Laura Lanzerotti

Laura Lanzerotti is a partner in The Bridgespan Group’s San Francisco office and leads Bridgespan’s work in Innovation Strategy and Collaborative Processes. Since joining Bridgespan in 2006, she has supported a number of institutional and family philanthropies to develop and refine their impact strategies and nonprofit leaders to pursue innovation and scale in a variety of fields including early childhood, youth development, economic opportunity, and place-based change. Some of her recent clients include The Studio @ Blue Meridian, PolicyLink, Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), Eden Housing, and Hopelab.

Laura’s specialty is designing innovative and inclusive strategy processes, including a project for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation that engaged hundreds of people in developing an economic development plan for their community, an “open strategy” project for the Wikimedia Foundation to which over a thousand people across the globe contributed, and support for a group of funders in the early childhood field to help them align investments to improve kindergarten readiness. In addition, Laura has worked across dozens of Bridgespan initiatives as a lead designer and facilitator of Impact Labs - workshops that take place over the course of days or months and create the space and structure for groups to learn together and collaborate towards better solutions.

Laura is co-author of “Moving from Intention to Impact: Funding Racial Equity to Win,” (Bridgespan.org, 2021) “Twin Engines for Propelling Social Impact,” (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2021) “Is Your Nonprofit Built for Sustained Innovation?,” (SSIR, 2017) “Geek Cities: How Smarter Use of Data and Evidence Can Improve Lives,” (Bridgespan.org, 2013), and “Living Into Your Strategic Plan: A Guide to Implementation That Gets Results,” (Bridgespan.org, 2011).


Prior to joining Bridgespan, Laura was a consultant at Informing Change and the LFA Group, helping foundations, government agencies, and nonprofits build performance measurement systems and conduct evaluations. Laura graduated from Brown University with a BA in History and completed the Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs in San Francisco. She received her MPP from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.