 Chris Rabb, Facilitator
Chris Rabb is a writer, consultant and public speaker on the intersection of entrepreneurship, civic engagement, media, social identity. His critically acclaimed book, Invisible Capital: How Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial Opportunity (2010), insightfully frames the facts, fiction and future of modern U.S. business in a funny, substantive, and counter-intuitive way that challenges the rhetoric proclaiming hard work, a great dea and a positive outlook lead to success in business.
Presently a visiting researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Mr. Rabb 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 in and on entrepreneurship from various
vantage points, including founding a technology-based product design firm, running a nationally recognized nonprofit-based business incubator in Philadelphia and focusing on public policy impacting social entrepreneurship and community economic development as a fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan public policy research and advocacy center in New York City. Mr. Rabb 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.
Mr. Rabb is an accomplished genealogist and gifted story-teller, having been covered widely on radio, TV and print for his ground-breaking work on connecting genetic testing and family history. He is a trained improvisational performer (having trained at Second City in Chicago and performed with Yale’s premier improv comedy troupe, The Purple Crayon). Mr. Rabb is also a former stand-up comedian, having performed professionally nationwide for three years.
Mr. Rabb seamlessly incorporates his unique humor and eclectic experiences into his media appearances, interactive presentations, speeches and writings as well as 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, Black Enterprise, Colorlines.com, Mother Jones and The Nation. 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.
Mr. Rabb 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-Maker fellow with the Poynter Institute since 2009.
Mr. Rabb serves on the boards of the Applied Research Center (NYC/Oakland, CA), Bread & Roses Community Fund (Philadelphia, PA) and on the national advisory board of Voice Male Magazine.
A proud Chicago native, Chris lives with his two sons in Philadelphia. |
