Hyacinth Vassell Senior Director, Entrepreneurship Hyacinth Vassell is a senior director in Entrepreneurship for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where she is responsible for implementing the Entrepreneurship department’s strategic plan while building strong relationships and alignment and establishing accountabilities for senior program officers and directors across all entrepreneurship functions. Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation, Vassell was vice president of innovations engineering with the Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO), where she oversaw and developed strategies across the department’s programmatic, research, and advocacy initiatives to transform the small business ecosystem by developing tech-enabled solutions to aid BIPOC, underserved, and underrepresented small businesses with access to capital and building sustainable capacity. Earlier, Vassell was director of inner-city capital connections with Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), where she oversaw all aspects of the national program, including growth strategy, curriculum, program impact, evaluation, and development of products for privately held small businesses. Vassell has a Bachelor of Science in psychology from the University of Massachusetts.