Kate has been involved in program development and leadership training for two decades all over the world. She began her work in Mumbai, helping to create health systems with East Indian families. Because she was working with a diversity of caste groups, her projects required a great deal of innovative and strategic creativity. Power dynamics, religious differences and economic inequalities where but a few of the complex issues that had to be accounted for in the delivery of efficient and relevant health care services.
Later, Kate brought these experiences working in India to bear on a number of health care projects she helped to develop in Indonesia on the island of Bali. It was also in Bali where Kate began her training in the Midwifery Arts and was apprenticed in an ancient way of supporting women, families and communities navigate the path of childbirth.
In Guatemala, over a four-year period, Kate helped to design and build a thriving village-based health care system whose primary purpose was to reach underserved women, families and children. Upon completion of this project, Kate returned to the United States to earn her formal Midwifery Degree at Birthingway College in Portland, Oregon.
After a number of years practicing Midwifery and community health in the United States, Kate made a transition that at first glance might appear puzzling but upon deeper inspection is quite consistent with the choices she has made throughout her life. She saw that to make the kind of global impact she was really trained for she needed to shift from working with families and communities to working principally with organizations.
One would be hard pressed to find a more profoundly impactful transformative event than childbirth – it is an event deep in risk, power, mystery and uncertainty. And when organizations engage in a period of transition and transformation these same elements come to the center – yet very few leaders are actually trained to work with, manage and eventually master them. We are talking about a skill level in listening, guiding, feeling and seeing that goes beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary.
When organizations get it right, when leaders rise to the occasion, a level of creativity and capacity comes to life that is best described as amazing. Kate’s job is to see to it that leaders and organizations have everything they need to be successful in such moments.
Kate speaks Spanish, is working on her Portuguese and continues to master the language set that is able to bring clarity to the ambiguous and highly complex process of personal and organizational change.