Who We Are

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.

Margaret (Maggie) Gunter, PhD, a member of the Prosperity Rings Board since 2002, has been the Director of Medical Outcomes Research at the non-profit Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque since 2013.

Prior to that time for, two decades, she was President and Executive Director of LCF Research, a non-profit created in 1990 to foster health services research and to provide continuing professional education for health professionals. In this capacity, Dr. Gunter collaborated with other innovators at Lovelace Health System in Albuquerque to develop the pioneering Episodes of Care ® disease management program in the early-to-mid-1990s, one of the nation’s earliest examples of population health management in an integrated health system. She has led the design, implementation, and evaluation of multiple innovative projects to improve health care in New Mexico and across the country.

Dr. Gunter served for 13 years as a member of the Board of the HMO Research Network, a group of research centers affiliated with prestigious health systems that use their collective scientific capabilities to integrate research and practice for the improvement of health care among diverse populations. She has been a member of the Steering Committee for the Albuquerque Coalition for Healthcare Quality, part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s national Aligning Forces for Quality initiative, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the New Mexico Telehealth Alliance.

Always interested in improving health care, Dr. Gunter led LCF in developing the New Mexico Health Information Collaborative, the statewide health information exchange network, to provide a comprehensive electronic patient medical record for all New Mexicans to serve the needs of patients and providers and reduce costly redundancy of imaging, lab testing, and other services.

Dr. Gunter received her PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh.

Senior Consultant, Joint Commission International (JCI)

Dr. Pasternak, Prosperity Rings Treasurer, has over 35 years of experience in health care as a physician and 17 years as a health care executive. From 2006 to 2009, he was Managing Director of JCI for the Middle East and India. Dr. Pasternak has consulted with health care organizations worldwide since 1993 and continues to do so. He is the author of many articles and an eBook on the subject of health care quality.

A retired U.S. Army Colonel, Dr. Pasternak served in Viet Nam and was Commander of two different Army Reserve hospitals. He received his BA and MD from Harvard University and his MBA from the University of New Mexico. He held academic appointments at the medical schools of the University of New Mexico and the University of Illinois, and was Clinical Professor of Health Care Management at the University of Washington School of Public Health.

In the 1980s and 1990s Dr. Pasternak was CEO of Lovelace Health Systems of Albuquerque, NM, and later held a senior executive position in the Sisters of Providence Health System in Seattle, WA. He has expertise in patient safety, quality of care measurement, and quality management in general, and speaks French, German, Hungarian, and some Spanish.

Dr. Pasternak’s professional affiliations include Distinguished Fellow and Life Member of the American College of Physician Executives (Trustee 1991-94), Secretary-Treasurer of the American Group Practice Association 1992-94, and Councilor of New Mexico Medical Society, 1981-90. He served on a number of non-profit Boards, including the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra (Albuquerque), Lovelace Medical Foundation (Albuquerque), Catholic Health Initiative (Omaha), and the Hope Heart Institute (Seattle), and is currently Chair of International Service for Rotary International, District 5030. Dr. Pasternak has been a Rotarian since 1987.

One of the world’s leading authorities on corporate and brand identity.

As Chairman of Marshall Strategy, Philip provides leadership for our firm and, as head of our international identity practice, provides strategic and creative guidance to high level government, corporate and non-profit clients. Philip was formerly Vice Chairman of Landor Associates, the world’s largest identity firm, where he founded and managed the worldwide Corporate Identity Group. He was also Vice Chairman of Frankfurt Balkind, the leading communication consultancy to the motion picture and television industry.

Philip has personally directed over two hundred programs creating successful identity strategies for entities such as: GE, Caterpillar, Bank of America, Fleet Financial, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, Cotton Incorporated, Stanford University, Pacific Telesis, Sprint, Knight Ridder, Times Mirror, Westin Hotels, Alcatel (France), Barclay’s Bank (England), Old Mutual (South Africa), Sony (Japan), Feruzzi (Italy) Jardine Matheson (Hong Kong), The World Wildlife Fund (Switzerland) and the Nobel Prize Committee (Sweden). He has served on The President’s Design Council and has been a featured speaker at the World Affairs Council, The European CEO Roundtable, The American Marketing Association, The Bank Marketing Association and The American Society of Security Analysts. He is a former Hollywood stuntman and Army officer who has trained with the U.S. Equestrian Team and was a member of the U.S. Olympic Rowing Team.

Philip graduated from Menlo College, attended the School of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley, received his BGE from the University of Nebraska and graduated from the Advanced Management Program of the Harvard Business School. Strategic Identity Programs led by Philip Durbrow General Electric, World Wildlife Fund, Cotton, Inc., American Film Institute, Caterpillar, 20th Century Fox.

Katherine Pasternak served as Senior Business Manager and Operations Manager for TechnoServe in Ghana West Africa and in the greater African sub-regions. TechnoServe is an international nonprofit organization that applies business solutions to poverty. Katherine managed public/private partnerships, designed and implemented development programs, and ran fundraising, PR and marketing campaigns locally, regionally and globally. Her expertise in economic development programming includes value chain development, entrepreneurship and business development, job creation, market linkages, farmer-based organizations, facilitating access to finance and microfinance programs.

Prior to working for TechnoServe, Katherine lived in Uganda and worked for Remote Transaction Services, Uganda, a USAID/Hewlett Packard funded project to bring remote transaction technology to microfinance institutions and their clients. She has an MBA and a Master’s in International Management jointly from Thunderbird, The Garvin School of International Management, and from the University of Arizona. Her BA is in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University.

Before focusing her career on International Development, Katherine led health and wellbeing programs in San Diego, California for the Alliance for African Assistance, a refugee resettlement organization. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia, she focused on participatory community development, and public health and sanitation. Katherine also worked in Co-Productions for National Geographic Television and as a Project Leader for youth exchanges with World Horizons International. She has been a ski instructor and participated in several triathlons.

Katherine is currently a full-time mother to her two young sons and daughter in Deerfield Beach, FL, where her husband Jamie Otis is high school principal of North Broward Preparatory School.

Sarah is the Director of Market Access Programmes within the Africa/Developing Countries Unit at GSK. Her role focuses on designing and delivering innovative business approaches for increasing access to medicines and vaccines though internal strategies, as well as collaborations with key governmental and nongovernmental partners.

Sarah is a public health specialist with over 15 years of experience serving as a technical advisor to the governments of Nigeria, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom, on a variety of initiatives to reduce morbidity and mortality rates among women and children. With the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), She spent 8 years supporting countries to introduce new and more effective diagnostics, vaccines and medicines to prevent and treat HIV/AIDs, malaria, pneumonia, and other infectious diseases. The cultivation of public private partnerships has been a critical component of Sarah’s work.

She has a BA in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and an MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.