Todd Williams

Highly committed to public education, Todd is the founding Chairman and CEO of The Commit Partnership, the nation’s largest educational collective impact organization with 200+ institutions (including 15 school districts and eight higher-ed institutions educating over 700,000 students) supported by a dedicated backbone staff of ~70 employees. Founded in 2011, together the Partnership and its backbone staff are collectively focused on improving academic outcomes and economic mobility levels across the Dallas County region as well as the state of Texas. Todd also served for eight years as the Education Policy Advisor to former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. Todd is a senior trustee and former board chair for Austin College, a liberal arts college in Sherman, Texas. With his wife Abby, Todd was the founding chair of the regional advisory board for Teach for America in Dallas/Ft. Worth, and together in 2007 they also helped establish the Uplift Williams Preparatory School, a K-12 free tuition public charter school operated by Uplift Education that educates ~1,500 primarily Hispanic students living in northwest Dallas. Todd also currently serves on the board of Fidelity Charitable, the nation’s largest donor advised fund with over $80 billion of assets under management. Todd was appointed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott in 2020 to serve on (i) the Texas Permanent School Fund Corporation (responsible for overseeing the investment of the state’s ~$50 billion endowment fund supporting Texas’ K-12 public education system); (ii) the year-long 2018 Texas Commission on Public School Finance (where he chaired its Outcomes Committee which ultimately produced 35 recommendations that served as the basis for Texas’ landmark HB3 legislation which equitably invested $11.5 billion in the state’s public K-12 education system in 2019); and (iii) the 2022 Texas Commission on Community College Funding, which recommended the strategic investment of ~$650 million of new biennial state funding (via Texas’ nation-leading HB8 legislation passed in 2023) to reward targeted outcomes and increase funding and accessibility for the state’s economically and academically disadvantaged students. Todd is the former Chair of the Citizen Budget Review Commission for Dallas ISD ($2.0 billion budget educating ~140,000 students). Todd is also the former chairman of both the Real Estate Finance and Investment Center and the Real Estate Council of Dallas.