2025 Impact Report

Linksbridge SPC

Since 2008, global health stakeholders have partnered with Linksbridge to improve human lives.

From countries prioritizing health investments to NGOs modeling vaccine impact to donors examining product demand, changemakers rely on our team for data-driven intelligence and analytics, expert technical assistance, and strategic guidance.

The problems we work on are too complex, and the stakes too high, for transactional relationships. Real progress takes time, trust, and a willingness to grow alongside one another. That’s why long-term, results-driven partnerships are at the heart of everything we do.

Partnership means reliability, continuity, and proven outcomes. At Linksbridge, it’s the way we make an impact.

Letter from our executive director

In our 17th year, Linksbridge and our partners confronted challenges on a scale we’ve not seen before.

The assumptions that have long underpinned progress in global health were abruptly and fundamentally upended. At the core of those assumptions was a shared commitment to integrity and mutual accountability; above all, a belief that lifesaving interventions, from therapeutic foods to antiretrovirals, would be delivered as promised and without disruption.

Today, we are operating in a markedly different context: systems are under strain, outcomes are at risk, funding is tightening, and trust is eroding. It is a true crisis and a moment of real consequence. Among the questions our team has been forced to confront: How do we sustain progress when traditional systems falter? How do we rebuild trust across fractured institutions? How can partners align their strengths to deliver outcomes that none could achieve alone?

It’s in many ways the test that we were built to tackle.

By drawing on and amplifying each other’s strengths, partnerships elevate all stakeholders, providing better outcomes in the near term while creating the conditions for continued effectiveness and ongoing growth.

As an employee-owned social purpose corporation (SPC), Linksbridge was founded to advance social impact by partnering with global, regional, and country stakeholders to empower their work and improve outcomes. Our role within these partnerships is to bring clarity and creativity: delivering best-in-class analytics to inform the development and procurement of affordable and effective vaccines, building data-driven strategies and tools to support country immunization programs, and imagining—and delivering—actionable and evidence-based frameworks to solve persistent problems in health systems.

By drawing on and amplifying each other’s strengths, partnerships elevate all stakeholders, providing better outcomes in the near term while creating the conditions for continued effectiveness and ongoing growth. Partnerships also demand accountability.

Our 2025 Impact Report helps us stay accountable to our partners, our team, and our broader ecosystem. We’re proud to share how we work, what we’ve learned, and where we’re headed next.

To our partners: thank you for your leadership, your resilience, and your trust. It is a privilege to work alongside you.

Heather Ferguson

Executive Director

Our role within partnerships is to bring clarity and creativity: delivering best-in-class analytics to inform the development and procurement of affordable and effective vaccines, building data-driven strategies and tools to support country immunization programs, and designing evidence-based frameworks to solve persistent problems in health systems.

2025 impact: empowering our partners

VACFA / UCT

Linksbridge has collaborated for years with the University of Cape Town (UCT)’s Vaccines for Africa (VACFA) Initiative and NITAG Immunization Support HUB (NISH) to advance immunization capacity building, digital innovation, and knowledge dissemination across Africa and globally.

Recent highlights

  • In 2025, Linksbridge and VACFA formalized our strategic partnership with a new memorandum of understanding that commits us to shared goals.
  • In May 2025, Linksbridge contributed to VACFA’s fourth Annual Vaccinology Course for NITAGs (AVCN), delivering hands-on training to participants from 11 countries on our MCV 5-dose assessment tool to support evidence-based decision-making for vaccine optimization.
  • Following the AVCN, Linksbridge and VACFA convened partners in Cape Town to operationalize the Vaccine Portfolio Prioritization and Optimization (VPOP) framework under Gavi 6.0, aligning on country needs and practical pathways from concept to implementation.

WHO African Region

Linksbridge partners with the WHO African Region (WHO AFRO) to advance evidence-based strategies for optimizing immunization programs, align regional and country stakeholders around more efficient vaccine products, and accelerate adoption of approaches that strengthen routine immunization systems.

Recent highlights

  • In 2025, our team participated in the Central Africa EPI Managers’ Meeting in São Tomé and the West Africa EPI Managers’ Meeting in Conakry.
  • With WHO AFRO, Linksbridge team members Rebakaone Bowe and Maggie Archbold co-authored an article in the Pan African Medical Journal as part of a supplement on 50 years of the Expanded Programme on Immunization in Africa.
  • We contributed measles vaccine delivery insights to WHO AFRO Regional Technical Working Groups (CESD and MEAL) to inform regional guidance and country implementation.

GVMM Partnership

Dating to 2015, the Global Vaccine Market Model (GVMM) is a best-in-class intelligence partnership between Linksbridge and such key global actors as the Gates Foundation, Gavi, PAHO, UNICEF, and WHO. GVMM includes historical market data on global health vaccines, forecasts from Linksbridge data scientists on vaccine demand, supply, and price through 2040, and more.

Recent highlights

  • In preparation for Gavi 6.0, the GVMM team developed critical new dashboards to help partners understand market scenarios and procurement impacts in the coming period.
  • With the new GVMM tools, partners can access forecasted Gavi 6.0 procurement costs, the impact of country vaccine choices on demand and market health, and the effects of other drivers of uncertainty.

CEPI

Since 2020, Linksbridge has partnered with CEPI to address pandemic threats through vaccine impact assessments, equitable vaccine allocation algorithms, and other projects where our data science and vaccine market expertise can help drive decisions.

Recent highlights

  • CEPI and Linksbridge participated in the first Chikungunya Global Meeting, organized by the International Vaccine Institute and the Gorgas Institute. Our work on chikungunya vaccine impact assessments informed group discussions on vaccine R&D, vaccine access, financing and procurement, and a forward-looking chikungunya vaccine initiative.
  • A report on the meeting was published in Vaccine: X in December 2025, with Linksbridge’s Katelyn Dinkel as a co-author.

People join Linksbridge to contribute to a better world. People stay at Linksbridge because they love how we operate, how we care for and respect one another, and how we help one another grow and learn.

2025 Impact: Our Business

Linksbridge is staffed by employee-owners committed to a better world. As an SPC, our social-impact focus guides not only the projects we accept but the way we run our enterprise each day:

  • Our employee ownership structure ensures that our business serves our team on equitable terms, leaving no one behind.
  • From transparent and equitable pay practices to best-in-class benefits (including a two-month paid sabbatical every five years of employment), we take care of our team.
  • Through the Linksbridge Foundation, we invest at least 5% of each year’s profits in awards to grantees, extending our impact to nonprofit partners fighting for intersectional justice and human rights locally and globally.
  • Our participation in the Duwamish Tribe’s Real Rent program, our carbon offset initiative, and our charitable contribution matching program help direct our resources to our community.

The Linksbridge Employee Ownership Trust

In late 2023, we established the Linksbridge Employee Ownership Trust as the legal owner of our enterprise, and we formalized the objectives of the trust as follows:
  • To ensure that Linksbridge SPC continues to fulfill its central purpose of creating positive social impact through its work.
  • To ensure the sustainability of Linksbridge SPC as an enterprise.
  • To ensure that the proceeds of Linksbridge SPC benefit its employees.

Salaries

Linksbridge pays competitive salaries to attract and retain skilled professionals for our Seattle and Washington, D.C. offices. We practice pay equity and pay transparency because we view them as imperatives for a workplace where everyone can flourish. The ratio between our highest and lowest salary levels is less than 3:1.
In 2025, our team earned the following salaries:
  • $81,034 for consultants
  • $95,524 for senior consultants
  • $115,763 for associates
  • $144,717 for senior associates
  • $173,644 for directors
  • $202,597 for principals
  • $231,525 for partners and our executive director
Linksbridge also returned retention bonuses totaling $398,789 to our employee-owners, whose creative, rigorous, and passionate work helped see our partners through a year of global challenges. In 2025, Linksbridge realized a 7% operating profit.

Benefits

In addition to becoming beneficiaries of the Linksbridge Employee Ownership Trust, all team members working at least 50% FTE earn standard but important benefits like employer-sponsored health insurance, 401(k) retirement plans with employer match, 11 paid holidays, and four weeks of paid vacation.
Our most unique benefit is a two-month paid sabbatical every five years. In 2025, a record seven team members enjoyed sabbaticals: Aline Benson, Andy Torkelson, Erik Osland, KJ Zunigha, Lena Stashko, Mira Sytsma, and Tim Anderson set off on adventures ranging from hiking and kayaking trips in their home states to exploring new countries.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice

Linksbridge’s impact depends on understanding diverse perspectives, collaborating across cultures, and developing partnership-driven solutions for complex global challenges. For these reasons, our internal investments in advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice-aligned practices (DEIJ) are not merely a matter of living our values and creating a workplace where our whole team can flourish. Such standards are indispensable to mitigating biases, communicating more effectively, and fostering trust with counterparts around the world. We would be less impactful without them.
In 2025, building off a third-party assessment of our strengths and weaknesses, Linksbridge began implementing a six-pillar framework for reflection, learning, improvement, and accountability. These are our focus areas:
  • Pillar 1: Transparent leadership communication
  • Pillar 2: Career clarity and inclusive advancement
  • Pillar 3: Teamwide training
  • Pillar 4: Inclusive hiring and onboarding
  • Pillar 5: Belonging and identity-based support
  • Pillar 6: Feedback and accountability infrastructure
In the first weeks of 2026, we rolled out a training curriculum grounded in accredited DEI frameworks and best practices and adapted for our organization. Our entire staff will go through the three-module curriculum by year-end, and we’ll update our community in next year’s Impact Report on how this training informed our culture, practices, and progress across the six pillars. As with efforts across all focus areas, we view this work as iterative and remain committed to inquiry, improvement, and accountability.

Insulin Engagement

In last year’s Impact Report we discussed Linksbridge's forthcoming participation in a project to increase equitable access to insulin in low- and lower-middle-income countries.
Like many global health product access initiatives, this effort brought together stakeholders from the nonprofit space as well as industry. Unusually for Linksbridge, catalytic funding for the insulin work originated with an industry partner with whom we contracted directly.
After careful review with our team and the Linksbridge Employee Ownership Trust Board of Trustees, we decided to proceed with this industry contract for the following reasons:
  • The work closely aligned with our social purpose objectives;
  • We had no active engagements in the insulin space that would pose conflicts;
  • There was no currently existing alternative funding structure available; and
  • Our industry partner agreed to the guardrails we felt were necessary to prevent conflicts of interest and ensure the initiative served global health.
With the initial phase of this engagement complete, we’re proud to say we were able to meet our objectives of outlining priority barriers in insulin markets and identifying the concrete actions, timelines, and responsibilities needed across partners to improve affordability, supply security, and access.
Moreover, we set up a governance plan—with global health partners at the helm—for managing the initiative and coordinating ongoing efforts to implement priority activities.
As an SPC, Linksbridge remains committed to social impact as our first priority. Direct engagement with nonprofit actors is the heart of our business. And that’s not going to change. From the insulin project, we’ve learned that there are genuine opportunities for meaningful global health impact via industry-funded channels, provided adequate guardrails are in place, genuine transparency is allowed for, and there’s willingness across partners to invest the time needed to establish trust.

Team News

Our team welcomed three new hires in 2025:

  • Associate Jenna Fritz joined Linksbridge to focus on global health market insights and analytics, with an emphasis on market dynamics across a range of product classes.
  • Associate Eda Reed brings a decade of experience in global health and development, with a focus on data-driven strategy, digital platforms, and applied analytics.
  • Consultant Hang Le joined the team to advance work in global health market dynamics and outbreak response analytics.
Meanwhile, Sheldon Halsted and Yvonne Teng were promoted to the director level in 2025, joining our senior management group.

With a focus on the fight for intersectional justice and human rights locally and globally, the Linksbridge Foundation operates with a keen recognition of the challenges inherent in the work of fundraising.

The Linksbridge Foundation

In 2025, the Linksbridge Foundation allocated over $52,000 for awards to grantees.
These included grants to immigrant rights organizations, a matching grant supporting Outright International’s emergency gifts to LGBTIQ partners in Jamaica following Hurricane Melissa, and a grant funding free, trauma-informed childcare for youth impacted by the Los Angeles fires.
We recognize that our giving power is relatively modest, but we try to make the most of our autonomy and flexibility as our grantees navigate a changing landscape for intersectional justice and human rights.
Our 2025 grantees include:
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project
2025 Grant: $5,000
Promoting justice by defending and advancing the rights of immigrants.
Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network
2025 Grant: $5,000
Protecting, serving, and strengthening immigrant communities in Washington State.
Project:Camp
2025 Grant: $5,000
Helping kids heal during emergencies and advocating for the needs of children and families.
Outright International
2025 Grant: $5,000
Working with partners around the globe to strengthen the capacity of the LGBTIQ movement.

Other Initiatives

SOC 2 Attestation

Linksbridge has long served as the custodian of important global health data assets, such as GVMM.
In 2024, we launched a third-party audit of our data security practices. Our objective was to achieve System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2) attestation, an industry-recognized standard requiring rigorous controls across areas including software development, data governance, business continuity planning, recruitment and retention, and disaster preparedness.
After a dedicated effort led by our Data + Analytics team in collaboration with an AICPA-certified auditing firm, Linksbridge received SOC 2 attestation in February 2025. A follow-up audit in 2025 reaffirmed our SOC 2 attestation.

Real Rent Duwamish

Our Seattle headquarters is situated on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people. In solidarity with the Duwamish Tribe, Linksbridge participates in the Real Rent program, making annual payments to Duwamish Tribal Services equal to the real estate taxes on our Seattle office.
In 2025, we paid $5,927 through this program, supporting the revival of Duwamish culture and the vitality of the Duwamish Tribe.

Carbon Emissions

Compared to the prior year, our 2025 carbon emissions fell 56% to 28.5 metric tons. Business travel remained the key driver, accounting for 85% of our emissions. In 2025, our team took fewer and shorter trips, booking less travel in emissions-intensive premium and business class.
Recognizing the negative impact of emissions stemming from our business activities, Linksbridge has purchased the following offsets through the U.N. Carbon Offset Platform:

Looking ahead

In 2025, our team responded to the massive disruptions in global health funding by deepening our collaborations with the partners best positioned to protect hard-won gains. Our joint work with WHO AFRO, VACFA, and country and global partners became more urgent and extensive. We expanded our team and entered a new strategic partnership with Africa-based counterparts.

Looking to 2026 and beyond, our focus will increasingly center on country partners: the national immunization programs, NITAGs, and EPI teams navigating an era of constrained resources and shifting priorities. Supporting their Gavi 6.0 preparation and vaccine portfolio optimization work is among our highest priorities. In March 2026, this commitment was on full display when Linksbridge and VACFA co-led a multi-country workshop in partnership with Gavi, University of Cape Town, and Australia’s National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, convening stakeholders from eight countries to share evidence and cross-country experience on vaccine presentation optimization, including the measles-containing vaccine dose switch. Equipping NITAGs and EPI teams with tools, financing insights under Gavi 6.0, and clearer approaches to vaccine prioritization and optimization is exactly the kind of partnership-driven work that this moment requires.

The challenges ahead are serious. Funding gaps will force difficult choices. Some programs will struggle to survive. But we have also seen that partnerships—real ones, built on trust, continuity, and shared purpose—create resilience that institutional funding alone cannot. Country teams supported by strong peer networks and reliable analytical partners are better equipped to make the evidence-based decisions that protect communities, even in a crisis.

Our priorities for the year ahead reflect this conviction:

The world our partners are working in is harder than it was. Our commitment to working alongside them—with the clarity, creativity, and care that define our partnerships—has never been stronger.

We work on issues that matter.

Linksbridge expands the capacity of NGOs, IGOs, and nonprofits to improve human lives.  A social-purpose consulting and advisory firm, we help changemakers multiply their impact through creative thinking.
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