Honoring Casey Johnson, VP of National Portfolio & Learning

As Casey Johnson steps down after 13 years, we reflect on her profound contributions to GreenLight Fund’s growth, mission, and national impact.

Casey Johnson joined GreenLight Fund in 2012 as the founding executive director of GreenLight San Francisco Bay Area. In 2017, she transitioned to lead the national portfolio team.

When staff join GreenLight Fund, we ask them to share their greenlight, what motivates you to do this work. Casey’s greenlight as shared in 2012 remains the same today: “For all children to have incredible equitable opportunities from day one, thriving in engaged communities that lift them up continually as precious assets and investments for our future and provide learning opportunities at every turn.” You can read more about what drives Casey’s passion in the Business Journals column, In Her Own Words.

As the longest standing staff member at GreenLight, Casey has been an instrumental part of the organization’s rapid growth from its first expansion outside of Boston through today, with 14 sites across the country. Casey is stepping down from her role this month, and in this post she shares her reflections. John Simon and Ali Knight add their gratitude for her substantial and meaningful contributions.

GreenLight’s work is all about supporting amazing social innovation to scale and grow into our cities around the country to meet community-identified critical needs and gaps. What I never dreamed of is getting a front row seat in doing that same work for ourselves – helping to take GreenLight from just one community in Boston where it all started 20 years ago to now 14 communities including our latest launch in Miami. What an incredible journey, for over 13 years, to go from sitting around a small table with just four of us to now paging through multiple screens on Zoom as we get closer to 70 GreenLighters later this year, and from just a handful of investments in Boston to now 62 spanning our national network across many focus areas.

I could write a lengthy novel on all the things I have learned while at GreenLight along the way, from assessing leadership capabilities to determining community fit to how to read an audit to being a strategic board member and thought partner. But what stands out the most to me will always be the impact in our communities, especially from the first investments I helped bring into the San Francisco Bay Area many years ago.

When we invested in Genesys Works in 2013, it was to offer an amazing opportunity of a meaningful year-long paid internship during senior year of high school to students in the Bay Area to set them up for a strong path post-graduation for themselves and their families. The first cohort of Bay Area students, that in the words of Genesys Works “broke through”, are now close to 30 years old and well into their careers, some married and starting families of their own. The majority of alumni went on to college and many have worked for the companies where they had their internships, and some even worked at Genesys Works – truly paying it forward for young people coming up behind them. In a recent Genesys Works’ alumni survey, alumni that were 7+ years post-program now have a median annual income of $60K and 50% of alumni said they might not have enrolled in college without Genesys Works. To see 17 year olds work on interview skills and college essays while balancing school and working 20+ hours a week at their internships to now having graduated from college and flourishing in their careers is a significant life-changing trajectory that GreenLight is known for investing in.

Fast forward a couple of years to my third investment in Springboard Collaborative, an innovative organization that closes the literacy gap for young students experiencing poverty in the Bay Area by bridging the divide between home and school. Springboard combines home visits, family training and workshops, teacher coaching and learning bonuses so students have the requisite skills to access life opportunities. The initial partnership with Oakland Unified School District in 2015 impacted close to 500 students in a few schools, and now almost 10 years later, has impacted over 4,000 students across 50 schools with multiple school district partners throughout the Bay Area. Springboard’s deep commitment to the region continues with students showing a 5-month reading growth gain on average instead of a typical summer slide, and 85% of students participating in Springboard programming increasing their reading proficiency last year. Springboard has now expanded its California footprint well beyond the Bay Area to include Los Angeles and Fresno, increasing its reach 52% from 2022 to 2023 alone. Those students who first experienced Springboard back in 2015 are now graduating high school and are well on their way to achieving their dreams with a solid literacy foundation.

If you had asked me on March 5, 2012 (my first official day at GreenLight Fund), what I could have imagined the impact would be 13 years into the future – I never could have dreamed of Genesys Works or Springboard Collaborative or the tens of thousands of Bay Area young people impacted by our investments all these years later. It has been a gift to see what has been built in the years since I took a national leadership role with GreenLight extending my focus, advisement and support well beyond the Bay to a national network that is now 14 communities strong. Just this last year alone, our portfolio investments around the country  impacted close to 750,000 people. Each person has a name, a story, a dream – and GreenLight played a role in bringing positive change and impact to their lives. What an amazing run it has been for me to be a part of affecting that change, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in significant ones. I will be the biggest GreenLight champion in the years to come to see those stories of impact unfold for millions more.

I first got to know Casey when she was part of the team at GreenLight Fund Boston’s second portfolio organization, Raising a Reader. I knew even then that she was a superstar. She left Raising a Reader at the end of 2008 to move with her family to the Bay Area.

Fast forward a few years later when we knew the Bay Area would be one of our first expansion sites. Margaret Hall and I immediately thought of Casey as the perfect leader to launch our work there. When she joined GreenLight as our first Bay Area Executive Director and set the bar high for all the EDs to follow, GreenLight’s staff fit around a small table. Casey was then and continues to be today a key partner in our vision and growth. GreenLight would not be where it is today without her leadership.

Over the past 13 years, she’s been a captain and a coach – which came naturally given her athletic background – for GreenLight, our staff and each of our portfolio organizations along the way. It would be impossible to name all the ways Casey made GreenLight better. I’ll just share a few examples – she led the innovations and codification of our program model, built out the way we work with Selection Advisory Councils and portfolio organizations, spearheaded the development of our measurement systems and portfolio organization database, for existing organizations and those we should consider in future pipelines, and all that has made it possible to significantly change outcomes in communities and measure and report on our impact across the country. I am incredibly grateful for her thought partnership, her commitment to this work and her phenomenal contributions. As she steps away to focus on her family and engage in her next chapter, I know she will always be a champion for GreenLight and maybe even send us some good advice every now and then!

It has been an absolute joy to partner with Casey this past year as we’ve advanced the national scope of our work. In our short time together, I’ve learned a great deal and continue to be inspired by her people-centered approach to furthering the GreenLight Fund mission. 

As we approach Casey’s last day, I can’t help but reflect on her significant impact on GreenLight, our model and our culture. I recall a walk-and-talk we took through downtown Denver last summer (a meeting style we both enjoy) where we had a candid conversation about GreenLight’s growth trajectory. Casey shared her initial concerns about our pace when we expanded from three to five sites, but also how she’d become more confident in the Method’s application to new cities as we grew. Ironically as we, two out-of-towners, navigated unfamiliar streets in what was GreenLight’s 13th and newest site at the time, it became clear to me that Casey’s leadership and perspective shift has been integral to our smart and responsible growth these past 13 years.

During that walk, she described her role as the “clutch” to our co-founders’ “stick shift” partnership dynamic — an important mechanism for vehicles to shift gears effectively while keeping passengers safe. We are grateful for this and thankful that her leadership has helped the organization move to an “automatic transmission.”

Reading Casey’s reflections, what I’ll miss most is her warmth and clear focus on the people central to our work — our staff, our partners, and those who benefit from services provided by our investments. We are so fortunate that her warmth is infectious and has become part of GreenLight’s DNA. We will always be grateful for this evergreen gift to GreenLight, to the sector, and to the ongoing efforts to help children and families access inclusive prosperity