Nancy Pasternak, LPC, MA

Nancy Pasternak, President and CEO of Prosperity Rings, is a Licensed Professional Mental Health Counselor who specializes in treating survivors of domestic violence and post traumatic stress. While Executive Director of Apna Ghar, domestic violence shelter and social services for South Asians in Chicago, she learned about micro credit loans to poor women in India as a means to empower them and lift them and their families out of poverty and subservient status. Inspired by this phenomenally effective loan methodology, she created Prosperity Rings as a 501©(3), a family foundation, in December 2000. In Dushanbe, Tajikistan she spent nine months with Doctors Without Borders training professionals to treat their population with post civil war trauma, and later went back and established the first Tajik Rotary Club. With Northwest Medical Teams International she provided similar training for post tsunami Indonesia and post earthquake El Salvador.

For eleven years, Nancy taught Dale Carnegie human relations courses in Albuquerque, New Mexico where she and her husband raised their three children, Ken, Katherine and Sarah. Her MA in counseling is from the University of New Mexico. Nancy also earned a Masters Degree in Hispanic American Studies at Stanford University after which she studied a year at the University of San Andres, Bolivia on a Rotary Fellowship. From that year and her Junior year in Spain, she speaks fluent Spanish.

Nancy has been an active and longtime Rotarian, for which she received Rotarian of the Year Award and was recognized at their International Conference.