Jessica Harrison Fullerton

Jessica Harrison Fullerton is a Managing Director of the Strategy and Build team at GDI Americas. Across her career, she has spent over fifteen years building and strengthening organizations seeking to improve life outcomes for people experiencing poverty, displacement and conflict.

At GDI, Jess is spearheading a portfolio of initiatives focused on child development and protection. She launched and serves as the interim COO for NurtureFirst, a global organization that builds and improves systems to support home-based childcare (HBCC) providers, so they can deliver evidence-based, affordable, culturally relevant childcare wherever they are. Jess is also leading an incubation team that is working to eliminate childhood lead exposure in lower and middle income countries (LMIC) in partnership with Open Philanthropy’s $100M+ Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF) and with the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future (PLF), a global UN-led multi-stakeholder initiative. Among her other GDI initiatives, Jess served as the COO for Malengo, an organization that seeks transformative income gains for low-income youth  through international educational migration.

Jess began her career as a Strategy and Management Consultant at Bridgespan and Dalberg Global Development Advisors. Subsequently, at Evidence Action, she launched a $35M effort in collaboration with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health and SCI to treat 100M children in five years across the country. Most recently prior to GDI, Jess spent seven years in strategy and operational leadership roles in the Program Quality Unit, the Emergencies Team, External Relations and the Office of the CEO at the International Rescue Committee, a $1B organization delivering programming to crisis and conflict-affected populations globally. She has an MBA from Columbia, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School and a BA from Middlebury College. She is a former Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has written for Stanford Social Innovation Review. When she’s not working, you can find her hiking the trails in Colorado where she lives with her husband, three young sons and rescue dog, Tabasco.