Staff

Susan Cornell Wilkes

Founder and President at Adventures in Giving LLC

Susan is the Founder and President of Adventures in Giving, LLC. Her company provides management and consulting services to family and small foundations on effective international grant making and organizes trips for foundation families and groups to developing countries to meet potential partners and visit grant sites. A Native of Washington, D.C. and educated at Harvard, Susan launched her career in the independent sector as a co-founder of internationally acclaimed Up With People Inc. She has since collaborated with corporate, private and community foundations in a broad range of philanthropic and international development activities in 30 countries, as well as in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York, Minnesota and Arkansas, where she worked with President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Prior to creating Adventures in Giving Susan spent two years collaborating with members of the Rockefeller family in an innovative effort to involve foundations and corporations in stimulating the creation of venture capital funds in Africa and Latin America through profitable investments in entrepreneurship and sustainable economic development for positive social impact. An advocate of microfinance, Susan and her husband Jim Klobuchar, well-known Minnesota columnist, author, mountain climber and adventure travel leader, published "The Miracles of Barefoot Capitalism", the story of microcredit organizations, programs and clients whom they interviewed on three continents. Susan is a family member Trustee of the Peter C. Cornell Trust, established in 1949 in Buffalo, New York by her great uncle, father of the famous American actress, Katharine Cornell.