About

Sasha Dichter

I’m the co-founder and CEO of 60 Decibels, an impact measurement company that helps anyone, anywhere listen to the people their work is meant to serve. Before that I spent twelve years in various senior roles at Acumen.

I’ve written this blog since 2008. It started with fundraising and generosity, evolved to focus on leadership and change in the social sector, and keeps coming back to the long, slow work of pursuing mastery. These days it covers a lot of AI. Taken together, it’s a record of what I’ve been thinking about for the last 18 years.

Work

2019 to todayCo-founder and CEO, 60 DecibelsWorld-leading company on social outcomes measurement in the impact sector.
2007 to 2019AcumenAs Chief Innovation Officer, helped create Lean Data and +Acumen, the school for social change, and oversaw the Acumen Fellows Program. Before that, as Director of Business Development, led global capital raising, including a $100M raise.
EarlierGE Money, IBM, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Booz Allen HamiltonExpanding financial services for underserved communities at GE Money, corporate citizenship strategy at IBM, microfinance in Indonesia, and telecom consulting in Latin America and Europe.
SchoolHarvard College, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business SchoolBA, MPA in International Development, and MBA.

Why fundraising, why generosity

This blog started in October 2008 with my Manifesto for Nonprofit CEOs. I was frustrated that leaders in the social sector kept apologizing for asking for money.

A year later I tried an experiment: for a month, I said yes to everyone who asked me for money. What I learned became my TED talk, and in 2011, with a small group of friends, it became Generosity Day, a reboot of Valentine’s Day.

My story

I’m the child of immigrants, and it’s always felt particularly unlikely that I get to spend time on planet earth.

My grandparents, Lejb and Chaja Dichter (later Leon and Lucy), fled the Nazis in the early 1940s: from Poland to Lithuania, to Japan, and finally to Shanghai, where my father was born. They arrived in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day 1947 with their two-year-old son, my father Misha, having buried their first child in the Shanghai ghetto.

My mother, Cipa, was born in Rio de Janeiro, also to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. She emigrated to the United States at the age of 18 to study classical piano, first at the Eastman School of Music, and then at Juilliard, where she met my father.

My parents were born 11,000 miles apart. When I think about everything that had to happen for the two of them to meet, the odds against my being here seem even longer.

At my desk I keep a printout of the document that records my grandparents’ arrival as refugees in Kobe, Japan in 1941. It reminds me that I’m here because people I’ll never meet took risks to shelter my family. A lot of why I do this work comes from wanting to pay that forward.