Jillian Crane is President and CEO of First Responders Children’s Foundation (FRCF).

 
FRCF is a national non-profit organization founded in 2001 to help the 800 children who lost a first responder parent on 9/11. Since then, FRCF has grown tremendously in its scope of services and its positive impact on the children of first responders.
Ms. Crane joined FRCF’s Board of Directors in 2013. As a board member, she advocated for increasing the perspectives and participation of women from first responder community, for increasing the number of women on the board, and for introducing more programming around women and diversity. As Ms. Crane’s leadership contributions were increasingly recognized, her day-to-day responsibilities expanded in a succession of leadership roles. In her most recent role as FRCF’s President and CEO, Ms. Crane led the organization through the trials of COVID-19, evolving its mission and expanding programs to better serve families of first responders in a time of great need. She pivoted the focus from scholarships to broader financial assistance for families, launching new Emergency COVID-19 Hardship Grants at the start of the pandemic. Ms. Crane stewarded the foundation through sudden and rapid growth, expanding the definition of a ‘first responder’ to include nurses, medical workers and 911 dispatchers, and carefully appointing a talented leadership team. She then worked with her team to launch a range of new programs, including resiliency/mental health, bereavement assistance, disaster relief and community engagement—all laser focused on meeting the growing, ever-changing needs of children and families of first responders. Under Ms. Crane’s leadership, FRCF has grown its funding more than 10-fold and has supported hundreds of thousands of first responder families across the country. In just two years, Ms. Crane helped transform FRCF from a regional charity into a national nonprofit organization.
 
Ms. Crane’s work with children extends beyond the nonprofit realm. As Vice Chairman of Kidtagious, a kids' entertainment and toy licensing company (the same team that brought Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to market), Ms. Crane helped identify, procure and commercialize intellectual properties for the children’s entertainment market.
 
In a past life, Ms. Crane was an actress and a writer for theater, television and film. Her credits include The PracticeLaw and Order Criminal Intent, Homicide, the Netflix series Spinning Out and the 1999 film Election starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.  
 
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