Board

Ambassador Sally Shelton-Colby
Member

Ambassador Sally Shelton-Colby is director-general of La Pietra Coalition, an initiative of the Vital Voices Global Partnership. She has held a number of senior positions in the public, corporate, and non-profit sectors as well as in international organizations. She has been Deputy Secretary-General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, France; Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Global Programs at the U.S. Agency for International Development; U.S. Ambassador to Grenada, Barbados and several other Eastern Caribbean nations; Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America and the Caribbean; and Legislative Assistant for Foreign Policy to then-Senator (later Secretary of the Treasury) Lloyd Bentsen. Most recently she developed and ran a transparency and accountability project for USAID and the Government of Mexico in Mexico City.

She was a Vice President of Bankers Trust Co. in New York City where she was responsible for managing the bank’s political risk in developing countries during the third world debt crisis of the 1980s. She also served on the Boards of Directors of Valero Energy Corporation, a Fortune 500 company and the world’s largest oil and gas pipeline company, and the Baring Puma Fund, a closed-ended fund traded on the London Stock exchange and engaged in acquiring emerging market equities.

Ms. Shelton-Colby has served on a number of non-profit Boards of Directors, including Helen Keller International, Helen Keller International Europe (where she was also president), the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Atlantic Council of the U.S., the Center for International Environmental Law, the American Committee for Aid to Poland, and the American Hospital of Paris, among others.

She was one of the founders and first Chairman of the Board of Directors of UNAIDS, a U.N. entity which coordinates the HIV-AIDS prevention programs of the World Bank, the WHO, UNICEF, UNDP, and UNFPA. She served on two White House Commissions: the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission (Russia), where she was Vice Chair of the Committee on Health and the Committee on Agriculture, and the Gore-Mubarak (Egypt) Commission where she was Co-Chair of the Committee on Education.

Ms. Shelton-Colby was a Fulbright Scholar at the Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris, received a Master of Arts in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy and Washington, D.C. (with an Area of Concentration in Southeast Asian Studies), and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors in French from the University of Missouri. She is fluent in French and Spanish and has basic Italian. She has taught political and economic change in developing countries at Georgetown University (where she was also a Fellow), Texas A&M University, and the Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile. She taught U.S. foreign policy decision-making at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and was a Fellow at its Center for International Affairs. She has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Missouri and Mount St. Mary’s College. She has testified frequently before the U.S. Congress and appears on U.S. and international television and radio discussing U.S. foreign policy and international public policy issues.

Ms. Shelton-Colby joined the board of the Pan American Health and Education Foundation in 2008.

Ms. Shelton-Colby signed a conflict of interest statement and agrees to abide by PAHEF's conflict of interest policy.