Women Who Inspire Us
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Randi Shade

Randi Shade is co-founder and general manager of Charitygift which she launched in August 1999 to create a new gift category--one that allows businesses and individuals to conveniently give a donation to charity as a gift to honor someone else.

Charitygift became a division of Charitableway in July 2000. Funded by Benchmark and Softbank, Charitableway is headquartered in Silicon Valley. It is the only major VC-backed charitable giving-related E business. While Shade continues to run Charitygift out of Austin, TX, she also serves as executive vice president of Charitableway.

Prior to launching Charitygift, Shade served as the director of national development for City Year, Inc., an eleven-city domestic peace corps, where she was responsible for raising an annual budget of more than $16 million from public and private sources. Shade served under Texas governors Ann Richards and George W. Bush as the founding executive director of the Texas Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service, which launched AmeriCorps in Texas and coordinated the Governor’s Annual Volunteer Conference.

Under Shade’s leadership Texas was awarded more funding for national service initiatives than any other state. She was also the youngest person in the country to hold her position and the only one to survive a transition of governors in 1994. Shade has also previously worked for Procter and Gamble and Teach for America.

Shade earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School where she also completed courses in the John F. Kennedy School of Public Affairs and the Graduate School of Education. She holds a bachelor of arts degree from the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was elected student body president.