Theresa Bedeau

Theresa Bedeau is the Founder and Principal Advisor of Solaria Strategy, a strategic advisory practice working with mission-driven and impact-oriented organizations on the challenges that sit between strategy and execution: how institutions coordinate across fragmented ecosystems, how decisions get built into repeatable systems, and where emerging technologies like AI can extend reach and accountability without sacrificing trust. Her value lies not in technical depth but in the ability to translate between what technology can do and what institutions, governments, and communities actually need, and to design the governance and operating structures that make adoption work in practice.

That work is grounded in more than 15 years across philanthropic capital, community development finance, strategic partnerships and impact measurement. At Capital One, she held direct oversight of $20M+ in national grant portfolios, led enterprise-level strategy for small business support initiatives, and helped direct a $200M multi-year impact program, working across financial institutions, CDFIs, nonprofit intermediaries, and public-sector partners to build systems that connected capital to communities at scale.

As Chief Strategy and Engagement Officer at the Justice Climate Fund, she joined the founding executive team to build strategy, engagement, and impact infrastructure for an organization capitalized to deploy nearly $1B in clean energy finance across underserved communities. In that role, she designed the organization's impact measurement framework, co-authored a concept paper for an integrated Impact and Data Platform addressing data standardization gaps across the clean energy finance ecosystem, and built the external engagement and fundraising infrastructure from the ground up. That work gave her direct experience with the governance, interoperability, and institutional trust challenges that emerge when data-driven platforms are deployed in high-stakes public and community contexts.

Theresa serves as Vice Chair of the Board of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity and holds an MPA in International Development and Finance from NYU Wagner and a BA in Sociology from Cornell University.