Gregory Kearns

Gregory Kearns has worked for over 25 years, living and working in over 50 countries, including living for ten years in South Sudan, Vietnam, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Gregory is effective at working cross-culturally and has led teams as large as 350 staff (Vietnam and Bosnia), both national and expatriate, in achieving lofty goals across a wide range of technical sectors, including certification, public health, education, agriculture/food security, anti-trafficking, democracy and governance, monitoring/evaluation/learning, leadership development, strategy design and execution, as well as several others.

Gregory has himself raised funding and has recruited, trained and coached teams who raised well over $1 billion from corporations, foundations, high net worth individuals, small gift donors, and bilateral and multilaterals institutions such as the World Bank and the Governments of Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, UK, Finland, Austria, Canada, New Zealand, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Norway. The size of funding raised was between $20,000 and $89.5 million.

Building and mentoring teams has been key to his success. In his most current role, Gregory led a team of more than 100 staff working out of 15 country offices (including the U.S.-based headquarters office) serving 26 countries. In addition, he has been consistently successful in aligning strategy with programming, technical rigor, operations, human resources, finance/audit, and communications and external affairs. A salient ingredient to success has been the development of hundreds of partnerships, with donors, businesses, and local civil society organizations. It is these partnerships which sustained work once programming ended.

In his most recent role, one focus was advocating to key Senate and House committees on issues of importance to his institute. This also including publishing four pieces in journals and publications read by the foreign assistance community, as well as presenting to several think-tanks (including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, American Enterprise Institute, and Hudson Institute) and universities (Georgetown, Johns-Hopkins, American, and George Washington).