Alene Gelbard

Biography

Alene H. Gelbard, PhD, is founder and principal of ACCESS Partnerships that increases the abilities of businesses to partner with community organizations for community well-being. ACCESS Partnerships is the successor of a program that she created and ran at the Public Health Institute for nearly a decade called ACCESS Health Worldwide (ACCESS-HW). ACCESS Partnerships uses business experiences and perspective on partnering, reinforced by those of community organizations, and works with a local partner to run sustainable mechanisms created by businesses and community organizations to meet their partnering needs. This approach produced a model for partnership building in Indonesia that continues to be highly successful nearly a decade after it began. Dr. Gelbard is an Adjunct Professor of Social Enterprise in the School of International Service at American University where she teaches business-nonprofit partnership building. Her prior experience includes decades of work on health, population, and development issues while living in Indonesia, Bolivia, France, Brazil, and the Philippines. She has also worked on these issues elsewhere in Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Previous positions include Senior Population Policy Advisor for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington, D.C., and Senior Communications Advisor on Health, Population, and Nutrition for USAID/ Indonesia, Advisor to the Ministry of Planning and Coordination in Bolivia, and Policy Analyst for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As director of international programs at the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), she served on U.S. delegations to several international conferences on development in the 1990s. Her experience includes training policymakers and others in the public and nonprofit sector on how to use data in policy making and program development and management. She speaks French, Spanish, Portuguese, and limited Indonesian.

Research Interest

community organizations