Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance

Director, Nonprofit Repositioning Fund

Nadya K. Shmavonian is Director of the Nonprofit Repositioning Fund, a newly created pooled fund to encourage and support mergers and other types of formal, long-term collaborations between nonprofit organizations. These repositioning collaborations can range from voluntary back-office consolidations, to programmatic joint ventures, to mergers and acquisitions. The Fund seeks to have catalytic impact on the capacity, effectiveness, and financial health of the Greater Philadelphia nonprofit sector. Nadya retains a private practice as an independent consultant to foundations and nonprofit organizations in the areas of strategic facilitation and planning, management and executive coaching, leadership and organizational development.
Nadya most recently served as president of Public/Private Ventures (P/PV) from January 2010 – July 2012, where she presided over the closure of the organization. Nadya has extensive foundation management experience, having served as vice president for strategy at the Rockefeller Foundation, and executive vice president at The Pew Charitable Trusts where she also worked as director of administration and as a program officer in health and human services. Before joining the foundation community, she worked in the health sector, as well as overseas in humanitarian relief, both of which she has continued to address during the almost three decades she has spent in and around philanthropy.

Nadya serves on the Boards of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, the Lenfest Foundation, and Philadelphia Youth Basketball. She helped found and served on the board of The Alliance for A Green Revolution in Africa (a joint partnership of the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations), as well as the Partners for Seed in Africa Fund, an initiative for South Sudan supported by Howard Buffet. She has served on the Advisory Boards of the National Philanthropic Trust and the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was one of the first two non-family members of the Surdna Foundation Board, where she served for six years. She is an instructor at the School of Social Policy and Practice (SP2) at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches graduate seminars to SP2 and Wharton students on nonprofit governance, as well an international on-line governance course for the Center for Social Impact Strategy.

Nadya holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.B.A. with a concentration in health care management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She was awarded the Kathleen McDonald Distinguished Alumna Award from Wharton Women in Business in 2011.