practices to Transform Wealth Into a More Just and Sustainable Future, a book that reimagines how philanthropy can meet this moment. 

For two decades, she has worked to reshape philanthropy’s purpose and practice while leading innovative funding institutions. As Executive Director of the General Service Foundation (2015–2022), she aligned the foundation’s grantmaking, investments, and governance with justice values. She was the founding director of the Rise Together Fund, a donor collaborative at the Proteus Fund, and previously led the Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. 

A National Center for Family Philanthropy Fellow, Dimple’s leadership has been recognized with a Scrivener Award for Creative Grantmaking. She serves on the Board of Directors of Solidaire Network and has served on the boards/steering committees of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, Northern California Grantmakers, and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees. 

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she advises donors and foundations on transforming wealth into a just and sustainable future.

Vera Michalchik leads Stanford PACS’ Effective Philanthropy Learning Initiative’s research on philanthropy and the design of programs, consultations, and materials for donors, advisors, and others wanting to advance insight and practice in giving for social good. Vera has spent her career in the non-profit and public sectors, applying a research-plus-practice lens to processes, relationships, and outcomes. Her efforts have succeeded in helping manage expectations between local organizations and global funders, adapt effective programs to new cultural contexts, document successes and lessons learned in evaluation studies, and build new approaches through applied research. She brings to her role extensive experience in social science research, putting relevant findings to use in her previous positions at SRI International, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics, and Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning. She also built a library system on a small island in Micronesia while collecting data there for her dissertation on knowledge management across social settings. She holds a PhD from Stanford, EdM from Harvard, and BA from UC Berkeley—her studies all focused on learning, media, and the shaping of cultural norms.