Secretariat
The Global Social Service Workforce Alliance maintains a core team of staff that supports the network and coordinates projects focused on social service workforce strengthening. The Alliance also frequently works with and hires external consultants.
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Alliance Secretariat
Hugh Salmon
Director
Hugh is a qualified social worker. He has served as the Director of the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance since 2020. He began his career in direct social work practice with children and families in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, and since 2000 he has worked internationally in a variety of roles, as a trainer, consultant and programme director. He was a member of the leadership team that established Family for Every Child as a global alliance, committed to reforming and improving children’s care worldwide. Hugh has also worked as a consultant on a range of regional and national initiatives to map, assess, develop and strengthen the social service workforce, focusing on its role in child protection and social protection in particular, but also in health, education and justice systems. He has master’s degrees in social work from Goldsmiths, University of London, and in civil society management from London South Bank University. He is currently based in London, UK.
Dr. Natia Partskhaladze
Senior Technical Advisor
Natia has 20 years of experience in the field of child and social protection systems, alternative care and social service workforce strengthening, both at the policy and programming level. She is a founder of the Georgian Association of Social Workers and one of the establishers of social work academic education in the Democratic Republic of Georgia, teaching social work at the graduate and undergraduate programs. Currently, she is a Chairperson of the Georgian State Council on Social Work Academic Education. Natia has worked for UNICEF Georgia and UNICEF Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia in Geneva for almost 10 years and has contributed to reforming child care and strengthening the social work profession in Georgia and other countries of the region. She earned social work, medical and policy graduate degrees from leading universities in the USA, Georgia and Hungary and has a doctoral degree in social work.
Alex Collins
Senior Technical Advisor
Alex Collins is a public health and social work professional with over a decade of experience strengthening the social service workforce and advancing child protection. She has led work on systems improvement, and monitoring and evaluation, in health and social welfare sectors, including maternal and child health and HIV programming. Alex has provided strategic and technical assistance to initiatives with a range of partners across Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe. Her work spans workforce assessments, policy and guidance development, and cross-sectoral program design. Grounded in frontline experience as a medical social worker and case manager in hospital settings in the USA, Alex brings a practical, systems-oriented lens. She has master’s degrees in both social work and public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with additional certification in global health and international development. She is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.
Katie Gatza
Intern (Boston College MSW in Global Practice)
Katie Gatza is a social work professional specializing in community well-being, community capacity building, and participatory systems change. Her work spans direct engagement, program design, research, and organizational coordination across diverse contexts, supporting the development and facilitation of community-based initiatives while contributing to systems-level assessments and strategic planning processes. She has particular interest in bottom-up and middle-out approaches that engage communities in defining, designing, and implementing solutions. Her experience includes mixed-methods research, stakeholder analysis, Root Cause Analysis (Ishikawa diagrams), and fuzzy cognitive mapping to examine complex social systems, working across qualitative and quantitative methodologies with familiarity in programming languages used for data analysis and systems modeling. She is especially interested in data ethics and strengthening participatory, accountable approaches to research and evidence-building, with attention to how institutional narratives affect minoritised and maturing communities. She is completing a Master of Social Work in Global Practice at Boston College (May 2026) and is based in the United States.