Dear Friends:
It is with great pleasure that I announce the promotion of our Chief Program Officer, Maria Peña, to President of LIFT. In her new role, Maria will serve as my right hand, leading the day-to-day management of the organization and partnering with me to set strategy as we pursue the next stage of LIFT’s work to break the cycle of poverty for families with young children.
In the two years since she joined LIFT as Chief Program Officer, Maria has impressed all of us with her business acumen, analytical chops, and deeply personal connection to LIFT’s mission and members. She has refined our program model and inspired an “impact first” approach to performance management that has led us to more than double our impact on families. She has also guided LIFT’s “constituent voice” efforts, resulting in a groundbreaking member-led evaluation system that is transforming both LIFT and the anti-poverty field more broadly.
Immediately before joining LIFT, Maria served as the head of the entrepreneurship and economic development portfolio at Vital Voices Global Partnership, an NGO founded by Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright to support women’s leadership around the world. Prior to that, she spent more than a decade advising Fortune 500 companies on mergers and acquisitions, organizational change management, and risk management strategies at Ernst & Young, LLP, PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, and IBM Global Services. I invite you to get to know more about her, and I encourage you to be in touch with her at [email protected]. You can also follow her on Twitter @LIFTpres.
Please join me in warmly congratulating Maria on her new role!
Hear From Maria!
Tune into the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s webinar, “Valuing Frontline Work”, on September 23, 2015 at 2:00 p.m. EDT where Maria will join some of the nation’s greatest nonprofit strategists to discuss what it really takes to measure impact.