The Team

Kate Q. Williams, ESQ.

Founder and Owner

Kate Williams is the Founder and Owner of Philanthropy Partner LLC. She brings a comprehensive perspective to the private foundations and funders she supports, having served as legal counsel, grantee, funder, operator, and board leader. This combination of legal, governance, and operational experience, paired with a wide network across the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, allows Kate to offer clients a model that unites legal compliance, grant execution and strategy, grantee partnerships, board oversight and governance, and the day-to-day management and coordination of complementary supports. Kate built Philanthropy Partner to serve as a trusted partner for private foundations, addressing their needs in integration with one another.

Before founding Philanthropy Partner, Kate spent twelve years serving on the Board of Trustees for the Thomas Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation, including as Chair, guiding board governance, grantmaking, and strategy. She also served as in house counsel at Merakey, a national nonprofit, and earlier in her career advised public charities and private foundations as outside general counsel. Kate is admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar. She currently serves on the Board of Broad Street Love.

Ricki Gever Eisenstein

Senior Philanthropic Advisor

Ricki advises private foundations on grantmaking strategy, program design, and grantee partnerships. She brings decades of experience in nonprofit leadership, fundraising, grant writing, and program development, along with a deep knowledge of the Philadelphia nonprofit community - giving foundation clients a grantee’s-eye view of what effective, sustainable philanthropy looks like in practice. Ricki draws on this experience to help clients design grantmaking strategies, evaluate impact, and structure partnerships that sustain and amplify outcomes. Her programmatic perspective also supports Philanthropy Partner’s legal and compliance work by helping to ensure that grantee partnerships, grant agreements, expenditure responsibility procedures, and due diligence processes are both legally sound and operationally feasible.

Ricki holds a Certificate in Advising for Impact (CAFI) from the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Higher Education Management, also from Penn. She currently serves as President of the Board of the Pig Iron Theatre Company.

Nicole Dobbs

Paralegal

Nicole provides paralegal support by assisting with entity formation, conducting due diligence on grantee applicants, tracking grant agreement compliance, supporting grant cycle management, preparing materials for board and committee meetings, assisting with annual filings, drafting policy documents, and more. Nicole is committed to helping Philanthropy Partner’s clients operate efficiently and with the appropriate level of complexity.

Nicole holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Arcadia Univeristy, and an ABA-approved paralegal certificate from Villanova University.