Dr. Zelizer has over 30+ years experience in the social impact sector. He has always been committed to fostering access to information, opportunity and impact. As an undergraduate at the
University of Massachusetts he developed a periodic and informal newsletter (handwritten) of social justice events to share with his colleagues.
It is particularly during his Junior year abroad in
Pecs, Hungary and when he returned to Pecs for two years as a
Junior Fulbright Scholar that he saw how critical access to information and mentorship was to so many. One of the main reasons he landed a Fulbright scholarship was due to a very persistent mentor who strongly pushed him to apply for the life-changing experience.
After completing his MA degree at
Central European University (at that time based in Prague), Dr. Craig Zelizer started a humble
yahoo groups listserv that shared countless jobs, fellowships and grew even more during his time as a Program Officer at
IREX. The free resource gained a large following of tens of thousands of professionals and students from around the globe.
His dream was always to create a peer to peer networking and support platform that would connect changemakers to opportunities, community and impact but for years the technology to do this wasn’t available. Eventually PCDN started as a volunteer effort focused initially on connecting the global peacebuilding opportunity using the
Ning Platform. Then came social media and the launch of a dedicated
PCDN Website,
newsletter, and growing social media presence on
Twitter, Linkedin,
YouTube,
Facebook, &
Instagram.
Since then we have grown to a community of thousands and one of the world's best platforms to advance careers of impact with hundreds of blogs on all things social impact careers, over 100 episodes of our award-winning Social Change Career Podcast, the Career Campus for impact professionals, career services, workshops and much more.
