Diane Melley

Diane Melley is a Senior Executive Advisor and consultant. Presently, as a Senior Advisor for Eisenhower Fellowships, she leads the building of new strategic relationships with the corporate sector as well as strengthening the global network of fellows with focus on women leaders. Recently, at Philadelphia Foundation, she led planning, execution and partnership-building, in support of a series of initiatives implementing Philadelphia Foundation’s second century of civic and philanthropic leadership in the community including the Covid 19 fund and response. Now in its fourth year, she architected the visioning as well as the implementation of the Greater Philadelphia Corporate Volunteer Council and Regional Civic 50 which recognizes top performing company’s corporate citizenship.  She also serves as a subject matter expert to the Chamber of Commerce of Greater Philadelphia on the expansion of the Civic 50 regionally.

Melley joined the Philadelphia Foundation as Executive Director in August 2018 after 36 years at IBM, where she was Vice President, IBM Foundation and Vice President for Global Citizenship Initiatives. That role included IBM’s global Impact Grants program, which brought technology solutions to communities around the world, its humanitarian responses to disasters, and its IBM Global Volunteers program. She also led IBM’s own Centennial Celebration of Service in 2011 and launched as well as led IBM’s Veterans Employment Initiative to accelerate hiring of veterans across a network of major companies. A Systems Engineer and technologist by training, she led the IBM’s Systems Integration practice prior to leading the global citizenship team.

A long-time Philadelphian with a bachelor’s in Computer Science from LaSalle University, Melley holds an MBA from Drexel University, and is a graduate of Harvard and Stanford Executive Leadership Programs.  Melley has served on the boards of Independent Sector, the Points of Light Institute and presently IAVE (International Association of Volunteer Effort) and Juneteenth Advisory Board.  She is a 2001 Eisenhower Fellow to the European Union and Ireland. She formerly served on the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia board and as two-term chair of the Philadelphia Education Fund, as well as two-term chair of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Center for Corporate Citizenship.

She is a founding faculty member of the Institute for Corporate Social Responsibility at Johns Hopkins University and is certified by both IBM and the Project Management Institute as a Project Executive.  She is passionate about mentoring and providing opportunities for girls and the under-served in the STEM fields.

She lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband and two daughters.