Clea Finkle

August 5th, 1963 - November 28th, 2023

“If a poet is anybody, (s)he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed with Making.” e e cummings

Clea was obsessed with the Making. Indomitable, kind, compassionate, driven, humble, wickedly funny and intellectually, an intense flame. Identifying a critical issue or problem to solve and then turning a spark of an idea into programs that would better the lives of millions of women throughout Africa and Asia.

Born in Los Angeles to academics, and named by her parents after a character in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, by the time she was 6, she had lived in India, Switzerland, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. In Ann Arbor, she attended grade school and high school, and then went on to earn her BA and Masters at University of Michigan in Political Science and Sociology. She then studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi on her dissertation. While in India, she hiked the passes of Nepal solo and spent time working Mother Teresa's organization. Moving to Seattle, she completed her PhD in Political Science and South Asian studies at the University of Washington. Her doctoral dissertation “State, Power and Police in Colonial North India”, while carefully written and containing remarkably original research, also managed to capture the reader with evocative images of time, place and society. She was a brilliant writer.

After her studies Clea went on to work as a consultant for PATH(Seattle) and other agencies where her focus on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS prevention, supply chain expertise and scaling strategies in Africa and other developing areas quickly developed her reputation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hired her as a consultant in 2006 and subsequently as an employee in 2012.

The Foundation is where Clea really spread her wings and began to develop, with the broader Family Planning team, programs that would ultimately impact millions of women and their children throughout Africa, Asia and the Philippines. Her programs were focused on providing modern contraceptives to the urban poor--programs that had a direct effect on improving mother and child mortality rates, as well as better long outcomes for the children. Clea was one of those rare individuals who was extraordinarily original in her approach to a problem, tenacious in her goals, but assiduously avoided the limelight and politics of bringing big projects to life. She developed, launched and led the Nigeria family planning investment portfolio from 2012-2017 in close coordination with the Nigeria Ministry of Health, including initiating work with private pharmacy operators to vastly expand access to contraception, and she developed, launched and led the family planning investment portfolio in Kenya from 2017-2021, including innovative investments in contraception for nomadic populations, e-commerce, pharmacy provision, and supporting the design and roll-out of a sustainable mechanism for financing contraceptive commodity procurement. Her most cherished accomplishment, however, was also the Family Planning team’s single largest global investment: The Challenge Initiative (TCI). The Challenge Initiative | Urban Reproductive Health (tciurbanhealth.org) continues to this day as a renowned model for leveraged funding, local ownership and sustainable scale of proven high-impact interventions, having expanded to 185 cities across 13 countries with a footprint of over 200M in population. Overall, she initiated, led, and managed a portfolio of more than $175M with 15 grants across 12 countries.

She was most recently working as Chief Strategy Officer for Partners in Expanding Health Quality and Access, helping to lead the work of the global ExpandNet network in building global scaling capacity through development of country-based resource personnel and the establishment of the Scale-up Learning Center online platform. She was also developing a case study of the scaling up of the pharmacy work in Nigeria that she had begun working on with the Ministry years earlier. Scaling the impact of effective programs was one of her passions.

Clea’s energy was legendary—nothing seemed to slow her down. One of her foundation colleagues once said, as she whizzed by on a scooter with a broken foot, that all she needed was a cape. She extended that energy to everything she threw herself into whether karaoke sessions with her work peeps, planning vacations to far flung destinations throughout the world with her husband and family, hosting her entire family in our home every other August, dancing and, of course, welcoming new and old friends into our home for memorable meals.

Clea is survived by her husband, Steve Brugger, who in mid-life had the incredible luck to get to meet Clea and to finally check the box for “sustained, romantic love”. She was preceded in death by her father, Jason Finkle, a professor of Political Science at University of Michigan (“Are you Jason Finkle’s daughter?” she would hear time and again). Her close and loving family, her son Ian Hill, step-sons Aidan and Griffin Brugger, mother Patricia and her sisters Lisa, Nina and Moira were all present at Clea’s passing in her and Steve’s home in Seattle on November 28th.

As her energy ebbed in her final days, she repeatedly said to family and friends who came to say goodbye, “I am surrounded by love”. We all miss her dearly and know that the legacy of love she’s left will continue to inspire us, and that her compassion, humility and wit will live in our hearts and our memories forever. 

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