Suzanne Rivecca

Background

About Suzanne Rivecca

Successful institutional fundraiser, donor relations professional, and development/communications/grant writer for human services, advocacy, and arts nonprofits and higher education, with 20 years' experience securing five, six and seven-figure foundation and government grants and principal gifts, collaborating across programs and departments, stewarding philanthropic relationships, and crafting cases for support that inspire donors to give. In addition to my career in fundraising, I am also an award-winning author whose 2010 debut short story collection ("Death is not an Option," WW Norton) won the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Story Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Frank O'Hara International Short Story Award (fellow finalists included Colm Toibin, Yiyun Li, Edna O'Brien, Anthony Doerr). Awards and honors include an NEA fellowship in creative prose, two Pushcart Prizes, inclusion in Best American Short Stories, a Wallace Stegner fellowship in fiction at Stanford (2005-07), a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2010-11), and a John Guare Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2011-12). My nonprofit fundraising work and my creative writing background exist in conversation. In fiction and essays, I write about what's important to me (including homelessness, displacement and gentrification, sexism, mental health, coping mechanisms, the complexities of trying to live a creative life). These subjects often overlap with my fundraising work, which has focused on areas including housing insecurity, harm reduction and humane, culturally competent approaches to substance use, income inequality, human rights, policy and advocacy for people-powered movements, and the role of arts, culture, and journalism in society. I build cases for support that are enhanced by a storyteller's instinct for world-building and an ability to translate data, programmatic outcomes, and metrics into compelling, people-centered narratives.