2022 ATHENA Leadership Award Recipient, Christi Terefenko Co-Founder & Executive Director, VOiCEup Berks

CO-FOUNDER & EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, VOICEUP BERKS

Christi Terefenko

The ATHENA Leadership Award celebrates leaders who demonstrate excellence, creativity and initiative in their business or profession; provide valuable service to improve the quality of life for others in their community; and actively assist women in achieving their full leadership potential. Since 1993, 38 distinguished women in the Berks community have received the ATHENA and we proudly present 2022 ATHENA Leadership Award recipient Christi Sychterz Terefenko as our Woman2Know!

What path led you to where you are today?

I was born and raised right here in Reading. I attended Lehigh University where I received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and then Johns Hopkins University where I received a master’s degree in biomedical engineering. After graduate school I moved to Virginia where I began a 20-year career in the medical research field. I moved back to Berks in 2001, continued to work as a research consultant and began to become involved in nonprofit work locally. I not only volunteered but I sat on numerous non-profit boards including BEACON House, the Gilmore | Henne Community Fund, Wood-to-Wonderful and the Junior League of Reading (JLR). As part of JLR, where I also served as President, I helped launch successful programs like JLR’s “Youth Empowered” initiative and its “Young Women’s Summit,” a two-weekend long program for Reading and Muhlenberg middle-school girls to learn leadership skills through education and service learning. After spending several years working with my colleagues, Rachel Kuhn and Christie Botterbusch, implementing service clubs in local school districts, we turned our passion for empowering youth into a career by co-founding the nonprofit organization VOiCEup Berks. VOiCEup Berks and its Youth Volunteer Corps of Reading programs give youth the opportunity to advocate for issues they are most passionate about and take initiative by developing service projects to affect change in those issue areas.

Is there an “a-ha” moment or experience that defines who you are today?

In my early work with local nonprofits, I began to feel something missing. I saw there were not many available opportunities for youth to engage in meaningful community projects, at least not in ways that make them understand the “why” behind the actions. I realized there was a need to give youth a platform from which they can speak out and help on issues they decide are important; a platform youth can use to create sustainable change by engaging in the community in meaningful ways.

What is “service learning"?

Service learning is a teaching and learning strategy that combines education and reflection with meaningful community service to enhance students’ learning. It’s important to teach youth the “why” behind what they are doing and that every volunteer task, even the non-glamourous ones, serves a purpose when working to make community impact. For example, several years ago we did a YVC project with Family Promise where they needed help stuffing envelopes to support their work fighting homelessness. Not exactly something middleschool or junior high kids get excited about, right? Well, we started out the project by asking each student to draw a picture of what they thought a homeless person looked like. Many

of them drew pictures of old men under bridges with shopping carts. From there, we talked to the group about what Family Promise does, how they help homeless families and homeless teens, the causes of homelessness, the large number of homeless youth in local school districts and how important it is to get information about Family Promise’s services out to members of the community. With this background, our youth volunteers better understood the need and how important it was to get those envelopes stuffed. So, they stuffed the envelopes happily because they understood they were helping, even only if in a small way. At the end of the stuffing party, we asked our YVC students again to draw a picture of a homeless person. These last pictures were very different from the first ones. One student drew a picture of himself and said, “A homeless person can look just like me.” Their perceptions changed as a result not simply from doing the task but from understanding why the task was important. That, is service learning.

What have you learned from your work?

I am constantly amazed at the power, intelligence and passion of the students I work with. Their passion lifts me up. I have as much to learn from them as they do from me. Do you have a mentor or friend who inspired you in your work?

I am inspired first and foremost by my mom. I am the 10th of 11 children in our family and we grew up with her example that service to others is essential. One way she (and my dad) served the community was as foster parents, and I grew up with many foster siblings running around our home. She was a woman of faith, believing “To whom much is given, much is expected.”1 She lived it as well as passed on those values to us.

What is the best advice you have received?

Well, it’s not so much advice as an author whose words resonate with me, Marianne Williamson: And as we let our own light shine, We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.2 What advice do you want to give other women?

Women, even today, are encouraged to be modest. I think we need to embrace our fabulousness. Don’t apologize for being awesome! I also think that we need to constantly strive to lift each other up. Too many times we see a win for someone else as a loss for ourselves. We need to learn to truly celebrate the accomplishments of other women as a win for us all. There is enough room on the mountain top for all of us to stand. What does it mean to you to win the ATHENA Award?

I was nominated by Katie Schadler, a Wyomissing High School senior with whom I have worked on incredible youth-driven projects over the past two years. I am grateful to be able to use the ATHENA Award as a platform to empower more young people like Katie and encourage them to take on leadership roles in their schools and in the community. As past ATHENA winners already know, we don’t get anywhere by ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before us, our friends and mentors, sisters and colleagues, and we reach our hand out to help elevate the young women that come behind us. I am blessed to have co-founded such an impactful organization, to help facilitate amazing projects, to work with and mentor amazing young women, to collaborate with and learn from amazing female leaders and to ultimately be able to make a positive mark in this world.

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1Luke 12:48, the Bible 2 “Our Deepest Fear,” A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson,

March 1996

What people say about Woman2Know, Christi Terefenko:

In teaching me to recognize my potential and fearlessly voice my opinions as not only a community leader but as a female, Christi’s mentorship has most significantly inspired me to unapologetically immerse myself into my passions…Christi has wholeheartedly changed the very direction of my life. — Katie Schadler, Wyomissing High School senior Christi really is one of my biggest inspirations: a successful woman who uses her position to empower the next generation. — Saishree Mupparaju, Exeter High School senior Her passion to serve the community by empowering our youth is beyond gratitude from Berks County, as she is the reason behind youth excelling and using their voices. — EliAnna Bermudez, Oley Valley High School senior

Above L to R: Rachel Kuhn, Christie Botterbusch & Christi Terefenko – VOiCEup Founders

VOiCEup Berks/Youth Volunteer Corps of Reading

VOiCEup Berks, a fund of Berks County Community Foundation, was founded in 2015 to connect people and organizations to meaningful volunteer and service-learning opportunities. Youth Volunteer Corps of Reading is the youth program arm of VOiCEup. Youth Volunteer Corps (YVC) is a national program that develops students age 11-18 by engaging them in service-learning opportunities that meet community needs, build life and career skills and inspire a lifetime service ethic. Since launching YVC Reading programs in 2016, VOiCEup has engaged over 1,600 unduplicated youth in 24,000+ hours of community service to Berks County. What is the general mission of VOiCEup Berks?

The motto of VOiCEup Berks is “Find your VOiCE. Make an Impact. Change the World.” It’s the genesis of the organization: Give people, especially youth, a voice and give them opportunities to make sustainable change. Even the logo reflects the mission: Volunteer Opportunities i (an individual raising their hand) Connecting Everyone. What are some of the ways in which VOiCEup Berks has impacted the community?

“Girls Supporting Girls. Period.” was a project created in 2018 by a group of Reading middle school girls to fight for menstrual equity by ensuring that period products in underserved facilities like low-income schools, shelters and prisons, were safely accessible and affordable. The project continues today with ongoing product supply drives and raising awareness about period poverty. And Stand Together Against Racism (STAR). In the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the pandemic, several peers and I initiated a virtual series called “Community Conversations for Change,” a safe space for youth to engage in challenging but necessary conversations about race. STAR members shared these conversations with police officers, state representatives and civil rights activists; lead a virtual national anti-racist sit-in called “Stand-Up, Stand-In” and delivered a presentation on increasing cultural representation within curriculum to over 40 Berks County teachers at a professional development conference. What started as a small project to locally address racism transformed into a national youth-driven movement carrying its message of tolerance and acceptance to thousands of people through dozens of youth-led projects, striving to educate others, to stand up to intolerance, to respect differences and to create a community that is welcoming to all.

What do you want youth to learn from or want youth to teach the community?

VOiCEup Berks provides youth with the opportunity to pick the issues they want to address, the issues they see need to be addressed. As such, they are invested in the projects and incredibly passionate about them. Even during the pandemic, the youth used virtual platforms to connect with each other and the community at-large about everything that was going on. VOiCEup Berks shows youth that when kids talk, people listen.

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By Kirsten P. Haas, Executive Director Girls on the Run of Berks County