Connie K. Duckworth

Connie K. Duckworth is a former Partner and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs, and retired in 2000, following a nineteen-year career. Ms. Duckworth was named Partner in 1990, the first woman sales and trading partner in the firm’s history. After Goldman Sachs, Ms. Duckworth founded ARZU in 2004 to empower destitute women weavers in rural Afghanistan and served pro bono as its Chairman and CEO until its merger with UK-based Turquoise Mountain in 2019. Ms. Duckworth is a director of Steelcase Inc. (NYSE: SCS) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Previously, she served as a Trustee of Equity Residential and on the Boards of Directors of Northwestern Mutual, Russell Investment Group, Nuveen Investments, Smurfit Stone Container Corporation, and DNP Select Income Fund. In her philanthropic work, Ms. Duckworth is a Trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, an Overseer of The Wharton School, and a member of the International Board of Advisors of the University of Texas at Austin. She serves on the Board of NorthShore University HealthSystem, in Evanston, Illinois, where she was the first and only woman Chairman of the Board. She is a founding member of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Bush Institute’s Women’s Initiative Policy Advisory Council in Dallas. The recipient of numerous awards for leadership, social impact and innovation, Ms. Duckworth holds an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.