The Missouri Foundation for Health in St. Louis has announced DWAYNE PROCTOR as its new president and CEO, effective May 3. Proctor comes to MFH from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in New Jersey, which he joined in 2002 as a senior communications and program officer, providing strategic guidance and resources for several child health and risk-prevention initiatives. In 2005, he was tapped to lead the foundation's national strategies to reverse the rise in childhood obesity rates and in that role worked with his colleagues to promote effective changes to public policies and industry practices, test and demonstrate innovative community and school-based environmental changes, and use both "grassroots" and "treetops" advocacy approaches to educate leaders on their roles in preventing childhood obesity.

The board of directors of the Skoll Foundation in Palo Alto, California, has announced that MARLA BLOW will be joining the foundation as president and chief operating officer. Blow currently serves as senior vice president for social impact in North America at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, the finance payments company's primary philanthropic vehicle. Prior to joining Mastercard in 2019, she was founder and CEO of FS Card Inc., a DC-based credit card venture designed to make traditional credit available to underserved consumers, and a partner in Fenway Summer LLC, a consumer finance investment and venture capital firm that incubated FS Card.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in New York City has announced the appointment of SINDY ESCOBAR ALVAREZ as the new director of its medical research program. Escobar Alvarez joined DDCF as a program officer for medical research in 2010 and was promote to senior program officer in 2016. She currently serves as vice chair of the board of the Health Research Alliance, a coalition of nonprofit funders of biomedical research, and is also a member of the American Association for Cancer Research, American Society of Hematology, New York Academy of Sciences, and the Association for Women in Science and a past member of both the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute’s Advisory Panel on Rare Diseases and Vivli’s External Advisory Committee.

The Chicago-based Obama Foundation has announced that SHAWN RAY WHITE will join the foundation’s team as general counsel. In that role, White will lead all aspects of the foundation’s legal affairs, including those related to the design, construction, and operations of the Obama Presidential Center. A member of the State Bars of California and New York, White began her career in the New York City office of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, LLP, where she was a member of the international practice and focused on mergers and acquisitions, capital markets and securities transactions, and subsequently served as vice president – corporate counsel in the enterprise-wide strategic mergers and acquisitions, securities and governance unit at Prudential Financial, with a concurrent role as chief legal counsel to the Prudential Foundation. Most recently, she served as general counsel to the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation and the Broad Family Office.

Atlanta business and civic leader MILTON H. JONES, JR. has been elected chair of the UNCF (United Negro College Fund) board, the first African American to hold that position. Jones, who prior to his election as board chair, served as vice chair of the board and chair of the finance committee, will succeed WILLIAM F. STASIOR, SR., retired chair and CEO of Booz Allen Hamilton, who served as UNCF’s chair for eleven years. Jones is a founding member of Peachtree Providence Partners Holding Company, LLC and, prior to that, worked for more than thirty-two years at Bank of America, including roles reporting directly to the chairman and CEO.

TIFFANY COOPER GUEYE, chief operating officer of Blue Meridian Partners, has been elected to chair the board of the Center for Effective Philanthropy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A member of the CEP board since 2013, Gueye will succeed Heinz Endowments president GRANT OLIPHANT, who has chaired the organization’s board for more than six years. In her role as chief operating officer at Blue Meridian Partners, a partnership of philanthropists that funds scalable solutions to the challenges faced by young people and families in poverty, Gueye provides strategic leadership for the organization’s operating systems and shared services. Before joining Blue Meridian, she served as chief executive officer (2008-17) of BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life), a national youth-serving organization, where she started her career in 1998 and served in a variety of roles prior to being named CEO.

NICKEY GOREN has announced that she is stepping down after seven years as president and CEO of the D.C.-based Meyer Foundation, effective May 31.  Goren will continue to serve the foundation as a senior advisor, charged with chronicling its journey into racial equity and systems change, for the remainder of 2021 and will also serve as a resource to JANICE THOMAS, the foundation's vice president for finance and operations, who will be stepping in as interim president and CEO, effective June 1.

And PND notes the passing, at the age of 94, of Dorothy (Dolly) Ginsberg Lemelson, wife of Jerome Lemelson and co-founder of the Lemelson Foundation in Portland, Oregon. Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1926 to Louis and Lena Ginsberg, Dolly grauated from the Parson’s School of Design in New York, taught at the Newark School of Fine Art for several years, and then went into interior design, establishing a business that supported her family for several decades after her husband stopped working to devote himself full-time to a career as an independent inventor in 1959. (Jerry Lemelson went on to hold more than six hundred U.S. patents.) When her husband passed in 1997, less than five years after the Lemelson Foundation launched, Dolly and her sons Eric and Robert took the reins, with Dolly serving in the roles of president and chair until 2018. According to a statement on the foundation's website, her leadership "reflected her belief that the goal was to give to others who hadn't had such good fortune the opportunity to meet their full potential and for those individuals to feel the satisfaction of experiencing how they could help to make the world around them a better place." In addition to her leadership of the Lemelson Foundation, she was the founder and president of the Dorothy Lemelson Foundation, which focuses on support for teachers and at-risk young people in public education in Oregon and Nevada, two states where she lived in the last several decades of her life.