Jamie Allison

Jamie Allison leads the Walter & Elise Haas Fund in partnership with trustees, ensuring that the foundation’s work expresses its values, resonates with community, and catalyzes the field. She focuses on organizational leadership, strategy, and governance. Her top priorities are to ensure that the Fund’s staff thrive in their roles and that the Fund’s practices and grantmaking advance liberation and community transformation. Jamie’s 20 plus years in philanthropy combined with experience in the public sector and local government enables her to understand how these systems can be leveraged to make real change. Every day, she is inspired by the community leaders who endeavor to dream and make real a more just society by widening the circle of care to include all of us.  

Jamie earned undergraduate degrees in Political Science, Economics, Spanish, and Humanities from the University of Tennessee and went on to receive her Masters from the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Her breadth of civic involvement includes guest lecturing at UC Berkeley and Mills College, serving on the boards of BoardSource and The Whitman Institute, a spend-out foundation that coined and promoted trust-based philanthropy, and serving as faculty for Northern California Grantmakers’ New Grantmakers Institute. When not at work, Jamie keeps active as a hiker and frequent attendee of music and film festivals and Major League Soccer games.