Francesca Ioffreda

Francesca Ioffreda brings domestic and international expertise working across the public, private, and social sectors to lead large-scale economic development, innovation, and workforce efforts, organizational transformations, and public-private partnerships. 

As CEO of Breakthrough Strategy Partners, a consulting firm focused on economic development, Ioffreda has supported regions on their place-based development strategies for the Economic Development Administration’s $10B Tech Hubs program and worked with business and civic alliances across the country to develop shared impact models to address talent and opportunity gaps. As a Senior Advisor to the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, Ioffreda is helping create an economic development curriculum and strategy for the Center’s future expansion. 

Ioffreda launched an inclusive growth initiative and spearheaded regional workforce efforts at the Greater Washington Partnership, a CEO-led business alliance of 45+ of the region’s largest employers focused on making the Baltimore to Richmond region more economically competitive, where she served as Vice President for Inclusive Growth and Talent Initiatives from 2020 to 2023. Notably, she led the Partnership’s $4.7 billion five-year collective commitment to shared prosperity that was unveiled alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Raimondo, and U.S. Small Business Administrator Guzman in March 2022, and helped to operationalize these supplier diversity, community banking, and racial equity commitments through targeted programing, communities of practice, and supportive tools. Ioffreda also led the development of a Regional Blueprint for Inclusive Growth, an integrated, first-of-its-kind private sector led 10-year economic development strategy that engaged over 200 cross-sector stakeholders, and an accompanying Inclusive Growth Dashboard to track progress. 

While at the Partnership, Ioffreda oversaw the Collaborative of Leaders in Academia and Business—an-action oriented partnership of businesses and academic institutions to create a diverse tech-ready talent pipeline and a nationally recognized employer signaling system to provide transparency into industry labor market needs and talent trends. 

Previously, as a consultant at Deloitte, Ioffreda served as Chief of Staff for the firm’s Smart Cities practice and led client engagements on regional growth strategies, jobs plans, supply chain, and innovation ecosystems, and ran national DEI recruiting initiatives. She has also served as a policy fellow for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and capstone research fellow for former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, and was a research Fulbright Fellow in Bogota, Colombia, assessing the impact of the country’s conditional cash transfer program. 

Ioffreda is a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Metro, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Washington Business Journal 40 under 40 honoree (2022). Francesca is active with Leadership Greater Washington and an alumni council board member of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Francesca has a master of business administration from Harvard Business School, a master of public policy from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations from Claremont McKenna College.