Our Team
Mark Gleason
Managing Partner
Mark joined The Drexel Fund after 10 years at the helm of the nonprofit Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP), which raised more than $120 million to invest in the creation, expansion and transformation of 70 public and private schools. During that period, the number of students attending high-achieving schools in Philadelphia nearly doubled. Prior to PSP, Mark worked in a partnership development role for Christ the King Prep School, a Cristo Rey Network-affiliated Catholic high school in Newark, NJ, and served as a member and four-year president of the South Orange-Maplewood (NJ) Board of Education. Earlier, Mark worked as a reporter, editor and publisher. He co-founded a literary entertainment magazine called Book, which became a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Mark holds degrees from Georgetown University and Northwestern University.
John Eriksen
Partner & Co-Founder
Prior to founding The Drexel Fund, John worked at the Leadership Roundtable with a focus on Catholic schools. At age 34, John became one of the youngest Catholic school superintendents in the country in Paterson, N.J., where his work was featured in the Time magazine article “Looking for Solutions to the Catholic School Crisis.” John began his career in education as a high school teacher in Baton Rouge, La., as part of the fourth cohort of teachers in the Alliance for Catholic Education. John earned a B.A. in economics, history and government from the University of Notre Dame, as well as an M.A.T. from the University of Portland and an M.P.P. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. John is an Aspen-Pahara Institute Fellow.
Naomi DeVeaux
Partner
Prior to joining The Drexel Fund in 2024, Naomi was a partner at the National Charter Schools Institute where she enjoyed co-creating performance goals that capture school quality at its core and working with commission and board members on values-driven decision-making. She previously served DC students as a teacher, an advocate for choice, and at the DC Public Charter School Board, where she made school performance actionable for parents, including creating the first School Quality Dashboard. She began her career in education as an English teacher and literacy coach in traditional and charter high schools. She is a member of the Center for Learner Equity, DC Bilingual Public Charter School’s board chair, and a board member of the Diverse by Design Charter School Coalition. With a BA from Reed College and MA from CSU Long Beach, Naomi received a Fulbright scholarship and an Aspen-Pahara fellowship.
Jeff Kerscher
Partner
Jeff joined The Drexel Fund after three years at Amazon where he led new strategic initiatives for Amazon Advertising and the company’s online education platform. Prior to Amazon, Jeff spent 10 years at Seton Education Partners where he launched the Seton Blended Learning Network which leveraged adaptive technology and data-driven instruction to improve academic performance and reduce operating costs in under-resourced Catholic schools. Jeff scaled the program from a single pilot to a national 13-school network serving 3,300 students in 9 cities. During this time, network schools posted growth on-par with or outpacing that of multiple high-performing charter networks while simultaneously driving a collective 30% increase in enrollment. The network was featured in The New York TImes, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and NPR. In 2019, Jeff founded the Romero Academy model which transitioned parish managed Catholic schools to an independent network. Jeff started his career as a middle school social studies teacher in Washington, DC. Jeff has a B.A. from Xavier University, an M.Ed from the University of Notre Dame, and an MBA from the University of Washington.
Aarushi Prabhakar
Investment Director
Aarushi joins The Drexel Fund as a recent MPA graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs where she specialized in economic development and strengthened her quantitative analytics skillset. During this time, she also built experience in the American education policy and philanthropic landscapes through various internships. Prior to graduate school, Aarushi built and launched an education technology tool for English as a Second Language, which is used by 10,000+ private and public school students across India. Aarushi earned a B.A in Economics from the University of Delhi.
Eric Oglesbee
Founders Program Director
Eric joined The Drexel Fund in July 2022 after guiding River Montessori High School – a Drexel Fund portfolio member located in South Bend, Ind., – to a successful launch in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to co-founding a school that was the beneficiary of a Drexel Fund startup grant, he is a former recipient of a Drexel Founders Program fellowship (2019-20). Prior to engaging in his work to launch River Montessori, his career included being a tenured university professor, serving as a development director at a private elementary school, launching a consortium of Montessori schools, and founding a voice analytics tech startup. Eric possesses a B.A. from Bethel University (Indiana) with a double major in biblical literature and mathematics as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in general linguistics from Indiana University.
Heather Bokon
Director of Operations
Heather comes to Drexel after being an administrator for eight years at Good Shepherd Montessori School in South Bend, Ind. She is a product of 16 years of Catholic, private education, which has driven her passion for supporting the private school sector. The call to serve children has also always been a driving force in her life’s path. Both in her professional and personal life (as a wife and mother), Heather strives to be the behind-the-scenes thread and glue that keeps all the pieces together. She holds a B.S. in biology from Saint Mary’s College. In her spare time Heather can be found launching professional fireworks and kayaking the St. Joseph River.
