Dennis Whittle is the CEO and president of the Jacksonville Civic Council (JCC). He is a founder of several organizations credited with major innovations in international aid, philanthropy, public sector feedback loops, and experiential education. He has advised many private companies and public organizations seeking to be world leaders in a rapidly changing environment. 

Whittle began his career in 1986 as an economist at the World Bank, where he oversaw large investment projects in Indonesia and Russia.  He was appointed Senior Partner of the Bank’s Strategy and Innovation Group in 1997, where his team created the Development Marketplace, a new open-source approach to finding and funding new ideas to promote economic growth and reduce poverty.

Based on his work at the World Bank, Whittle co-founded and was CEO of GlobalGiving, the first - and still largest - online crowdfunding platform for community-based projects.  To date, GlobalGiving has raised $1 billion from one million individual donors and 600 corporations for projects in 175 countries. 

Whittle also co-founded and was CEO of Feedback Labs, a network of organizations committed to making citizen feedback loops the new normal in aid, development, and philanthropy. 

Most recently, he co-founded Normal Next, which provides a new form of experiential learning that enables students to work on real problems facing society with real leaders in real time.

Whittle earned a bachelor’s degree at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar, and earned a master’s in public administration at Princeton University. He has served as visiting lecturer at Princeton, professor of the practice at UNC-Chapel Hill, and visiting scholar at NYU.