Paul Carttar

Paul is a Senior Advisor to Dunecrest. He brings more than forty years of experience across the public, private, and non-profit sectors, and his career has circled one question throughout: how capital gets deployed so that it produces measurable results for people who need them. He has approached that question from inside federal government, from a global consultancy, from the leadership of major philanthropies, and, more recently, from the boards of the investor networks trying to build the practice of social investment in Africa and Asia.

During the Obama administration he served as the inaugural director of the Social Innovation Fund, a presidential priority programme that mobilised more than one billion dollars of public and private capital to scale non-profit organisations with demonstrated impact on economic opportunity, health, and youth development in low-income communities across the United States. He led its design, launch, and first three years of operation, developing the grant-making strategy, establishing the intermediary partnerships through which public investment was leveraged with philanthropic capital, building coalitions across government, philanthropy, and the non-profit sector, and putting in place the performance measurement and accountability frameworks that made the results legible.

His recent work has moved that same logic into the energy transition. Between 2022 and 2024 he acted as strategic advisor to the Lieutenant Governor of Kansas on a one billion dollar proposal to develop regional hydrogen production, storage, and utilisation industries, submitted to the United States Department of Energy under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. A central requirement of that programme is the Justice40 directive, under which forty per cent of the benefits of federal investment must reach disadvantaged communities. Paul led the process to submission and advised on the Justice40 compliance framework and the design of the community benefits plan, covering community and labour engagement, high-quality job creation and training including project labour agreements, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. He has also advised the World Resources Institute on project prioritisation and impact measurement. This is, in practice, the same problem climate finance faces everywhere: not whether capital can be raised for the transition, but whether its benefits reach the communities that carry its costs.

Much of his advisory work now concentrates on emerging markets. He is a founding advisor and board member of the African Venture Philanthropy Alliance, the first pan-African network for active social investors, where he helped guide its development and launch and continues to advise on network strategy, governance, and the growth of its investor community. He sits on the advisory group of the Global Alliance of Impact Networks, is a partner of the International Venture Philanthropy Center, and has served on the advisory board of Social Ventures Hong Kong. He has advised on the development of social investment networks across Africa and Latin America and, through his work with Dunecrest and previously with Energe Networks, on non-profit sector capacity building in Saudi Arabia, including the delivery of a leadership development programme for social sector leaders.

Paul is a senior advisor to and co-founder of The Bridgespan Group, where he played a foundational role in launching what became one of the leading consulting firms dedicated to social impact, and continues to support projects in philanthropy, non-profit strategy, and organisational scaling. Before the Social Innovation Fund he was an executive partner at New Profit, working with entrepreneurial non-profit chief executives on organisational strength and scale, and before that chief program officer at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, responsible for all programmes and grant-making, and executive vice-chancellor for external affairs at the University of Kansas.

He began his career in the public sector, on the staff of the United States Senate Budget Committee and at the Department of State as special assistant to Ambassador Arthur F. Burns at the United States Embassy in West Germany. He then spent several years at Bain and Company, rising to vice-president, followed by executive positions with two early-stage companies in the healthcare industry.

Paul holds a master of business administration from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a bachelor of arts in economics and English from the University of Kansas, where he graduated with highest distinction, and completed a year of legal studies at Cornell University School of Law. He has been a featured speaker on social innovation and impact investing at conferences in more than fifteen countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Singapore, India, and Chile, and serves on boards in both the United States and Africa.