Trustees
and Staff

Kathy serves as Director for The Summit Foundation’s Equality for Women and Girls program. The program’s goal is to transform harmful, gender-based social norms so that girls and women from marginalized backgrounds are healthy, educated, empowered, and able to reach their full potential. Most of the program’s current grants focus on changing young people’s lives in the Mesoamerica region. A few support initiatives that advance momentum for gender equality and sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice in Latin America and globally. In 2021, the program opened a modest US grant portfolio focused on young BIPOC-led and -focused efforts for gender equality. Kathy has led the program since 2010 and has participated in various multi-donor initiatives on ending child marriage; sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice; youth participation and leadership development; education; engaging new philanthropists on gender equality; and Central America.

Kathy currently serves on the boards of Kakenya’s Dream and WINGS Guatemala. She served on the boards of Funders for Reproductive Equity (FRE) for six years, two of those as co-chair, and of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) for seven years.

Before joining Summit, Kathy was Deputy Director of Women and Population at the United Nations Foundation, where she helped launch UNF’s Universal Access Project and expanded its work on adolescent girls, culminating in the Girl Up campaign. Prior to that, Kathy was Co-Executive Director of Just Detention International. Earlier in her career, she helped build and directed the Global Legal Program of the Center for Reproductive Rights, as the concept that “reproductive rights are human rights” became more firmly rooted in international human rights law. Kathy is a graduate of Princeton University and received her JD from Columbia Law School.

Cheri serves as Director of The Summit Foundation’s Resilient Mesoamerican Reef program. The program seeks to restore and protect the Mesoamerican Reef ecosystem, an important center of biodiversity that provides essential services to people throughout the region and beyond and is at risk from unsustainable human activities. The program funds work in the Mesoamerican Reef countries of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras, focusing especially on expanding and strengthening marine protected areas, reforming unsustainable fisheries, reducing nutrient pollution, and protecting and restoring critical habitats.

Cheri is a biological oceanographer with experience in marine conservation and resource management around the world. Prior to joining Summit, Cheri was Deputy Director of the Strategy, Learning and Evaluation Department at the Walton Family Foundation, where she supported strategy development within, and led evaluation of, the foundation’s Environment Program. Cheri’s other prior positions include directing ocean programs at the Wildlife Conservation Society, The Ocean Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund Canada, as well as in threatened species conservation and management for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Cheri holds a Ph.D. from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An avid scuba diver, Cheri spends as much time as possible near, on, or under the water.

Lex Sant has been president of The Summit Foundation since 2018 and has been a trustee since 1991. In addition, he was president of the Sant Foundation since its inception in 2015 and a director since 2016 though its merger with The Summit Foundation in 2023.

Prior to starting the Sant Foundation, he was co-founder and managing director of Persimmon Tree Capital, a private investment fund focused on renewable energy and energy efficiency investments, founded in 2008.

Mr. Sant also worked for five years at the AES Corporation, a leading global power company with electrical generation and distribution businesses in more than 20 countries. At AES, Mr. Sant was most recently a director in the Alternative Energy group, for which he was responsible for the origination and execution of transactions related to biofuels, wind, and other forms of renewable energy. Prior to that position, Mr. Sant had responsibilities in large-scale mergers and acquisitions and corporate strategy.

In addition, he is a member of the Board of Directors of Oceana, a trustee of the Maret School in Washington, DC, and an emeritus member of the national board of directors for the Trust for Public Land.

He is past chairman of Island Press and a former trustee for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Mr. Sant holds an MBA with High Distinction from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree in English from Dickinson College.

Nick serves as Director for the Summit Foundation’s Sustainable Cities program. The program works to ensure our cities reduce carbon emissions and pollution through radical climate action, with an aim of full carbon neutrality by 2050. The Sustainable Cities program provides grants to organizations in the U.S. that challenge the structures that inhibit climate progress, with a particular grantmaking focus on grassroots, policy, and environmental justice organizations.

Prior to joining Summit, Nick was the Campaign Director for the Northeastern U.S. for the Energy Foundation, where he led grantmaking and strategy with grantees throughout the region. Before his career in philanthropy, Nick was an advocate: he was the Executive Director of the U.S-based nonprofit Tri-State Transportation Campaign and, before that, the Deputy Director of the Riders Alliance. In those roles, he was one of the leaders in the fight to win congestion pricing in New York and has won campaigns focused on funding billions of dollars in transit and transportation improvements in the greater New York City region. Nick was also the Sierra Club’s Northeastern Communications Director and a Senior Associate at BerlinRosen, where he advised advocacy organizations on strategy and communications. He began his career working in economic justice at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, where he led campaigns for workers’ rights in the transportation, construction, and hotel industries. He is a native of the L.A. region and often cites growing up in the county with the worst air quality in the U.S. as a powerful motivator for the work he does. Nick is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and now resides in New York City with his husband and their dogs.