Media Contact: Laurel Lundstrom, llundstrom@pathfinder.org
June 1, 2022—Natasha Sakolsky will join Pathfinder as the organization’s first Chief, Global Services. This new leadership position will oversee global operations and technical staff supporting teams around the world with services that allow for best-in-class operations and program quality in every country where Pathfinder works.
Sakolsky has spent more than three decades in the development and public health sectors, leading strategic planning, organizational design and culture initiatives, and organizational change processes. She has supported programs in Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, India, Myanmar, and Brazil, and has lived and worked in West and Central Africa on HIV and AIDS, family planning, and maternal and child health programs. She provided oversight to teams around the world, mitigating risks while ensuring quality, compliance, ethics, learning, and results.
For Pathfinder, Sakolsky will oversee operational and technical teams in areas including human resources, security, information technology, digital innovations, program quality, monitoring and evaluation, and organizational performance. She will work closely with CEO, Lois Quam, and two new Pathfinder Presidents who will be announced in the coming weeks—President Africa and President, South Asia and Middle East—to drive locally led strategies that advance country-led solutions for sexual and reproductive health and rights.
“This position and the global team Natasha will lead really breaks away from the headquarters-field model that has governed our industry for decades,” said Lois Quam, CEO, Pathfinder. “Rather than having support services based largely in the US, on the other side of the world from where services are provided, staff carrying out our operational functions will be based globally. Whether you are a staff member in Abuja, Karachi, or Boston, you will be supported with best-in-class services available during your own working hours.”
Since the 1990s, Sakolsky has helped international nongovernmental organizations build country-led strategies and structures. At Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, for example, where she recently served as Vice President, Program Implementation and Country Management, Sakolsky designed and launched country-owned positioning efforts and was the co-chair of the organization’s Global Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Initiative.
“Pathfinder is on the cutting edge in the development sector in terms of restructuring to a locally led development model,” said Sakolsky. “I am really looking forward to joining an organization that joins my passion for sexual and reproductive health and rights and country-owned and -led programs.”
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Pathfinder International is driven by the conviction that all people, regardless of where they live, have the right to decide whether and when to have children, to exist free from fear and stigma, and to lead the lives they choose. As a global health organization with locally led, community-driven programs, Pathfinder supports women to make their own reproductive health decisions. Pathfinder works with local partners to advance contraceptive services, comprehensive abortion care, and young people’s sexual and reproductive rights in communities around the world—including those affected by poverty, conflict, climate change, and natural disasters. Taken together, Pathfinder’s programs enable millions of people to choose their own paths forward.
