Amazon doesn’t have a great reputation when it comes to community engagement. It’s been at the center of public rancor over rapid development of its Seattle campus and the skyrocketing cost of living in the city, and for many years the tech giant kept quiet about its philanthropic efforts.
But following a successful nonprofit expo in November and ongoing partnerships with homeless shelter Mary’s Place, that reputation is beginning to change. The company has been more vocal about supporting local causes and helping employees get more involved in the community.
Now Amazon has hired longtime nonprofit worker Alice Shobe as the company’s first director of community engagement to help Amazon centralize its efforts to give back to its hometown.
Shobe has worked in the nonprofit sector for more than 25 years, including a four-year stint leading the Sound Families Initiative, a collaboration between the City of Seattle and the Gates Foundation that increased transitional housing for homeless families.
An Amazon spokesperson said Shobe will have a dual role at the company, both working with employees to develop community engagement ideas and also working with external partners like Mary’s Place.
— Marchex chief revenue officer Gary Nafus is resigning. His resignation was recorded in an SEC filing and confirmed to GeekWire by a company spokesperson.
Nafus had been at the company for just over 18 months and cut his teeth in the tech world with 10 years in leadership positions at Oracle. A spokesperson said the company doesn’t plan to replace him in the near future, instead relying on an existing sales leadership team.
His departure follows close on the heels of layoffs in January that cut the advertising analytics company’s staff by 10 percent. In October, Marchex CEO Pete Christothoulou and board chairman Clark Kokich resigned from the company. One month prior, chief product officer Ziad Ismail also stepped down.
— Global health nonprofit PATH announced Tuesday that entrepreneur Carla Sandine has joined the company in the newly created role of chief communications officer.
Sandine was formerly the founder and president of Phoenix-based digital marketing company Highway Twenty. After almost six years at the helm of the company, she decided to sell it in order to accept the CCO position at PATH and relocate to Seattle.
In her new position, Sandine will head PATH’s marketing and communications and drive a new focus on greater marketing integration across PATH’s many projects and disciplines.
“Carla brings a unique passion for social justice, evident throughout her career, combined with the creativity and tenacity to drive new ways of communicating around issues that don’t always make the headlines,” Mark Murray, PATH VP of global engagement and communications, said in a press release. “Her range and depth of experience will help PATH to knit our communications functions together into a truly integrated effort, and break new ground on how we communicate into the future.”
— PushSpring, a Seattle company that tracks audiences on mobile apps, announced Tuesday that Erica Chriss has joined the company as its first executive VP of business development and publishing.
Chriss has a history of advising and leading startups, assisting them with monetizing mobile content. She was most recently the interim CEO of the Imagine Food Innovation Group, and continues to advise several startups.
In her new role, Chriss will be responsible for publisher partnership and other business development efforts.
“I was immediately impressed by the team, technology and vision at PushSpring,” Chriss said in a press release. “We are bringing real value to the mobile advertising ecosystem and I’m eager to work with our publisher partners to help them realize the value PushSpring’s solutions can bring to their business.”
— Washington State University‘s Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture has a new dean: Mary Rezac, a longtime professor with a history of industry partnership.
Rezac was previously an endowed chemical engineering professor at Kansas State University, where she was also the director of the college of engineering’s major grant initiatives.
“The economy of Washington state is the envy of the world,” Rezac said in a press release. “The Voiland College is well positioned to support knowledge-based companies across the state from aerospace to power systems to information technology. I look forward to helping WSU continue to fuel the state’s economic engines by producing ready to work engineers and contributing to the innovations that will transform the way we live.”
— Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom announced Monday that it has hired Walmart and Sam’s Club vet Brent Beabout as the company’s new executive VP of supply chain.
Beabout will take charge of developing Nordstrom’s supply chain in the e-commerce arena, the same role he has held at Walmart’s dot.com for the past three years. His addition is another sign that the retail giant is placing more emphasis on e-commerce and tech-driven retail. Beabout starts at Nordstrom on April 3.
