Page 6 - BusinessWest February 6, 2023

“During my
time there, we announced a new strategic focus on dismantling structural racism and promoting more equitable economic and social mobility. And while that work is by no means easy,
it’s incredibly important, and
I spent the past few years with a great team trying to figure out how to make that happen.”
rience I have is relevant to thinking about how we can change that together — not just the Community Foundation, not just our non- profit partners or our donors, but all residents of the region.”
Questions and Answers
Burke recalls that it “almost felt like I was cheating.”
That’s almost.
In the run-up to the first of her interviews with CFWM for the
president’s position last September, she noted that Zobel was the most recent guest on BusinessTalk, the weekly podcast hosted by this writer. She listened to the episode, not once but twice, and heard Zobel talk in vague terms about what might come next for her career-wise — and, in far more specific terms, about the many new programs and initiatives she and her staff introduced during her tenure, everything from Valley Gives to Valley Creates.
“It was such a helpful interview,” she recalled. “I was able to get a sense of what she felt was important and what she thought were some of the great successes here.”
Whether listening to the podcast had any impact on her perfor- mance during that interview is a subject for debate (Burke already knew a great deal about the Community Foundation, as we’ll see), but what isn’t — according to those doing the interviewing — is that Burke is a logical successor to Zobel, and this position is a logical next step for someone who has spent a career working to advance diversity, equity, and the inclusion of diverse perspectives.
It’s a career that has taken her from New York to Nicaragua to Hartford, and to remote-working opportunities long before they became the norm.
Our story starts with Burke — who earned her bachelor’s degree in political science at Wellesley and a master’s degree in interna- tional relations at Yale — working for the Ford Foundation in New York, where she served as program officer, U.S. Foreign and Secu- rity Policy, Governance & Civil Society.
In 2007, she and her family moved to Nicaragua for what she called “a different pace to her work” than what she found in New York. There, she worked first for the nonprofit Centro de Estudios Internacionales, where her efforts supported the emerging LGBTQ+
movement and the development of a nationwide campaign to advance human rights.
“My role was to support various representatives of the movement to create a platform for them to come together and establish some advocacy priorities and to really be a go-between with the funder to make sure of the direction it was moving in, and to really track the impact of the work,” she explained. “For me ... I had not worked on that particular issue before; it was incredibly eye-opening. It was very humbling to be working in a second language and be the least articulate person in the room.”
Burke worked for the group for roughly three years, eventually transitioning to a new role with the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines. She started working as a researcher in Latin America — Nicaragua was a country impacted by landmines from the war in the 1980s — and eventually became executive director of the campaign.
She was still in that position when she returned to Western Mass. nearly a decade ago, eventually to ease herself out of that role — while also downsizing the organization, as more countries addressed the problem of landmines.
“It’s kind of nice to be involved in something where we could see steady progress and say we were working ourselves out of a job; it’s not often that you get to say that,” she noted. “Every year I worked there, the casualty rate declined.”
In some respects, leading a coalition to ban landmines is a world apart from work with a local foundation, she said, but in Burke’s estimation, the work is very similar.
“Sometimes people say, ‘how did you go from this international work focused on advocacy at the U.N. and traveling around the world to working for a local foundation?’” she noted. “My feeling
on that is that every issue is a local issue somewhere, and what we were really trying to do at the international level is raise up local issues that were impacting people in mostly post-conflict countries, and get international attention to redistribute resources — not total- ly unlike what a founda-
tion does to help those with the greatest need.”
Burke
Continued on page 37
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Common Threads is an opportunity to hear about the exciting work happening at Dress for Success Western Massachusetts and the stories of the
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