Attorney and former RBS director to lead Lifting Up Westchester

Lifting Up Westchester, a nonprofit social services agency based in White Plains, has appointed Anahaita Kotval, an attorney and Tarrytown resident, as its new executive director.

Kotval is the chief operating officer and general counsel of Inspirica Inc. in Stamford, a nonprofit that finds permanent housing for the homeless. She will join Lifting Up Westchester, which provides shelter for the homeless and meals to needy residents of the county, on May 23. She succeeds Paul Anderson-Winchell, who is retiring after 11 years as the agency”™s executive director.

An honors graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, Kotval was a prosecutor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before joining Royal Bank of Scotland, where she specialized in securities regulation in her 13 years there. She last served as managing director and general counsel of RBS Global Banking & Markets, formerly Greenwich Capital.

Kotval joined Inspirica in 2011 as chief operating officer and general counsel. Before her move to the nonprofit sector, she was an active volunteer and board member of My Sister’s Place, a battered women’s shelter, and Pro Bono Partnership in Westchester. She received Pro Bono’s Volunteer of the Year award in 2003 and its Volunteer of the Decade award in 2007.

Helen Hamlyn, president of the Lifting Up Westchester board of directors, called Kotval “the natural choice” for the executive director”™s position to emerge from a search for Anderson-Winchell”™s successor conducted by the Support Center for Nonprofit Management in Manhattan. “Anahaita brings years of nonprofit experience, superior business and legal acumen and tremendous passion to the position,” she said in the Monday announcement.

Kotval, a lifelong Westchester County resident, said that “having a safe, stable and affordable place to call home is the foundation on which all other economic and social advancement can be built. I was drawn to Lifting Up Westchester because its programs are centered on helping clients to achieve this housing stability and the self-sufficiency that follows.”

Founded in 1979, Lifting Up Westchester operates eight community-based programs and serves approximately 4,000 men, women and children each year, serving 140,000 meals to the hungry and providing 28,000 nights of shelter for the homeless.