Emergency response, global health, and the partnerships that held both together. Cotter Impact Partners does the part I kept looking for from the other side of the table.
For most of those fourteen years I sat on the receiving end of cross-sector partnerships. A company would offer something genuinely useful. A foundation would want to connect two organizations that had never met. Everyone in the room wanted it to work.
Then the actual work would start. Scoping what was being offered against what was needed. Getting an agreement that both legal teams would sign. Working out who does what when something goes wrong at two in the morning. That work has no owner. It lands on whoever has the least time, it happens before there is a budget line for it, and it is most of the difference between a partnership that gets announced and one that delivers.
Cotter Impact Partners does that part. We come in early, sit in the rooms where the details get sorted out, and step back once the partnership runs without us.
I have spent fourteen years in emergency response and global health, at Americares, Project HOPE, and Healthcare Ready, where I served as executive director. Nearly all of it depended on organizations that had never worked together before, and on someone being willing to sort out the details before anyone had a budget line for them.
I hold an MPH from Boston University and an executive certificate in nonprofit management from Georgetown. I work from Falls Church, Virginia.
A line about your project, your role, and what you're hoping to talk through is enough to start.
