OUR TEAM

Shiva Sarram, Founder and Executive Director

Shiva Sarram was born and raised in Tehran, Iran during the devastating Iran-Iraq war - a war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties. Her family moved to Europe briefly and eventually, to the United States where she has resided since the 1980's. Shiva attended the University of Pennsylvania where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Economics. She then worked on Wall Street for Chase Manhattan Bank, Deloitte & Touche, Tiger Management and McKinsey & Company.

Shiva has been involved with philanthropic efforts for over 30 years including serving on the Board of the Tiger Foundation for a decade, a $100 million dollar grantmaking foundation working to break the cycle of poverty for children and families in New York City. Her passion for war-affected children as well as her education in economic development, led her, in 2009, to the extraordinary vision and founding of the Blossom Hill Foundation which to date has established 14 schools and programs around the globe for war-impacted children and families. She resides in New Canaan, CT with her husband and two children where she is actively involved in a number of social justice and public policy issues including climate change, foreign policy and sensible gun law reform.

She is an avid traveler and photographer, passionate about flowers and farms and deeply rooted in her Iranian-American identity.

Rosy Nimroody-Jacobs, Deputy Director

Rosy Nimroody-Jacobs, worked as a Communications Specialist in Resource Development at Save the Children in Fairfield, CT for the last six years. Her proposals and reports secured funding from corporate donors, foundations, and individual philanthropist for both development and emergency programs. She was responsible for covering several emergencies including the Syrian refugee crisis in the Middle East and the Ebola and hunger crisis in Africa. She was previously a project associate at the World Policy Institute and project director at the Council on Economic Priorities, both in NYC, where she directed studies on the impact of defense spending on the US economy, international nuclear non-proliferation treaties, and corporate responsibility issues. In addition to numerous published articles, public speaking engagements, and advocacy work on Capitol Hill, she was also the lead writer and editor of Star Wars: The Economic Fallout (a published book on the economic implications of building a ballistic defense system). She was also a foreign correspondent for the Journal of Commerce and a freelance journalist based in Italy. Rosy is a graduate of Boston University with a major in journalism and a minor in political science, and has a MA from New York University in International Relations. A native of Iran, Rosy immigrated to the US where she sought political asylum after the Islamic revolution. She has various degrees of fluency in several languages including Farsi, French, Italian, German, Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish.