Josie Everett
Senior Advisor, Strategic Initiatives
Staff member since 1998

“Since my first experience with Heart to Heart in Russia in 1995, I have considered it an honor and privilege to be part of this noble humanitarian mission. Witnessing our medical volunteers in action over the last 25 years—being part of saving the lives of tens of thousands of desperately sick children—has been phenomenal. The need to expand heart care around the world, to save adults as well as children, has never been greater. Seeing the next generation of Heart to Heartniks take up and expand this work is my greatest professional reward.”

Josie Everett began her work with Heart to Heart in 1995, when she volunteered as a Russian-English interpreter in St. Petersburg. She was immediately taken with the organization’s education-based program model and appreciated its potential. In 1998, after working as a nonprofit professional for seven years, Josie became Heart to Heart’s executive director, a position she held for nearly 25 years. (See a retrospective of her accomplishments below.) In her new role, Josie will be focusing on ensuring Heart to Heart’s self-sustainability. She will use her deep institutional knowledge and decades of experience to help guide the next generation of Heart to Heart leadership in expanding our life-saving work. Two high priority long range objectives are growing Heart to Heart’s nascent Legacy Giving Program and enhancing the board of director’s governance model. Contact Josie here if you’d like to help her with these important projects! Josie will continue to serve on the program, fundraising, and governance board committees.

Looking back: 1995–2022

From volunteer to executive director

When Josie volunteered to provide Russian-English interpreting for Heart to Heart’s medical director in St. Petersburg, she had no expectation of donning scrubs and interpreting through an 8-hour open heart surgery. In retrospect, the experience was life changing. At Children’s Hospital No. 1 in St.Petersburg, she was able to witness firsthand the effectiveness and scalability of Heart to Heart’s work, just six years after the organization had been founded. Through the lens of a nonprofit program developer, Josie sensed that expanding Heart to Heart’s training approach would have immediate and long term impact. Three years later, she was excited to be offered the opportunity to become Heart to Heart’s executive director. She savored the challenge of codifying and scaling the efficacious model she had seen in action to save more babies and children in desperate need of heart surgery.

Throughout the Soviet era, Heart to Heart’s Russian cardiac colleagues had been isolated from Western advances being made in pediatric cardiac medicine. Heart to Heart was confident that, by bringing more Russian doctors up to speed through stepwise teaching and clinical skills training, we would enable them to save the lives of tens of thousands of children born with heart defects. Josie worked closely with the board of directors to update the organization’s vision and mission. Together they began growing the Heart to Heart community of medical volunteers and financial supporters needed in order to scale operations. Two significant steps were developing a common language and establishing a set of metrics to express program needs and communicate progress to everyone involved in expanding our work. Within several years, the Heart to Heart community was able to support the development of multiple cardiac partner sites caring for both pediatric and adult heart patients.

Codifying the program model 

In 2002, with the steady guidance and support of two founding board members, Josie helped launch Heart to Heart’s second major initiative, the Into the Heartland Campaign (2002-2019).

By the end of the Campaign, thousands of physicians and nurses throughout Russia had received advanced cardiac education and training. To date, cardiac specialists trained by Heart to Heart in Russia have saved the lives of nearly 35,000 children; they will continue to save the lives of more than 2,000 children each year—in perpetuity, with no further investment from Heart to Heart. After scaling Heart to Heart’s program model across the world’s largest country, Heart to Heart was ready to dream even bigger: Josie spearheaded our Going Global Campaign, positioning the organization to save children and adults in other areas of need.

Building organizational capacity

Teaching and training provided by Heart to Heart’s medical volunteers has had three synergistic outcomes: It empowered Russian specialists to save their own children. It gave them the tools to become teachers themselves—able to train the next generation of Russian specialists in their own regions. It inspired some Russian colleagues to “pay it forward,” joining the ranks of Heart to Heart’s medical volunteers in training others within Russia and in other countries.

To leverage these invaluable human resources, Josie began diversifying the administrative and financial resources to take Heart to Heart to the next level. Josie’s partner in expanding both the board’s skill set and fundraising capacity was the board chair she had recruited, a longstanding Heart to Heart supporter, and an accomplished nonprofit leader in her own right.

Going Global

Since 2015, Josie has traveled to Latin America 11 times to lead site assessment or cardiac training missions in five countries. Additionally, she continues to promote educational collaborations within Russia as well as in the former Soviet republics, particularly in Armenia and the Ukraine.

During her tenure as executive director, more than 32,000 children’s lives were saved by doctors and nurses trained by Heart to Heart. She was instrumental in securing over $11M through foundation grants and individual gifts, and more than $20M in in-kind donations. Josie grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley, with a minor in Russian language and literature. After studying in the USSR in 1987 and 1990, she completed two years of graduate work at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, specializing in Russian-English translation. Josie speaks Russian and Spanish fluently and describes her French as functionally polite. She is the mother of two children, an avid knitter and reader, and a middle distance trail runner.