“From Silence, Hope”

  Our speaker this week will be PAUR member Bill Doyle. Bill moved from the for-profit sector to the non-profit sector seven months ago when he was recruited as Executive Director of Foundation for Hearing Research, Inc. dba Weingarten Children’s Center in Redwood City (FHR). FHR’s intensive education and therapy program teaches spoken language to children who are deaf or hard of hearing so they can close the gap with hearing peers and succeed in mainstream education starting in the first grade. FHR, a California 501(c)(3), has been a center of excellence and national leader in the field of listening and spoken language for 51 years.

  Bill will be joined by Renee Schwall, a director and alumna of FHR who will discuss the personal impact of FHR’s spoken language program. Renee is Director of Analytics and Optimization at LiveOps and mother of two. She has previously worked for TuVox and NASA Ames. Renee holds an MA in Communications and BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University where she was also President of the Ski team and Captain of the Mountain Bike Team.

  Bill’s career has included turnaround and operating management of mid-sized companies, private equity investing, investment banking, and consulting. He achieved successful corporate rejuvenations by applying a single source for operating management, capital, and strategy. His past employers include McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs, Allied-Signal, Alex. Brown & Sons, and Govett. Bill holds an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a BSE from Princeton University.

  Bill is seeking to apply his for-profit experience to help FHR build a sustainable funding base and extend its transformative mission to the majority of children who are deaf or hard of hearing in mainstream schools who fall progressively further behind for lack of spoken language capabilities.