About

About Stephanie

The company is led by Stephanie Riven, who has spent more than 40 years building institutions, teams, and funding capacity across a wide range of nonprofit organizations. For each engagement, she assembles a team of professionals—strategic planners, writers, researchers, and specialists—tailored to the client’s specific goals.

Stephanie previously served as an affiliated consultant with David Bury & Associates, a New York-based arts management firm, and as a Visiting Practitioner at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she was a member of the Arts in Education Advisory Council.

Stephanie is most prominently associated with the Center of Creative Arts (COCA) in St. Louis.  As COCA’s founding executive director, she conceptualized, managed, and supervised the organization’s growth from a startup with an annual budget of $80,000 to the fifth-largest multidisciplinary community arts center in the country, with a budget of $5 million and $16 million in assets. In 1987, the year of its founding, COCA served 40 children.  Today it serves 65,000 people annually.

COCA received many honors during Stephanie’s tenure, including an Excellence in the Arts Award from the Arts and Education Council and a Coming Up Taller Award from the President’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities. COCA also attained national recognition as one of 12 exemplary organizations in Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education (Wallace Foundation / Project Zero / Harvard Graduate School of Education).

Stephanie has received a number of awards, including the YWCA Leader Award, the Visionary Arts Award, a Distinguished Alumna Award from Washington University in St. Louis, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arts and Education Council of St. Louis.