The Team

Kate Q. Williams, ESQ.

Founder and Owner

Kate Williams is the Founder and Owner of Philanthropy Partner LLC. She has had the unique opportunity to support private foundations and grantmakers from nearly every vantage point - as legal counsel, as a grantee, as a funder, as an operator, and as a board leader. That breadth of perspective allows Kate to help foundations operate in a way that balances strong grantee partnerships, good governance, strategic direction and responsiveness, and funder leadership in a way that brings those priorities into collaboration with one another and reflects stakeholder perspectives. Kate partners with visionaries and trustees to ensure that grants and collaborations are not only impactful, but are executed with careful attention to a foundations’ priorities, strategy, and legal compliance obligations.

Prior to founding Philanthropy Partner, Kate served for twelve years on the Board of Trustees for the Thomas Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation, including as Chair, where she guided board governance, grantmaking, and strategic direction. 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.

This combination of legal, governance, and operational experience in private foundations - paired with a wide network across the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors - allows Kate to offer clients a comprehensive model that unites legal compliance, grant execution and strategy, board oversight and governance, and the day-to-day management and coordination of complementary supports. Where many advisors specialize in one piece of a foundation’s needs, Kate built a model to serve as a single trusted partner for private foundations, addressing their needs in integration with one another.

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 brings this knowledge to foundation clients, helping them design grantmaking strategies, evaluate programatic 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 from the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania, a PhD in Higher Education Management from the University of Pennsylvania, and currently serves as the President of the Board of Pig Iron Theatre Company and School.

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 level of complexity needed (and no more).