Elwood Hopkins is Presidential Fellow of the Kresge Foundation.
He is Founder and Managing Director of Emerging Markets, Inc. a consulting firm that has worked with major financial institutions and supermarket operators to profitably expand their retail operations into low-income neighborhoods nationwide. Clients have included Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Capital One, HSBC, Sun Trust, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, and US Bank as well as Supervalu, Kroger, Superior Markets, and Unified Grocers.
He is the former Executive Director of Los Angeles Urban Funders, a consortium of 21 foundations and corporations investing in neighborhoods impacted by the 1992 Civil Unrest, and he was a Trustee of the Los Angeles Reinvestment Committee. He has helped to form or advise more than a dozen funder collaboratives in cities nationwide, and is the author of Collaborative Philanthropies (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). Elwood remains a Senior Advisor to the USC Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy where he has directed multi-year inquiries, such as “Prioritizing Place,” and “Drawing on Detroit,” among others. He has also been enlisted by the Kresge Foundation to facilitate its national partnership on economic inclusion, called the Shared Prosperity Partnership, with the Aspen Institute, Brookings Institution, Living Cities, and the Urban Institute.
Previously, he was a Research Scientist at the New York University Urban Research Center with visiting appointments at universities and research centers in Bangkok, Jakarta, Tokyo, Beijing, Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. He has advised the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Center for Human Settlements (HABITAT), Organization of American States, the German Marshal Fund, and the World Bank.
He holds a BA from Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude, and an MA in Urban Planning from the UCLA School of Public Affairs, where he was valedictorian and now serves as a Senior Fellow. He is currently studying in the Real Estate Investment Programme at the Said School of Business at Oxford University.