Nicholas Pelzer

Senior Director, Portfolio

Nicholas manages Blue Meridian’s relationships with select investees, including providing guidance and serving as a lead touchpoint during the development and execution of scaling plans. Working closely with Managing Directors and other staff, he also sources new investment opportunities and collaborates on innovation initiatives to expand Blue Meridian’s work, with a focus on Nationwide Solutions.

Nicholas brings twenty years of experience in collaborative learning design, national program direction, and strategic grantmaking. Before joining Blue Meridian, Nicholas worked as a Senior Program Officer in the Education Leadership Unit at the Wallace Foundation where he worked with school districts, universities, technical assistance providers, and stakeholders across the country to strengthen their efforts to attract, train, evaluate and support school leaders in urban areas. Prior to this, he served as Director of Public Service Leadership & Strategic Initiatives at National Urban Fellows, Inc., where he worked to support long-term strategies and innovative approaches to ensuring diverse leadership in the public sector.  Before that, he served as a Project Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation where he helped launch and expansion of several multi-million-dollar grantmaking programs focusing on creating a more highly educated healthcare workforce, introducing new and diverse researchers to the field, and improving access to quality healthcare for underserved communities. Nicholas is an alumnus of several public service and leadership programs including the National Urban Fellowship, AmeriCorps VISTA, Lead NJ, and the America’s Leaders of Change program.

Nicholas holds a Doctor of Education (Ed.D) from Columbia University, a Master of Public Administration from Bernard M. Baruch College-CUNY, and a BS in Communication from James Madison University.