Tova Vance is an executive leader with twenty years growing mission-driven organizations — nonprofits and startups, foundations and Fortune 500 companies — convening leaders across sectors and bringing together stakeholders who see the world differently. She pairs people-centered intention with business rigor, strengthening ecosystems, delivering financial and social results, building high-performing organizations, and leveraging inflection points to drive growth. An entrepreneurial builder, she finds people with big ideas, runs diligence, and turns the ideas worth uplifting into reality.

Most recently, Tova led former Fortune 500 chief communications officers and a Brown University computational-neuroscience professor to build and bring to market an AI-powered decision intelligence tool for iQ 360, re-founding the business advisory as an AI-native services company. The tool helps boards and executives make decisions that consider diverse stakeholders and deliver stronger financial results and social impact, and it’s now driving conversations with mid-market and Fortune 500 leaders.

As Chief Operating Officer of Higher Ground Labs, a five-fund, $42 million impact investing platform backing tech innovation across more than 60 early-stage companies, Tova partnered with the founder on investment strategy, diligence, and capital deployment. She rebuilt finance and operations, stood up the firm’s fifth fund, which raised a significant portion of its $10 million target within months, and helped deliver the ecosystem’s relied-upon annual landscape report and leadership conference.

Earlier roles built the same foundation of growth and rigor. As Chief Operating Officer at Novel Messaging, she helped the founders build a scalable organization delivering strategy communications for high-profile clients including the climate initiative Breakthrough Energy and leading national advocacy organizations. As inaugural COO at Do Big Things, a social venture and digital strategy firm, she tripled digital ad sales, profitability, and valuation in fourteen months while building the team, operations, finances, and culture behind the growth — serving organizations including the NAACP, Earth Day Network, and NBC’s Erase the Hate campaign.

Through her partnership with Gagen MacDonald, a leading firm in culture and business transformation, Tova counseled Fortune 500 executives at Merck, Pfizer, Amgen, Deloitte, and GE through disruption and advanced the field’s thinking on people-centered strategies, convening C-level forums with leading global brands on leadership through disruption, organizational transitions, and building inclusive cultures. Her rebuild of Merck’s communications function preceded the company’s #2 ranking among pharmaceutical firms on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired list, and she led Gagen’s West Coast expansion, exceeding its first-year revenue goal.

Tova’s work with mission-driven institutions includes advising the Comer Family Foundation on sharpening the impact of its grantmaking across climate research and youth education. She also gave eight years of service to Kehilla Community Synagogue, a diverse member-based nonprofit rooted in social advocacy, serving on the board and leading an inclusive organizational-development process and the organization’s founders-to-next-generation leadership transition.

Tova earned her B.S. in Public Relations and Political Science from the University of Oregon and her M.S. in Communication from Northwestern University. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and is committed to building prosperous and sustainable communities.