Bio

Marie-Rose is the President of RMC-Romain Murphy Consulting, a nonprofit management and strategy firm that works internationally with a wide range of organizations from grassroots to local and national organizations to 1 billion INGOs. She consistently combines rigor, creativity, and strategy to shape meaningful changes across diverse spaces and brings an ability to connect community voices with institutional reform, while influencing global agendas. 

An established social entrepreneur, she co-founded, launched, and led several programs and organizations in the Global North and the Global South over the course of her career, including Haiti’s first community foundation, the Haiti Community Foundation. She consistently leverages her skills, experience, energy, and creativity to make a meaningful impact. With well over $70 million in private and public funding raised over the course of her career, she excels in resource development, organizational development, operational management, philanthropy and capacity reinforcement. Marie-Rose provides thought leadership in anti-racism, localization, decolonization, aid restructuring, and community-led structural change. She creates viable and sustainable pathways of development for low-income individuals, marginalized communities and Global South countries. She consistently serves as an effective “Partner for Community Change.”

Marie-Rose has more than 30 years of experience and a strong track record in community development, human services, humanitarian projects, philanthropy, marketing, executive leadership and social entrepreneurship. Working across various sectors allows her to work with clients and organizations to co-create effective solutions for the complex challenges that they face. 

Over the course of her career, Marie-Rose has worked as an executive director, a deputy director, a senior director, a project manager, and a consultant for local, regional, national, and international organizations. She has served on boards and advisory committees for organizations such The Boston Foundation, Respond, and JVS Boston, a regional U.S. organization serving immigrants and refugees, where she co-chaired the agency’s Client Services Committee and served on its Executive Committee.

Marie-Rose has received various awards from the City of Boston and other civic institutions. She’s also been the recipient of international fellowships from institutions including the Ford Foundation and Community Foundations of Canada. She is the Co-Chair of the Pledge for Change’s Global Advisory Committee and of its Global Advisory Committee Review Panel, working with INGOs such as CARE, Oxfam, Save the Children, Cortaid, and more on the localization and decolonization of aid. She is also on the Advisory Board of the Harvard Business Review and currently a member of IARAN (Inter-Agency Research and Analysts Network)’s Community of Practice, an international network of practitioners, focused on humanitarian analysis and foresight. In 2019, she was selected to be on the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s international “Women to Watch” list as well as on a global “Philanthropy Women Thought Leaders” list. She served on the Advisory Council of The Equity Index, a United Kingdom–based project, and she is a member of Alliance for Empowering Partnership (A4EP), a network of Global South leaders focused on the localization of international aid.

Marie-Rose has an MBA from Babson, an M.S. in Community Economic Development from New Hampshire College, and a B.S. in Journalism with a focus on International Relations from Boston University. She also holds a Certificate from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Executive Education in “Leading Smart Policy Design: A Multisectoral Approach to Economic Decisions,” as well as a certificate in Asset Management from the Consortium for Housing Asset Management. She also studied Design Thinking at the University of Oxford, England. Marie-Rose is fluent in French, Haitian Creole, and English and has a working understanding of Spanish. A published author of two books, she’s written several articles and blogs for U.S and international organizations as well as international magazines and publications. Some of her publications and presentations are now part of the curriculum of many universities’ international development and humanitarian leadership and management courses.