Julie McCarthy

Background

About Julie McCarthy

Julie has more than 20 years of non-profit and philanthropic leadership experience in the areas of economic justice and good governance. Prior to joining NatureFinance, she was the founding Co-Director of the Open Society Foundation's Economic Justice Program, a $100 million per annum global grantmaking and impact investment program focused on issues of fiscal justice, workers’ rights and corporate power. In 2021, she led OSF’s $11 million global advocacy campaign on debt and financing economic recovery in low and middle income countries. Prior to this, she founded and led the Open Society Foundation’s Fiscal Governance Program. From 2011 to 2012, she served as the founding Director of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), after having worked with the Obama White House and Brazilian Government to develop and launch OGP as a senior adviser at the Transparency and Accountability Initiative. In 2009, McCarthy served as a Franklin Fellow and Peacebuilding Adviser at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where she helped scope and launch a $30 million peacebuilding program in Liberia. Prior to this, McCarthy directed the Open Society Foundations’ Revenue Watch Program and then co-founded the Natural Resource Governance Institute, serving as its deputy director until 2009. In 2004, she was the researcher/writer for the Open Society Foundations’ award-winning Iraq Revenue Watch Project. McCarthy is currently a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Sustainable Development and an Aspen/ADL Civil Society Fellow. She sits on the boards of Luminate Strategic Initiatives and Keseb, and is on the advisory board of the International Budget Partnership. She has a BA in Philosophy from Cornell University and an MA in International Relations from Yale University. Julie currently lives in Warwick, NY with her three children.