History of Board Service:
- ID Insight, Board Member and Audit Finance Committee Member, 2015-Present
- One Acre Fund, Founding Board Chair, 2006-Present
Matthew Forti, the current managing director of the One Acre Fund, enrolled at Kellogg with the goal of transitioning into the nonprofit sector. “I was drawn to the program's outstanding reputation for combining classroom and experiential learning, as well as the cohort of participating students who I believed would form a valuable learning community during and after Kellogg,” he says.
While serving as a Kellogg Board Fellow, Forti was placed on the board of Donors Forum (now Forefront), which serves nonprofit organizations in Illinois. During this time, he worked closely with the executive director and other board members to learn the basics of board governance.
At the same time, Forti was collaborating with his Kellogg peers to establish what would eventually become the One Acre Fund, a social enterprise that supplies financing and training to help smallholder farmers in Africa grow their way out of hunger and build lasting pathways to prosperity. After graduating, he volunteered to become the founding board chair, a position that required him to put his lessons from the program into immediate practice.
“KBF shaped every aspect of how I ran One Acre Fund's board, from recruiting new board members, to structuring committees, to shaping the dialogue during meetings, and to self-assessing our effectiveness,” he says.
Forti still thinks fondly of his experience today. “KBF was absolutely central to my Kellogg experience. The combination of rigorous coursework with the experiential learning of sitting on an actual board made this a foundational component of the social impact skills and community I was seeking to build at Kellogg.”
