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Alumni News | 01/26/2021
By: Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation

January 2021 Connections

The Alumni Advisory Board and emeritus members had a zoom catch-up.
Julie Gerkhi (1998) and Robert Accordino (1999) met up over zoom.
Juliana Tafur (2003) connected over zoom with Jarvis Sam (2009) and Jorge Casimiro (1994), who both work at Nike.
Juliana Tafur (2003) also met up with Chantelle George (2006) in Miami for a socially-distanced lunch.

Virtual #CokeScholarsPro Classes

Led by Coke Scholars for Coke Scholars.

Mike Doughty (1993) led You’re in Charge of Your Own Happiness: Proven Strategies to Make Life Better.
Jonathan Quarles (2000) led Making Dollars While Making Change: The Importance of Building and Growing Double and Triple-Bottom Line Businesses.
Juliana Tafur (2003) led Conversations that Matter and Courageous Listening, a two-part virtual empathy-inducing workshop on how to have heart-to-heart conversations that lead to understanding and how to listen to see past stereotypes. This is the group from night one…
…and this is the group from night two!

The SIP Podcast: Season 2 and Instagram Lives

In the third episode of season 2, Chantelle George (2006), founder of her own higher ed consulting business, interviews fellow entrepreneur and Coke Scholar Kathryn Minshew (2004) about her journey from working on vaccine introduction in Rwanda with the Clinton Health Access Initiative, to creating a career blog for women, to founding and leading The Muse.

The two discuss the obstacles women face when pitching investors and how Kathryn used real-life A/B testing to find which environment and persona works best for her. “I was already getting dinged for being young and being female – I needed to show up ready to play,” she says.

Chantelle and Kathryn also went live on Instagram to talk more about being women entrepreneurs.

In episode 5, Sue Suh (1992), the first Chief People Officer for TIME, interviews fellow Coke Scholar and good friend Jason Feldman (1990) about his journey to co-founding Vault Health, a startup specializing in healthcare for men that turned its focus to distributing the first FDA EUA approved at-home saliva test for COVID-19, helping the PGA, NBA, and NHL resume practice and games and universities reopen their doors.

Sue and Jason went live on our Instagram and talked about their holidays and Jason’s triplets, who are seniors in high school.

In the last episode of the season, actor Kevin Shen (2000) interviews Joe English (2013) about his journey creating Hope in a Box, a nonprofit on a mission to help rural public schools cultivate empathy and fight prejudice by representing LGBTQ people, stories, and history in school libraries and classrooms.

Joe shares how, starting with his own high school, Hope in a Box gives rural educators curated boxes of books with LGBTQ+ characters, detailed curriculum for these books, and coaching on how to build an inclusive classroom. Since 2018, Hope in a Box has grown into a national program supporting hundreds of schools in all 50 states and currently has a waitlist of 600 schools.

Kevin and Joe also went live on our Instagram to talk how the program was developed, some of the roadblocks Joe’s encountered with school boards, and how he made the leap of quitting his job at McKinsey to lead Hope in a Box full-time.

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