Todd Williams

Highly committed to public education, Todd is the founding Chairman and Executive Director of The Commit Partnership, the nation’s largest collective impact organization with over 190 institutions (including 15 school districts and eight higher ed institutions educating over 790,000 students) focused together on meaningfully improving post-secondary completion levels across the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He also serves as the Education Policy Advisor to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. Todd is a current trustee and former board chair for Austin College, one of the region’s leading liberal arts institutions located in Sherman, Texas. With his wife Abby, Todd also serves on the board and was the founding chair of the regional advisory board for Teach for America in Dallas/Ft. Worth, and also helped establish in 2007 the Williams Preparatory School, a K-12 free tuition public charter school operated by Uplift Education that educates over 1,500 primarily low-income children in northwest Dallas. 100% of its graduates since its first senior class in 2011 have been accepted to a four-year college or university. Todd is the former Chair of the Citizen Budget Review Commission for Dallas ISD ($1.7 billion budget educating 160,000 students) and the former Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees for Uplift Education, a public charter school management organization serving almost 15,000 students across the D/FW area. He 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 both a partner and as global co-head of Goldman Sachs’ real estate private equity investment area, retiring in 2009 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. A public school graduate from Bryan Adams H.S. in Dallas ISD, Todd earned an M.B.A. with distinction from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and graduated with a B.A. in Economics from Austin College in Sherman, Texas in 1982.