Jeffrey Wilder Earls, Co-founder

Jeffrey W. Earls is a co-founder of Boon. For 28 years, he has served the John C. Griswold Family Foundation as president and director, managing the operations of the foundation, working with family directors and other grant makers to provide funding to an extensive number of nonprofits.

JCGFF supports community-based, social services operations for organizations in education, the arts, nature, and the environment. Mr. Earls has sponsored many grants to support research in the education and learning disabilities field, and he is a strong advocate of its importance to the public education system.

Mr. Earls has decades of experience in nonprofit governance as a board member, working as a trustee and fiduciary to insure a nonprofit meets its responsibilities to the public. He has been a director at Positive Directions, CT; The Audubon Society; Robert A. Welke Cancer Research Foundation; Worthy Johnson Scholarship Trust; Operation Hope, The Council of Churches of Greater Bridgeport, CT, and the Equis Effect.

For 30 years Mr. Earls was an executive in the aviation insurance business with Marsh & McLennan, Aon (Frank B. Hall, Bayly, Martin & Fay – merged) The Whitmore Group, USI CT and Hub International. He was responsible for Commercial Aviation accounts—managing, marketing and handling of day to day responsibilities with respect to the insurance needs of the companies he worked with.

Mr. Earls retired from the insurance industry and is dedicating himself to the nonprofit sector. Mr. Earls was Director of Development at Family ReEntry in Norwalk, which assists individuals and family’s involved with the criminal justice system, and he is the former Director of Development for the Klein Theater in Bridgeport, CT. He also served as Director of Philanthropy at ReadWorks, which improves teacher effectiveness and student reading performance by offering free, online, cognitive science-based instruction and curricula to teachers through lesson plans, curated nonfiction and fiction articles, training materials, and assessment tools.