Blue Ridge’s John Griffin Elected Next Chairman of Robin Hood Foundation

(Bloomberg) -- John Griffin, founder of Blue Ridge Capital, will be the next chairman of the Robin Hood Foundation, the poverty-fighting organization with Wall Street in its DNA.

Griffin, 56, was elected Thursday for a two-year term, succeeding Larry Robbins of Glenview Capital Management.

The timing is good, Griffin said, because he closed his hedge fund two years ago and turned it into a family office. He’s been on Robin Hood’s board since 2011.

“What fires me up about Robin Hood is using the same risk-taking mentality that helped me in my career to improve the lives of millions of New Yorkers who most need our help,” Griffin said by phone.

Before founding Blue Ridge, Griffin was an original “Tiger cub,” mentored by Tiger Management’s Julian Robertson in business and philanthropy. He first donated to Robin Hood in 1990, when the fledgling group’s risk-taking activities included funding the distribution of clean needles to fight the spread of AIDS.

Widely Adapted

Its metrics approach, once edgy, has since been widely adapted by other groups, and its supporters have grown to include academics and technology titans.

Investments in tech companies like Amazon.com Inc. and Netflix Inc. helped Griffin build his fortune, and tech tools have defined his philanthropic ventures.

Griffin founded iMentor, an email-based means of pairing more than 33,000 high school students with adult mentors over the past 20 years. His Blue Ridge Labs, which develops tech-based solutions to economic inequality, was merged into Robin Hood in 2015. The lab’s products include an app to help food-aid recipients manage benefits on their smartphones, and JustFix.nyc, a platform for tenants to request repairs.

“John is a roll-your-sleeves-up kind of person,” said Wes Moore, Robin Hood’s chief executive officer.

‘Numbers Game’

In recent years, the board has diversified to include people like former Washington schools superintendent Kaya Henderson; John King, education secretary during the Obama administration, and Steve Stoute, a marketing executive. None of them has come from the hedge fund industry.

“This is not a money board, this is a problem-solving board,” Moore said, adding it’s possible that a non-hedge fund manager could be elected chairman in the future.

“As our board continues to diversify, it’s a natural numbers game where the future leadership of the organization is,” he said. “There’s a real deliberateness in that.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill, Peter Eichenbaum

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