Margery Bronster and Paula Pretlow
Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation
The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation announced that Margery Bronster, a lawyer and Hawai’i’s former attorney general, will join its board of directors, and Paula B. Pretlow, who has served as a trustee since 2018, will begin a three-year term as chair of the board, both effective June 23, 2023. The Weinberg Foundation’s five-member board is responsible for setting the policies that guide its investments and grantmaking.
Ms. Bronster is an internationally and nationally recognized civil litigation attorney with extensive experience advising trusts and foundations on fiduciary duties. Before becoming a founding partner of Bronster Fujichaku Robbins (formerly Bronster Crabtree Hoshibata), she served as Hawai’i’s attorney general from 1995 to 1999. In that role, she showed steadfast leadership throughout a multiyear investigation into the Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate charitable trust, the largest private trust in the country, resulting in lasting improvements of its overall administration and selection process for board members to better serve the community. She also won a settlement agreement from tobacco companies amounting to more than a billion dollars for the state of Hawai’i that has led to decades of new statewide health care programs and improved health across the islands.
Ms. Bronster is a recipient of the Profiles in Courage Award from the Conference of Western Attorneys General, Kelly-Wyman Award for Outstanding Attorney General from the National Association of Attorneys General, and Outstanding Women Lawyer Award from Hawai’i Women Lawyers.
Ms. Pretlow has extensive finance and investment management experience, building a career in helping company leaders maximize shareholder and stakeholder value. As a former Senior Vice President of Capital Group, a $2.2 trillion privately held investment management firm, she headed the firm’s public fund business development and client relationship group and was responsible for large client relationships. Ms. Pretlow serves on a number of boards in the private, philanthropic, and nonprofit sector, including Williams-Sonoma, Vroom, The Kresge Foundation, Northwestern University, and her synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El.
Contact: 410.654.8500.
Martin Cohen
MetroWest Health Foundation
MetroWest Health Foundation announced that Martin Cohen, its President and CEO, intends to retire at the end of 2023. As its founding president, Mr. Cohen helped to shape the mission of the foundation and lead it through a period of unprecedented growth and investment in the health of the region.
When the foundation was formed in 1999 its endowment stood at $43 million. Today it stands at over $110 million, and it has invested more than $77 million into programs and services across 25 MetroWest communities. These investments have resulted in tangible impacts in the areas of health care access, behavioral health, health care workforce development, and public health.
The foundation’s trustees will be meeting soon to select a firm to conduct a national search for Mr. Cohen’s successor. Information on the search process will be posted on the foundation’s website.
Contact: 508.879.7625.
Lucia Corral Peña
Blue Shield of California Foundation
Blue Shield of California Foundation promoted Lucia Corral Peña to Chief Program Director to oversee the overall strategy, design, and management of its programs. Ms. Peña is a respected leader, and the architect of the foundation’s domestic violence prevention strategy. She joined the foundation 10 years ago, serving as a Senior Program Officer overseeing its work and grantmaking focused on breaking the cycle of domestic violence.
Ms. Peña has led proactive and innovative projects to end domestic violence in California. She launched the foundation’s Reimagine Lab initiative that brought together a diverse group of leaders from across California to apply human-centered design to domestic violence prevention with promising new solutions. She also created its Breaking the Cycle Two Generation cohort, a group of 12 organizations that are building evidence for community-level practices that achieve domestic violence prevention for whole families. Currently, she is orchestrating the foundation’s investments in community-based solutions to domestic violence that go beyond the criminal justice system.
Prior to her role at the foundation, Ms. Peña was Principal of Corral Peña Consulting, where she worked to address the unmet needs of immigrants, agricultural workers, and women in California. She has contributed to national- and regional-level collaboratives on Latino leadership, reproductive justice, economic and housing justice, and civic engagement projects across Northern California and the Central Valley. She previously served as Director of the Western Region for Hispanics in Philanthropy and as Program Director at The California Wellness Foundation. Ms. Peña currently serves on the boards of Sisters of St. Joseph Health Care Foundation and Northern California Grantmakers and is a founding member of the California Gender Justice Funders Collaborative.
Nicole Sherard-Freeman
Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan
The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan named Nicole Sherard-Freeman Chief Operating Officer beginning on July 10th. She will report to Richard (Ric) DeVore, president of the Community Foundation. In this role, Ms. Sherard-Freeman will oversee its donor services, finance, grantmaking services, information technology, as well as the program and New Economy Initiative teams.
Ms. Sherard-Freeman previously served the City of Detroit as Group Executive of Jobs, Economy & Detroit at Work and as Executive Director of the Mayor’s Workforce Development Board for Mayor Mike Duggan. Before that, she was President and CEO of Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation. From 2014 to 2018, she served as Managing Director for the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce.
Richard Tate
California Wellness Foundation
The California Wellness Foundation announced that current Executive Vice President, Richard Tate, will be its next President and CEO. Mr. Tate will assume the role on September 1st; Judy Belk will continue as President and CEO through August 31st, then serve as senior advisor through December 31st.
Mr. Tate, as a man of color and member of the LGBTQ community, two groups underrepresented in philanthropic leadership, brings his whole self into his work and encourages others to do the same. His lived experience and courageous leadership embody the foundation’s belief that wellness requires social justice and a deep commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
At Cal Wellness, Mr. Tate has played a key role in aligning the foundation’s board, management, and staff on organization-wide efforts to advance its mission and vision. When he joined in 2016 as Vice President of Public Affairs, he established its first integrated public affairs department, a multidisciplinary team responsible for communications, community relations, and public policy activities. In 2020, he was named Executive Vice President to also lead strategy, planning, learning and innovation, and serve as Chief Deputy to the President and CEO.
Mr. Tate has driven several ground-breaking foundation initiatives. He helped conceive and manage the Advance and Defend campaign, which after of the 2016 election, raised the foundation’s voice and rapidly moved millions of dollars to advocacy partners; and played a key role in launching the Hope and Heal Fund in 2016, which in the aftermath of the 2015 San Bernardino massacre, became the first ever state-wide funder collaborative on gun violence prevention. In addition, he’s helped the foundation respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by quickly moving more than $20 million to underserved communities and spotlighting health inequities; helped leverage Cal Wellness’ full $1 billion endowment to align with its mission; and served on the founding committee that launched Leverage the Trust California, the first-ever network of Black foundation trustees in the state.
Prior to joining Cal Wellness, Mr. Tate served as Vice President of Communications and Marketing at Hopelab, the health-focused nonprofit organization of the Omidyar Group, and as a Director of Communications at Chiron, a global biotechnology company. His background includes more than 20 years of cross-sector leadership experience in business and philanthropy. Mr. Tate is currently on the board of the Stupski Foundation. He has served as board chair of Northern California Grantmakers and OUTWORDS and as a volunteer and board member for the Bay Area Surgical Mission.
Contact: 818.702.1900.
Winston Wong
CDC Foundation
Winston Wong, MD, MS, scholar-in-residence at the UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity, has been elected to a five-year term on the board of directors of the CDC Foundation. Dr. Wong will join other board members to provide guidance and oversight to the foundation, which is the independent nonprofit created by Congress to mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources to support the critical health protection work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) and the nation’s public health system.
Throughout his career, Dr. Wong has been dedicated to improving health equity and addressing socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in health. A fellow of the American Academy of Family Practice, Dr. Wong’s professional career has encompassed executive roles at community health centers, federal service, and most recently at Kaiser Permanente, where he served as Medical Director for Community Benefit for more than 17 years. At Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Wong developed partnerships with communities to address health equity through enhancing population health and the dissemination of evidence-based medicine. He was also responsible for its national philanthropic strategies to support clinical and population management initiatives and for its quality initiatives to address disparities among its 12 million patients.
His commitment to addressing health equity is anchored by his experience as a bilingual primary care community health center physician for the Asian immigrant community in Oakland Chinatown, which led him to leadership roles in the United States Public Health Service, where he served as the Health Resource and Services Administration’s Chief Clinical Officer for a region that spanned the Pacific and Western United States.
In 2016, Dr. Wong was appointed to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Minority Health, and in 2019 was appointed Chair. At the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Dr. Wong chairs the Roundtable on Health Equity and has served on the Board of Population Health and Public Health Practice. He is a board member at Grantmakers In Health and current acting CEO and Chair of the National Council of Asian Pacific Islander Physicians. Dr. Wong served on the board of The California Endowment and board Chair for the School Based Health Alliance.
His work in developing programs and policies to address health equity has been recognized by awards from the California Primary Care Association, Latino Health Access, the Minority Health Foundation, Asian Health Services, Congresswoman Barbara Lee and the U.S. Public Health Service, where he received the Outstanding Service Medal. Dr. Wong received a Doctor of Humane Letters from the A.T. Still University of Osteopathic Medicine.
Contact: Amy Tolchinsky at atolchinsky@cdcfoundation.org.