Founder
Prior to founding The Crossings Collective, Nelson developed the launch strategies for Onboard Climate, a talent development collaboration of the six largest philanthropic climate investors in the world, and the Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation to target its $9B+ for breakthrough in foundational medical research. He also advised D-Wave, the only publicly traded quantum company, on a go-to-market strategy for Research and Higher Education. He was previously Chief Commercialization Officer for Hum.AI, a startup that created GenerativeAI Earth Observation solutions for conservation and climate research. Previously, he was the inaugural Global Head of Impact Computing at AWS, where he developed Advanced Computing solutions using GenAI, Quantum Computing, Modeling/ Simulation/Digital Twin for climate risk in food security, population health, and climate analytics. He is a Founder of the AWS Impact Computing Project at the Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI), which funds data science research for climate risk. He was Director of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, the world’s largest open-source climate data repository and grant program, and he created the world’s first bespoke Social Determinants of Health data science platform with 350 organization in Ohio. With HDSI and the Rockefeller Foundation, he helped develop a strategy to address the nonprofit talent gap in climate-focused data science.
Prior to joining AWS, Nelson was Head of Social Impact at the Computer History Museum, where he helped the Board transform the museum from an institution that preserves/presents the history of computing, to an engine of social impact. He also advised one of the largest family offices in Silicon Valley on a $100M fund to address wealth inequality among African Americans. Nelson was a Fellow at Penn’s Graduate School of Education, where he designed/taught a master’s program on Social Impact Entrepreneurship.
In 2012, Nelson co-founded Declara, a venture-backed adaptive learning platform that uses hierarchical deep recurrent neural net to personalize professional learning. In four years, Nelson attracted the largest series-A in Silicon Valley history and directed Declara’s organic growth with governments in three continents, and in Fortune500 talent organizations, where it still facilitates professional development and innovation. He was deeply involved in the product development strategy and led the company’s M&A process, which resulted in the company’s sale in May 2019.
Nelson was Chief Strategy Officer of the Stupski Foundation, where he designed a seven-state/30-district network focused on to personalizing learning at scale by building systemic innovation capacity among professionals in urban public school districts. This Innovation Lab Network became a hallmark of the Obama Administration’s education policy and served as a lab for policy innovations in the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. He was invited to apply the lessons the Network globally through to OECD’s global Innovative Learning Environments Initiative.
Nelson founded Advent Strategy, a global innovation strategy firm, where he led dozens of engagements with impact investing, philanthropic, corporate, academic, and international development institutions working in education, public health, human rights, and governance. He advised the President of Colombia and his Cabinet on national social impact innovation and poverty reduction strategies and served as Head of Strategy for the BBC World Service’s unit on social impact, where he led education, health, and human rights initiatives globally.
As Director of the Royal Institution World Science Assembly, he led a global initiative on pandemic preparedness with the CDC, WHO, and many ministries of health and leading pharmaceutical companies to foster alignment between science and public policy and solve market failure in pandemic-scale vaccine development. He managed the campaign of Ashraf Ghani, former President of Afghanistan, for UN Secretary General, and began his career as an intelligence analyst at Booz Allen Hamilton, a Senior Engagement Manager at the Ulanov Partnership (a social impact strategy firm comprised of ex-McKinsey partners), and Analyst for John R.W. Stott, leading Anglican theologian and Chaplain to H.M. Queen Elizabeth II.
Nelson has served on the Boards of Commonweal (in process), PRC (San Francisco agency serving unhoused adults); Grantmakers for Education; Boundless Social Impact Investing; Growth Sector Workforce Development; and StartOut LGBTQ entrepreneurs. He served on the Advisory Boards of the Templeton Foundation, the Burberry Foundation, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, and the NYC Public Schools InnovationZone. He participated in the creation of the National Commission on Nonprofit Governance (which became BoardSource.)
Nelson was in the PhD program at the London School of Economics, where he researched the theological foundations of Christian Democratic federalism in the design of the EU. He was tutored at Christ Church, Oxford, by Oliver O’Donovan and graduated from Amherst College magna cum laude. He has been a Fellow at Columbia, NYU, KU Leuven, and Penn, and participated in the Program on Innovative and Adaptive Ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. A native Colombian, first generation immigrant, and first-generation college graduate, he is fluent in Spanish and French. He has lived and worked in seven countries, across seven continents, using three languages.
Nelson Gonzalez
For more than 20 years and in six continents, Nelson has worked in philanthropy, tech, research, and public policy to foster innovation for social/environmental impact in AI/Quantum, governance, climate, population health, learning, community development, and spirituality.
With the founding of The Crossings Collective, Nelson is turning his attention from large-scale systems change using technology, capital, and policy to an effort that translates his lifetime of work various spiritual lineages and with numerous teachers, to local community building for resilience that centers sacred practices. He is on the path to ordination in the Soto Zen lineage of Suzuki Roshi through the San Francisco Zen Center. He completed his Bhakti-focused yoga teacher training with Janet Stone, which included time engaged with devotional practice in the main Shiva Temples of Tamil Nadu. He is a student of Dorothy Hunt, one of ten people to receive transmission from Adyashanti, with whom he integrates his Christian, Zen, Vedic, and Shamanic lineages, and Robert Hopcke, the most senior queer interpreter and practitioner of Jungian psychology into spiritual direction. Seeking to translate between scientific and contemplative epistemologies, he is the founder of a study group on Buddhist concepts of dependent origination and agentic AI. He has lived in San Francisco for 15 years, worked at or with numerous Bay Area focused or located philanthropies (The Evelyn and Walter Hass Jr. Fund, The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, The Stupski Foundation, the Stuart Foundation, and the Asia Foundation), served on the Board of PRC, volunteered with the local chapter of the Mankind Project—an initiation-based global men’s movement—for more than a decade, at the Stonewall Project at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation for six years. He has been a member of the Episcopal Church of St John the Evangelist in the Mission, which focuses on outreach to the unhoused (it houses the Gubbio Project), advocacy for harm reduction, and protection of immigrant rights. A native Colombian, he works with an elder shaman in his ancestral region of Antioquia.
