Yifan contributes to Blue Meridian’s investee selection process, supports individual investee relationships, including developing scaling plans, and helps assess investee and portfolio-wide performance. Working closely with Managing Directors, she also collaborates on innovative initiatives to expand Blue Meridian’s work, with a focus on The Studio @ Blue Meridian.
Before joining Blue Meridian, Yifan served as the Director of Strategic Initiatives & Learning with Root Cause Institute, where she advised nonprofits, public agencies, funders, and cross-sector collaboratives working to expand equity and opportunity with communities across the country. Her work focused on liberatory design, piloting and scaling effective social sector solutions, building and strengthening collective action networks and backbone organizations, strategic planning and change management, and developing learning & evaluation systems that helped partners clarify and assess impact while driving ongoing improvement. Before Root Cause, she began her career in youth empowerment, leading a nonprofit that built and scaled educational, leadership, and global exchange initiatives reaching thousands of young people each year.
Yifan holds a BA with Honors in Environmental Science & Public Policy from Harvard University.