About Us

Upstream Consultants bring many years experience designing and evaluating model programs, developing resilient organizations, and advocating for resources for communities that are heavily impacted by HIV/AIDS, incarceration, drug-related harm, as well as social and political disenfranchisement. We also engage additional contractors as needed to ensure that each project has the professional skills, content knowledge, cultural responsiveness, and organizational experience required to accomplish your goals.

Director
Kelly McGowan, M.P.A., launched Upstream Consulting in 1999 to address the needs of community based organizations that serve disenfranchised communities. Since launching the consulting group, she has provided program and organizational development support and secured more than $8 million in government funding for community based organizations serving communities of color.

McGowan emerged as a student leader in the anti-apartheid movement to divest universities from South African corporations in the mid-1980’s. Following graduation, she joined ACT-UP New York and Housing Works, Inc. where she implemented a model, independent living program for homeless people living with HIV that became a prototype for Ryan White CARE ACT funded scattered site programs. Since then, she has worked to improve service provision and health access for communities in the United States that are traditionally underserved by mainstream care systems through the development of model programs and policy advocacy. In the 90’s she co-founded and directed a peer-based HIV prevention organization for street-oriented LGBTQ youth. Through scientific evaluation of program outcomes and advocacy efforts, the project became the first government funded peer-based HIV education and prevention intervention.

McGowan earned a bachelor of science in Human Development and Family Studies from Cornell University and a master’s degree in Public Administration and Health Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She has been a teaching colleague with the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University and has training in structural family therapy from the Ackerman Institute and Salvador Minuchin’s Family Studies, Inc.Senior Consultants

Lourdes D. Follins, MSW, Ph.D. is an organizational consultant, trainer, and educator who has been committed to working with and for the socially disenfranchised since the late 1980s. While she has extensive experience working with and for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people of color as a mental health provider, Follins has also worked with and advocated for urban children and adolescents in foster care, the juvenile justice system, and the mental health system. As a result of her work, Follins offers consultation, curricula, and trainings in mental health; racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identities; as well as spirituality and religion. She has created training curricula for social service and HIV prevention organizations and provided trainings and workshops for over 8 years. In addition, Follins has worked with culturally and sexually diverse populations of adolescents and adults in New York City for over 15 years, as both a service provider and a supervisor.

As an adjunct professor at the Metropolitan College of New York and an adjunct assistant professor at the City University of New York, she both educates and trains tomorrow’s social service professionals in areas such as counseling, diversity, and human growth and development. A New York State Licensed Social Worker, Follins earned her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Clinical Social Work at New York University.

Jo L. Sotheran, Ph.D., specializes in research, evaluation, needs assessment, writing, and program development for underserved populations. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in anthropology and a Ph.D. (Rutgers University) in sociology and has worked in public health for over 15 years. She is familiar with both qualitative and quantitative data-collection and evaluation approaches. Her particular interests include community needs assessment methods, service development for the continuum of drug-involved populations, especially methadone treatment, outreach, and other lower-threshold interventions. She regularly volunteers and is presently on the working Boards of two, small community-based organizations. As a consultant, Sotheran has supported the development of community-based research and evaluation systems. Recent assignments have included: regional community assessment and program development for MSM populations in rural areas, grant development in HCV and HIV among drug injectors, a technical review of New York City’s public school HIV curricula, designing evaluation systems, training on evaluation and implementation of behavioral interventions, and preparation of agency promotional materials.