Nancy Willis joined Humane Society Silicon Valley in 2023 and, during that time, she has worn many hats, including overseeing the marketing team and planning and executing The Fur Ball fundraising gala in 2024. Most recently, she has worked cross-functionally to lead the rebuild efforts after the recent fire at HSSV in 2024.

Nancy has more than two decades of leadership experience across a range of nonprofit and for-profit organizations, including the Maui Humane Society and the Major League Baseball Players Association. As a lifelong animal lover, Nancy has always been surrounded by pets. She has fostered many dogs and she has a soft spot in her heart for senior animals.

Katie Evans oversees the Mutual Rescue team and its day-to-day operations, bringing people and priorities together to keep the work moving. She also leads marketing and communications at Humane Society Silicon Valley. Katie’s career has taken her from video games at Sony to public relations at Robert Half and, later, the future of work at Upwork. Along the way, she has built teams, shaped communications strategies, and helped organizations tell stories that connect with people. She brings that mix of storytelling and team leadership to Mutual Rescue. At home, Katie shares life with her husband and son, along with Murphy the cat and Yoshi the dog. The two animals keep things lively and give her a daily reminder of why the bond between people and animals is worth celebrating.

Finnegan Dowling is Mutual Rescue’s senior manager of shelter engagement. She has been poking around animal welfare for more than 25 years and has worked in shelters in Washington, Colorado, California, and Nicaragua. Prior to Mutual Rescue, she was the social-media manager for Humane Society Silicon Valley, where her work was honored with Shorty and Communicator Awards. Finnegan’s writing has been published in The Bark, Bay Woof, and Huffington Post. She lives in coastal Texas with an opinionated dog and her husband. When not working, you can usually find her reading, writing, or running around Latin America.

Mutual Rescue’s executive producer and co-creator is David Whitman, whose lifelong curiosity about the world was sparked in childhood by reading about faraway places. He became an exchange student to Belgium, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, then volunteered for three years with the Peace Corps in Saint Lucia. For 14 years, he managed Berkeley’s Hertz Concert Hall, where he worked with many of the world’s preeminent performing artists and scholars. He was appointed to the establishing committee for Art Basel Miami Beach and delegations to Switzerland, Italy, and Brazil. Collaborating with Italy’s Opera Laboratori, Ministry for Cultural Heritage, and the storied Uffizi Galleries, he coordinated a monumental, transatlantic exhibition in the Bay Area on Leonardo. He then directed Silicon Valley’s resplendent, global Tech Awards galas for nearly a decade before establishing Mutual Rescue with Carol Novello in 2015. Along the way, he’s often traveled with his camera, leading to photography exhibits, publications, and awards—including from National Geographic Traveler. He was appointed by the City of Livermore, CA to its Commission for the Arts and joined the boards of the Yavapai Symphony Association and San José Museum of Quilts and Textiles. He and his basenji companions live in Arizona’s majestic Granite Dells, where many of the earliest Westerns were filmed.

Carol Novello is the author of Mutual Rescue: How Adopting a Homeless Animal Can Save You, Too (Grand Central Publishing), co-creator of Mutual Rescue, and now a strategic adviser to the initiative. She holds an MBA from Harvard and a BA in economics and English from Dickinson College. She was a senior executive in the tech sector, most recently at Intuit, before becoming the president of Humane Society Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, until 2020. Maddie’s Fund awarded her the Maddie Hero Award for innovation and leadership in animal welfare. She enjoys spending time with her adopted companion animals at their home in Serenbe, Georgia.

Blythe Jack—a lifelong animal lover and a proud pet parent to her dogs Oakley and JosieBelle—is Mutual Rescue’s strategic adviser. As a board member at Humane Society Silicon Valley, she fell in love with Mutual Rescue and its mission at first meeting in 2017. Her support is reflected in every facet of the initiative. Blythe has been an active private-equity investor in the consumer sector for nearly 25 years, having been a managing director at TSG Consumer Partners for over 11 years, where she led investments in consumer brands such as BrewDog, Backcountry, Dutch Bros, IT Cosmetics, and Canyon Bicycles, among others. She counts a great husband of over 20 years and teenage daughter among her pack, along with their beloved hounds.