EZRA JEROME, MPH
Founder
Ezra Jerome is the founder of Protea Consulting. He offers strategic consulting services rooted in best practices to bring high-quality, low-cost public health solutions to communities. By working with communities as partners, he empowers people to define challenges, determine interventions, measure effectiveness, and ultimately create sustainable solutions to improve their health, well-being, and happiness. With over a decade of experience, he provides services across the entire program lifecycle including partnership development, resource mobilization, program design and implementation, and project management.
Ezra sees program design and implementation and resource mobilization as two sides to the same coin that can mutually reinforce one another. He readily adopts this lens as a Deputy Director of Foundation Partnerships at UNICEF USA where he stewards relationships and facilitates co-creation of programs with leading institutional funding partners including the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and ELMA Philanthropies. With a track record of securing $1M+ grants across a range of partners, he has managed and supported a complex, international grant portfolio of over $300M with a focus on communicable diseases (polio, malaria); water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH); maternal, neonatal, and child health (MNCH); community health; and digital health.
While pursuing his MPH at New York University and working at the patients’ needs-driven nonprofit Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), Ezra first learned of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) and how these ancient ailments create lifelong, community-wide debilitation and contribute to cyclic, intergenerational poverty in families. His commitment to marginalized communities was reinforced after traveling to Sudan and collaborating with the Mycetoma Research Centre on implementing a digital health-based surveillance and case management platform to help map mycetoma patients and connect them to care. As a former member and ongoing collaborator with NYU’s Applied Global Public Health Initiative, he continues to drive forward NTD control and elimination projects in Sudan and Ethiopia. Relatedly, he is a firm advocate of the access to medicines movement, having co-founded the NYU chapter of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) and worked with Médecins Sans Frontières’ Access Campaign.
Ezra serves as a Board member and Director of Public Health for Archangel Airborne, a nonprofit organization of aviators, clinicians, and multidisciplinary experts that provides disaster response and medical/logistical support to underserved areas domestically and internationally with a focus on health systems strengthening projects in Haiti. In addition, he has significant experience working with UN development agencies, international non-governmental organizations, and civil society organizations and has built out a wide network of partners from disparate backgrounds, geographies, and skill sets.