“When I first came to this country not speaking a word of English, I used to watch a lot of TV to learn English. One day on the 6 o’clock news, I saw a group of angry white parents throwing rocks at yellow school buses carrying small black children from Roxbury to South End; they called themselves BusStop. I knew then there was something very fundamentally wrong with this country.”

Shiree Teng has worked in the social sector for 30 years as a social and racial justice champion – as a front line organizer, network facilitator, capacity builder, grantmaker, and evaluator and learning partner. Shiree brings to her work a lifelong commitment to social change and a belief in the potential of groups of people coming together to create powerful solutions to entrenched social issues.

Shiree has an intimate understanding of the issues and challenges related to working in communities of color and dynamics of class, culture and power. Having spent her life in the social sector, Shiree comes to the work from the perspective of building capacity. For the past twelve years, Shiree has worked as a Program Officer and Consultant to Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness program. Shiree leads the statewide technical assistance team of La Piana Associates to support The California Endowment’s Healthy Returns Initiative. She has worked on the evaluation and capacity building teams for the Hewlett Foundation’s Neighborhood Improvement Initiative.  She is also the lead evaluator for NCDI’s five-year capacity building effort funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Benton Harbor, Michigan, as well as the Mid-South Delta region. Shiree leads by serving: she uses a culturally-based approach and relies on core competencies of strategic thinking, listening and synthesizing, connecting, and mobilizing action.

Shiree chairs the board of Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and previously LeaderSpring and other social sector groups. In 2008, Shiree received the Alliance of Nonprofit Management Capacity Builder of the Year Award, and was a member of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) National Conference Planning Committee.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Shiree is fluent in three Chinese dialects. Having lived and worked in Watsonville and Salinas with cannery and farmworkers, Shiree has a functional understanding of Spanish. She holds degrees in Social Welfare and Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and is a doctoral student in Human and Organizational Development at Fielding Graduate University. She lives in the Fruitvale District in Oakland.

Consulting clients include One East Palo Alto, National Community Development Institute, and South of Market Community Action Network.