Adene Sacks

Adene Sacks happily wears many hats as a strategy consultant, grantmaker and philanthropic advisor. In 2019, she co-founded the WithIn Collaborative, a consulting collaborative that partners with nonprofit, foundation, and public sector leaders to co-design powerful responses to social challenges.

Together with the WithIn team, Adene has designed and facilitated 12 cross-sector leadership cohorts that are actively reshaping public systems in California; partnered with a hospital system and Native leaders to reimagine the birth experience for Native parents; and served as senior advisor to both DataKind and the Fellows Program at Stanford’s d.school. In 2019, Adene co-authored the book Leading Systems Change which provides funders and practitioners with tools for leading equity-centered systems change.

In a previous life, Adene was the first senior program officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation and, before that, the founding US director of the Israel Venture Network, initially a project of the New Israel Fund. In 2011, Adene received the JJ Greenberg Award for Philanthropic Leadership from the Jewish Funders Network. That was a really good day in light of what JJ Greenberg was all about.

Adene immigrated from South Africa when she was 5, grew up on the east coast, and now considers California home. She has been a donor to the New Israel Fund since she was 18 years old.