Joseph P. Kennedy II
Advisory Board Member

Joseph P. Kennedy II serves as Chairman and President of Citizens Energy Corporation, a non-profit company that channels revenues from successful businesses to fund and operate a wide array of charitable programs in the U.S. and abroad.

Kennedy founded Citizens Energy during the oil price shocks of the late 1970s, using the profits from global petroleum trading and refining deals to write down the cost of home heating oil for the poor and the elderly in Massachusetts. Before stepping down from Citizens in 1986 to spend 12 years in the U.S. Congress, Kennedy started innovative ventures in the natural gas, electricity, and conservation industries.

These ventures included Citizens Power & Light, a pioneering electricity trading company in the pre-deregulated market, which became the first non-utility to win a federal license to trade power between utilities; Citizens Gas Supply, a leading marketer of natural gas to Local Distribution Companies formed after successfully challenging monopoly control of the nation’s natural gas pipelines; and Citizens Conservation, a leading innovator in the conservation field, achieving average energy savings of 40% through retrofits in thousands of housing units across the U.S.

Kennedy also launched Citizens Medical, which has become the nation's largest marketer of mail-order prescription drugs, facilitating billions in sales and 40% savings for consumers over conventional delivery.

Millions of dollars in dividends from Citizens' ventures went to support social programs as innovative as the businesses that financed them, including solar energy projects in Venezuela and Jamaica, a hybrid seed program in Nigeria, biomass energy projects in Costa Rica, and the creation of Angola's first private university.

While serving on Capitol Hill, Kennedy was an outspoken champion of efforts to leverage the private market to address social needs. Fair lending reforms and affordable housing investment incentives authored by Kennedy have led to billions of dollars pouring into low-income neighborhoods across America to start new businesses, help families purchase homes, and construct hundreds of thousands of new units of housing. Kennedy also spoke out strongly in Congress for human rights and economic opportunity around the world.

After returning to the helm of Citizens in 1998, Kennedy launched CitizensHealth to provide low-cost prescriptions and medical care to the uninsured and expanded the company's efforts to provide low-cost heating oil and natural gas. Under his leadership, Citizens Energy is also developing alternative energy projects, including wind farms in Canada and the U.S, and geothermal generation and transmission in California. In addition to his work at Citizens, Kennedy currently serves as a Director of Provide Commerce, a publicly traded internet retailing company.