In Episode 03 of Leaders of Tomorrow, LAJF Executive Director Helene Mattera talks to Inna Kuvich. Inna immigrated with her family to Brooklyn from Ukraine in 1994, and she attended Camp Rising Sun in 2001. Though she works in consulting and brand management, Inna has remained active with LAJF and CRS ever since, selflessly giving back in a variety of ways. It all stems from her gratitude for her time at CRS and her desire for subsequent generations of campers to have as amazing an experience as she did. Just a few of the conversation topics:
The nervousness Inna felt at applying to a “sleep-away” camp for the first time
The impact CRS has not just on campers but on their “whole orbit” of family and friends
Inna’s lifelong bonds with friends she met at camp
How CRS encourages young people to push boundaries—and their own limits
That the CRS experience showed Inna that “there is a lot of good in the world,” and how the presence of fellow alumni all over the world reminds her of that
What it is that keeps Inna involved with LAJF and CRS after so many years
Listen now:
Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to Leaders of Tomorrow. I'm your host, Helene Mattera. We created Leaders of Tomorrow to inspire you to find your calling, to help make a better world and share how our program lays the foundation to inspiring great leaders.
At our summer program, we give teenagers the opportunity to run the camp each day, while staff stay behind the scenes as a support system. This gives our participants practice in making important decisions and seeing firsthand, how the international community is impacted. Decades after their camp experience, our alums have shared that it was Camp Rising Sun that had the greatest impact on their approach to impact the leadership and how they choose to dedicate themselves to serving their communities and the world. We hope this series gives our listeners hope and prompts you to reflect on your own leadership styles.
In today's episode, I'm talking with Inna Kuvich. In her work life, she is a strategy and marketing lead at Pernod Ricard, and before that was a senior manager in the retail and consumer products at Deloitte Consulting. In her volunteer life, she is leading our strategic planning process, is currently on the board of the Camp Rising Sun New York Alumni Association, and was just elected to the Board of Directors of Louis August Jonas Foundation.
I have known Inna since she was a camper and have watched in awe as she has developed as a leader in her career and in service to our organization. Inna attended Camp Rising Sun in the summer of 2001. She was born in the Ukraine, moved to Brooklyn in 1994 and attended Stuyvesant High School, a highly competitive public high school in New York city. She describes what it was like to attend an international program as an immigrant teenager and how it prepared her for a career involving a lot of travel.
Her experience at camp gave her the confidence and skills to thrive in multicultural environments. We recorded the session on September 11th, 2020. It should not go without mention that when 15 year old Inna returned to school in September, 2001, she was just a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. She recounts a beautiful story of that day and how feeling globally interconnected gives her hope knowing there is a network of Rising Sun alumni trying to make the world better, even through difficult times.
Paint a picture for us. It's 2001 in Brooklyn, and you decide to apply to Camp Rising Sun.
Sure. I had moved to the U.S. from Ukraine in 1994 so my family had been living in Brooklyn for a while. It was my freshman year of high school. And so after going to elementary school and junior high school in Midwood, which is South Brooklyn, like a typically basically Jewish, Italian, Russian mixed neighborhood, I had started commuting to school. So for me, this was the first time where I was going to school by myself. I was on the train for about 40 minutes to an hour every day, and I was getting out of my Brooklyn bubble, so to speak, and getting to know other parts of New York city on my own without my parents.
And what made you apply to Camp Rising Sun?
So, my English teacher recommended me for Camp Rising Sun. I remember going to an info session and hearing about the experience with some of the other alumni from Stuy shared and how they talked about their summer and how exciting it was for them to be around people who came from different parts of the world, like some parts that I had heard of, some parts that I had never heard of and what an important experience it was for them. So for me, that sounded super interesting.
I'd say I was also very nervous about leaving for eight weeks and abandoning whatever summer plans I thought that I would have with my friends or with my family. I had never gone to sleep-away camp before. So it was something that I was interested in, but it was also something that I wasn't a hundred percent sure I'd be able to do. So I remember making a deal with my mom that I would apply and then we'd see what happens and only then it would be decided.
So, you decided to come and then you decided to stay. What was that decision like for you and what was your interaction with your mom about deciding to stay at camp?
Well, I think I was pretty nervous about it, but I didn't really think about it as much. I was just thinking about, "Okay, well, if it's not it's fine, or if it's not as good as I think being in the city could be, then why would I do it?" So, again, we had made a similar agreement, which was, "Okay, well, if you're still not having as much fun when you're there, you can always go home." But the funny thing is, the second I got there, and even before, because I had hosted someone, so I already had a sense of how fun this summer would be and what are the people that I would need would be. But once I met people on the campus, I just saw how interesting it would be to get to know everybody and spend time with them, and how much was really planned for summer. I honestly didn't even think about going home after that.
Yeah, that's so common. I find that a lot of the fear is in the unknown, but once you're there, it's really hard not to enjoy and love the program as you're living it.
Exactly.
Tell us about the person that you hosted before camp.
When Inna was in high school, her family hosted a girl from Hungary, whose family came to visit for Thanksgiving years later.
At first, we decided not to host anybody because actually my parents and I moved into our house probably three weeks before it was time for camp to start. So, my house was under all kinds of constructions and my mom was really worried about hosting someone, because it wasn't perfect conditions, but then someone called again and said, "We really, really need hosts. Please." So I was pretty excited about it.
My parents agreed and I ended up posting Alexandra from Hungary. We spent a couple of days before camp exploring New York City. I remember being so proud to show her like downtown Manhattan. That was where I went to school and it was the area that I was just getting familiar with.
Again, that became super significant, given everything that then went on to happen 2001, but it was such a good foundation for our friendship because after hosting her, I'd always said, "I'll come visit you when we're in college." So I ended up visiting her when I was abroad, and then she ended up coming to the U.S. for her master's degree and basically living in my apartment on the weekends in New York City. So getting to know a lot of my undergrad friends and obviously my camp friends.
Then her family came here to the U.S. for Thanksgiving because of her and my parents ended up hosting her family. So it was a really cute meeting of the families because they had known of each other for so many years and had heard of each other. So it was crazy to see like our moms were basically friends too from having known each other over decades.
I love how the camp experience not only impacts the person who attends, but it really just impacts their whole orbit, including families and other friends. That's a great story.
I think it's funny. You'd asked me what was it like coming back? I mentioned it before that maybe camp friends were an unknown entity, but when I think about how they were an unknown entity then, but now like my family is so protective of my camp friends too, that it used to be like, wait, "What do you mean? You're trying to do this with people from camp. We don't know them." And now it's like, "Oh, okay, well, if it's someone from camp, it's totally fine. We're good. Tell us how it goes, have them come over for dinner."
Like, one of my camp friends, he has a law firm on Avenue U, which is close to my house. I remember when there was this [incident] that was going on, my dad went to drive by to make sure that everything was okay and like to report back, which I thought was really sweet.
Yeah, the camp people have permeated the family boundary.
Exactly.
That's great. You went to camp, you had an experience and something that I know about you is, that you really kept in touch and stayed really connected, made a lot of lifelong friends at our program. What was it like to go home in 2001 after having had this really impactful experience and then returning back to your neighborhood in Brooklyn?
Yeah. So I think the first thing I noticed, I was an only child, so it was a pretty big adjustment for me to go with living with that many people, to coming back to my house where it was relatively quiet, or I'm the only person making the noise. So I remember feeling like I really missed that part about how busy and how active things were. And I remember looking at a map of the world and just thinking about how crazy it was to know real people in all parts of the continent and how you read about something and you studied it. Or in my case, I'd obviously lived somewhere else as well, but how places don't seem so far or so scary when you're on Skype with someone from Eastern, from Hungary or from Israel throughout the course of your couple of weeks.
I think the other part that was pretty unique about my experience is that only a couple of weeks after we got back from camp, it was September 11th, 2001. So that was a very emotional and big day for anyone who was, whatever parts of the country they were in, but of course, for people in New York and people at my school who were there.
So, I remember I actually left the house that day, reminding myself to make sure that I wished one of my camp sisters a happy birthday. Then after everything happened and after eventually I made my way back home pretty late that evening, I had so many messages and so many phone calls from people from so many countries. It was just so crazy to me that we had had this experience and that something happened and people were actively reaching out. It really made me appreciate that connection that I had built in terms of not only did I have a sudden care and interest in all these places in the world, but equally people have that interest in me. That really over time, I think I've always approached camp with that type of open-mindedness of like, there's always more people that you can get to know who share your values and how important it is to be open to that.
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I agree that events like that really bind us together in some ways and realize all of the connections that we have and all the potential connections that we can have if we put more work into it. What was the post-camp Inna like? How did you merge your two worlds together?
So, when I had reflected earlier on about how going to high school was a big change for me, because it was a change out of my neighborhood and change into a new location and new experience, having gone to camp was a whole other level into that, right? Because not only did I now have friends that were based about my school, but I also had friends who lived in other parts of Brooklyn. I had friends who lived in Queens, who lived in Manhattan, and all of that was on top of some of the connections that we had in school. So all of a sudden, I wanted to explore even more. And this was a group of friends that were completely new to my family. They didn't know them from school. They didn't know them growing up. They weren't family friends. It was a whole unknown entity.
For me, what I really appreciated was, I met people who had a lot of similar experiences, especially because a lot of people from New York are girls or people who grew up somewhere else, or if their families are from somewhere else, so it's not just New York that's a part of their identity. But it was also really interesting to meet people who were pushing boundaries in some of the things that they were doing, whether it was music interests or art or different lifestyles. So for me, high school, I hadn't really had a chance to really diversify myself yet because it was just freshman year. Camp was really my way of meeting people who taught me to be a little bit more open-minded about values or who were exploring things that maybe I wasn't.
How did this experience, opening up your world intersect or even potentially conflict with the more protective perhaps, immigrant family dynamic that you've had?
It's pretty common that when you move from somewhere else, you already tend to feel a little bit more protective. You want to make sure that everything is always safe and it's a little bit different from the mindset that maybe other people grow up with. So I think for me, it really was around testing my boundaries and trying to go to more places or venture further out. I think probably the biggest thing was, wanting to go out of the city, for example.
So, I remember when I came back, it's like, "I'm going to Greece the day that I graduate high school." It was very interesting because all of a sudden I was like, "Wait, my boundary isn't just exploring New York City. My boundary is actually, I want to explore the world." So even saying things like that was so scary for my family. They were like, "What do you mean you want to go?" To their credit, they were eventually very supportive, but I can see how having a kid who comes back and it's like, "Well, now I want to go to these 60 places where I'd met people," and some of these places is in Forest Hills, Queens. But some of these places it's like Japan. And having your 14-year-old talk about that is... I think especially then when things weren't so connected, it was really different from how people had grown up, where most people didn't commute to high school and they maybe didn't go away to college and they didn't move away when they were older.
Travel has really been a central part of your career working as a consultant. Can you talk to us a little bit about how central travel is to the work that you've been doing?
Following her Camp Rising Sun experience, Inna resolved to visit Greece upon graduation from high school.
Absolutely. So the first job that I got out of undergrad was consulting. Part of taking on that job was, you have to be okay with going anywhere. That can be anywhere within driving distance, can be anywhere in the country, and even better would be going somewhere international for assignment. So, because I had been so excited about traveling and visiting people basically as soon as I could getting out of high school, I did end up going to Europe and I also studied abroad and had the chance to visit camp sisters there.
For me, I never felt unsafe at the idea of travel. I always just felt like, "Okay, well, if I go here, then there's probably somebody that I know from camp here, or maybe they're close enough." And that means if they're good, and I had this connection with them, then what it really means is that there's a lot of good out in the world.
And I think going back to your other question, one of the mindsets about being more protective around yourself, having had that immigrant experiences, you don't always trust that there's as much good in the world, so you're much more apprehensive. But I think the camp experience for me, made me feel really positive, like that there is a lot of good in the world. It was a good thing to go out and seek that. So, that job for me was not intimidating at all. If anything, it was a selling point because all I could think about was, "Okay, I have this opportunity not only to travel for work, but use that as a way to connect with some of the people that I've met from camp over the years."
Your work with the foundation, so volunteering with the Louis August Jonas Foundation, and working with Camp Rising Sun, I've noticed that you have been able to incorporate your professional skills with some of the needs that we have had in our organization. There's so many projects, special projects that you've worked on, but I'm curious if you could talk about how your work has impacted the ways that you want to give back to Camp Rising Sun.
I thought about what I learned on my job, and sometimes the feeling is, when you're in strategy consulting, what do you really learn versus someone who maybe has been in the same job for years on end? And I started thinking about how can I take some of the frameworks and some of the getting people to articulate the correct problem and frame out the right options? Where would that be a value? How do I use that as opposed to maybe just relying on what people automatically think of as financial contributions that are a lot harder for people to make when they're younger or more junior in their careers?
So, for me, I realized I also liked what I did and I specifically sought out areas where that type of thinking is helpful. And social planning, I would say is a good example where a lot of the work is really figuring out how to things connect? Or what's the right question to be asking? How do you ask it? Who do you ask it to? So that's really been a passion area of mine is, figuring out what is it that I know from my job that can be relevant here?
I think even as I look at what was happening over the past couple of months with the virtual instructions, I think it was so great to see people really share some of their professional experience with other alumni who are interested or also work in that space and have those types of discussions and see the power of our community when we use our collective brains well. This was really something.
Have you ever been able to utilize the Camp Rising Sun alumni community with regard to your career? whether for specific opportunities or even just support or coaching, mentoring?
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of it was around helping find alumni who work in similar areas. Actually, I also remember using it for colleges as well, just going back pretty far. But I think a lot of it is around mentoring support and finding people who are, especially women, who I think are breaking out into leadership roles and getting guidance from them on how did they do it? How do you not diminish yourself and your contribution in the workplace? Which is again, probably more likely to happen to women. I would say our camp alumni network has been pretty powerful with role models, and with people that you can reach out to on these topics for sure.
What our listeners may not know is that our program is gender divided to a girls and a boys program separately. So, thinking back to your experience, going to the girls program, do you feel like that... or how do you feel like that female community impacted how you saw yourself as far as your own leadership style and voice and how that potentially impacted the path you were on?
Me, I tend to be quieter and I used to be a lot more shy than I am. I really felt like the world valued a specific type of leadership. So who's the person that's going to be loud and stand in front of the room and take charge, be that kind of obvious leader that you see? So, when I got to camp and we talked about this idea of servant leadership, what does it mean to lead a community, it was such a different way of thinking. I began to realize that I do have the potential to be a leader because there's not only one type of leader that is going to be valued in that world. If anything, having that community mindset of that orientation is, so important and so much more relevant when you're thinking about how to run a good team or how to run a sustainable organization.
So, I think for me, having the chance to get to practice that in a community, I think for me personally, the fact that it was a girls camp, I think helped, but I do also value the fact that we do have a cross camp and a boys camp, where we have the opportunity to meet people across both of those camps over the years. Really, it helped me understand that you don't have to be a very specific way to be a leader. It's that when you're in a community and the community has certain values, anyone can lead if they are willing to step up and kind of be the values that the community needs at that time.
Why do you still stay involved after all of these years? You're someone who is very closely involved and serves the organization in so many different ways. What do you get out of it as far as from a volunteer perspective, why do you keep doing this?
I think I've always been part of relatively large organizations. So I went to a large public high school. I went to a large university. I worked at a large company, went to a large graduate school. So for me, camp is actually one of the places that I've been involved in that's a relatively small organization. So, part of it is, when you're a part of something smaller, its ability to exist without the involvement of the people who participated in it and ensure that it's better for the next set of people who go through is much more important in the sense that, if I didn't do anything for my university nothing would change on their end. But I think if people took that mindset for LAJF, given how important alumni involvement is to both the financial side, but also to the passing the traditions and the network. That would have a pretty detrimental impact on our community.
So, part of it is, that sense of obligation about, given that we're smaller, how important to this to have more people that participate. And I think from a personal level, I've obviously been able to meet people over the years that became really good friends, that weren't people that I went to the camp with. So, I was thinking about it as like, it's the gift that keeps on giving. You can meet with someone at a reunion later in life or through a committee or something and become really good friends. You had this shared experience, but it wasn't something that you did together, but it can still be one of such a meaningful connection that you have. That, I think for me, it's really been such a big broadening of my social circle and my horizons over the years that I think I... That's what I get out of it, I guess.
Yeah. What do you think 15-year-old Inna would think of you today?
Ooh, I don't know. That's a hard question to ask. Well, hopefully she would be proud of the fact that I'm still involved. And I actually, I remember in my vigil letter, I said to myself that, "If you're not in touch with these people today, you better get on the phone with them right now." And I was like, "Huh, I still am. That's pretty good."
For those who don't know, the vigil letter is a letter that campers write to themselves at the end of the summer. They sit out in the woods, maintaining a fire all night and then they get the letter back when they're 21.
Yeah, that was pretty cool. I think she'd be pretty proud of all of the things that I've gotten to see and how it built my camp network and hopefully over the things that I'm doing right now.
Inna, what gives you hope these days?
For me, it's when I think about all of the things that are going on in the world and especially how the most recent several months brought so much of that to light with COVID and the social justice conversations that have been going on, I think what gives me hope is that there's a lot of people out there who are genuinely committed to building a better world with what they're doing. And it doesn't necessarily have to be all these big things that they're doing. There's a lot of people doing big and great things, people who are committed to just creating a better community for themselves and the people that are around them on a day-to-day basis.
Even joining some of the sessions from campus somewhere like the virtual alumni instructions, was just so great to see that everyone is thinking in this way and making this concentrated effort across so many different parts of the world. So that these big struggles are not individual struggles, but they're a struggle that everyone is having, and I think that that gives me hope that someone will find ways to make it better or collectively people will move the needle on some of the things that we know are pretty terrible today.
Non-profit organizations like ours are able to thrive with the support of brilliant volunteers like Inna Kuvich. We are grateful to her and other alumni who lend their time and talents to help us carry out our mission. Volunteering with the Louis August Jonas Foundation, or another organization that is important to you, is a powerful way to stay energized and to contribute to building a better world. You can learn about our volunteer opportunities on our website, www.lajf.org. Thank you for joining us today. And you can find all the links and show notes for today's episode at www.lajf.org/podcast. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform to hear more inspiring stories of leadership, connection, and hope.
About Inna:
Inna Kuvich serves a a senior manager in the consulting and brand management world, having spent her career developing these skills. She earned her MBA in Management from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2013, having graduated with a bachelor’s in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell in 2008. She is on the Board of Directors of the Louis August Jonas Foundation and has volunteered countless hours for the organization’s benefit.
Connect with Inna in the CRS Alumni Group on LinkedIn.