Ann Lee

Ann Young Lee (CORE, CEO and Co-founder) has over 20 years of experience managing large-scale humanitarian responses including community-led sustainable development, emergency relief, urban planning and reconstruction, local governance and beyond. Alongside Sean Penn in 2019, Lee co-founded CORE, an evolution of Penn’s J/P HRO, an organization born in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Since 2016, Lee has spearheaded CORE’s successful transition into a resilience-building INGO, responding to humanitarian and natural emergencies in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, Latin America, throughout the United States, Ukraine, and beyond.

Before CORE, Lee worked with UNOCHA, the Secretary General’s World Humanitarian Summit, and CHF. At the Women’s Refugee Commission, she developed a gender-sensitive emergency assessment tool, CLARA, now used by INGOs worldwide. Lee, recipient of the prestigious 2009 SID Truman award, authored “Livelihoods in Emergencies: A Double-Edged Sword.”  Lee holds an MA in Urban Planning (NYU) and an MA in Economics & Conflict Management (Johns Hopkins University, SAIS).