National Volunteer Week Meet Susan Patton

As part of National Volunteer Week we are highlighting one of our many outstanding volunteers every day this week!

Meet Susan Patton

Project HOPE is well-known for its medical professional volunteer program. But HOPE also utilizes the expertise of other professionals to support our health education and humanitarian assistance programs around the globe.

Susan Patton, a Human Resources executive from Merck, is on a two-year sabbatical dedicated to global travel and volunteer work. From Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Susan has spent much of her sabbatical volunteering for Project HOPE.  To date, she has donated more than 315 volunteer hours to help build and strengthen HOPE’s organizational capacity. As a non-medical career professional, Susan exemplifies Project HOPE’s philosophy on expanding and diversifying volunteer capabilities and opportunities to build the best possible global health programs.

Susan first learned about Project HOPE while working for Merck, a partner that has supported Project HOPE’s lifesaving programs for more than 50 years. She decided to volunteer to assist HOPE with a unique project at the Millwood, Virginia headquarters. She is currently acting as a volunteer advisor for Project HOPE’s strategic improvement initiative, known as Vision 2015. The initiative is bringing together teams of more  50 Project HOPE employees to create strategies and implementation plans for HOPE’s core practice areas (infectious disease, non-communicable disease, health of women and children,  health systems strengthening  and humanitarian assistance-disaster response in addition to the Gifts-in-Kind and volunteer operations platforms.  In addition, these multi-disciplinary teams are working to improve other aspects of organizational effectiveness, such as internal communications and processes for operating as an efficient global team.

Susan brings with her incredible skills and experiences from her career in human resources and consulting to guide the formation of the teams and to provide an outline for the experts within Project HOPE to complete the work. A highlight of her time with HOPE included guiding a meeting with the Senior Leadership Team on the behavioral and leadership implications of the initiative and facilitating a two-day meeting in which all the team members came together to share and improve strategies.

“It was very motivating to work with Project HOPE employees from headquarters and around the world,” she says. “Their passion for HOPE’s mission is contagious and I really appreciate their willingness to create new ways to sustain HOPE.”