Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

Managing Director at the Rock Creek Group, an investment management company. She is Chair of the Governor’s Retirement Security Task Force for the State of Maryland. Ms. Townsend founded the Center for Retirement Initiatives at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, where she is a Research Professor. The initial focus of the Center is to help states plan and implement policies and programs that would make it easier for people who do not have easy access to a pension plan to save for their senior years in an efficient and cost-effective manner, utilizing pooled, professional asset management. As the State of Maryland’s first woman Lieutenant Governor, Ms. Townsend was in charge of a multimillion dollar budget and had oversight of major cabinet departments, including Economic Development and Transportation, State Police, Public Safety and Correction and Juvenile Justice. Prior to being elected Lt. Governor, Ms. Townsend served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States. Prior to serving at the Department of Justice, Ms. Townsend spent seven years as the founder and director of the Maryland Student Service Alliance where she led the fight to make Maryland the first—and only—state to make service a graduation requirement. She has been appointed Special Advisor at the Department of State. She is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She taught foreign policy at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and has been a visiting Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In the mid-1980s, she founded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. An honors graduate of Harvard University, Ms. Townsend received her law degree from the University of New Mexico where she was a member of the law review.