A soon-to-be Clark University alumna will be the featured speaker at the May 20 Friday Night Dinner, one of the highlights of Reunion Weekend.
Delight Gavor ’16 is a Global Scholar, psychology major and double minor in management and entrepreneurship. In her first year at Clark, she co-founded Dormboard, an attachable bedside desk for students that is offered to incoming Clark and Worcester Consortium students.
Combining her interests of education and entrepreneurship with her passion for youth engagement, Gavor co-founded the Butterfly Effect. In its infancy, the program was designed to help 36 truant youths explore areas beyond the classroom and apply those discoveries to solve issues in their community. After being awarded a grant from the Davis Projects for Peace, Gavor was able to grow the Butterfly Effect has been able to grow into a year-long curriculum for more than 200 students in two public schools in her home of Accra, Ghana.
Gavor will attend the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Learning and Teaching program in the fall. She conveys her gratitude to her family, particularly her parents, Vera and Sebastian Gavor, who will be in the audience at Sunday’s commencement.
Also at the dinner, Clark will honor two outstanding alumnae.
Shelia McCann ’71 will be presented with the Distinguished Service Award.
A native of Washington, D.C., McCann’s 40-year management career spans multiple industries in New England, New York City, Washington and South Florida. She was an assistant dean of students at Clark and corporate equal employment officer for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company before beginning a 13-year career in the financial services industry that concluded at Fannie Mae.
McCann served as the deputy assistant secretary for administration in the U.S. Department of the Treasury during the Clinton administration. Since 2001, she has lived in South Florida and worked in the nonprofit sector, serving victims of domestic violence and as a grants professional. She ended her full-time professional career in 2015 as the first senior director for strategic clinical programs for Health Choice Network, a collaboration of community health centers in 14 states serving more than nine million insured and uninsured residents. She holds master’s degrees from the Tufts University Department of Education and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.
Robin Cohen’06, M.P.A. ’07, will receive the Young Alumni Award.
Cohen has served as a class agent, APAP admissions volunteer, and member of the Class Reunion Committee, and is on the steering committee of the 75th Anniversary Celebration of Coed Clark. She has pursued opportunities in the nonprofit sector as both an employee and volunteer since graduating from Clark with her bachelor’s degree in government and international relations and master’s degree in public administration.
Cohen is the associate director of annual giving for Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, where she oversees the annual fundraising efforts of BGCB’s young professionals group, the Friends Council, and the women’s leadership council, the Artemis Circle. Additionally, she serves on Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters Board of Directors and co-chairs the Friend 2 Friend Advisory Committee. An active community volunteer, she is a tutor and mentor at the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club and has been matched with Dmitriy, a young man with mild developmental disabilities for the last eight years.
The New Jersey native lives in Boston, where she was recently honored as a “Chai in the Hub” awardee from Combined Jewish Philanthropies. She thanks her parents for insisting she take a tour of Clark after initially refusing to get out of the car as a high school junior.