nonprofit-leadership
(4)
Ann Fyfe Built the Room Where Medtech Ideas Met Reality
Before accelerators became a Silicon Valley reflex, Ann Fyfe helped put one inside a community hospital - then built the partnerships that let fragile medical-device ideas meet clinicians, regulators and reality.
Karen Lithgow
Karen Lithgow is the Chief Marketing Officer of Goodwill Industries of South Florida, the Miami-based nonprofit that employs roughly 3,600 people and reports annual revenue near $196 million. She arrived at Goodwill after a corporate and consulting career that included brand and marketing roles connected to P&G, Disney, ADT and Western Union, followed by partner-level brand strategy and interim CMO work at the consultancy Chameleon Collective. At Goodwill South Florida she oversees marketing for an unusually wide portfolio: a chain of donation centers and thrift stores, an e-commerce operation, and Blue Box Solutions, the organization's B2B manufacturing and logistics arm that produces tens of millions of dollars of military apparel each year. Her public message centers on a single idea she has stated plainly - focusing on abilities rather than disabilities.
Ryan Berg
Ryan Berg is the co-founder and CEO of The Aruna Project, a Cincinnati-based athleisure bag and accessories brand stitched entirely by survivors of sex trafficking. With his wife April, he built a hybrid model that fuses a for-profit fashion label with nonprofit holistic care - transitional housing, counseling, healthcare and a living wage - to create what he calls lifelong freedom. The work started after a single TV news brief about children rescued from a brothel sent him hunting for that brothel on a business trip to India, where he found a two-mile stretch holding an estimated 15,000 enslaved women. The Aruna Project says it has helped free and employ more than 160 women across India and the Tri-State and contributed to an 86% drop in trafficking in that part of India.
David Werdegar
Dr. David Werdegar, MD, MPH is the former President and CEO of Institute on Aging (IOA), San Francisco's leading nonprofit dedicated to helping older adults and adults with disabilities live with dignity and independence. A physician trained at New York Medical College and UCSF, Werdegar transformed IOA from a community program into a comprehensive elder-care organization serving thousands annually across the San Francisco Bay Area. Under his watch, IOA opened a landmark 50,000-square-foot campus on Geary Boulevard in 2011, consolidating programs spanning home care, dementia day enrichment, and the 24/7 Friendship Line warmline. He retired in 2022 after steering the organization to nearly $100 million in annual revenue with a staff of around 900.