• Chair, Co-Founder, Win-Win Strategies

Marissa Wesely is a life-long champion for gender equity and the transformative power of investing in women. She co-founded Win-Win Strategies (WWS), which works to build bridges across sectors to support women’s economic resilience across the globe. As the organization’s Chief Executive Officer, she built a strong network of foundations, women’s funds, grassroots women’s organizations and private companies dedicated to collaborating for gender equity. She now serves as an Advisor to Women Win - a global women’s fund guided by the vision of a future where every woman and girl exercises her rights - into which WWS merged in 2019. In her ongoing work to advance the mission of WWS, she was a key partner in designing and launching in 2021 the Resilience Fund for Women in Global Value Chains, on whose Advisory Board she now serves. Among her many other non-profit board roles, Marissa currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Equality Fund and Women Win. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and speaks and writes regularly on issues of women’s empowerment and rights, including as the co-author of the 2015 cover story in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “Empowering Women at the Grassroots.” Prior to her time at WWS, Marissa had a long career as a leading banking and finance lawyer for the global law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. During her time there she received the ABA’s Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award for her work advocating for women in law.