Josie Everett's introduction to Heart to Heart was linguistic rather than medical or administrative. In 1995, Heart to Heart requested a business interpreter to negotiate with the Ministry of Public Health on behalf of a hospital program in St. Petersburg and asked her to personally volunteer for the job.Josie's first assignment in St. Petersburg was to interpret at a meeting between Dr. Nilas Young and Dr. Alexander Zorin, Chief Cardiac Surgeon of St. Petersburg. By the end of the meeting, the doctors had decided to per form immediate surgery on a young man and asked Josie to interpret in the operating room. Josie was the only person in the OR who spoke both languages fluently, and much of the eight hour surgery was narrated to her. Awed by the complexity of the procedure and the intricacy of the teamwork, Josie considered whether the extraordinary experience mightn't be the "best and highest" use of her language and communications skills.

Josie joined Heart to Heart as its third Executive Director in 1998. She has provided administrative leadership on more than 15 surgical-educational missions to Russia. She continues to serve as chief interpreter in the operating room during Heart to Heart surgeries, coordinating the OR interpreters and overall communication. Since she began with Heart to Heart, she has helped launch two new pediatric sites in Russia and secure more than $4 million in revenue and nearly $10 million in in-kind support.

Josie has 18 years of professional non-profit experience. Her prior travel to Russia includes a six month program in Moscow, living with a Russian family and studying translation at the Maurice Thorez Language Institute (1990), and a summer language program at the Pushkin Language Institute in Leningrad (1987). Josie completed two years of graduate work at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, specializing in Russian/English translation. She holds a B.A. in History from the University of California at Berkeley, with a minor in Russian Language and Literature. She attended Berkeley on a running scholarship, and thinks that her years of middle- and long-distance running have helped her with pacing for life's marathon efforts and gearing up for its inevitable sprints. She is fluent in Russian and Spanish and describes her French as functionally polite.