Diane Felicio, Ph.D.

With over 25 years of experience in senior leadership roles, Diane has served as a strategist, executive director, operations expert, fundraiser, crisis manager, and trusted advisor and relationship builder across a broad range of institutions in the non-profit and related sectors. Within these positions, Diane has been directly involved with recruitment activities across countless roles including college and university faculty/deans/provosts/presidents, development professionals, and operations staff/ directors/executive directors, as well as board recruitment and governance.

Diane’s success as a fundraiser has been most notable with leading national foundations. She has developed strong, meaningful relationships with program officers and as a result has worked with teams to develop winning multi-million-dollar proposals and programs. In 2015, Diane led an effort at Community Catalyst—a national health care advocacy organization— to secure the largest single philanthropic gift in the organization’s history: $14.8 million dollars from The Atlantic Philanthropies to develop the Center for Consumer Engagement in Health Innovation. The award was one of the final legacy grants given by the foundation before it completed all grantmaking in 2016.

Trained as a social psychologist and mediator, Diane has had experience leading and partnering with a range of social change actors including advocates, organizers, policymakers, academics, business executives, and cultural leaders. Along with 10 years at Community Catalyst, Diane also has worked at The University of Vermont, Goddard College, Simmons University, Boston Children’s Hospital, and The Health Initiative. Her volunteer and board roles are wide-reaching and most recently include the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, LPAC (Lesbian Political Action Committee, where she served as board chair), and the Equality Fund at The Boston Foundation, among others.

Diane holds a bachelor’s degree from Adelphi University, and a master’s and a doctoral degree from The University of Vermont; she has a certificate in mediation from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, among other highly regarded institutes. She is a passionate art collector and has dabbled in improv, which serves as a constant reminder that keen listening, risk-taking, and co-creating lead to the most surprising and fulfilling results. She is based in New York.