Andel Koester

Andel Koester is Associate Director of the What Works Cities initiative. She previously managed the Smarter Cities Challenge, a signature IBM philanthropic initiative that deploys top IBM talent to help cities around the world address their most critical challenges, winning awards from the US Department of Housing & Urban Development and USDA, and the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. She has also led IBM’s City Forward, a Webby Award-winning web tool for visualizing open data about cities. She has previously been a communications strategist at SS+K (Shepardson Stern + Kaminsky), advising such clients as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Goldman Sachs “10,000 Women” initiative, Obama for America, the Pfizer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation, among others. She has also led a civic tech discussion series at Personal Democracy Forum and laid the groundwork for the Global Corporate Giving Initiative at the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP). Koester has a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. in International Studies from Emory University, and was a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in New York.