Eastside Pathways Board is pleased to announce we have contracted with Valtas Group to place Amy Wasser as our Interim Executive Director to lead the Eastside Pathways Backbone. Amy is a 25+ year non-profit professional with significant expertise in transitional leadership, building organizational capacity, and strategic planning. Amy will start on Monday, December 12th and remain as our Interim Executive Director until we are able to find a permanent Executive Director. Updates about that search can be read here.
We look forward to all Eastside Pathways partners (organizational, community, philanthropic) meeting Amy in the next few months.
Eastside Pathways Backbone and Partners are extremely grateful to Stephanie Cherrington for her passionate and visionary leadership over the past 10 years. Her last day with Eastside Pathways will be December 30th. Please read the message from Stephanie below.
Thank you,
Eastside Pathways Board
A message from our outgoing Executive Director, Stephanie Cherrington
It was fate and luck that brought me to this work 11 ½ years ago.
In May of 2011, I ran into Bill Henningsgaard – whom I’d briefly met years before – when he asked if I’d be interested in helping with “this new startup idea, collective impact”. He shared with me the white paper from the Stanford Social Innovation Review which I promptly read that night. Immediately, I was hooked. After spending years in the private and nonprofit sector, I knew that if systems change was ever possible, it would be through collective impact. I was in!
After over 2 years of working hand-in-hand with Bill and a small but dedicated team, losing him and his son, Max, in August of 2013 was one of the saddest days of my life. I’m forever grateful for the vision that Bill and his wife, Susan, had for our community and in particular, our children, youth, and young adults. The vision to understand how we, as stakeholders in our community, could eliminate both the duplication and gaps that are often harmful to our community youth. Harm, which we often create unintentionally by working in isolation.
It’s true, there are many, many programs in which partnering takes place. However, as the saying goes, “programs rich and systems poor” – we need more than just programs. The ideal is to create persistent systems, no matter the individual in place. That means organizational, community, and funder systems which create sustainable bridges for the adults who provide the support and services, and ultimately for the children, youth, and young adults of our community. Bridging the gaps between early learning to K-12, K-12 to post-secondary degree, training, or certification, and post-secondary to employment sectors.
This community partnership has come a long way in 11 ½ years thanks to the work that each of you have put into building it together with the Backbone staff and board. Thank you for the dedication to constantly examining your individual practices, policies, and behaviors, to making the modifications necessary for progress, and to each other to create a community system which builds equitable pathways for children, youth, and young adults, especially those most directly impacted by existing systems.
I plan to continue this work in some form or shape as I move forward and I look forward to staying connected to this community. Know that I’ll be cheering you, the staff, board, and future leadership on while you continue this work for yourselves, each other, and most importantly for the children, youth, and young adults in our community, cradle to career.
Until we meet again…
Warmly,
Stephanie