Senior Leadership

David Shapiro

David Shapiro is the President and CEO of MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership. In this capacity, Shapiro is responsible for the strategic oversight of a nonprofit organization that serves as the lead champion for youth mentoring in the United States. For more than 20 years, MENTOR has worked closely with its strong and vibrant network of State Mentoring Partnerships and more than 5,000 mentoring programs and volunteer centers throughout the country serving more than three million children in all 50 states.

Shapiro, along with MENTOR’s Board of Directors, guides the organization to help expand the capacity of mentoring programs across the nation to serve more youth, more effectively. MENTOR does this through developing and delivering resources to mentoring programs around the U.S., providing a public voice on Capitol Hill, through the media and other venues for mentoring, and promoting quality for mentoring through standards, cutting-edge research and state-of-the-art tools.

Before his appointment to MENTOR, Shapiro served as President and CEO of Mass Mentoring Partnership (MMP) for seven years, the state’s umbrella organization for youth mentoring. MMP works across sectors to increase the quantity and quality of youth mentoring opportunities for the Commonwealth’s young people.

MMP has a statewide network of 175 mentoring programs that serve 23,000 young people. MMP seeks to double the number of young people in quality, structured mentoring relationships to 40,000 by 2013.

In Shapiro’s tenure, MMP opened a Western MA office and launched initiatives including: Champions of Mentoring at Fenway Park, Highland Street AmeriCorps Ambassadors of Mentoring, Red Sox Mentoring Challenge, Quality-Based Membership, Mass Mentoring Counts and the Bill Russell Mentoring Grants Program. MMP has grown by 400 percent, protected and increased state funding for mentoring, collaborated to attract federal funding and now distributes more than $300,000 to the field, $500,000 in services and $250,000 in match activities and scholarships for mentees.

In addition, the number of young people matched in quality mentoring relationships has increased by almost 50 percent during Shapiro’s tenure through MMP’s work with high quality mentoring programs driving impact in critical societal issues from youth violence prevention to academic achievement to workforce development.

Shapiro is chair of the board of the Mass Nonprofit Network and on the boards of Common Impact and Friends of the Children- Boston. He has received the Manza Excellence in Leadership Award by MENTOR, was selected for the Barr Foundation Fellowship and was named to the Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40. He lives in Jamaica Plain with his wife Kristin, who is a financial aid advisor for ACCESS, and two sons, Brennan and Jack.

Tammy Tai

Tammy Tai is the Chief Program Officer at MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership which is the lead champion for youth mentoring in the United States.  In this role, Tammy is responsible for providing support to a network of local and state mentoring partnerships, umbrella organizations supporting youth mentoring programs through resource development, mentor recruitment and referral, and capacity building and technical assistance support; supporting the dissemination of relevant research to the field; and creating multiple ways to share learning and best practices within and outside of the mentoring field. Previously, she spent four years at the Hyams Foundation as the Teen Development Program Officer where she designed and implemented an initiative called Teen Futures that focused on addressing the high school dropout rate in Boston and Chelsea.  Tammy’s commitment to tap the power and potential of young people was solidified through her work running summer and after-school programs in Mission Hill as a college student.  From there she spent four years as an elementary bilingual Spanish teacher and also directed a mentoring program for high-risk teenagers in Phoenix, AZ.  She has served as a non-profit consultant helping organizations expand their programmatic capacity and worked with the Mass Mentoring Partnership to help design the Ambassadors of Mentoring Program.  Tammy has a BA in Sociology from Harvard University and an MBA from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.  Raised in New York by immigrant parents from Jamaica, Tammy currently lives in Dorchester with her husband, a nonprofit Executive Director and their three children.