Susan Ditkoff

Senior Advisor, The Bridgespan Group

Susan Wolf Ditkoff (she) is a Senior Advisor at the Bridgespan Group, Administrative Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, Affiliate Faculty at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Senior Advisor to TEN: Together Ending Need. Her research and writing focus on the ethics of wealth and philanthropy.

Ditkoff joined Bridgespan in 2001, serving most recently as a partner and co-head of the firm’s global philanthropy practice. She specializes in advising families and foundations who seek to support marginalized communities with passion and humility. She has also led design teams with community leaders on systems change initiatives and social movements. She has published extensively in the Harvard Business Review, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and numerous publications in the US, India, China, Israel, and the UK. Her research has been included in more than a dozen graduate school syllabi globally—including in HBR's 10 Must Reads on Nonprofits and the Social Sector—and her interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Yahoo Finance Live, Bloomberg Radio, CNBC, and WNYC among other venues.

Ditkoff graduated from the Harvard Divinity School, where she researched Religion, Ethics, and Politics, and from the Harvard Business School, where she co-founded the Social Enterprise New Venture Competition, served as an elected member of the School’s ethics panel, and was later appointed Vice President of the HBS Alumni Board of Directors. She was also a Visiting Lab Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Center for Ethics at Harvard and a Leadership Coach in the HBS Executive Education program. Previously, Ditkoff was a financial analyst and behavioral health analyst in the private sector. She was trained in ethnography and anthropological linguistics at Yale College, where she researched the public education of Spanish-speaking students in the United States and served a practicum as a bilingual classroom aide in a local public school. She was a publicly elected school board official for more than 14 years, where she co-chaired two public school building projects ($350 million) and the District’s COVID-19 Task Force on Remote Learning and School Reopening.