Henry Timms, CEO of Lincoln Center for Performing Arts
Prior to his current position, Henry Timms served as Executive Director of the 92nd Street Y for more than 12 years where he created programs and movements that foster learning, civic responsibility, culture and innovation, both in New York City and around the world. In 2012, Timms founded GivingTuesday, which engages more than 27,000 partners in a global day of giving that was honored with a Cannes Lion at the International Festival of Creativity; the PRWeek Global Award for Nonprofit Campaign of the Year; and the inaugural UJA-Federation Riklis Prize in Agency Entrepreneurship. Timms also co-founded the annual Social Good Summit which pioneered a new, inclusive summit model that opened up the critical discussions held during UN week to a much wider audience and led to concurrent gatherings around the world. As an extension of the Social Good Summit, Timms partnered with Wesleyan University to develop a MOOC (massive open online course) called “How to Change the World” and 51,000 students participated in its first year. Timms co-authored the “Big Idea” in the December 2014 edition of the Harvard Business Review on New Power – How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World and How to Make it Work For You, which was named one of the ten “Ideas of the Year” by CNN. He is a practitioner in residence at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (Stanford PACS) and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils. In 2014, Timms was named The NonProfit Times Influencer of the Year. Timms is a member of several philanthropic committees, including the Lipman Prize Committee at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the board of the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York and is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA), where he is chair of the nominating committee for the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin Medal.