The S.B. Questionnaire: Raissa Smorol
Chatting Education with the Development Director of the Santa Barbara Scholarship Foundation
“The joy of changing a life can happen at a local level or at a global one,” explains Raissa Smorol. She’s development director for the Santa Barbara Scholarship Foundation, which, in 2016 alone, granted 3,019 scholarships totaling $8.76 million and provided financial aid advice to more than 36,500 students and families in Santa Barbara County. “Education is one of the key drivers for personal and community change,” she says. “Providing an education is one of the best ways to create quality in a society. It creates a fair platform for young people to reach their fullest potential.”
Raissa’s commitment to helping others started at an early age. She grew up in an affluent community in Westchester, New York, but headed to Belize when she was 16 to dig trenches for USAID and teach English. It was life-changing experience. She noticed that people lacked material wealth but had an abundance of love, and that the concept of “enough” was different from how she’d been brought up. She explains, “It opened my eyes to basic needs in the community: access to clean water, medical care, consistent education, and job opportunity.”
Raissa returned to the United States hoping to “alleviate some of these imbalances.” She got an undergraduate degree from Cornell, a Masters in Public Administration from Columbia, and then worked for a philanthropy consultancy, where she specialized in designing strategic fundraising.
