Helena Foulkes former CEO, Hudson’s Bay Company; Board Director at Skillsoft Helena Buonanno Foulkes is an experienced, innovative CEO and senior executive who has had transformative impacts on many organizations and industries. She is known for being a purpose-driven leader who has spent her career promoting a community-conscious approach to business. For 25 years, Helena worked her way up at CVS, helping to build the company into Rhode Island’s largest and cementing the company’s status as a national leader in healthcare. Throughout her entire career at CVS—from her first job as part of the store design team to ultimately becoming President of Retail— she got results by pulling teams together to unlock hidden opportunities and make bold decisions. As President of Retail, Helena was responsible for 200,000 employees and eighty billion dollars in revenue. She led groundbreaking efforts to create the ExtraCare loyalty program, improve prescription drug delivery to help lower costs, and to remove tobacco products from all 8,000 CVS stores. Having lost her mother to lung cancer and having beaten cancer herself, this decision was profoundly personal. Helena then became CEO and a board member of Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), where she led a significant transformation of the business. Helena reinvented the organization by streamlining the operating structure, building the leadership team, overseeing strategic transactions and overhauling the operating focus of HBC. These critical shifts helped the company pay down sizable inherited debts and positioned it for a digital-first future. Before joining CVS and HBC, Helena worked at Goldman, Sachs & Co, and Tiffany & Co. She has received numerous professional honors, including being named to Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business lists as well as Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business. Helena serves on numerous boards, including the of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Dodd Center at the University of Connecticut, and the Harvard University Board of Overseers. Helena holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband, and they have four grown children. A proud Democrat, she is currently running for Governor of Rhode Island.