Paula Fynboh Receives Torch Award for Ethical Leadership
Aspire’s Executive Director, Paula Fynboh, was awarded the 2025 Torch Award for Ethical Leadership by Leadership Center of Arlington!
The Torch Award for Ethical Leadership recognizes a regional leader who embodies ethical choices and behaviors in their professional career and community service. You can find a recap of the event below.
Introduction Remarks by Peggy Fox, External Affairs Manager, Dominion Energy
“The Torch Award for Ethical Leadership recognizes a regional leader who embodies ethical choices and behaviors in their professional career and community service. We are excited to present the 6th Annual Torch Award for Ethical Leadership to Paula Fynboh, Executive Director of Aspire Afterschool Learning.
Aspire’s mission is to expand learning opportunities that help historically underserved students fulfill their potential through afterschool and summer learning programs. Under Paula’s leadership, the number of students served by Aspire has more than doubled in three years’ time as the organization seeks to close the opportunity gap and help students reach their full potential. Paula’s leadership goes beyond impressive performance metrics. The Aspire team appreciates how she provides each team member with a combination of autonomy and support, plus grace when mistakes are made. She also works hard to combat burnout, lifts others up, and makes time to read with students every week. This ensures her work is informed by the day-to-day program experience with Aspire students. It is clear that organizational values serve as a road map in Paula’s leadership. For her, values are not just words on paper, but rather a guide for living the organization’s mission in both good and challenging times.
And those challenging times hit hard on April 28th, that’s when Aspire was notified that their AmeriCorps funding was cut, impacting their 17 Aspire AmeriCorps members who serve their students every day. Leaders across the community watched Paula compassionately, yet boldly, stand up for the mission and for every single person they serve. One of Paula’s team members made this observation: Paula is honest when things are hard and gracious in giving credit and recognition. She’s supportive when people come to her with hard to solve problems. Genuine and authentic above all else.
Please join me in congratulating Paula Fynboh on the 6th annual Torch Award for Ethical Leadership.”
Paula’s Remarks
I’m incredibly humbled to receive the Torch Award for Ethical Leadership, and I’m accepting it on behalf of the Aspire students, parents, AmeriCorps members, staff, and Board of Directors that I am lucky enough to lead beside.
To me, this award is in recognition of Aspire students. Students who dream big, work hard, and show up every day in systems not always built for them, but who shine anyway.
It’s in recognition of our families, who might not be visible in circles of power, but who are hardworking, critical members of our community and only want what all parents want, the best for their kids.
It’s in recognition of the Aspire team, whose leadership has shown brightly, especially in the last two weeks. In late April, Aspire was one of 1,000 organizations across the country who were impacted by cuts to AmeriCorps. All of Aspire’s AmeriCorps funding was eliminated, effective immediately.
This award is in recognition of those former AmeriCorps members who said they would return to Aspire, not for the meager living stipend they received, but to create a softer landing for our families, who without Aspire, literally had nowhere else affordable to send their students to learn after school.
This award is also in recognition of Aspire’s staff team show up every day, choosing joy over apathy and in true Aspire fashion, helped figure out a plan to continue our programming as is through the end of the school year despite these cuts because they know every day matters and makes a difference.
And it’s in recognition of our board, who years ago supported my creation of a values scorecard that guides all of us at Aspire ensuring our actions and decisions are rooted in our organization’s values. These tangible steps to center our values are always important – and become even more important as we navigate difficult times like these. For example, our board leaned into these values and had the moral courage to approve having Aspire be the only nonprofit in Virginia to sign on to a federal lawsuit challenging the illegal termination of our AmeriCorps funding because they understood that our promise to close the educational opportunity gap means being a voice for our families.
The Aspire community reminds me every day that leading with values is not just possible, it’s powerful.
On a personal level, I passed up two promotions in my earlier career because I couldn’t see myself in the kind of leadership that was modeled to me, leadership that too often replicated the same systems of harm we said we were working to change. I didn’t yet know leadership could look differently, that it could look like joy, vulnerability, and hope, and when I reluctantly stepped into leadership, I knew I’d make a million mistakes. But I also hoped for the courage to lead differently and center equity every step of the way.
Since then, I’ve learned that saying “I don’t know” isn’t just okay, it’s a leadership strategy because it creates space for others to bring their lived expertise and talents forward. I’ve learned that playfulness and empathy aren’t “soft skills,” they are powerful skills and they allow Aspire’s walls to ring with laughter, even when the work is really hard. And I’ve learned that moral courage is contagious, and Aspire makes this type of leadership feel easy.
This collective leadership makes sure our students are seen, families are heard, and our values are not words on a website, they are felt in the joy, belonging, growth, and excellence in our students.
And right now, that collective leadership is so important as the world feels really heavy and Aspire has to make up 30% of our budget due to the loss of AmeriCorps funding. Unless we close this gap, we will not be able to serve one in three of our students next year. Aspire is the only daily academic afterschool program for 3rd – 8th graders in Arlington offered at no cost to families, so if we have to reduce the number of students we serve due to these cuts, there will be nowhere else for them to go.
Despite these challenges, we are choosing to lead with hope, imagination, justice, love, and abundance.
The day our students learned that Aspire lost our AmeriCorps funding, one of them drew this for me [a drawing of a $100 bill]. Another student asked, “How much money do you need for Aspire… because I saved $50 and you can have it.” They’re already leaders, aren’t they?
In closing, I want to come back to two of my personal core values, hope and a belief in enough. I know there is a lot of fear and a sense of scarcity right now, but I also know that if an Aspire student is willing to give his $50 so one-third of his classmates don’t lose access to the high-quality daily afterschool and full-day summer reading, math, and social-emotional support that is closing the educational opportunity gap for Arlington’s most vulnerable students, together I know we’ll find enough to close our funding gap and do right by our kids and families. Because limiting opportunities for students to realize their full potential is not consistent with our values, and it’s not who we are.
Thank you for your recognition of the amazing Aspire community, and I hope you will continue to rally behind us during this critical time.