March 31, 2021

Maternity Foundation welcomes Helena Lassen as new Program Director

After ten years with Maternity Foundation our Program Director, Anne Marie Barrie, has decided to take on new opportunities with Dan Church Social. We are immensely grateful for all the incredible work and impact Anne Marie has created over the past ten years. She will be missed, and we wish her all the best for her future.

To take over from Anne Marie, we are extremely pleased to welcome Helena Lassen as Maternity Foundation’s new Program Director as of April 1st 2021.  Helena Lassen has been with Maternity Foundation for the past two years as Senior Program Manager, overseeing our portfolio of projects and partnerships in especially South East and Central Asia and East Africa. Her efforts in establishing and consolidating our Safe Delivery Program in Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Tanzania and Bangladesh have been remarkable and she has shown strong leadership skills from the very beginning.

Helena will use her extensive experience and strong global partnerships to oversee Maternity Foundation’s entire program portfolio and together with the rest of the Program Team, work towards reaching even more skilled birth attendants with the Safe Delivery Program in our joint effort to enable safer childbirths for women and newborns, everywhere.

“Helena is an incredibly talented strategist; she is structured and a people’s person. This is something we have all benefited from in Maternity Foundation the past years, and we are pleased to now see Helena take on her new role as Program Director in a very important time for Maternity Foundation, where we are expanding both our reach, services and strategic priorities. She will be a great leader for the Program Team”, Anna Frellsen, CEO of Maternity Foundation says.

Before joining Maternity Foundation, Helena has done extensive fieldwork in humanitarian and development settings in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Serbia, Kosovo and Ukraine – including several years with the Danish Refugee Council.

Helena holds a BA in Sociology and an MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration. She is currently based with her family in Moscow, and will lead our program team based in Copenhagen, Ethiopia, India, and New York.