Maya Bernstein

Maya Bernstein is the founding co-director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership’s Certificate in Facilitation and is on faculty of the Masa Leadership Center in Jerusalem. Maya is a founder of UpStart Labs, which supports innovation in the nonprofit sector, and has consulted for many organizations in the Jewish community, including the Wexner Foundation, UJA-NY, the Jewish Federations of North America, and the Jim Joseph Foundation. Her writing on the topics of leadership and facilitation have been published widely, including in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and the Harvard Business Review. She has lived and worked in Belarus, China, Israel, and Germany. She is a graduate of Columbia College and has a Master’s Degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education; she is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a 2012 recipient of the Covenant Foundation’s Pomegranate Prize for emerging leaders in the Jewish community. Maya recently released her debut album, “Shiviti,” with Noah Solomon, and her first collection of poetry "There Is No Place Without You," is available from Ben Yehuda Press. Maya lives in Yonkers, NY with her husband, Noam Silverman, and five children.