Sally Smyth is the director of community finance and impact for Opportunity@Work. From 2015-2016, Opportunity@Work was based at New America.
Smyth is responsible for the organization’s work to ensure that the implementation of TechHire in the 50+ communities across the country is appropriately staffed and funded to support the development of robust ecosystem partnerships and create measurable social impact. Smyth also leads Opportunity@Work’s support of TechHire community lead institutions and their local partners in prioritizing and tracking core metrics, for the purposes of establishing and maintaining alignment across partners, iterating and improving the work over time, and communicating the quantitative impact of the work.
Prior to joining Opportunity@Work, Smyth served as a policy advisor in the White House at the National Economic Council (NEC) and before that as a presidential management fellow at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). During her tenure at NEC and USDA, Smyth worked to advance community economic development priorities—at NEC contributing to the president’s efforts to increase private investment in essential infrastructure and create pathways to well-paying tech jobs, and at USDA, leading the interagency Promise Zones initiative for the department.
From 2007 through 2011, Smyth was an analyst with the Center for Effective Philanthropy, first in Cambridge, Mass. and then in San Francisco, Calif., where she helped launch CEP’s west coast office. At CEP Smyth created and presented assessment reports to senior executives of large grantmaking foundations, and was personally entrusted by CEP leadership to present reports to some of CEP’s largest and most important clients, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. During her time at CEP Smyth also co-led the development of a new tool synthesizing donors’ perceptions of the community foundations to which they give, including writing the first surveys, managing the collection and analysis of data, and sharing results with the first clients.
During her time at CEP and after, while obtaining her MPP at UC Berkeley, Smyth gained experience in workforce and economic development through consulting for the Food Chain Workers’ Alliance and the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union Western States Council, serving on the Development Committee of the Northern California Community Loan Fund, and launching the Berkeley Food Institute at UC Berkeley.
Smyth received a BA in the College of Social Studies from Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the Robert Schumann award for excellence in environmental stewardship, and a masters of public policy from the Goldman School at the UC Berkeley.