Honorees

Ted Leonsis is founder, chairman, managing partner, and chief executive officer of Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE).  In that role, Mr. Leonsis is the principal owner of the NHL’s 2018 Stanley Cup Champion Washington Capitals, the NBA’s Washington Wizards, the 2019 WNBA Champion Washington Mystics, the 2021 & 2020 NBA 2K League Champion Wizards District Gaming, and the NBA G League’s Capital City Go-Go.

In addition to the teams, Mr. Leonsis owns the 20,000-seat Capital One Arena and operates MedStar Capitals Iceplex, the Capitals’ training facility, MedStar Health Performance Center, the Wizards, Mystics and Capital City Go-Go training facility, George Mason University’s EagleBank Arena, and District E, a premier, nearly 14,000 square foot live-event theater focused on esports, adjacent to Capital One Arena at Gallery Place.

Mr. Leonsis also owns Monumental Sports Network, a regional media platform distributed on linear television, digital, mobile, and over-the-top (OTT) platforms. Monumental Sports Network is the exclusive local broadcast and streaming network for the Washington Capitals, Wizards and Mystics; and operates the state-of-the-art Monumental Sports Network studios located next door to Capital One Arena.

Leonsis is also co-owner and co-chairman of aXiomatic Gaming, which has a controlling interest in global esports franchise, Team Liquid.

Mr. Leonsis serves on the Board of Governors for the NBA, NHL, and WNBA. He is on the Executive Committee of the NHL, the Audit and Finance Committee of the NHL, the Advisory/Finance Committee of the NBA and serves as Chairman of the NBA Media Committee and Chairman of the NHL Media Committee.

Mr. Leonsis is a nationally recognized entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, and award-winning filmmaker, who has won Peabody and Emmy awards.

A longtime venture capitalist, Mr. Leonsis is cofounder and partner at Revolution Growth, a $1 billion set of investment funds, where he and his partners make a select group of speed-up capital investments in businesses each year, typically investing $25-50 million per deal.

He is Chairman of the District of Columbia College Access Program (DC-CAP), a nonprofit scholarship provider committed to encouraging and enabling D.C. students to enroll and graduate from college.

He also serves on the boards of several public companies, including American Express and Groupon; and is the former vice chairman and president of AOL.

Originally from Brooklyn, New York and later Lowell, Massachusetts and Vero Beach, Florida, Mr. Leonsis resides in Potomac, Maryland with his wife, Lynn Leonsis.

Jim Shelton is the Chief Executive Officer of Blue Meridian Partners and a member of its Board of Directors.

Jim leads Blue Meridian’s efforts to connect investors and visionary leaders to utilize transformative capital to scale solutions that enable all Americans to achieve economic and social mobility and escape the persistent and powerful gravitational pull of poverty.

Prior to becoming CEO in March 2025, Jim served as President and Chief Investment and Impact Officer, overseeing Blue Meridian’s day-to-day operations and its efforts to continuously increase the impact, reach, and influence of social sector leaders and their organizations. During this period, Blue Meridian redoubled its nationwide efforts to expand effective solutions and deepened its support of regional and local strategies to break the predictive power of who one’s parents are and where one grows up on life chances through the compounding benefits of proven and promising solutions from cradle to career. Jim also led Blue Meridian’s pursuit of new approaches to improving economic and social mobility, including extending the organization’s work to explore the roles of for-profits, policy, and advocacy.

Jim’s early career spanned software development and impact-focused entrepreneurship, investing, and philanthropy. He served as the Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Education and was the founding Executive Director of My Brother’s Keeper. Subsequently, he was President and Chief Impact Officer at 2U, Inc. partnering with colleges and universities to increase access to and affordability of top degree programs. He later served as the founding President of Education for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Immediately before joining Blue Meridian, Jim founded Amandla Enterprises, an impact investment and advisory firm.

Jim serves on the boards of several non-profit and for-profit impact-focused organizations and is a Senior Social Impact Advisor to KKR.

Jim holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Morehouse College and master’s degrees in business administration and education from Stanford University.