PartnersGlobal appoints Kyra Buchko and Roselie Vasquez-Yetter as Co-Executive Directors

  January 28, 2021

PartnersGlobal has appointed Kyra Buchko and Roselie Vasquez-Yetter as Co-Executive Directors. Together, they will lead the organization’s future strategy and programming at a time of great flux and opportunity for PartnersGlobal and our broader network.

Julia Roig continues in her role as President of PartnersGlobal, focusing largely on external relations, innovation, and the organization’s new domestic peacebuilding portfolio.

PartnersGlobal has an ever-critical mission in the world today: to support locally led and long-term efforts to build peace, strengthen democracy, and increase the resiliency of the civil society sector,” says Roig. “I am thrilled to continue working on this mission with Kyra and Roselie, demonstrating an innovative model of shared leadership of day-to-day management. They both bring a wealth of expertise and experience to their important roles.”

The executive team says this move toward a shared leadership model is one of the many ways PartnersGlobal is bolstering its own organizational resiliency.

Kyra Buchko, Co-Executive Director, PartnersGlobal

The Co-Executive Directors come into the roles with a long and successful history both at PartnersGlobal and in the broader global development space.

Buchko’s collaboration with PartnersGlobal began in 2017 when she was tapped for her expertise in access to justice, rule of law, and human rights issues to advance Partners’ programs and local partner capacities in Africa and the Middle East. In 2019, she joined the Partners’ staff as Managing Director for Program Portfolios.

Before joining the organization, Buchko was Senior Technical Director of New Rule, LLC, where she provided rule of law advisory services across the globe while focusing on the development and growth of a woman-owned small business. She has lived in South Asia and Eastern Europe, where she worked with national human rights institutions, justice sector actors, and community-based organizations on capacity development, conflict management, peacebuilding, and legal services delivery. Buchko launched her development career as one of the initial directors of the American Bar Association’s international programming and has served on the boards of NGOs in several countries.

Roselie Vasquez-Yetter, Co-Executive Director, PartnersGlobal

Vasquez-Yetter joined PartnersGlobal in 2015 as Global Director for Civil Society. She began her career in Moscow as a PR manager on the first USAID public-private partnership promoting distance learning for staff of Russian-American joint ventures.  From there, she spent several years working at the intersection of capacity-building, advocacy, and entrepreneurial skill-building, often in politically challenging and conflict-affected environments.  She has designed and led multiple projects, including as Chief of Party for programs to build organizational sustainability and resiliency through soft diplomacy, social entrepreneurship, public-private partnerships, and alternative revenue generation in fragile and volatile states.  She has worked across Russia and Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Prior to her promotion to Co-Executive Director, Vasquez-Yetter played a dual role at PartnersGlobal with a foot in both the regional teams and the technical support team. She provided strategic planning and oversight for the Latin America programs and played a leading role in advancing PartnersGlobal’s civil society resiliency programming and innovative Resiliency+ Framework, which offers tools and tactics to support organizations in navigating complexity and thriving in uncertainty.

The Co-Executive Directors say they are eager to take on their new roles at such a significant time for global civil society, including PartnersGlobal and our network.

“Across the globe, we are encountering complex and interconnected crises: COVID-19, economic strain, threats to democracy. It’s a critical time for PartnersGlobal and the Partners Network to apply our own resiliency ethos so we are able to continue supporting others in our sector. This is a top priority for me in this new role,” says Vasquez-Yetter.

Buchko adds, “We at Partners are committed to building on our successful adaptive management approaches as we focus on strategic alignment of operations and programs in the post-COVID environment. I am honored to be co-leading PartnersGlobal at this pivotal juncture.”

Click here to read more about the leadership team.