For the last 35 years, Sterling Speirn has worked in corporate, community, private and family foundations, as a CEO and Trustee.  He recently completed a year’s service as Interim CEO of CFLeads, a national network working to advance community leadership practices among Community Foundations in the U.S.  Previously, he was Interim president & CEO of the Maine Community Foundation and completed six years as a Trustee of the Greater Washington Community Foundation. Prior to that, Sterling recently served as CEO and Senior Fellow of the National Conference on Citizenship, a public charity chartered by Congress in 1953 to “indicate the ways various organizations might help create a more active, alert, enlightened, conscientious and progressive citizenry.”  During that time, he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences national Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship which in June 2020, issued its report, “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy in the 21st Century.” 

From 2006-2013 Sterling was president and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.   A year after his arrival, as a result of  several special study sessions he organized for the Board of Directors, they called on the staff to help the foundation become an effective anti-racist organization.  Under his leadership, in 2009 WKKF launched America Healing, a five-year, $75 million initiative to support programs that promote racial healing and address racial inequity.  He led the creation of a $100 million Mission Driven Investment Fund that built a portfolio of private investments in alignment with the foundations programmatic and place-based focus areas.  He was a champion of WKKF’s food systems work that helped build the food movement in the U.S., and he joined the campaign launched by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium to positively disrupt the practice of dentistry by training mid-level dental therapists to provide routine primary oral health care to medically underserved people in tribal, rural, and urban communities. 

Sterling was president & CEO of the Peninsula Community Foundation (now the Silicon Valley Community Foundation) from 1990-2005 where he founded the Center for Venture Philanthropy and launched the Assets for All Alliance to create the largest Individual Development Account program in the country, matching the savings of working poor families as an asset building strategy to escape poverty.  Sterling co-founded the Raising a Reader take-home book bag program, where today he serves on the Board of Directors.  Celebrating 25 years of pioneering family engagement strategies to promote early childhood literacy, Raising a Reader has served more than 1.8 million children and their families in 34 states.   

Sterling began his career as a 7th and 8th grade English Teacher and later served in the U.S. Department of the Interior.  He also worked as a Legal Aid lawyer, managed a large community health center, and managed the national computer grants program at Apple Computer.  He graduated from Stanford University and the University of Michigan Law School.  He is married to Diana Aviv, has two children, and is an avid community gardener and hiker.