Brian L. Trelstad

Brian Trelstad is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School in the General Management Unit and the Faculty Chair of the Advanced Leadership Initiative. He teaches elective courses on Social Entrepreneurship and Systems Change and Investing for Impact, and the first-year required courses on the Social Purpose of the Firm (SPF) and Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA).  His research focuses on social entrepreneurship, systems change, impact investing, and the role of business in society. 
Brian is also a Partner and Board Member at Bridges Fund Management, an impact investing fund that invests in health, education and environmental services business.  Prior to Bridges, Brian was the Chief Investment Officer of Acumen, where he oversaw investments in South Asia and Africa. Brian is a founding board member of Impact Capital Managers, a national membership association of impact investors in the United States and a founding board member of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE). Prior to Acumen, Brian worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, was a lead environmental staff person at the Corporation for National Service. He has been involved in a range of non-profit and for-profit start ups.  Brian serves on the boards of Candid, the Global Development Incubator and Digitals Commons and is both a Kauffman Fellow of the Center for Venture Education and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

Brian has an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and an MA in City & Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. From 2012 to 2019, he taught a graduate course in social entrepreneurship at Princeton University’s School for Public and International Affairs.