Official Bio

Vanessa Mason is the Founding Executive Director of New Legacy Collective, where she leads the work of connecting and resourcing the many efforts to bring material, relational, cultural, and spiritual healing to society. She has spent her career translating vision to practice, advising institutions, companies, movements, and communities in designing the systems that make repair and belonging real and resilient. Across research, philanthropy, and ecosystem leadership, her work has consistently cultivated the conditions to scale systems of healing and belonging.

Before founding NLC, Vanessa served as a Principal on the Building Cultures of Belonging team at Omidyar Network, where she led Cultivating Repair, a grantmaking strategy that mobilized collaborative efforts to strengthen a culture of repair across the United States and seeded the ecosystem that became New Legacy Collective. Prior to that, she was a Research Director at the Institute for the Future, where she helped businesses, civic organizations, and social sector leaders think systematically about the futures they were building toward, with a consistent focus on well-being, belonging, and the conditions for human flourishing.

Vanessa is a sought-after voice in philanthropic and movement spaces. She has spoken at Philanthropy New York and ABFE, and was a featured panelist on Bridgespan's Dreaming in Color podcast. Her work has been quoted in publications including the Stanford Social Innovation Review and Inside Philanthropy. She has been recognized as an Aspen Ideas Festival Spotlight Health Scholar and a TEDMED Research Scholar.

She also authors Future of Belonging, a newsletter bringing futures thinking to the art and science of designing a home, a life, and a world that nourishes belonging within and around you.

emoji Bio

💼 Executive Director @ New Legacy Collective

👩🏾‍💻 Creator and Writer @ Future of Belonging / imagining how we can remodel tools and approaches to fulfill the basic human need for belonging over the next decade as loneliness, alienation, and exclusion become more pervasive.

🧠 Recovering perfectionist, she/her, ENTP, Type 7

📍Lisbon, Portugal resident / Houston, TX native / past lives in Mozambique, Argentina, Brazil

🕵🏾‍♀️ Equitable, Inclusive, Decolonized, Humanity-Centric, Optimistic Futures

🔥 Wit 💡, whiskey 🥃, wanderlust 🗺, interior design 🏡, dancing to music of the African diaspora 💃🏾, gardening 👩🏽‍🌾