The president of the Alper Portfolio Group, a marketing and consulting company for commercial real estate, financial and nonprofit groups, since the turn of the century, Patricia Alper has dedicated her career to aiding businesses, corporations and academic institutions in mentoring the youth to develop their own innovative projects and ideas. She is a board member of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) and US2020, a White House initiative to build mentorship programs for students in the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. Notably, she was honored with the NFTE Lifetime Achievement Award in Volunteerism.
Drawing upon more than 35 years in business, Ms. Alper has worked with a hands-on approach with today’s youth in an effort to help the understanding of the growing skills gap in the United States. She integrates the perspectives of both employers and the youth, noting that the youth are often ill-equipped or under-trained to enter the workforce, and therefore, employers find it difficult to hire better-prepared youth for contemporary jobs. Ms. Alper is the renowned author of the book “Teach to Work: How a Mentor, a Mentee, and a Project Can Close the Skills Gap in America,” published in 2017, which can be purchased on Amazon.com and in Barnes & Noble stores. She is also a distinguished public speaker.
Holding the trademark of Project Based Mentorship®, Ms. Alper discusses how the concept can integrate corporate employees, retirees and businesses in the ultimate aspiration of passing on their skills to the next generation of workers. Through her work with the NFTE, she was instrumental in the founding of the Adopt-a-Class program in 2001. She has also invited myriad business leaders and educators to coach entrepreneurship students in their business plans.
Highlighted in numerous esteemed publications, Ms. Alper has been featured in The New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, TIME, Forbes, CEO Magazine and Philanthropy Magazine. She emphasizes that the most important aspect of her career has been having a plan and mapping out her goals, keeping at the forefront of her mind where she sits in the lexicon of competition. Throughout her career, she has learned to persevere and acknowledge her attributes, as well as remain consistent in her goals.
Prior to developing her commitment to strategic-based learning and mentorship, Ms. Alper was involved in the construction industry as a co-founder of a multi-million dollar project management company, in which the company built corporate headquarter facilities and high-end interiors for large businesses. Following her graduation from college, she spent five years working with incarcerated youth in Iowa’s Youth Detention System. Additionally, she served as a counselor to adolescents at Chestnut Lodge, a long-term psychiatric hospital in Maryland, and sits on the board of trustees of the Phillips Collection.
Alongside her primary feats, Ms. Alper was also the host of her own radio talk show, “For Love or Money.” For more than 20 years, she has been a board member and trustee of the Alper Family Foundation. Ms. Alper currently focuses her efforts on working with universities in positioning themselves within mentorship programs, in which corporations and businesspeople share their knowledge with university students.