Stephen Robert

Chairman & CEO at The Oppenheimer Group in Manhattan, New York

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Stephen Robert cofounded Source of Hope Foundation with his wife, Pilar Crespi Robert, in an effort to aid populations in desperate need of food, water, health care, education, and micro-finance opportunities. Mr. Robert’s foundation has partnered with charitable organizations in such countries as Colombia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Israel, Palestine, and Uganda and works closely with programs designed to improve education there. In Colombia, Mr. Robert’s organization partnered with the Genesis Foundation’s First Learning Steps project to offer Colombian children better access to a quality education. The program aims to improve the level of education that 250 children between the ages of two and five years old receive in the Magdalena area of Colombia. Mr. Robert’s foundation hopes that other areas of Colombia will duplicate the program and has received support from the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare to do so. Source of Hope has also partnered with Google and Mercy Corps to fund the Arab Developer Network Initiative, which seeks to teach young Palestinians how to write computer programs on multiple platforms.

In addition to his humanitarian efforts, Stephen Robert serves as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. as well as an Overseer at the Watson Institute for International Studies. Mr. Robert also acts as an International Director of the U.S. Middle East Project and as a Director of Millennium Promise, a United Nations-sponsored initiative committed to reducing extreme poverty in the world by 2015. Prior to founding Source of Hope Foundation, Stephen Robert held several prominent positions in the financial industry.

Mr. Robert served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Renaissance Institutional Management LLC for four years and as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the investment bank Oppenheimer & Co. Stephen Robert also served as Chancellor of Brown University from 1998 to 2007 and has written several articles about the 2008 financial crisis for such publications as Forbes and The Daily Beast.