Julie McCarthy

​Julie McCarthy is currently Managing Director at NatureFinance, which works to make financial markets and economic systems more nature-positive and equitable. Prior to that, she was Senior Advisor to the Chair of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All. She is also a nonresident fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. She has nearly two decades of nonprofit and philanthropic leadership experience in the areas of economic justice and good governance. She was the founding co-director of the Open Society Foundations’ (OSF) Economic Justice Program, a $100 million per annum global grantmaking and impact investment program focused on issues of fiscal justice, workers’ rights, and corporate power. In 2021, she led OSF’s $11 million global advocacy campaign on debt and financing economic recovery in low- and middle-income countries. Prior to this, she founded and led the Open Society Foundation’s Fiscal Governance Program. From 2011 to 2012, she served as the founding director of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), after having worked with the Obama White House and Brazilian government to develop and launch OGP as a senior adviser at the Transparency and Accountability Initiative.
In 2009, McCarthy was selected as a Franklin Fellow and peacebuilding adviser at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where she helped scope and launch a $30 million peacebuilding program in Liberia. Prior to this, McCarthy directed the Open Society Foundations’ Revenue Watch Program and then co-founded the Natural Resource Governance Institute, serving as its deputy director until 2009. In 2004, she was the researcher/writer for the Open Society Foundations’ award-winning Iraq Revenue Watch Project. McCarthy holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s from Yale University. Julie is a Fellow of the Civil Society Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.