Joe Nail

Bio

Joe is the Founder and CEO of Lead For America, a nonpartisan national service organization building a stronger nation by enlisting exceptional Americans to serve in the places they call home. Through the Hometown Fellowship, Fellows serve in a paid, full-time capacity alongside a local leader in their hometown or home state for one year, before advancing into positions of community, state, and national leadership for decades to come. Joe founded Lead For America from his college dorm room in 2017 and has since raised more than $20M to make LFA one of the fastest growing nonprofits in America. LFA has been profiled nationally by outlets including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CBS This Morning, and NPR. In 2020, Joe was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Joe also serves as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army National Guard, graduated first in his class from Officer Candidate School, and competes as a member of the All-Guard National Marathon team at races nationwide. He previously represented the U.S. abroad through a State Department scholarship to Indonesia and a year-long Congress Bundestag scholarship to Germany.

He is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University where he will earn an MBA from the Graduate School of Business and a Master's in International Policy with a focus on U.S.-China relations and Great Power conflict. Joe graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UNC-Chapel Hill in 3 years as a Morehead-Cain, National Merit, and Coca-Cola scholar. He earned a Master's degree from Duke Divinity School, where he focused on the intersection of faith, public leadership, and military service. Outside of work, Joe is a National Geographic Young Explorer and dedicated Kansas City Royals fan, Ironman triathlete, mountaineer, and ultramarathon runner. His team and LFA are based in Kansas, where Joe was born and raised.