Megan Golden, JD

Mission:Cure

Title Affiliations: 

  • Co-Director, Mission:Cure

Megan Golden is co-director of Mission: Cure, a nonprofit using outcome-based financing, impact investing and drug repurposing to cure chronic pancreatitis, a devastating disease afflicting her younger brother.

Until March 2017, Megan was Director, Pay for Success Financing at the South Carolina-based Institute for Child Success. She worked with jurisdictions across the U.S. to improve their children’s health, education and well-being through large-scale expansions of effective early childhood programs. She conducted ICS’s feasibility study on Pay for Success financing for the Nurse-Family Partnership in South Carolina, which resulted in a $30 million expansion that served thousands of low-income first-time mothers. This Pay for Success project was the largest in the world and the first to use Medicaid funding as part of the financing package. She served on the advisory group for McKinsey & Company’s work on “social impact bonds,” and has published extensively on PFS financing and performance measurement.

From 1999-2011, Megan was Director of Planning and Government Innovation at the Vera Institute of Justice, where she worked with government to implement innovations in criminal justice, child welfare, mental health, and eldercare. She led a major reform of New Orleans’s criminal justice system and helped Chinese academics and officials pilot criminal justice reforms. Megan also directed the Fellowship for Emerging Leaders in Public Service at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service from 2006 – 2009. Megan practiced law from 1992-1994 as a Skadden Fellow at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. In 1994, she was awarded a White House Fellowship. Megan began her career working for New York City government as an Urban Fellow. She has a BA in political science from Brown University and a JD, magna cum laude, from NYU Law School.