Changing What’s Possible
Table of contents
Maura O’Neill
This story is part of the Architects of Impact series, highlighting stories of innovation that demonstrate how our Community is mobilizing to ensure a world that works for all people and the planet.
When Maura O’Neill walks into a room, she brings decades of experience in business, government, and philanthropy. She also brings a restless, systems-thinking energy—a refusal to accept that the way things are is the way they have to stay.
It’s what drove her to run four successful energy efficiency businesses. It’s what brought her to the Obama administration as the first Chief Innovation Officer at USAID. It’s what’s fueled her lifelong focus on the power of entrepreneurship. And it’s what drew her to Forward Global.
She’s on a mission to make connections across sectors.
“Philanthropy has this unique role,” Maura says. “It can take the risk when the government or businesses can’t. But we have to stop thinking of that as the whole job. If we’re not asking what happens when we exit stage left—if we’re not designing with public and private partners from the beginning—we’re setting things up to stall.”
At Forward Global, Maura has found peers with whom her work resonates. For Maura, our Community is a space where solving systemic problems isn’t a side conversation, but the point.
Maura first crossed paths with Forward Global CEO Renee Kaplan through the Skoll World Forum and was immediately drawn to her leadership. “Renee was saying what too few in philanthropy are willing to say: this isn’t just a community for people who want to give—it’s for people who want to solve.”
It was the need for action, the appetite for risk, and the embrace of bold conversations that made Forward Global feel different. “This is a community that doesn’t settle for surface-level. It’s asking the hard questions, together,” she says.
Maura now leans into Forward Global’s New Economy, Climate, and Democracy action labs, seeing them as living test kitchens for the kind of multi-sector, locally grounded change she believes is most urgent.
A Guiding Light for Systems That Work
Before she shaped national innovation policy or launched large-scale philanthropic ventures, Maura was deep in the energy sector—first at Seattle City Light, then founding multiple energy-efficiency and smart-grid startups across the Pacific Northwest. Her companies worked with more than 100 utilities, pioneering models that helped households and businesses save billions while shifting the energy economy toward cleaner, decentralized systems.
That early work hardwired her understanding of how real change happens: not through innovation alone, but through aligned systems, like policy, capital, regulation, and community, all moving in sync. “You can’t just invent something great,” she says. “You have to change the system so it can thrive.”
Now, she’s applying that lens far beyond energy: to equity, entrepreneurship, and opportunity. Her core question: What would America look like if opportunity weren’t gated by gender, geography, economic status, or race?
Her answer is ambitious: $5 trillion more in GDP, 20 million jobs, and 2 million women and people of color leading bold new enterprises. “We can get there in a decade—not five centuries—if we’re willing to act differently.”
That’s the heart of her Decade Project: a push to rewire entrepreneurship ecosystems in underinvested places like tribal communities and rural towns. In southern Arizona, she’s helping launch programs where Native electricians are both trained for jobs and to start businesses. “It’s about shifting from workforce development to ownership. From participating to leading,” Maura says.
Like the smart-grid work of her early career, Maura’s work with the Decade Project is a reminder that the system shapes what’s possible and who gets to build it.
Changing What’s Possible in the U.S. and Abroad
At USAID, Maura launched the Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) Fund to invite anyone to propose sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective solutions for global development. But she always pushed funders to look beyond the pilot phase. “You need a great idea, yes. But you also need a path to scale—whether that’s the private sector, policy change, or both.”
She recalls visiting a maternal health NGO in Guatemala’s Indigenous highlands, an effort solely supported by philanthropy. “It was saving lives. But the government wasn’t involved. So we asked: how do we scale this as a public good, not a private project?”
That’s the shift she hopes to encourage within Forward Global. “We need to design from day one with the endgame in mind—not just showcasing good work, but locking arms with business and government so it can live beyond us.”
What keeps Maura going is the promise she sees, especially in unexpected places. “Some of the most exciting entrepreneurship is happening in places we’ve historically ignored, like rural America and Tribal areas. They just need systems designed to let them lead,” she says.
Maura is currently advising Native-led entrepreneurship initiatives and helping shape a new Tribal-focused operating board. Her eye is on 2035, but her moves are urgent now.
She’s also tracking the backlash, from DEI rollbacks to philanthropic retrenchment. “Fear is contagious. But so is boldness.”
That collective energy is what keeps Maura as an active member of Forward Global, as she continues to take on wide-reaching projects: “It’s one of the few places where learning and action truly converge. Where the conversation isn’t just about giving—but about changing what’s possible.”
