Our Leaders

Mr. William G. Parrett,
Chair, United Way of America

 Bill Parrett is retired Chief Executive Officer of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and Senior Partner, Deloitte & Touche, USA. In a career that spans more than 35 years, he has served many of the firm’s leading clients. He co-founded Deloitte’s Global Financial Services Industry practice and served as its first Chairman. A long-time advocate of community service, Bill serves on the Board of Trustees of Carnegie Hall and the National Advisory Board of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. He is a member of the Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) and of the G100 CEO Forum. Bill serves on the boards of the Japan Society and the U.S. - Japan Business Council. In addition, he is a member of the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD), and serves as Chairman for the United States Council for International Business (USCIB) and as an International Councillor for the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). He also serves as a trustee to St. Francis College and to the Catholic University of America. In recent years, he has led Deloitte’s participation at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, including leading high-level discussions on corporate governance, doing business in China, and on key issues impacting the financial services industry. Bill is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. A graduate of St. Francis College in New York, Bill joined a predecessor firm of Deloitte & Touche in 1967. He became a partner in 1977. He and his wife, Diane, have six children and four grandchildren.

Brian A. Gallagher
President and CEO, United Way of America

Brian Gallagher became President and Chief Executive Officer of United Way of America in 2002 and immediately took on the challenge of leading the transformation of the organization to focus on community impact. A career veteran of the United Way system, Gallagher believes that the true measure of success for United Way and other philanthropic organizations is bottom-line results: the lives that are changed and the communities that are shaped. This represents a dynamic shift from the United Way recognized for decades as the nation’s premier fund raiser and distributor. Today, Gallagher has raised the bar on the accountability, governance and transparency standards adopted as a requirement of membership for each of the 1,300 local United Ways across the country.

He began his career with United Way in 1981 as a management trainee, later working in various positions in United Ways around the country including Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Reading, Pennsylvania; Providence, Rhode Island; and Atlanta, Georgia. He most recently served as president of United Way of Central Ohio (UWCO) in Columbus, where he had first-hand experience with community impact, creating a very successful Family Housing Collaborative, which works simultaneously to obtain low cost housing while providing day care and job training so that the cycle of homelessness is broken.

Gallagher was born in Chicago and grew up in Hobart, Indiana. He received his bachelor’s degree in social work from Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, in 1981 and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992. In May 2003 Gallagher received an honorary Doctor of Humanities from his alma mater, Ball State University.