Shawn Landres has spent more than two decades leading organizations to achieve coordination without consensus—building alignment where incentive structures, institutional cultures, and accountability systems create genuine complexity. He holds degrees in religious studies and social anthropology from Columbia, Oxford, and UC Santa Barbara.
As co-founder of Jumpstart Labs (2008–2025), he helped build what became known as the Jewish Innovation Ecosystem, work that influenced tens of millions of dollars in philanthropic investment. In early 2022, he designed and led a multinational volunteer network across 20 countries that coordinated the evacuation of more than 4,600 people from conflict zones in Ukraine.
Shawn serves as Chair Emeritus of the Los Angeles County Quality and Productivity Commission, which oversees the nation’s largest local government innovation fund, and is a past chair of the City of Santa Monica Planning Commission. He was a team lead on Los Angeles County’s ProsperLA initiative, which earned a 2021 National Association of Counties Achievement Award, and the Obama White House featured him as a “Spotlight Innovator” in 2012.
A Board officer for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, he serves on the Public Policy Advisory Committee for SoCal Grantmakers, is a Senior Fellow at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and advises Known Holdings, Main Character Capital, and NEXUS.
This past year we’ve learned that videoconferencing and teleconferencing are legitimate, and in some ways better, ways to participate in local government. But the pandemic also has laid bare longstanding inequities that separate too many Californians from decision-makers. Short-term fixes aren’t sufficient, and long-term reform cannot come soon enough.