Playgrounds of Progress: The Boston Club Service Trip To Guatemala

Join us to learn more about our journey with School the World, an NGO founded and led by Club member Kate Curran, and members and friends of The Boston Club. We’ll take you to the heart of rural Guatemala, where our Guatemala Service Trip Affinity Group partnered with School the World to build a playground for a school in a remote village —not just a place to play, but a powerful symbol of hope, childhood, and possibility. Witness what happens when women lead with purpose, children gain space to dream, and a community joins in the transformation. Have fun watching us dig, paint, and mix and haul cement by hand. But also discover the cultural exchange that can reshape futures, one village at a time. And learn more about the next trip, where we hope to involve more Club members as well as young girls from Boston in another impactful service mission.

The service trip brigade included Vicki Amalfitano, Anne Bailey Berman, Kate Curran, Beata Dragovics, Sharon McNally, Lisa Prior, Fredi Shonkoff, and Yvonne Tang.

Speakers

Vicki Amalfitano is a nationally recognized marketing and strategy executive with over 25 years of experience leading brand, communications, and business growth initiatives in leading health care, academic, and research institutions as well as health technology start-ups. As Principal of Dalton Marketing Advisors, she helps organizations align marketing strategy with business goals, drawing on her leadership roles at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard University, and beyond. A trusted consultant, educator, and thought leader, Vicki brings a unique blend of strategic insight and real-world experience to every engagement. She has held leadership roles in many health industry professional organizations, as well as served on nonprofit boards. Her avocation is as a master naturalist and citizen scientist, leading programs at arboretums around Massachusetts.

Kate Curran founded School the World in 2009 with a mission to fight extreme poverty at its roots by bringing education to the world’s poorest children. She is also the author of School the World’s holistic education strategy, earning praise from USAID, Ministers of Education, and leading education experts. Now in its 16^th year, School the World has impacted more than 170,000 children in rural Central America, building 167 schools and 95 playgrounds, stocking 952 libraries, training 8,275 teachers, empowering 12,083 parents to be their child's "first educators" and awarding 3,055 scholarships for young people to continue their education after primary school.

Prior to School the World, Kate was an attorney and executive at GE Capital, where she was recognized as a change agent and thoughtful advocate for responsible business practices, shaping deals and products with an eye toward economic fairness, winning a significant investment for services to victims of identity theft, and brokering a $100,000,000 Community Reinvestment Act strategy with an innovative public-private partnership to revitalize Connecticut's downtrodden Bridgeport. G.E. recognized Kate’s accomplishments with multiple awards for legal excellence and outstanding contributions to the business. Both her high school and college have recognized her with their highest awards for leadership and service, and she was recently honored as one of Forbes’ 50 Over 50: Women Leading The Way In Impact.

Lisa Prior is a recognized author, speaker, and expert in leadership and change, featured or quoted in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Success Magazine, Forbes, ABC News Radio and several academic publications. Lisa serves Csuite, VP and high-potential executives, and has devoted her career to enabling leaders to build more open, inclusive environments where people and the organization thrive. She draws on both practical experience and academic training in organizational change and design, systems thinking, global cultures, positive psychology, instructional design, qualitative research, and adult learning. Lisa values evidence-based approaches and works with clients to pinpoint measurable outcomes. Recently, Lisa was part of a research team in a supervised study of work well-being and burnout. Results were published in a peer-reviewed journal. Lisa has served or is serving as an Executive Coach in both the MIT Sloan School of Management Executive Education program, as well as at Harvard Business School Executive Education. She is a Master Coach Supervisor in the Executive Coaching Program of William James College, Boston. 

A lifelong learner, Lisa is a fellow at the Institute of Coaching (A McLean/Harvard Medical School Affiliate). Professional certifications include: Transformational Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (Diversity@Workplace; Boston Chamber of Commerce); Organizational Culture Change; Intercultural Management/Global Cultures (Hofstede Institute, Lisbon, Portugal; Helsinki, Finland); International Coaching Federation (ICF); and a variety of leadership- and team- assessment tools and approaches. Lisa held a research appointment at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and holds Master Organizational and Adult Learning, Boston University; Bachelor of Arts, Psychology; Bachelor of Arts, Spanish, Fairfield University Before founding Prior Consulting Lisa led teams in financial services in a variety of settings and situations, including serving as the human resources project leader for Boston’s largest merger at the time, and acting as chief business officer for the company’s award-winning Corporate and Community Affairs function. Today, Lisa serves as board member of the Governor-appointed Massachusetts Economic Assistance Coordinating Council; President-Elect of The Boston Club, a 650+ organization of women executives; Board Member of STRIVE, a program of the Justice Resource Institute focused on Boston’s most vulnerable citizens; and board member of the consulting firm Power and Systems.