Dr. Tyler Spencer has deep and broad experience as a leader in the social impact sector. He has been a community organizer, program designer, doctoral researcher, strategy consultant, grant reviewer, chief fundraiser, and Founder/Executive Director.

At age 22, after volunteering as an HIV prevention educator in South Africa, Tyler founded Grassroots Health, a non-profit organization that mobilizes NCAA student-athletes as health educators in Washington, DC middle schools. A student-athlete himself, he mobilized his peers to build Grassroots Health from a small student group in his campus apartment into a city-wide organization with a reach of more than 10,000 youth.

Along the way, Tyler developed deep experience with questions that philanthropists and non-profit leaders face — “How do we define and measure our impact in a meaningful way?”, “What should the relationship between a funder and a nonprofit leader look like?”, and “What’s the most effective strategy for mobilizing resources for social impact work?”

When Tyler passed the torch to the next generation of young leadership at Grassroots Health, he developed a passion for working alongside philanthropists and nonprofit leaders to help tackle some of these questions, and this led to the creation of Spencer Strategies. In a consulting and training capacity, he has worked with organizations like Atlantic Philanthropies, the United Nations, GlaxoSmithKline, and the MTV Staying Alive Foundation.

Tyler holds a Ph.D. in Public Health and an M.Sc. in Evidence-Based Social Intervention from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He also studied as an undergraduate at both the University of Virginia and Georgetown University. His work and story have been highlighted by the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Clinton Global Initiative, and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.