PARTNER PROFILE:

SYLVIA PEREZ -- the world’s her oyster

(Profiled 4/12/12)

It would be logical for you to ask one of SVP’s newest partners if she ever sleeps. Once you learn what she has done with her professional and personal time, you could easily assume that the only way she has accomplished all that she has is by being either an insomniac or a workaholic. But you’d be wrong. In fact, even Sylvia’s closest friends are unaware of an amazing fact: She’s as comfortable sitting on a beach for two weeks doing absolutely nothing as she is in her full-court press professional mode.

Above all, Sylvia is a planner. In fact, she spent nine months of last year doing personal strategic planning. She discovered that she is now in a “practice” phase in which she has come into her own as a professional; she is intentionally using the skills and techniques she developed in earlier years to think strategically and to share with others what she has learned along the way.  Eventually she expects her journey to propel her into being a leader of an organization whose mission and culture complements her style and values. But for now, she loves her work at The Cleveland Foundation and has become a Cleveland convert.

Sylvia was born in Washington, D.C., and lived there with her parents and two younger sisters until the end of high school. Her family was always civic-minded, drawn to issues involving equity and justice and ethnic power dynamics. During high school, she took part in CITYterm, an experiential learning program in New York City where she learned in powerful, though unorthodox ways. She remembers going up to the top of the World Trade Center where she was asked to look out over the landscape, isolate something she saw to pose a question about, and then answer that question. The critical thinking this program inspired appears to have informed her behavior ever since.

Sylvia attended Columbia University where she majored in Urban Studies with a concentration in Latino Studies, and studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After college, Sylvia remained in NYC to work for Living Cities, a national community development collaborative, and learned about the national community development system as well as nonprofit operations.  She then shifted to international development in Nicaragua where she worked for Pro Mujer and learned how to empower people to work together through microfinance and grassroots community capacity development. The following year, Sylvia applied for and received an international fellowship with a Colombian NGO – Give to Colombia -- which was based in Miami. She lived in Bogota as an Atlas Service Corps Fellow and helped match U.S. donors to Colombian nonprofits; along the way she helped major philanthropic partners leverage their financial and intellectual resources to develop high-impact and strategic initiatives throughout the country. She returned to D.C. after a year and opened an office there for Give to Colombia, serving as its Development Manager.

In April, 2011, Sylvia attended graduate school at Baruch College in NYC via an executive fellowship program for nonprofit and public sector professionals – National Urban Fellows – which enrolled her in intensive classes and placed her at The Cleveland Foundation for nine months. After graduating with an MPA, she returned to work full-time for The Cleveland Foundation as the Chief of Staff and Manager for Governmental and International Affairs.

Sylvia’s passions run deep. She loves cities. She loves to do what she can to make others’ lives better. She cherishes mentorship and pursues this love as the vice-president of the National Board of Sigma Lambda Upsilon/Señoritas Latinas Unidas, a Latina-based sorority, and as a weekly volunteer for Minds Matter, a Cleveland nonprofit based on a national model which helps high-performing, low-income students prepare for college. Sylvia glows as she describes her mentee’s current and potential accomplishments; she clearly hopes their relationship will continue to grow over the years. 

Sylvia’s friends would be likely to describe her as “serious, loving, kind, crazy, and really busy.” They have also been known to call her a “gypsy” both because of her love of travel and for her open-minded decision-making and flexibility when it comes to accomplishing her goals.

We have partner Shilpa Kedar to thank for introducing Sylvia to us and whetting her appetite for our mission and for the opportunity to accomplish “organizational impact” and learn about nonprofits in Cleveland through a different lens. Sylvia has the remarkable capacity to think strategically and see the big picture, while also enjoying life’s simpler pleasures. It is our pleasure to introduce her to you.

MIKE SHAFARENKO – MAN OF ACTION

 (Profiled 2/23/12)

Arguably ever since his high school days when he sold cutlery in St. Louis, Missouri, Mike Shafarenko has been on the cutting edge. An entrepreneur and a visionary by nature, Mike has pursued his passions and has built civic initiatives and social enterprises around them.

Mike was born to Russian Jewish immigrants and although he has an older brother, he is the only member of his family to be born in the United States. Although he can’t read or write Russian, he speaks it fluently to this day. He has also played the violin since the age of nine, serving as the concert master of his high school orchestra, and later as an undergraduate member of Case’s Chamber Orchestra.

While majoring in Psychology and minoring in Entrepreneurship at Case, Mike reflected on what he might do with these pursuits. He googled the terms “psychology and business” and discovered the fields of Industrial Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. Inspired by this notion, Mike accepted an internship in Case’s HR department and helped develop an internship program that placed interns internally instead of farming them out. Mike pitched this to the provost while still an undergraduate, and upon graduation, Mike was asked to run this program. When funding for this position later fizzled, Mike found two part-time jobs that appealed to his entrepreneurial spirit: 1) serving as the volunteer coordinator for IngenuityFest where he created a system for volunteer coordination and administration, and 2) coordinating events for Entrepreneurs EDGE, a group which helps middle market companies grow through innovation and entrepreneurship.

From there Mike moved to The Fund for Our Economic Future where he served first as a coordinator and then as the manager of Finance Operations, overseeing a $9 million annual budget. After a couple of years he “got the entrepreneurial itch again” and collaborated with Fund members and staff on “how to engage people in the region around the work The Fund was doing.” Recognizing the existence of duplicative government services and the need to maximize economic growth, they created “EfficientGovNow” to inspire collaboration and efficiency among municipalities. They received hundreds of local government collaboration proposals and put the best ones up for a public vote that garnered over 30,000 votes from across 16 counties. This approach “catalyzed collaborative activity among governments and raised awareness of the need for greater collaboration and efficiency.” EfficientGovNow captured the interest of the Knight Foundation which provided a $3 million grant to create The Civic Commons in late 2009. Mike became president of The Civic Commons one year ago and delights in his ability to pursue social entrepreneurship once again.  Asked to describe what he does now in six words, Mike rose to the challenge beautifully by stating that his organization is an “engagement platform that drives civic action.”

Mike has brought that spirit of engagement to SVP – first as a volunteer who helped plan our bigBANG! conference on social innovation last fall and now as a partner. In his new role, Mike is eager to see the “direct impact of investment and effort beyond what he does on a day-to-day level.” Soon SVP’s partners will get to know Mike as his friends do – as loyal, smart, intense, impatient, thoughtful, perspicacious, and really good at Tetris.

Whether intentionally or not, Mike is clearly living Thoreau’s words: “If you have built your castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. . . .”