About Mercy Corps: Our Leadership:

Paul Dudley Hart, Senior Vice President

As Mercy Corps’ Senior Vice President, Paul Dudley Hart brings 25 years of senior management experience, as well as a highly successful track record in organizational leadership and management. Since joining Mercy Corps’ senior management team in April 2003 Paul has been on a number of assignments both domestically and overseas including serving as Mercy Corps’ Chief of Party in Iraq during August and September of 2003 and managing the merger of Mercy Corps with Conflict Management Group of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Paul also focuses on funding diversification, strategic alliances and other new agency initiatives nationally and internationally.

Paul comes to Mercy Corps most immediately from a private consulting practice where he worked with for-profit and not-for-profit clients with organizational development, social responsibility, and strategic planning services. Previously he served as President of The Brown Schools (TBS) Education Services Group. TBS is the largest provider of education, therapeutic and family support services for children with extraordinary needs in the United States. Paul's group served over 3,000 students through 800 employees in 12 programs across five states and Puerto Rico.

Before that, Paul was CEO of Pacific Crest Outward Bound School, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, with operations throughout the West Coast providing exponential education programming structured to inspire self-esteem, self-reliance, concern for others and care for the environment.

Paul grew up in England but emigrated to Australia at age 17. Paul’s early career was as seaman and diver aboard a square rigged sailing ship doing underwater filming in the South West Pacific. He moved next to colder regions — Antarctica. Paul spent 10 years in the National Science Foundation’s U.S. Antarctic Research Program (USARP) and for most of that time had operational leadership responsibility for USARP’s principal ocean science operation. For six of those years, the program was operated jointly with the Argentine government and Paul was based in Buenos Aires. Over 10 years, Paul spent 90 months deployed in Antarctica. When he took time to thaw out, he managed marine and environmental survey programs in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Vietnam, Algeria, Egypt, the UK, Mozambique and Guyana.

Paul moved next to The Woods Hold Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the world’s largest private marine research lab, where he served as Director of Development and then Director of International and Industrial Programs. Paul was a key WHOI team member responding to the opportunities and massive international public interest following the 1985 discovery of RMS Titanic.