Ivy & Patrick – Class of 2025
Ivy Gamble-Cobb and Patrick Frawley – Class of 2025 – were matched in Greater NY as two leaders grounded in service and mission. Gamble-Cobb is the Executive Director of The Family Center, which she co-founded in 1994 to serve New York City children and families confronting illness, crisis, and loss. Frawley, now retired, spent decades at Fidelis Care, one of New York’s largest nonprofit health insurance companies.
Each year, The Family Center reaches more than 5,500 New Yorkers across all five boroughs, providing support when a family member, primary caregiver or breadwinner is struggling with illness. Through health care coordination and legal services, it stabilizes families and enables parents to better care for children. Like many nonprofits, The Family Center had been strained by the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the organization’s clients.
“When I met Patrick, I my staff and I were exhausted. After having gone through COVID, we were feeling disconnected from our core mission. Morale was low. Everything felt frayed. In my first meeting with Patrick, I thought: ‘how is this going to work?” Gamble-Cobb says. “By the end of the first meeting I felt like I could exhale. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath for so long.”
Over two years, the Greater NY Partners talked strategic planning, succession, and staff engagement — with mission as the throughline. “I shared things with Patrick that I didn’t even want to share with my senior leaders,” says Gamble-Cobb. “That one hour a month with him was my time. He was objective. He listened. And he always brought it back to mission.”
“We didn’t spell out ‘mission’ as our core theme at the beginning,” says Frawley, “But mission became an underlying anchor in all conversations. It wasn’t just doing the work — it was reconnecting to the nature of the work as noble and making a difference. We spent a lot of time talking about how to energize people toward that. My conversations with Ivy exceeded what I thought Greater NY would be. It turned out to be so much more rewarding than I expected.”
For Gamble-Cobb, the conversations were transformative. The Partnership came while The Family Center was working on a strategic plan. Together, Gamble-Cobb and Frawley discussed the organization’s most pressing needs and determined it would be helpful to bring in a management consultant to work with the staff.
“I can’t force the mission down people’s throats,” she says. “I can’t drag someone to the watering hole. They have to want to be there. Now, The Family Center is in a different place. The organization feels more stable. This is a relief to me as we think through succession planning. I’ve been here for more than 30 years. Now, I’m asking myself what I need to do in the next five years to build the foundation for this organization to continue long after I’m gone.”
Greater NY connects leaders in strategic service to the people of New York City. For Gamble-Cobb and Frawley, leadership was about returning to core purpose, mission, and creating space for reflection.