Jared Lyon
Building Institutions That Serve Communities at Scale
Jared has spent his career helping organizations grow, adapt, and lead with greater scale and clarity. His experience spans executive leadership, board partnership, fundraising, public affairs, coalition building, cross-sector partnerships, and external representation.
As President & CEO of Student Veterans of America, he led the organization through a period of significant national growth and maturation, helping strengthen its position as a trusted voice at the intersection of higher education, workforce outcomes, public policy, and veteran success.
His next chapter applies that same playbook more broadly: helping mission-driven institutions across education, workforce, civic trust, and public purpose grow with relevance, lead with credibility, and build durable impact over time.
Full executive profile
Four Pillars of the Work
Education, workforce, civic trust, and public purpose. Four interlocking pillars of the institutional infrastructure a country needs to govern itself, compete, and stay together.
Federal higher education policy, post-traditional students, and the institutional capacity that turns access into outcomes. The system that has carried the public-purpose case for American higher education, and how to argue it again.
The handoff between education and work, the institutions that make it durable, and the cross-sector partnerships that connect schools, employers, and communities to shared outcomes at scale.
Leading nonpartisan institutions in a low-trust era. Earning standing across sectors, administrations, and political coalitions, and treating public trust as an institutional asset that has to be built and stewarded over time.
The broader public-purpose rationales that undergird American civic institutions. Why they were built, how they hold up, and what it takes to defend and renew them in the world we are in now.
Jared Lyon at TEDxFSU, featured on TED.com
“Rethinking Our Expectations for Post-Traditional Students” — on why the students American higher education was originally built for are no longer the students it actually serves, and what that means for institutions.
Nonpartisan Engagement at the Highest Levels
Nonpartisan engagement in national, state, and institutional leadership settings.
Essays on leadership, governance, and institutions
New essays on building and governing mission-driven institutions, drawn from a decade leading at national scale. Free to subscribe.