Charitocracy is staffed exclusively by volunteers who donate their time so that none of your generous donation goes to salaries or any other form of compensation. Helping bring out your inner philanthropist is payment enough for us!
The Founders
We are Jessica Sands and Benj Lipchak, married couple and co-founders of Charitocracy Corporation.
Jessica, a former drama and theatre educator at the middle school, high school, and university levels, now devotes her time to nonprofits. She was President of Heron Pond Montessori and First Flight Elementary PTOs, Treasurer of Theatre of Dare, and currently serves as Executive Director of Dare County Arts Council. Jessica runs a tight ship of fiscal responsibility, yet also inspires her teams and expands the impact of her organizations.
Benj, a software engineer and engineering manager, is learning about nonprofits as he goes along. His expertise is in computer graphics and game technology, where he's led teams working on graphics acceleration and video game optimization for products ranging from workstations and laptops to tablets, phones, TVs, and watches. Benj has sat on international standards bodies, co-written books, and been awarded 3 patents. He also serves as Treasurer of Dare Education Foundation.
Charitocracy was Benj's semester project for his social entrepreneurship course at Babson in 2011. It was merely a slide deck back then, but 4 years later, with Jessica's blessing and support, he got up the nerve to take a year off from his day-job to finally pursue his vision. They went live with Charitocracy in September 2016.
Jessica and Benj live on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with their two children, Felicity and Harry. In 2020 they introduced this local Charitocracy OBX site to more closely serve their neighbors in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
The Board
Jessica and Benj are joined by four fantastic board members!
David Haas has over 25 years of innovation, sales, marketing, product development and business development expertise in the Digital Media, Event Technology, Social Media and Experiential Event marketplaces. David’s current focus is launching new technology products for FreemanXP and building personal development apps.
Lisa Nicholson brings us over 20 years of experience in business management, customer service, social media, and marketing. She started in the medical industry and switched over to real estate and vacation rental management and sales. Lisa is an avid volunteer in her community, and enjoys reading and spending time with her family and friends.
Mike Andrews started programming computers more than 30 years ago, and never stopped. Along the way, he created many legendary bugs, and a few tidy solutions to complex problems in filesystems, distributed computing, computer audio, and block storage. He was awarded two patents for network filesystem technologies. Mike brings a proven background in project management and a fierce sense of humor to the task of chipping away at the world's mountain of injustices with Charitocracy.
Sam Cortez has a background in banking and corporate finance, including completion of financing transactions such as initial public offerings, mergers & acquisitions, and strategic restructurings. He has substantial experience with Boards of Directors, including public, private, and non-profit Boards, and has been designated a Board Leadership Fellow by the National Association of Corporate Directors. Sam enjoys the arts and staying close to the beach.