The Team

Alice Gugelev

Alice has always been passionate about International Development and is excited to finally be applying her skills with The Muskoka Foundation. Her background spans careers in finance and strategy consulting, in for-profit, pro-bono and non-profit companies. Having worked on the trading floor with currency and interest rate flows and on project finance transactions on Wall Street and in Asia, Alice rounded out her development work preparation with Bain & Company Southeast Asia working on corporate strategy specializing in supply chain and logistics, consumer products and commercial banking. Alice spent significant time working in Thailand, India and China and worked and traveled pretty much everywhere else in Asia.

In the social sector, Alice started with a short stint at the World Bank in Asia, followed by heading up Bain's pro-bono consulting practice in Singapore culminating most recently in a manager role with The Bridgespan Group in San Francisco working on education. With her experience and degrees from Columbia College in East Asian Studies and Economics, political science from the Stanford Japan Center in Kyoto and an MBA from Harvard Business School in hand, Alice is now FINALLY starting to feel more qualified to make a positive difference! Most of the learning and impact though, Alice anticipates will happen through The Muskoka Foundation's work with on the ground partners and local communities where our approach will be to listen first and learn what really works as we go.

You can contact Alice via email to: alice -at- TheMuskokaFoundation.org

Jay Shapiro

Jay comes to the Muskoka Foundation from a very different persepective. As one of the pioneers of the Internet industry in Asia, Jay had the good fortune to travel extensively throughout Asia, meeting all sorts of different people in different cultures, all unified by two things: 1) the incredible power of the Internet to connect people around the planet; and 2) the impact of entrepreneurship to affect a community of talented individuals and their network of families and friends.

Jay grew his own business: "BLUE" from a small Singapore startup of 3 people, to a globally dominant, profitable force in the marketing industry; with offices in London, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai and San Francisco. 

When BLUE was acquired by the global WPP network in June 2007, it allowed Jay to begin to focus on leveraging his entrepreneurial skills and broad network to help those in developing communities through his work with the non-profit Muskoka Foundation.

Most exciting for Jay is the ability to combine his strong belief about the impact of the entrepreneur, with his passion for overland travel and off-road exploration.

Jay is a die-hard Toyota fan, having owned (at various times and in various states of disrepair) a HiLux, a Land Cruiser, a Tacoma and a Prius. Though he admits to (wonderful) distractions along the way of two Jeep Wranglers, a Ford F-650 and a red 1984 BMW 6-series that he never should have sold...

You can contact Jay via email to: jay -at- TheMuskokaFoundation.org