Dr. Alene H. Gelbard has over four decades of international experience advancing social and economic development. During the last 15 years, she has focused on helping businesses become more engaged in improving community well-being based on the experiences and perspectives of businesses. Results include a highly successful model for business/community organization partnership building that has produced sustainable local resources for partnership building in Indonesia. Today, a network of hundreds of businesses and community organizations in that country use the resources to increase their abilities to partner. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Social Enterprise in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. where she has taught business-nonprofit partnership building for the past six years.

She created ACCESS Partnerships as a successor to ACCESS Health Worldwide (ACCESS HW), a project she created and ran at the Public Health Institute (PHI) from 2004 – 2016. Her prior experience includes advising policymakers, program directors, and researchers on how to use data for effective policymaking and program development and management. Her positions include Senior Population Policy Advisor for the US Agency for International Development USAID) in Washington, DC, 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 nonprofit Population Reference Bureau (PRB), she served on U.S. delegations to several international conferences on development in the 1990s. She has lived and worked in Indonesia, Bolivia, France, Brazil, and the Philippines and worked in other countries in Asia, Latin American and Africa. She speaks French, Spanish, Portuguese, and limited Indonesian. She has a doctorate in population dynamics from the Bloomberg School of Public Health/Johns Hopkins University and a BA in French from the University of Washington.

Strengths include strategic planning, leadership, management, design thinking, coalition and network building, and oral and written communication skills, especially in multicultural and multilingual settings.