Taste of Success Awards
The Taste of Success Awards—the GRAMMY Awards of the social enterprise sector—honor the business professionals and executives from our corporate partners in the New York City region who have shown excellence in leadership and volunteerism to help low-income adults and youth secure good jobs and achieve economic mobility.
| The Spirit Award recognizes a volunteer whose commitment demonstrates StreetWise Partners’ mission and vision by helping mentees build pathways to sustainable employment. | Winner: Bobby Milancewich Bobby helped launch our first Jersey City program. Originally planned to be held at Lehman Brothers—only days before the bankruptcy—he quickly scrambled and helped move the entire program to a new site at Goldman Sachs. His leadership during these difficult times was incredible, and the NJ program launch was a huge success. Thank you Bobby. |
| The Mentor-Mentee Partnership Award is given to the team that best exemplifies the StreetWise Partners model for the mentor/mentee partnership. | Winners: Leshai Ryals and Andre Stapleton Leshai, a mother of two children, came to StreetWise Partners to find a career with job security and benefits. With the unending support from her mentor Andre, Leshai was able to focus on her personal priorities and career goals, and now has a permanent position with Morgan Stanley that provides her with the salary and benefits she needs to support her family. Congratulations Leshai and Andre! |
| The Leadership Award acknowledges and celebrates the volunteer whose leadership has mobilized and inspired others to commit their time and resources to developing onramps of opportunity for the unemployed and underemployed. | Winner: Sunil Bhide Sunil has led StreetWise Partners programming for young adults for 5 years. He’s in an outstandingly inspiring leader, dedicates an enormous amount of time, has a “can –do” attitude, strong business acumen and is a true leader of change. He also won the top volunteer award while he was at Credit Suisse. |
| The Social Entrepreneurship Award is given to the volunteer whose creative and innovative spirit drives StreetWise Partners’ growth and impact. | Winner: Patrick Chang Patrick’s contribution to StreetWise Partners in the 18 months that he has been involved has been immense. Patrick brought a new level of energy and creativity to the table, and always ensures everyone is connected; he is a true self-starter, always engaging new volunteers, and encouraging current volunteers to maintain their involvement. He also was responsible for the Taste of Success event webpage which was a fantastic addition to this year’s event! |
| The Wise Award celebrates the contributions of a StreetWise Partners volunteer who has supported and enabled low-income youth and adults to advance in their careers by activities such as launching a new curriculum, creating a new event that has national impact or opening new pathways to mentees in a new market area such as energy. | Winner: David Jaffe David has been involved with StreetWise Partners for almost 8 years. David organized an ‘Industry Day’ where mentees from all over New York and New Jersey and volunteers from different industries came together to conduct career panels and informational interviews. The day was a HUGE success and Industry Day has now been adopted by all of our program sites. |
| The The Corporate Community Impact Award showcases organizational excellence in leadership as demonstrated by a corporation’s outstanding commitment to the mission of StreetWise Partners. | Winner: TheLadders The Ladders launched a high impact event to engage its employees to leverage their top talents and assets to improve the resumes, interview skills and job networks of people working out of poverty. The Senior Team and employees looked at their business model and creatively said, what talents of human capital do we have as a firm to help mobilize economic change for others? They are an outstanding partner! |
| The Strategic Growth Award recognizes a volunteer that helped StreetWise Partners in a planning, technical, consulting, or strategic capacity to help the organization impact more people and grow in the future. | Winner: Barry Sofferman This new award recognizes an individual who has exceeded the role as volunteer to help StreetWise Partners achieve strategic growth. There were many contenders for this award, but it was Barry who received an unanimous vote after donating nearly 100 hours of time to help StreetWise Partners navigate the technical issues that many small entrepreneurial organizations face. A special thanks to Barry for making StreetWise Partners recent office move go so smoothly. Congratulations Barry. |
