THE HONOREE

BIOGRAPHY

Highly committed to public education, Todd is the founding Chairman and CEO of The Commit Partnership, the nation’s largest educational collective impact organization with 200+ institutions (including 15 school districts and eight higher-ed institutions educating over 700,000 students) supported by a dedicated backbone staff of ~70 employees. Together the Partnership and its backbone staff are collectively focused on improving economic mobility levels across the Dallas County region as well as the state of Texas. Todd also served for eight years as the Education Policy Advisor to former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings.

Todd has been appointed by the Texas governor to serve on two select year-long committees charged with making recommendations to comprehensively improve the state’s educational systems: the 2018 Texas Commission on Public School Finance which produced 35 recommendations that served as the basis for Texas’ landmark HB3 legislation (which equitably invested $11.5 billion in the state’s public K-12 education system in 2019) and the 2022 Texas Commission on Community College Funding, which produced recommendations serving as the basis for Texas’ landmark HB8 legislation which created the strategic investment of ~$650 million to reward targeted outcomes while increasing funding and accessibility for the state’s economically and academically disadvantaged students.

Todd is a former board chair for Austin College, a liberal arts college in Sherman, Texas. With his wife Abby, Todd was the founding chair for six years of the regional advisory board for Teach for America in Dallas/Ft. Worth, and together in 2007 they also helped establish the Uplift Williams Preparatory School, a K-12 free tuition public charter school operated by Uplift Education that educates over 1,500 primarily Hispanic children living in limited income homes in northwest Dallas. Todd also currently serves on the board of Fidelity Charitable, the nation’s largest donor advised fund with over $80 billion of assets under management and over $15 billion of annual grant making.

Todd is the former Chair of the Citizen Budget Review Commission for Dallas ISD ($2.0 billion budget educating ~140,000 students) and the former Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees for Uplift Education, a public charter school management organization serving over 23,000 students across the D/FW area. Todd is also the former chairman of both the Real Estate Finance and Investment Center (located at the University of Texas) and the Real Estate Council of Dallas, the city’s largest real estate organization.

Prior to dedicating his efforts full time as a volunteer to public education, Todd served as a partner and global co-head of Goldman Sachs’ real estate private equity investment area, retiring in 2010 following a 20-year career with the firm in their New York, Los Angeles and Dallas offices. Total assets under management purchased by GS-managed real estate funds exceeded $100 billion in cost, including $10 billion of equity invested by Goldman Sachs and its managing partners.

Todd earned an M.B.A. with distinction from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a B.A. in Economics from Austin College in Sherman, Texas.