Brown is heralded as a teacher of entrepreneurship and a mentor for young business leaders seeking to marry social contribution and profit-making endeavors. Woerner is widely recognized as an expert in training and employment in the health care field. Each will prove invaluable as the Foundation implements a new five-year strategic plan dedicated to forging an authentic integration of business actions and societal wellbeing.
Brown holds faculty appointments at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University and the Public Policy Department at UNC-Chapel Hill. As president of the Robertson Scholars Program he directs a partnership between the two universities that allows selected students to craft a unique four-year experience. He served as the Chairman and CEO of the Covenant Insurance Company for almost ten years. Subsequently, he was the Vice President for External Affairs at the University of Connecticut and the Chief Operating Officer of Credit Suisse First Boston's Equity Division. He is the founder and Director of the Hart Leadership Program's Enterprising Leadership Initiative, a program to stimulate and support Duke undergraduate students to create and sustain meaningful social purpose enterprising leadership ventures.
In addition to her role at HCR, a certified home health organization founded in 1978, Woerner is the Founding Director and First President of the Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research, which provides resources to support nursing research. She is the first living woman to be inducted into the Rochester Business Hall of Fame, acted as a delegate to the Atlantic Treaty Association, and has served on National Advisory Boards for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the Nursing Shortage and Nursing Leadership. In addition, she has completed a two-term limit on the New York Federal Reserve and is a Director for First Niagara Financial Services.
"My most rewarding experiences have involved supporting talented young people," Brown said. "It's exciting to join a Foundation that is dedicated to nurturing the talent of youth wherever it is found, and at a time that the Foundation's signature Yoshiyama program is breaking new ground where social ventures, young entrepreneurs, and efforts to address poverty meet."
Woerner added: "We are on the verge of historic health care reform, but not enough attention is being paid to preparing a health care workforce that will be able to put reform into action where it most matters: at the patient's bedside, so to speak. The Hitachi Foundation is taking a leadership role on this very question."
