Robert F Sherman Ph.D. serves as Director, Initiative for Social and Emotional Learning at the NoVo Foundation. The Social and Emotional Learning Initiative seeks to advance educational experiences and practices that prepare children for personal and academic success—and help them develop the valuable social and emotional skills they need to become better students, create positive relationships and handle challenging situations they may face in school and life.
Most recently, Sherman served as Executive Director of the Action Center to End World Hunger, a division of Mercy Corps. The Action Center is an innovative, high-tech public and education/museum space that uses the lens of hunger to educate, inspire and mobilize action-taking (from personal to collective/political) against global poverty and hunger. While at Mercy Corps, he also developed and supervised the agency’s Global Citizen Corps, a youth activist and service program involving thousands of young people from 8 countries who convene in person and online in a yearlong peer-to-peer leadership, learning and service effort focused on local action-taking on global challenges around hunger, poverty, conflict, and human rights.
Sherman, founded and directed the national Effective Citizenry program at the Surdna Foundation in New York City where he served for 15 years. The program supported organizations that help young people participate meaningfully in shaping civic and community life. Anchored in social and emotional learning at its core, the Effective Citizenry program funded youth organizing, youth media, policy development, service-learning and a range of youth development strategies which promote individual growth and youth-led social change. Building strong intermediary organizations, undergirding funding decisions with research, and building sustainable, long-term field anchors was key to the program’s strategy.
Prior to Surdna, Sherman served in New York City government for 8 years: as Executive Director of the Increase the Peace Volunteer Corps, a city-wide, grassroots race relations initiative of the Mayor’s office in New York City; and as Director of the Community Relations Institute, a think tank studying neighborhood-based responses to racial tension housed at the New York City Commission on Human Rights. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University, and a BA from Haverford College.
