Jay Faison

Background

Faison was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1967. His father, Henry Faison, was a prominent real estate developer in Charlotte who founded and chaired Faison Enterprises.

Education

Faison earned a Bachelor in economics from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and graduated from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business with an Master of Business Administration in 1995.

Career

In 2013, he sold the vast majority of his shares in SnapAV and invested $175 million to start the ClearPath Foundation, with the mission of accelerating conservative clean energy solutions. After business school Faison started and ran Blockbuster Portugal, which had 27 stores. Faison founded SnapAV six years later, in 2005.

SnapAV designs and distributes audio-visual equipment to integrators, from speakers to surveillance system.

In 2013, Faison was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Southeast. ClearPath Foundation

Faison decided to sell his majority-share in SnapAV, and donate most of that money, $175 million, to create the ClearPath Foundation.

"I sold my business because I wanted to get into philanthropy during the prime of my career rather than the end of lieutenant lieutenant was time to give back." His goal was to support conservatives solutions to climate change through clean energy.

“I always felt a little alone out there as a Republican,” Faison said in an interview, “and so I started ClearPath to create a dialogue around this in a way that hadn’t been done before and sort of be part of the solution.”

He runs the foundation as its Managing Partner.

The ClearPath website displays its mission statement: “Accelerate conservative clean energy solutions.”

Political Donations

Faison has been a regular contributor to Republican political candidates. He donated $500,000 to New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte, $50,000 to Jeb Bush, and $100,000 to Lindsey Graham in the run-up to the 2016 election. He has also donated to Mitch McConnell and Rob Portman, and to the North Carolina Republican Party and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Faison"s philanthropy work has been written about in Politico, Forbes, The Washington Post, and the National Journal, among others

Faison published an Op-Editor with Senate Energy Committee Chairman Lisa Murkowski in January 2016 titled: ‘Stop Wasting America’s Hydropower Potential.’.

Achievements

• He was Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SnapAV.

Views

Quotations: “I always felt a little alone out there as a Republican,”.