It is my pleasure to nominate Patricia Leo for the Children’s Institute Coterie. Now the Executive Director of the Florence Muller Foundation, Patricia has a long history of serving our community with a special interest in the health and well-being of children and families. Patricia was part of the United Way for over 21 years. As Community Impact Director, she was instrumental in supporting the Giving Babies a Good start initiative, providing strategic direction, and launching Upstate Revitalization Initiative efforts including summerLeap, home visitation programs, and quality child care. She also was involved with the First Thousand Days, the Regents Blue Ribbon Committee for young children, and All Kids Thrive efforts, which target the needs of Rochester’s children and their parents.

In her current role with the Muller Foundation, she has helped fund a summer externship program for the Wegmans School of Nursing senior nursing students with the Nurse Family Partnership. This externship is helping to prepare future professional nurses for the population focused care that is responsible for the success of the Nurse Family Partnership in its service to young at-risk mothers and their babies.

Patricia Leo is a long-term supporter of Children’s Institute’s mission. She has been an articulate spokesperson for quality program evaluations, data informed decisions, COMET® system, and continuous quality improvements. Under her leadership, when the United Way faced a difficult challenge in insuring that they were collecting reliable and valid data from varied community groups, Patricia recognized the valuable contribution that COMET could make to solve this dilemma. Based on her leadership the United Way now uses COMET to measure program outcomes and effectiveness, which are critical to important funding decisions. Patricia also provides thoughtful leadership for the new Children’s Institute TRACC program as a member of the Strategic Planning and Leadership / Advisory groups.