Principal and Co-Founder
Francisco works with clients to connect thoughtful capital with durable civic, cultural, and community outcomes.
Francisco Martinez has spent fifteen years building the infrastructure that allows organizations to grow, endure, and lead. Across those roles, he shaped strategy for, managed, and unlocked over $2.7 billion in philanthropic capital.
He supported early groundwork for what became the DACA movement, modernizing communications, building fundraising pipelines, and connecting political leaders with impacted youth who would become the program's first recipients. From there, he rose through some of philanthropy's most consequential institutions — the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and MacArthur Foundation's Lever for Change — where he led communications and community engagement, and helped donors navigate gifts ranging from $10 million to $650 million, respectively.
That work taught him something he has carried ever since: durable impact requires scaffolding and trusted relationships, not just momentum. Today, as Founder of Sovereign Good, he brings his full range of skills, frontline organizing, institutional strategy, and capital deployment, to leaders and organizations working to create change that holds alignment across generations, not just grant cycles.
Francisco is a first-generation Salvadoran American. He has spent his career navigating rooms built for other people — foundation boardrooms, donor strategy sessions, policy tables — and that experience has sharpened a particular insight: the distance between institutional intent and community impact is almost always a governance problem, not a values problem. That insight sits at the core of what he brings to every client engagement.
He holds a Master of Business Administration with concentrations in Business Analytics, Entrepreneurship, and Finance, and Bachelor of Arts degrees in International Studies, History, Political Science, and Spanish, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also taught business and finance at Morton College, where he served first-generation and working-class students.
Beyond strategy, Francisco brings an unusually broad technical and creative range to his work: fluency across marketing, communications, brand strategy, advocacy, nonprofit management, fundraising, impact investing, and board governance, along with a working knowledge of design, coding, and data systems. His creative practice — spanning painting, mosaic, photography, and art history — informs how he thinks about narrative, identity, and the aesthetics of institutional change.
He serves as Board President of the University of Illinois Latina/Latino Alumni Association (LLAA), Board Chair of Remix_Culture, and holds board and committee roles with Nuestro Futuro at the Chicago Community Trust and Chicago Latines in Philanthropy.
Sovereign Good exists because he has seen what becomes possible when philanthropic capital is guided by both rigor and moral clarity, and believes that combination is rarer than it should be.