2018 is shaping up to be an exciting year at Fairmount Ventures. We’re fueled by the City’s new champion spirit, watching the triumphant return of the LOVE Park statue from our office windows, and kicking off our second quarter-century of service to the Philadelphia region. We’re also busy building our bench strength to drive even more impact for our nonprofit clients.

Fairmount is especially delighted to announce the following staff promotions as we expand our capacity and our expertise to help nonprofits advance their missions and thrive. 

Katie Muller, Vice President, applies her more than 10-year background in international development for the benefit of Fairmount clients. Through both strategic planning and resource development, Katie skillfully facilitates discussions with clients that connect their core missions to strategy, program design, and funding streams. She is known for creating clear processes that move clients from daunting challenges and loosely defined questions to concrete action plans that deliver results. Her work at Fairmount spans sectors, ranging from workforce development to social services and community health.

Katie’s recent work and impact includes:

• Katie partnered with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to design and secure funding for its Farm for the City project, which will bring people together this summer to explore issues of food access and social injustice at a beautiful demonstration farm in the middle of Center City.

• She led project management and strategy development for a large-scale collective impact project, in which Women Against Abuse – and other domestic violence advocates and service providers – created a plan for a citywide, coordinated response to domestic violence, now called Shared Safety.
• Katie provided key support on strategic plans for JEVS Human Services and its sister agency, JEVS at Home, helping both organizations to create roadmaps for mission-driven growth in the face of rapidly changing external environments.

Eszter Kutas, Assistant Vice President, draws on her nonprofit management and operations expertise to build strategic and business plans and provide executive search, board services, and project management for large-scale, complex projects, where she serves multiple stakeholders and maximizes social impact. Her approach centers on getting to know an organization and its culture, building relationships with key stakeholders to understand their motivations and aspirations, and then immersing herself in the client’s sector or industry to understand the peer group and best practices, in order to ensure success.

Eszter’s recent work and impact includes:

• Eszter continues to lead project management and fundraising efforts for the $7 million capital development of the Philadelphia Holocaust Memorial Plaza on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The new Plaza, spearheaded by the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, will be a “living classroom” dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and genocide education.

• Eszter has played a pivotal role in supporting the growth of Friends of the Rail Park, the organization driving the vision behind the transformation of the City’s historic rail lines into a three-mile linear park that will connect 10 adjoining neighborhoods. Eszter provided strategy and project management guidance to develop Friends of the Rail Park’s strategic plan and subsequently wrote and helped secure a $550,000 capacity building grant from the William Penn Foundation. She currently manages the organization’s search for its first executive director and, along with the rest of the Fairmount team, eagerly awaits the first section of the Rail Park, which will open to the public in Spring 2018.

Please join us in congratulating these two stellar professionals. You can read Katie’s and Eszter’s full bios, along with those of our entire team, on our new website.

Contact us at info@fairmountinc.com to explore how Fairmount experts like Katie and Eszter can help you plan, find new leadership, and fundraise for what’s next at your organization.

Want to join our team? We’re hiring.