GOVERNING BOARD
Maxine Friedman – Board Chair
Senior Vice President Growth, Bionic Solution
Maxine has 20+ years of strategic partnerships, business development and marketing experience at agency, startup and Fortune 500 companies. She currently leads Talent and Business Development for Bionic, an innovation and entrepreneurial practice helping the world’s largest companies launch new businesses. For five years, Maxine was Vice President of Partnerships at Clickable, where she was a part of the founding management team. She holds a B.S. in Journalism from California State Polytechnic University and an MBA from both Columbia University and London Business School and began her career at Cunningham Communication, a Silicon-Valley branding/PR agency, where she built and managed holistic communications programs for some of the largest technology brands – including, Oracle, Motorola and eSchwab (Charles Schwab)
Maxine, her husband, and two children live in the Meatpacking in NYC.
Sue Verity – Board Clerk
Liberty Mutual, Director of Financial Analysis
Sue joined the board as clerk after volunteering with the Boston Many Hopes chapter for several years. She studied Business Administration at the University of Vermont and has an MBA from Boston College. She works as a Director of Financial Analysis at Liberty Mutual in Boston. Sue visited Many Hopes in Kenya and was thrilled to meet the girls and see the impact in person.
Patrick Murphy
President, John Hancock Financial Services
CEO, New York Life Retirement Plan Services
Born and raised in Massachusetts, Patrick has spent the past 25 years in the financial services industry helping companies and their employees achieve financial security. He is currently the President of John Hancock Retirement Plan Services. Pat has also spent significant personal time as a coach and mentor, helping young people realize their potential on and off the athletic fields. He became a believer in the Many Hopes mission after meeting Thomas for lunch in 2012. He was a private donor and helped with fundraising before joining the board.
Daniel Grant
Global Staffing Lead, Google Search and Assistant
Daniel joined Google in 2015, after a career in recruiting across the non-profit and education industries. At Google, Daniel initially managed five teams of recruiters, primarily supporting Software Engineering hiring in the Bay Area. Daniel then spent a year leading Google Cloud’s Americas Sales recruiting teams in a hyper growth market. For the past two years, Daniel has been the Global Staffing Lead role for Google Search and Assistant, leading all staffing efforts for all global hiring of these technical businesses.
Before Google, Daniel was the Vice President of National Alliances at Teach For America, based in new York City. With his experience serving under-privileged children in South Africa and Namibia, Daniel launched our Many Hopes New York Chapter and served as Regional Director for our first year in NYC. Daniel first visited Mudzini Kwetu in 2009 and fell in love with our vision for long term, transformative change through the lives of the girls he met there.
Nelson Mills
Columbia Property Trust, President
Nelson has more than 30 years of experience in the real estate investment and financial services industries. He is responsible for overall strategy, operations, and financial performance of Columbia Property Trust, a $6 billion public real estate owner/operator. He also serves as a director on the Columbia Board. Prior to joining Columbia in 2010, he served for five years as the President and Chief Operating Officer of Williams Realty Advisors, LLC, managing and advising a series of real estate investment funds. Previous roles included CFO of Lend Lease Real Estate Investments and Partner at KPMG LLP. He received a B.S. degree in Business Administration from the University of Tennessee and an M.B.A. from the University of Georgia. Nelson and his wife, Judy, live adjacent to Madison Square Park in New York City.
Joseph Zito
(X)form Coaching and Consulting, Founder
Joseph is an Elite-Performance Strategist dedicated to transforming professional lives of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity into realities of clarity, control, calm, and continuous improvement. He previously spent 20 years in the corporate realm, serving as an operating executive in both early-stage startups (including two successful exits) and large global enterprises. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his amazing wife and their two incredible children.
Joseph McKnight
Joseph McKnight is a Managing Director with Blackstone Credit, focusing on mezzanine lending and private equity investments in the energy and power sectors.
Before joining Blackstone Credit, Mr. McKnight served as a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, where he focused on private equity and proprietary direct investments in power generation and renewable energy within the firm’s J. Aron commodity division. He previously worked as an Associate in the Natural Resources private-equity vertical at Apollo Management.
Mr. McKnight received a BA in History from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with academic honors
Becky Welday – Board Treasurer
Becky grew up in Texas and graduated from Baylor University with degrees in Economics and Finance in 1990. A former credit analyst and commercial lender at Bank of America, Becky stopped working in order to stay home with children, Richard and Layne. She met her husband, Rick, at Baylor and got married shortly after graduation. The Weldays have lived all over the world including periods in Switzerland, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Saint Louis, and all over Texas. Her extra time is spent volunteering with churches and other organizations and she enjoys reading, traveling, cooking, and spending time with family and friends.