Melville Charitable Trust, Executive Director

Melville Charitable Trust selected Susan Thomas, current Program Director for the Trust, as its next Executive Director. 

As Melville Trust’s Program Director, Thomas has led the foundation’s housing and racial equity efforts for five years and manages a state and national portfolio of grants supporting solutions to homelessness. Thomas has been instrumental in the creation of Funders for Housing and Opportunity, a national non-partisan, cross-sector funder collaborative focused on tackling the housing affordability crisis by supporting advocacy, narrative change work, and efforts to scale effective practices at the intersection of housing, health, economic mobility, and education. While at the Trust, she was also selected to participate in the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Fellowship program targeting leaders working to improve outcomes for children, families, and communities.

Before joining the Trust, Thomas was Project Officer for Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta, where she was responsible for leading Unsheltered No More!, an initiative to dramatically reduce street homelessness that placed over 1,000 homeless individuals into permanent housing. As the former president of Providence Consulting Group, she helped launch a Georgia-wide foundation to assist foster families, and she co-chaired an effort for the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Atlanta Housing Authority to rehouse 420 families as part of a major HOPE VI redevelopment project. Prior to her time at Providence Consulting Group, Thomas was Vice President of Community Investment and Area Development at the United Way of Greater Atlanta, where she was responsible for strategic investments of $107 million in grants over three years.

Thomas graduated with a BS in Accounting from the University of Maryland and earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Rebecca Swartz led this search with Tatiana Oberkoetter.