Todd Fisher came to the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) in 2018 ready to make a change. After 25 years with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Company (KKR), the investor and business operations executive had attained the apex of what he calls a “fabulous career,” ultimately serving as the private equity firm’s global chief administrative officer and partner. It was time to give back. “For many years I felt that there’s something more that I want to be doing,” he recalled. “There's a more direct impact on the world that I want to be making. Once I turned 50, I said, ‘You know, I've been talking about this for many years.’”

Currently the managing director of scalable solutions at Year Up, a nonprofit devoted to closing the economic opportunity divide in America, Fisher found the tools and the guidance to make that transition at ALI.  “ALI really spoke to me,” said Fisher, offering “a semi-structured way to pull myself out of a world that I’d lived in for 25 to 30 years” and immersing him in “a really interesting, stimulating environment with a cohort of people who were coming at this with a similar mindset, entering a stage of life with a desire to have a social impact and change.”

Fisher’s background had already given him a unique perspective on social problems – particularly the issue of economic mobility, the root of deep income inequity. “If you look at the last 50 years of this country, social economic mobility has been on a fundamental downward and consistent trend to the point where the concept of the American dream does not play out.”

“How do you get into that first job? Get on a pathway to a middle-class life?” These first career steps for older adolescents and young adults were not getting the attention that early childhood intervention had, he notes. When they were, “there was a lot of focus on skill-building colleges and community colleges, and not a lot of focus on actual connection to a job and the support surrounding an individual to make that young adult successful in a job.”

Thanks to his years at KKR and before that at Goldman Sachs and Drexel Burnham Lambert, Fisher had some ideas about how to address this issue. “One of the things I could add to this universe was my deep understanding of corporate America,” he realized. That included how corporate human resources worked – from mentoring and training people. “At KKR, I spent a lot of time and effort thinking about pathways into jobs.”

The issue was personal for Fisher. Married to a first-generation college graduate, his own career was made possible by the generosity and foresight of his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who came to this country as a refugee and scrounged and saved so his descendants could attend college. Acknowledging these privileges, as well as those accorded him as a white man in America, he says, “I was quite lucky to be able to access that opportunity – to have a grandfather and parents who were pushing me to do that.”

 At ALI, Fisher focused on classes at the Graduate School of Education. He also networked extensively, seeking to “really understand how this nonprofit ecosystem works.” 

With Year Up, Fisher found a nonprofit partner dedicated to bridging the gap between talented young adults who lacked access to the economic mainstream and the corporate world — providing in-demand technical and professional skills such as writing emails and interviewing, followed by an internship at a top company. Leveraging his corporate experience, Fisher has taken on the challenge of scaling Year Up’s services from approximately 4,000 students per year to tens of thousands, leading a team to expand the potential job base and program offerings. Through innovative, more sustainable models, his team is exploring shorter program lengths, new uses of technology, and new partnerships with other youth-serving organizations to create a broader talent ecosystem. “We speak the language of youth development and we speak the language of corporate America,” he said. “We can bring those two together in an effective way and create this connective tissue that really enables young adults to succeed.”