Jonathan is executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Fetzer Institute, a philanthropic foundation and ideas institution committed to helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Jonathan’s personal story is grounded in “meliorism” — the philosophical notion that the world can be made better by human action – a school of thought he came to learn about in his twenties but the seed of which was planted at an early age in reaction to the world’s indifference to the Holocaust. With this orientation, he studied religion at the College of William & Mary and devoted his professional career to working with nonprofit and philanthropic organizations where he found the greatest opportunity to exercise his moral imagination. For more than fifteen years, he was a senior executive of YMCA of the USA where he led national innovation efforts in the areas of healthy living and youth development. Under Jonathan’s leadership, the YMCA’s innovation ventures were featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Stanford Social Innovation Review and the U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services awarded the YMCA its highest honor for health innovation. Prior to the YMCA, he was CEO of the Nonprofit Center of Northeast Florida; an attorney advising nonprofits and foundations on tax and governance matters; a research associate at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University; and a program associate for religion at the Jessie Ball duPont Fund. Jonathan has a law degree from Northeastern University and a master’s degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Jonathan and his wife, Laura, have been married for 26 years. They have three children — a seventh-grade social studies teacher in Appalachia, a junior at the University of Rochester majoring in studio art, and a senior in high school.