Staff

Jessica Mindnich, Ph.D., is Director of Grantmaking and Organizational Learning at the Nellie Mae Education Foundation where she leads the full grantmaking lifecycle, oversees compliance and grants management systems, and builds the learning infrastructure that connects what NMEF funds to what NMEF knows. 

Her career spans more than two decades at the intersection of education policy, research, and philanthropy. At Children Now, Jessica  was the inaugural Director of Research translating rigorous data into real legislative wins for California’s children — including advocacy supporting AB 420 (2014), which made California the first state in the nation to eliminate “willful defiance” expulsions for all K–12 students and suspend the practice for the youngest learners — a law that directly addressed the racially disproportionate discipline pushing Black and Latino students out of schools. Her research also informed the campaign for the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF, 2013), the most comprehensive overhaul of California’s school funding system in 40 years, which redirected nearly $10 billion toward high-needs students and put communities in control of how those dollars were spent. She served as the organization’s primary research spokesperson, conducting 80+ media interviews and 100+ presentations, and co-advised First 5 California’s 10-year strategic plan on early education. 

Her decade in philanthropy spans three major foundations. At the San Francisco Foundation, she built the institution’s first Learning and Evaluation function, architected the Fluxx grants management system, and deployed a real-time data system that guided $3.6M in emergency COVID-19 funding to 375 organizations. At the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, she rebuilt the Learning and Evaluation department around an explicit racial equity commitment, anchoring a $1.5B, 10-year investment strategy in measurable outcomes. At the Mellon Foundation, she served as inaugural Senior Director of Strategic Learning and Evaluation, sharpening the focus of $550M in annual grantmaking across the enterprise. 

She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Human Development and Education from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a certified practitioner in Emergent Learning, Equitable Evaluation, and Results Count®.