SCI Welcomes new Board Chair Alberto Calvo

Here at SCI we are pleased to welcome Alberto Calvo as our new Board Chair.  By way of introducing this pillar of the community to our loyal supporters, we thought we'd share some information about Alberto and why he is excited about social capital.

Alberto Calvo is currently President of Compare Supermarkets Inc., a $13 million a year business serving the specific grocery needs of Hispanics and other ethnic minorities in the eastern Massachusetts area. Alberto is an engineering professional with over 35 years of experience in the defense industry. He held various engineering and management positions at TASC, Northrop Grumman Information Technology, SAIC, Jacobs Technology and currently at MCR Federal, LLC.  He is currently consulting for the AWACS Program Office at the Electronic Systems Center (ESC), Hanscom AFB, Bedford MA.  Alberto has served on various non-profit Boards of Directors: Catholic Charities of Massachusetts (1993-1996), Roxbury Community College (1997-2001), the Cuban Cultural Center (President from 2000 to 2002), and the Hispanic American Chamber of Commerce (HACC), who he co-founded in 1995. He was part of the Lead Boston Class of 2000, from the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ). More recently, he joined the Board of Social Capital Inc. (SCI), an innovative non-profit that aims to strengthen our communities by connecting citizens, where he currently serves as Board Chair.  Alberto holds engineering degrees from Northeastern University and M.I.T., and holds an MBA from Boston University. He is a resident of Newton with his wife Betty.

Our own Karen Rice recently asked Alberto a few questions about his involvement with SCI:

1) Why is SCI important to you and what made you get involved with
our nonprofit organization?  

"Reading the newspaper every day, makes me realize that America faces many social ills that are still very much prevalent under the surface.  Two recent incidents highlight these ills.... On a quiet Sunday evening last October in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire four armed teenagers broke into a house, selected at random, planning to kill anyone inside, and rob the house. Before they were done, two of them hacked a mother to death in her bed and severely wounded her young daughter. Another incident, of perhaps more notoriety is the arrest of widely known Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by Cambridge police officer Sgt. James Crowley apparently because of a misunderstanding, which publicly raised the old divisions on race, and forced President Obama to hold the now famous "Beer Summit" at the White House to ease the rising tensions.

These two incidents highlight the important role that Social Capital Inc. plays in addressing some of these social ills. Through its Youth Council work, SCI attempts to responsibly engage teenagers in improving their own communities by conducting civic minded projects such as helping the elderly, addressing teenage pregnancy, soothing poverty, and many other works. If these four New Hampshire teenagers would have been involved in a Youth Council in their own community, this tragedy would have never happened. One of the key tenets of SCI is to "know thy neighbor" through neighborhood block parties and civic engagement. If Professor Gates had better known his neighbor (the one who called the police to report a breaking and entering), the entire incident would have been avoided. Clearly, SCI cannot solve all of our social ills, but it certainly plays an important role in improving our communities and its residents by educating and promoting civic engagement and volunteerism. I believe that by engaging citizens of all walks of life, ethnicity, age, gender, religious belief, and political persuasion to engage with each other in improving their communities, America will emerge stronger and many of these social ills such as teen violence, racial prejudice, poverty, illiteracy, teen pregnancy, can be ameliorated. This is why I joined SCI's Board."

2) Why are you excited about the "developing Social Capitalists piece"?

“Well, SCI can not do it all, so we need a strong educational piece to develop new Social Capitalists that can organize community Youth Councils in other communities, so that community by community we can reach our ultimate goals of reducing social ills and strengthen our communities. Clearly, the Government has spent billions of dollars in education, health, law enforcement at the Federal, State and local levels using a sort of top down approach to the problems. SCI's approach is more grass roots, starting at the community level with its residents and teenagers to be more civic minded and engage others to improve their own community, where they live, send their kids to school and many work.  It seems to me that this approach is much more effective than a Government approach of pouring money to what they perceive are effective solutions to these problems.

It all starts with educating potential Social Capitalists and particularly our youth that appears to be lost in their own world and are very vulnerable to end in trouble. Educating Social Capitalists, I am sure, will result in more residents and youth being positively engaged in their own communities, being more aware of our ethnic, religious and generational differences, opening our eyes to problems in education, immigration, crime, social injustice, race and perhaps motivating each of us to take an active role in making our communities a better place to live and raise our kids. Isn't this the goal of every American family?”