John F. Gamba, Sr.

Co-Founder and Director

John F. Gamba, Sr. is a 2006 Co-Founder of the Gamba Family Foundation. His motivation to focus on improving education is two-fold. First, having grown up in a family lacking financial resources, his life was changed forever by receiving a full scholarship to attend college. Since then he’s lived with a commitment to repay the powerful act of goodness resulting from another’s generosity. Second, throughout his career he’s been taken by the “gap” for low-income children to secure a quality education.

He observed the divide whether it was in his business career, his time in the Army, his experience on public school boards in the 1970’s, his early support of the DC Scholarship Fund, or when he served on the Board of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. In response he’s felt compelled to improve education for disadvantaged students.

He graduated from Penn’s Wharton School and has an MBA from Drexel University. After a decades-long career with what is now Verizon Communications, he retired as a Sr. Vice President. Since then, he’s invested in several education technology companies where he served as Chairman of the Board with one of them going public.