We Welcome Our New Director, Sylvia Clark

The Herstory community warmly welcomes Sylvia Clark as executive director.  She hit the ground running on November 1, allowing founder Erika Duncan to more fully concentrate on writing the next volume of the manual and replicating our successful model as artistic director. 

We thank the Long Island Unitarian Universalist Fund and the Hagedorn Fund (both in the Long Island Community Foundation) for granting us the seed money for this position, along with the Long Island Center for Nonprofit Leadership and its director, Ann Marie Thigpen, for managing the search that led to Sylvia’s selection.           

A Long Islander since 1991, Sylvia brings a wealth of experience in philanthropy and nonprofit management as well as a passion for women’s issues, social justice and the written word.  Most recently, she served for 18 years as executive director of the NEC Foundation of America in Islandia, NY, which she built; the foundation focuses on technology for people with disabilities. 

Prior to that, she was vice president of the Mellon Bank Corporation in Pittsburgh, PA, where she designed and implemented Mellon’s philanthropic and community involvement programs, focused on community economic development, small business development and management assistance for nonprofits.

Sylvia’s biggest task as incoming executive director is to advance and ensure the fiscal well being of Herstory. “Erika has done a fabulous job of building the Herstory brand by means of personal persuasion and just plain magic,” she said. “The Herstory method has so much potential, but we must first improve our financial footing.”

To that end, one of her top goals is to create a way to formally evaluate the effectiveness of the Herstory method.  “We are rich with anecdotal feedback,” she said.  “But in order to approach prospective funders from beyond the inner circle of those foundations and individuals that have supported Herstory so generously over the years, we need to be able to demonstrate the longer-term impact of the Herstory method on its members.”

Sylvia also would like Herstory to become more self-sustaining, generating enough income through tuition, fees for special programs and the sale of the Herstory manual, books and other publications to cover a greater portion of total costs.  To accomplish this, she will work to boost enrollment in existing workshops and take a hard look at pricing and scholarship policies.

Looking ahead, she envisions a revenue-producing Herstory Institute for prospective facilitators to learn the method, then carry it around the country, around the globe and in their own domains.  Certificates would be awarded to those who successfully complete the program, and they would return to the Institute for periodic refresher training.  At the same time, Herstory would continue to develop exciting new programs in its Long Island “laboratory.”

We all agree that Herstory has a real and profound effect on those who experience it,” she added.  “Now we have to develop some new practices to safeguard our beloved Herstory for years to come.”