Bio
Rich Leimsider is thrilled to be the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Fund for the City of New York. In partnership with Nonprofit New York and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Rich is working to discover whether there are low-cost, high-leverage ways to help low income New Yorkers access existing government benefits programs. This project leverages the lessons learned from the 2022 Public Service Loan Forgiveness Campaign, an FCNY partner project that helped 75,000 people access $4.5 billion in debt relief.
Rich is a nonprofit consultant, and prior to the PSLF.nyc Campaign spent five years as the Executive Director of Safe Passage Project, growing five-fold a nonprofit organization that provides free lawyers to 1,400 child refugees who are being deported. At Echoing Green he led the growth of programs to support promising social entrepreneurs and at the Aspen Institute he launched and served as Director of the Center for Business Education. Rich serves on the board at myAgro, and has been an advisor to the World Bank, Harvard Business School, USAID, Google, and the United Nations. Rich is a graduate of NYC public schools, Williams College and Harvard Business School, has most of an MSW from the University of Texas, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.
