11 Questions for Jim Shelton of Blue Meridian Partners

Jim Shelton is the president and chief investment and impact officer of Blue Meridian Partners, a poverty-focused collaborative of heavy-hitting donors that, among other things, gives serious money to place-based, multisector partnerships, as I wrote recently. Shelton has an unusually multisector background himself. He oversaw education funding at both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and spent time in private industry working in educational technology and as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. On the government side, he served as assistant deputy and then deputy secretary and COO of the U.S. Department of Education under President Barack Obama.

He was also the founding executive director of My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, a multisector “call to action” launched by President Obama in response to the death of Trayvon Martin, designed to highlight successful programs and build supportive communities for boys and young men of color. Immediately prior to joining Blue Meridian, Shelton founded Amandla Enterprises, an impact investment and advisory firm.

In addition to his current role at Blue Meridian, Shelton serves on the boards of several organizations, including Duolingo, a gamified language learning app that shares your progress with others — as I recently discovered at a dinner party, when a friend’s teenage daughter asked me how my French was coming along. (Yes, having a 16-year-old girl track my progress does lead to more time online practicing French with an animated green owl.) The most popular language learning app in the world, Duolingo is one small example of Shelton’s driving interest — improving education and expanding access to it.

I caught up with Shelton over Zoom to talk about his path to Blue Meridian, his dedication to education and his perspective on philanthropy.

So much of your career has been focused on education. What drove you to this field?

I grew up in southeast D.C. and had very different opportunities than most of my friends because I went to a private school. My mom met a lady in the grocery store who told her about a school left over in southeast D.C. even after all the white people left, Naylor Road School. My parents worked out an opportunity for me to go to this school.

When I was in third grade, I was at my best friend’s house in the neighborhood. He had an older brother who was in sixth grade, who was the coolest guy, period. I wound up helping his older brother with his math homework. Because of what I thought about him, I immediately thought something was wrong with the school, not with him. He was clearly smart, cool, charismatic, hard working — all the things. It made me want to become a teacher.

Why didn’t you become a teacher?

My mom said, “You have to make money.” I was good at math and science in elementary school and in middle school, so I was pointed toward engineering and computer science. I thought I’d make money, then go back and do education later.

What was it like to go to Morehouse College, an HBCU?

I always had the dichotomy of living in my neighborhood, which was predominantly Black, and going to these schools that were predominantly white. The people around me who were Black didn’t have the opportunities that the white kids had, or that I had. I wanted to be in a community where the Black people had shared opportunities.

Morehouse was transformative for me, being able to see the diversity within the Black community. I had been underexposed to the full range of ways Black people lived. There were people there whose grandfathers had gone to college.

After Morehouse, you worked at ExxonMobile in Houston, went to Stanford for a dual MBA and master’s degree in education, then went to work for McKinsey. All of this, I’m assuming, was following your mom’s instructions to earn money. What was the “ah-ha!” moment that steered you back toward education?

I was on a path to be considered partner at McKinsey and about to move to South Africa. You have to prepare a lot of paperwork and answer a lot of questions about your goals and vision. I was talking about next steps, and the guy at McKinsey said, in an innocuous way, “At a certain point, you have to stop preparing to do things and just do them.” That was the moment. I realized if I stayed on the partner path, I would be there for a long time, and that the idea of trying to make enough money to have the independence to do this work without worrying about it was not as important to me as I thought it was. I decided to leave and go more directly to the things I was most passionate about.

But you didn’t actually go into teaching.

I leave McKinsey, thinking I’m going to go into education and economic development. Then I get a call from someone putting together a fund focusing on investing private capital in the education space and using technology. The internet was becoming a thing — I’m using the term “internet” to mean technology in general — and this group had an idea that education would begin to change rapidly due to the internet and new technologies. Because I cared about education and was a computer guy, I’d thought about it, too, but not as a focus of my own career. I went to talk to this guy about an idea I had about schools, and I was convinced to join. It was called Knowledge Universe and they had one of the largest pools of capital, so everybody who had an idea about how to apply technology to education showed up.

From Knowledge Universe, you cofounded LearnNow (a school management company that later was acquired by Edison Schools). At what point did you feel like, “Now I’m doing what I wanted to be doing?”

When I launched LearnNow, I felt like I was into something that was my calling. I thought, “We’re going to open these fantastic schools and do it in a way that we can learn what kinds of systems it takes to run great schools if you have the opportunity to build them from scratch.”

The problem I’m trying to solve is this: I know that most of the guys in my neighborhood are at least as smart as I am, and they are not getting the opportunity they deserve. The only way to really solve this is to solve it at scale. If there is a scarcity of resources, the kids with less resources will get pushed out. That was my logic.

You then went to the venture fund NewSchools before moving into philanthropy. How did you make the jump to philanthropy?

NewSchools was in-between, venture philanthropy. I realized that NewSchools needed more money. I went to talk to Gates about it and then they hired me. Gates said, “If we had someone focused on replicating what works in the education system, we could do more.” They had a strategy focused on small schools, replicating high-performing models, and improving graduation rates in our country. So many of our schools were allowing more than half the kids to drop out. People say that the small schools work and the work on improving graduation rates around the country was the largest impact on education they ever evaluated. I wound up staying at the Gates Foundation for five and a half years. I had another tremendous learning experience there.

How would you compare the approach of Blue Meridian and your job there to that of other foundations?

There are three or four things worth calling out. One is that when you’re thinking about how to actually improve people’s lives, education is central, but there are many factors that come into play that determine whether someone can change the trajectory of their lives. There are many points in the course of an individual’s life where things could go wrong and where investment continues to matter. You could have a great Head Start program, but you still need good elementary schools.

We have to stack these things so people can keep making progress, but most of our systems are not organized that way. Every time you improve a milestone, you increase the odds of them passing the next milestone. At Blue Meridian, we’re focused on getting coherence in the efforts communities are making to solve people’s problems and getting that alignment across someone’s life to compound the benefit.

Secondly, it’s a partnership of high-net-worth individuals and foundations working together. That partnership ethos brings a certain way of working, putting the work at the center, trusting the team and the expertise of the different players, and desiring to be in conversation and learning with each other.

Third, Blue Meridian makes sizeable investments and gives the investees a lot of flexibility. There are more people doing this now, but it’s not something that every foundation does. Then there’s the desire to keep innovating on what it’s doing. It started out focused on super-high-evidence organizations ready for transformative scale. Then, from there, it built out a way to help organizations get to that stage. Then they had a point of view about what place-based work looks like and evolved that. That notion of constantly learning.

The last thing I would say is that I have distinct pleasure working with the team here. These are people who pass the “good-good” test. They are good at what they do, they’re really committed to being good teammates and taking good care of people, and they are committed to changing people’s lives on the ground.

That sounds like the “good, good, good” test, like you need a third “good.” What does working in philanthropy allow you to do that your other roles didn’t?

One thing I love about being in philanthropy is being the risk capital and innovation capital so that government, which is the ultimate scaling organization, can begin to identify those things that are working and not change those giant systems to just anything, but to what has promise. There is a particular role for philanthropy to play.

Secondly, sometimes the incentive structures in the social sector or public sector are not aligned with what works; resources don’t necessarily flow to things that work. Here, I can identify things that are proven or promising and invest in those. The private sector, which is focused on what works, doesn’t drive you to serve people with the least resources. So in philanthropy, I can look for things that work and have market fit, but for the people who have the highest needs.

Every sector has its role. A unique challenge for us in making things happen in our country is that every sector has a caricature of what people in other sectors are like. So one of the big things is for us all to really understand the power and potential of us all playing our role in making this country what it aspires to be and can be.

You worked as the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. So President Obama. What was he like in person and what was that like?

People ask me all the time, “Did I have fun?” No. But it was an experience I would never trade for anything else. It was an incredible time and opportunity to serve. I didn’t have to be Senate-confirmed in my first role, so I started right away. The flags were still up at the Capitol from the inauguration. We’d just had a meeting in which we spent 20 minutes talking about Montana, which was more than I’d spent talking about Montana in my entire life. I felt the accountability about it being the whole country, and that every child was counting on us.

I was honored to work for President Obama and also for (former Secretary of Education) Arne Duncan. He is a phenomenal person, and I learned a tremendous amount from him. It was an honor working for President Obama, who was very focused on what it meant to take the crisis that we were in — people often forget what was happening in 2008 — and use the resources for economic recovery. The first thing he did was give it to teachers to make sure they stayed on the job. Then he used it to accelerate our agenda around education — that commitment of helping America live up to its potential and our full aspirations, with the strategic mind of knowing how to use those levers.

Anything else important about your path you'd like to share?

One thread I want to pull through that I learned at Gates: If you want to go fast, you go alone; if you want to go far, you go together. That’s an African proverb that was like a mantra at the Gates Foundation. For me, the difference between a traditional foundation versus working at Blue Meridian is the notion of partnership; you can pursue bolder and longer-term goals when you do it together. I just really believe in that. Trying to perfect how you do that well is going to be the next important phase of my life.

Clarification: This article was last updated on March 21, 2024 to clarify Jim Shelton’s recollections of his early education and attending Morehouse.

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