Bill Pitkin is a senior policy fellow in the Research to Action Lab at the Urban Institute. He leads work on upward mobility, housing, and racial equity.

Pitkin has worked at the intersection of research, policy, and social change for nearly three decades in nonprofit, philanthropic, and academic sectors. Pitkin has advised leading foundations and nonprofit organizations on strategy and catalyzing social equity through investments in collaborative leadership and systems change, and he has served as professor of practice at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He spent more than a decade at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, where he developed and directed US programs. Among his accomplishments at Hilton, he helped establish such models as the Home for Good Funders Collaborative, Los Angeles County’s pay for success initiative, and the Los Angeles County Flexible Housing Subsidy Pool.

Pitkin served on the Funders Together to End Homelessness board of directors from 2008 to 2021 (and was chair from 2015 to 2018) and is a fellow at FrameWorks Institute and advisory board member of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. He holds MA and PhD degrees in urban planning from University of California, Los Angeles.