The Board of Directors of Grameen Foundation
announced today
the selection of its next president and chief executive officer (CEO) Steven L.
Hollingworth, a distinguished leader in the field of poverty eradication.
He has been the chief executive
officer of Freedom from Hunger since 2011, where he has been a transformative
leader focusing the organization on the intersection of poverty, financial
services, hunger and health in partnership with other organizations.
From 2007 to 2011 Hollingworth was
the chief operating officer of CARE where he worked closely with the CEO to
develop and implement key organizational strategy and sound management tools
for assessing and enhancing performance.
He had direct line management
responsibility for global operations, program implementation, and finance in 70
countries. For 22 years before that Hollingworth worked in the field on
four continents for CARE, including as country director in India, Sri Lanka,
and Bangladesh, as well as in other positions in Latin America and Africa.
Robert Eichfeld, Chairman of the
Grameen Foundation Board of Directors stated today: “Steve Hollingworth has a
passion for the mission of Grameen Foundation -- to help the poor realize their
potential to get out of poverty.
He has world class experience in
field operations around the globe and in senior management positions in NGOs
that focus on the needs of the very poor. Steve is strongly supportive of
Grameen Foundation’s continued leadership in applying innovative technologies
to the needs of the poor in agriculture, financial services, and other
areas.
He also has a demonstrated talent for
successfully identifying partners among NGOs, governments and the private
sector who can help take an innovative program to scale to reach a growing
number of poor people. ”
Hollingworth will succeed Alex
Counts, the founder and CEO of Grameen Foundation for its first 18 years.
Counts is a major leader in the field of international development, where he
contributed to the massive scaling up of the microfinance movement globally and
more recently focused on the foundation becoming a practical innovator in the
fields of financial inclusion, smallholder agriculture and health care for the
poor.
Counts founded Grameen Foundation in
1997 with a $6000 grant from Professor Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize
Laureate, who serves today as a Director Emeritus of the
foundation.
Under Counts’ leadership Grameen
Foundation has grown to become a significant leader in anti-poverty efforts
worldwide. Counts serves as Co-Chair of the Microfinance CEOs Working
Group, of which Hollingworth is a member, and has been involved in a number of
other industry wide groups that encourage organizations working on poverty
alleviation to measure, evaluate and improve their performance in advancing
their social missions.
He has championed the sharing of
knowledge about both successes and failures across organizations, geographies
and program areas to ensure, and accelerate, continuous improvement in
international development efforts. Counts will continue to serve on the
foundation’s Board of Directors until January 3, 2016.
David Edelstein has been serving
with great distinction as the Interim CEO of Grameen Foundation since late May
2015. Edelstein came to the foundation from Microsoft Corporation with a
vision for the expansive role that technology can play in poverty
alleviation.
In collaboration with his colleagues
at Grameen Foundation, he has pioneered a number of initiatives at the
intersection of mobile technology and international development that have had
measurable positive impact on the lives of the poor.
More recently, he has worked on
organization wide efforts to enhance the strategic and operational goals of the
foundation. He will continue in the role of Interim CEO until Steven
Hollingworth joins the organization in early February 2016.
About Grameen Foundation
Grameen Foundation is a global nonprofit organization that helps the world’s poorest people achieve their full potential by providing access to essential financial services and information on health and agriculture that can transform their lives.
Grameen Foundation is a global nonprofit organization that helps the world’s poorest people achieve their full potential by providing access to essential financial services and information on health and agriculture that can transform their lives.
Founded in 1997, it delivers
solutions that respond to the needs of the poor, as well as tools that help
poverty-focused organizations become more effective. It focuses on initiatives
that can achieve widespread impact and uses an open-source approach that makes
it easy for other organizations to adopt them broadly.
Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus,
founder of Grameen Bank and the Grameen family of companies, is an inaugural
member of its Board of Directors, and now serves as director emeritus. Grameen
Foundation is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with offices in the U.S.,
Asia, Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment