Living Goods is in the process of developing a new multi-year strategic plan that will prepare us to drive significant impact over the next several years. Consequently, we’ve been evaluating key pivots we need to make in our organizational structure to be responsive to our evolving business model in existing and new countries. We have also looked at how our global functions currently operate and benchmarked them against other high-performing organizations. Based on our belief that it will both drive efficiencies and innovation, we are embarking on a journey to create a Shared Service Model of staffing that standardizes and harmonizes work processes, systems, and client experience across various locations. We are at the start of this journey at Living Goods, and it has already resulted in some changes across our global functions and created some new roles as we operationalize new structures and ways of working.

As part of this process, we have made some structural adjustments to our Global Executive Team to ensure that we align the team’s capabilities to support our emerging strategic needs and achieve our desired impact. Effective May 1, the positions of Regional Director of New Country Expansion and Chief Impact Officer ceased to exist, but we created a new Chief Program Officer (CPO) role.

We have appointed Emilie Chambert to serve as our new CPO. Emilie joined Living Goods in 2014 and has held the roles of Uganda Operations Director, Uganda Deputy Country Director, Uganda Country Director and, most recently, Regional Director of New Country Expansion. In this new role, Emilie will create and review Living Goods’ theory of change and optimize high impact service delivery through strategic program design and innovation, monitoring, research, evaluation, and learning. As Chief Program Officer, she will also oversee incubator stages of new country operations so that they deliver desired results and we effectively measure our work at each stage.

Andrew Karlyn, who has been ably serving as our Chief Impact Officer, stepped down from his role at the end of April to pursue opportunities outside of the organization. He is staying on in an advisory capacity through July to support a discrete piece of consultancy work. We thank him for his many contributions.