Foundation Welcomes New Chief Operating Officer

I have some exciting news to share with you today. Cheryl Scott, an admired leader with deep and impressive management experience, has agreed to join the foundation as our Chief Operating Officer.

After conducting a nationwide search, we were delighted to find such a great fit in our own back yard. Cheryl has many years of experience managing large, complex, and growing organizations. For 25 years she held leadership positions at Seattle-based Group Health Cooperative, one of the country’s oldest and most respected integrated health-care systems. Her career there included six years as executive vice president and chief operating officer, and seven years as president and CEO (1997 to 2004), during which time she led a major turnaround of the business. Cheryl is also a clinical professor in the Department of Health Services at the University of Washington, where she teaches a graduate seminar on leading complex adaptive systems.

All of us who met Cheryl in the hiring process were struck not only by her extraordinary record of achievement but also by her commitment to her community and to those less fortunate. We were also struck by her collegiality and down-to-earth approach to problem solving.
 
Cheryl’s broad range of skills make her ideally suited to lead an Operations team that’s responsible for many different and crucial functions: Finance & Administration, Financial Analysis & Planning, Information Technology, Security, Human Resources, Legal, Impact Assessment & Improvement, and Foundation Advocacy. The Operations team is critical to the success of our grantmaking teams—because it will set a standard of operational excellence and provide the platform on which we will build our grantmaking.

Cheryl will join us on June 26. Her arrival fills in the final leadership piece of our recent reorganization. She will join the presidents of our three program areas—Sylvia Mathews (Global Development), Allan Golston (U.S.), and Tachi Yamada (Global Health)—to form the foundation’s executive management team. As we collaborate to improve people’s lives with partners in the United States and around the world, we are fortunate indeed to have four such accomplished people leading our work.

Patty Stonesifer