 Chris Rabb, Facilitator
Chris Rabb is a professional facilitator, speaker, author and consultant who has advised corporate, entrepreneurial and nonprofit clients for over ten years on issues from intrapreneurship and organizational strategy to intellectual property and legal structuring considerations for new business ventures.
He is an adjunct faculty member at two universities: at Temple University’s Fox School of Business where he teaches social entrepreneurship, and at Philadelphia University where he’s on the faculty in the College of Architecture and the Built Environment, teaching in the master’s program in sustainable design. Chris is also the Social Entrepreneur in Residence at the Fox School’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute (IEI).
Chris is the author of the ground-breaking book, Invisible Capital: How Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial Opportunity, published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Released in 2010, his provocative book explores the hidden factors that influence business viability when hard work, a great idea, and a good attitude are simply not enough. It also lays out how, through development of commonwealth enterprises, our society can further democratize entrepreneurial opportunity towards greater social inclusion, economic sustainability and community wealth-building.
Chris worked in the U.S. Senate as a legislative aide and as a writer, researcher, and trainer for the White House Conference on Small Business. He has worked on entrepreneurship from various vantage points, including founding a technology-based product design firm, running a nationally recognized nonprofit-based business incubator and focusing on public policy related to entrepreneurship and community economic development as a fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan public policy research and advocacy center in New York City. Chris also served as a board member for ten years for a family-owned newspaper business in Baltimore acquired by his great-great grandfather in 1892.
Chris is an accomplished genealogist and gifted story-teller, and was covered widely on radio, TV and print for his ground-breaking work on connecting genetic testing and family history. He is an experienced improvisational performer trained at Second City in Chicago, and performed with Yale University’s premier improvisational comedy troupe, The Purple Crayon.
Chris seamlessly incorporates his unique humor and eclectic experiences into his media appearances, interactive presentations, speeches and writings. He also uses these well-honed skills in his capacity as a professional facilitator who works on organizational change with large-scale clients as an executive ensemble member of the awarding-winning firm, ImprovEdge.
He has been featured extensively in, and written for, a number of prominent publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, Mother Jones, Black Enterprise, Colorlines.com, Mother Jones and The European Business Review. He has appeared frequently on TV and radio as a political commentator and was among the first cadre of bloggers to receive press credentials to cover the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 2004. In February 2010, Chris hosted a 30-minute documentary TV show produced by the Applied Research Center called: ColorLines: Race and Economic Recovery, which aired nationally on LinkTV.
Chris is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Pennsylvania’s Master’s Program in Organizational Dynamics. He is a 2001 American Marshall Memorial Fellowship recipient awarded by the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. and has been a Sense-Making fellow with the Poynter Institute since 2009.
A native of Chicago, Chris lives with his two sons in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. |
