Shiyana Valentine joined WUCF TV & FM as their Education and Community Engagement Manager in January 2019. She is charged with growing WUCF’sr presence in the community and leading all PBS education projects and campaigns. As Central Florida’s PBS Station, WUCF works in schools, providing useful, child-engaging practical courses that feature PBS programs, case studies, standards-aligned and highly effective evidence-based curriculum. The partnership between PBS and local stations adapts public television programming — plus content from the Library of Congress, National Archives, NASA and more — to provide state curriculum-aligned, interactive digital learning objects for K-12 classrooms.
Previously, Shiyana successfully developed strategic partnerships for the Orange County Library System to promote and expand their youth services and audience, resulting in over 500,000 in annual cash and in kind donations and tripling community participation. She also cultivated a strong working relationship with Orange County Public Schools (OCPS) resulting in an initiative to automatically enroll students with a virtual library card thereby giving them free and direct access to ebooks, homework help and other valuable educational resources.
Before that, she was the founding Executive Director of Kerosene Lamp Foundation, a nonprofit organization that uses sports to empower at-risk youths to grow into healthy and well-educated leaders. Under her leadership, the organization scaled up operations to reach over 1500 youths annually and ran projects in multiple countries including St. Vincent and the Grenadines, USA, Trinidad & Tobago and Dominica.
Shiyana also spent three years with the World Bank’s Development Marketplace team where she successfully managed a global grant competition with an award pool of 4-6 Million that provided seed funding to innovative and early stage projects tackling poverty.
Shiyana has a Master’s Degree in International Development from American University in Washington, DC, and a Bachelor’s in Peace Studies and History from Colgate University in upstate New York.https://commons.erau.edu/space-congress-bios-2019/1052/thumbnail.jp