Jessica Pliska

Jessica Pliska is Founder and Head of Leadership Giving at The Opportunity Network, where she leads strategic fundraising, external partnerships, and individual and family impact investing, all to fortify OppNet’s long-term institutional health. In her previous capacity as Founder and CEO of OppNet for 17 years, Jessica grew the organization from a pilot serving one school and 10 students to a highly regarded education player in New York City, serving thousands of students, recruited from more than 100 schools. Jessica also sits on the organization’s board of directors. Before founding OppNet, Jessica launched the marketing department for Mercer Delta Consulting, a Marsh & McLennan company, as its first U.S. Director of Marketing, and before that she was an executive at Edelman, where she managed communications for CEOs. She received her B.A. from Yale College. Jessica and her team are credited with coining the term Career Fluency^® ― a powerful model for how students can build work experience, master professional skills and cultivate networks to launch successful careers as college graduates. The term is cited frequently in youth development contexts as a major factor in closing the achievement gap. She also introduced the term “career undermatching” to describe the phenomenon in which talented, college graduates from low-income families wind up in jobs that don’t match their abilities or ambitions. Jessica sits on the board of Career Village and previously sat on the National Advisory Board of the “I Have a Dream” Foundation. She is a member of the National College Access Network’s Rapid Response Policy Team and was one of the founding members of the Student Success Network. Jessica has served as an expert in working groups and forums about career readiness and career exploration policy and program development. She is a regular contributor for Forbes and has appeared in such national press as Bloomberg Television, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Huffington Post.