Steve Reifenberg (KNFP 13), Regional Office Director of Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Santiago, Chile.
This article originally appeared in the August 2008 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.
Steve Reifenberg Steve Reifenberg has worked for nearly 20 years on international education, negotiation, and development issues with Harvard University. Since 2002, he and his family have lived in Santiago, Chile, where Steve promotes and facilitates projects for Harvard students and faculty in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru.
Says Steve, ”I love working in an international setting, dealing with people from different cultures, and trying to learn and contribute to making positive change, especially in the area of education.”
In his early 20s, Steve spent two years working at a small orphanage in Santiago during a time of severe repression in Chile. While there, he witnessed the early stages of public protests that eventually ousted the repressive military government and led to the return of democracy. Steve recently published his first book, Santiago’s Children: What I Learned about Life at an Orphanage in Chile, about his profound experiences engaging with the children and their country’s struggles. (Visit www.santiagoschildren.com to learn more.) Nearly 25 years later, he continues to be involved with the orphanage and several of the children (now adults) he once lived with.
One of Steve’s current projects is ”to take some of the best lessons from Chile and internationally for child development, including from the Head Start and Early Head Start Program in the U.S., and apply them to educational settings in Chile.” He explains, ”We currently are running a series of demonstration sites and hope to demonstrate empirically the impact these interventions can have on the lives of poor children, and ideally replicate these programs on a national scale.”
Steve is also working closely with local communities in a conservation initiative in the Chilean Patagonia to preserve and develop land in sustainable ways.
”In the fields such as education and conservation, I think you have to be an optimist. You have to believe that positive change is possible,” he says.
In his approach to life and work Steve taps into the opposing tensions of driving an agenda and finding beauty in the moment. He says, ”If I am honest, I probably operate with two different, and even competing, measurements for success. First, I have a classic type-A personality. I like results, measurable results. I feel success in checking things off my to-do list. At the same time, I am convinced that there is real wisdom in how the Dalai Lama talks about success in life: What is success? To be happy…. The word he uses over and over is compassion, concern for others. He also focuses on being attentive to the moment.
”Therefore, competing with my type-A personality, I think consciously, ’Breathe. Be present now.’ And then I think, ’Don’t delay happiness.’ Even though not everything is perfect, even though there are still tons of things yet to do on my to-do list, appreciate this moment now, with my wife, son or daughters, my friends, my colleagues, and be aware of the many, many blessings I have in my life.”