Governing Board
Heart to Heart is a 501(c)3 volunteer-driven charity organization,
led by a governing board of directors. Board members provide organizational oversight to
ensure consistent programmatic and financial accountability. They all share a strong belief
in the effectiveness and value of developing self-sustaining heart centers to save children
born with heart defects.
Given the long-term objective of our mission and the complexity of
cardiac medicine, board continuity is key. Most current members have provided more than a
decade of continuous service. The Board functions as a team; decisions are made by consensus
and then implemented by a combination of board members, office staff, and medical volunteers.
The Board works closely with the executive director to allocate resources, maximize donor
ROI, and build our own organizational sustainability.
Josie Everett, Executive Director
1998–present
1998–present
“
I serve as the nexus – the connector and coordinator – of
Heart to Heart's diverse constituencies: medical volunteers, Russian colleagues,
US-based foundations and corporate sponsors, individual donors, and Board members.
We all share the common goal of developing heart centers to save as many children
as possible from heart disease.”
Josie Everett's introduction to Heart to Heart was linguistic.
In 1995, Heart to Heart needed a business interpreter to negotiate with the Ministry
of Public Health on behalf of a hospital program in St. Petersburg and asked her to
volunteer for the job. On the ground in Russia, Josie's first assignment was to
interpret at a meeting between Drs. Nilas Young and Alexander Zorin, Chief Cardiac
Surgeon of St. Petersburg. At the meeting's conclusion, the doctors asked Josie to
provide interpreting services in the operating room. In her first OR experience,
much of the eight hour surgery was narrated for her. Awed by the complexity of the
procedure and the intricacy of the teamwork, Josie wondered whether interpreting for
Heart to Heart might be the "best and highest" use of her language and communications
skills.
In 1998, Josie joined Heart to Heart as its third executive
director. She has provided administrative leadership on 25 surgical-educational
missions to Russia. She serves as chief interpreter in the operating room,
coordinating the OR interpreting team and overall communication. Since assuming
her position at Heart to Heart, she has helped launch and develop three new pediatric
sites in Russia. She has secured over $5 million in foundation grants and individual
donations, and close to $12 million in in-kind support.
Josie has 20 years of professional non-profit experience. Her
pre-Heart to Heart travel to Russia includes a six-month language program in Moscow,
living with a Russian family and studying translation at the Maurice Thorez Language
Institute (1990); and a summer program at the Pushkin Language Institute in Leningrad
(1987). Josie completed two years of graduate work at the Monterey Institute of
International Studies, specializing in Russian/English translation. She holds a B.A.
in History from the University of California at Berkeley, with a minor in Russian
Language and Literature. She attended Berkeley on a running scholarship, and thinks
that her years of middle- and long-distance running have helped her with pacing for
life's marathon efforts and gearing up for its inevitable sprints. She is fluent in
Russian and Spanish and describes her French as functionally polite.
