Jamaica Maxwell

Jamaica Maxwell joined the Packard Foundation in 2013 as a program officer for the Organizational Effectiveness program. At the Foundation, she manages organizational development grants to Conservation & Science and Population & Reproductive Health grantees, helping the Foundation’s core grantee partners strengthen their leadership, management, and operations. She also develops network and field-level capacity building efforts within these programs in the U.S., Asia, the Western Pacific, and Latin America. In addition, she leads learning explorations on emerging topics related to social sector capacity building, including systems analysis for program development/evaluation, and field-level leadership development. Previous to joining the Foundation, Jamaica spent 11 years at California Environmental Associates (CEA), where she gained deep experience providing strategic and organizational guidance to nonprofits, foundations, and businesses, with particular expertise in energy/climate change, biodiversity conservation, and agriculture/food systems. In her final five years at CEA, Jamaica was a senior associate for organizational design and recruiting services. In this role, she managed executive recruitment, staff planning and development, and organizational design for local, national, and international environmental NGOs. In addition, Jamaica has also run her own organizational development consulting firm, Jamaica Maxwell Consulting, and served as the founding program director for the Roots of Change Fund, a funder collaborative working to increase the sustainability of California’s food system. Jamaica holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Brown University and a master’s degree in writing from the University of San Francisco. In addition, she has completed fundraising training at the University of Indiana, Center on Philanthropy. Jamaica lives in San Francisco with her husband, two children, and two pet rabbits. She enjoys volunteering at her son’s elementary school and traveling with her family to beautiful cities and wild places, near and far.