Shena Ashley, PhD

Shena Ashley, PhD is a Vice President at the Urban Institute where she leads the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. Here she oversees a research-in-action portfolio currently focused on community investing, equitable grantmaking, democratizing charitable giving, and nonprofit and philanthropic policy. She has led the transformation of the National Center on Charitable Statistics to an open-data repository, which now makes over 20 years of nonprofit data freely accessible to the public. Under her leadership, the Center has developed a portfolio of data and evidence assessment services designed to help foundations and their grantee cohorts to develop better impact narratives.