Greenwich Harbor Partners Fills Board Seats for Teach For America Connecticut
July 13, 2023 – Greenwich Harbor Partners has assisted in the recruitment of Aruna Hobbs, George Kollitides, Adrienne Parkmond, Robert Taylor, and Nicole Torraco as new members of the board of directors at Teach For America Connecticut.
Ms. Hobbs has built investment based businesses for major Fortune 500 companies in pensions and DC markets, elevating them to ranks growing to over $100 billion in AUM across three leading insurance companies. Currently the head of institutional investments at MassMutual, she has previously held senior leadership roles at New York Life Insurance Co. and Aegon. She is also a frequent contributor, author, and speaker in public circuits and industry associations.
Mr. Kollitides has 30 years of private equity, strategy, and operations experience and is currently a partner and co-head of A&M Capital Opportunities, where he sits on the investment, conflict, and valuation committees. Over his career, he has invested in or acquired dozens of middle-market companies. He has also previously held senior positions at Cerberus Capital Management, TenX Capital Partners, Catterton, and GE.
Ms. Parkmond is chief operating officer at The WorkPlace, overseeing all program operations of the regional non-profit organization in Southwestern Connecticut. With nearly 20 years of workforce development experience, she has developed and implemented nationally recognized programs and is a speaker on issues relating to education, training, and workforce development. Ms. Parkmond is also faculty at Post University and Naugatuck Valley Community College.
Mr. Taylor has been a teacher of economics, entrepreneurship, and personal finance at Brunswick School, a private, college-preparatory school in Greenwich, CT, since 2005. He also served several years as the basketball and track coach there. Prior to becoming a teacher, Mr. Taylor had a background in investment banking at JPMorgan Chase and Kidder, Peabody & Co.
Ms. Torraco is president of Fittle, a Xerox Company, which she has transformed from an administrative leasing function to a growing financial services business unit. She also served as chief strategy and M&A officer at Xerox. Prior to that, Ms. Torraco spent over a decade investing in stressed, distressed, and event-driven debt and equity securities at Onex Corp. and Babson Capital. Before her work in the investment world, she was at Rothschild and Gleacher & Co.
Related: U.S. Boards Seen as Slowly Evolving
Teach for America is a non-profit organization whose mission is to “enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation’s most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence.” The organization aims to accomplish this by recruiting and selecting college graduates from top universities around the U.S. to serve as teachers. The selected members, known as “corps members,” commit to teaching for at least two years in a public or public charter K–12 school in one of the 52 low-income communities that the organization serves. Today, half of the corps identify as people of color, half come from low-income backgrounds, and more than 1,000 corps members and alumni were themselves taught by a Teach for America corps member when they were students.
Veteran Recruiters
Greenwich Harbor Partners’ principals, Carrie and Ted Pryor, have worked in the industry as general managers and investors and have direct professional experience with the types of issues that face their clients. The firm’s client roster includes IBM Cloud Services, Media General, Marlin Equity Partners, DIRECTV, SpinMedia, ReelzChannel TV, and Keurig Green Mountain, among others.
Greenwich Harbor Partners Fills Seven Board Positions for Teach for America Twin Cities
Greenwich Harbor Partners recently placed seven new members of the board of advisors for Teach for America Twin Cities. The new members are: Javier Alacron, senior vice president finance in agriculture at CHS Inc.; Nina Goodheart, SVP and president, structural heart and aortic operating unit at Medtronic; Joanne Knight, VP of finance in the agricultural supply chain enterprise at Cargill; Andrew Miller, COO at the Minnesota Vikings; Joseph Oppong, consulting partner at EY; Monica Schwarm, partner at BCG; and Sherry Smith, retired CFO and EVP at Supervalu.
Ms. Pryor has over 20 years of senior executive search experience. She has recruited board directors, CEOs and their direct reports, as well as partners for private equity firms. In addition to holding a board seat with the New York Pops, she serves as an advisory board member for Constellation Ventures. A veteran of the internet space since the early ’90s, she has deep experience in digital media, entertainment, and private equity.
Mr. Pryor focuses on senior-level assignments for general management, sales, marketing, and digital transformation. He specializes in recruiting executives using his four years as CFO and CEO of a venture-backed start-up, 10 years at General Electric Capital, and 20 years in international finance and investment banking. Mr. Pryor has served on public, private, and non-profit boards, and chaired the audit committee for the NBA’s Boston Celtics. In executive recruiting, he has focused on business services, digital marketing, E-commerce, ad sales, place-based advertising, communications, and customer service for growth companies and large national brands.
Related: Greenwich Harbor Partners Recruits Five Board Members for Teach for America Jacksonville
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
