Helen Dorado Alessi, one of the two newest members of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, has made a career out of working for social justice and helping foundations to leverage goodwill on behalf of underrepresented populations.
Along the way, she worked as Edwin Gould Foundation vice president and as the Toyota Motor corporate philanthropy manager. She also served for much of the decade of 2000 on the Board of Directors of Hispanics in Philanthropy and Philanthropy New York, as well as being a member of the Association for Black Foundation Executives
“No one foundation can do it all,” she says. “Developing partnerships across sectors is very helpful in terms of leveraging, impacting and succeeding in work toward social justice.”
She will be commuting from Long Beach, NY, to Arkansas for the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation meetings.
“We appreciate her willingness to guide and advise us on the implementation of our Moving the Needle 2.0 Strategic Plan,” said Winthrop Rockefeller President and CEO, Sherece West-Scantlebury, who said she was thrilled to see Alessi join the board. “We are so pleased this exceptional leader will offer her guidance and leadership to our Foundation.”
The timing also appears good for Alessi in her activism to make sure that her Long Island community was not overlooked in the massive Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts.
“The Hispanic community here really felt it,” said Alessi, who was serving at the time on the board of the Long Beach Latino Civic Association and also was recently nominated to the Long Beach City’s Ethics Commission. “We did a lot of work to help undocumented people get noticed and get services. People didn’t even know that we had a Hispanic population.”
She said the civic association helped to secure a $100,000 Robin Hood Foundation grant that, among other investments, helped to cover leases and provide housing for some of the residents who were left homeless by the super-storm.
The week before winging to Arkansas for her first Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation Board meeting, Alessi was to attend a meeting of her committee of the New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program outreach effort to discuss $25 million in state recovery projects proposed for the Long Beach area. She will be joining Calvin White, Jr. director of African and African American Studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, for their first Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation Board meeting on March 6.
Alessi, 54, is the daughter of Cuban and Puerto Rican parents, and her grandparents hail from Spain and Venezuela. Her husband of 30 years, Vincent Alessi, is the managing partner of Bobby Van’s Steakhouse in Lower Manhattan. They are awaiting the birth of their first grandchild on March 29. They have two grown children, daughter Andrea, who is a special education teacher, and son Vinny, who works at the new Bobby Van’s in Times Square, and a little Yorkie named Rocky.
