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Wednesday, November 4, 2009
MHT All-Star Maura Banta: Education mission
By Jim Schakenbach, Special to Mass High Tech
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MHT managing editor Rodney Brown on NECN: 22 tech companies give back to community
Flash Slideshow: Mass High Tech All-Stars Thought Leadership Roundtable
Who she is: As IBM Corp.’s East Coast regional manager for corporate citizenship and corporate affairs, her day job has been to help manage IBM’s corporate philanthropy, government relations and community relations.
Track record: A glance at her resume shows that her job is also a platform enabling her to champion education in Massachusetts: Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, past chair for the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, six years on the Massachusetts Educational Management and Audit Council and board member of United Ways of New England, Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation and Boston Plan for Excellence.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in economics, Marymount College.
What makes her tick: “One thing that’s been very important to me is to be part of the broad community that has helped advance education in the commonwealth. … Early on, I was fortunate enough to befriend Jack Rennie and Paul Reville, two amazing icons of educational reform in Massachusetts and co-founders of the Mass. Business Alliance for Education (Reville is currently Massachusetts’ Secretary of Education), and I became part of their ‘gang.’ That afforded me an awful lot of opportunity to have an active role in advancing the educational agenda.”
Accomplishments: “At IBM, I’ve been able to do something related to all this, and that’s to help architect a program that takes midcareer IBM-ers with math and science backgrounds and gives them an opportunity in an encore career to become K-12 math and science teachers. We came up with a program that gave people money and time and, probably most important, their manager’s permission to spend time while still working at IBM to get themselves certified as math, science or computer science teachers.”
How she got here: “I was one of 11 children and grew up with a mother who was a social activist in a family where we very much believed that we were fortunate and therefore we needed to share that good fortune, and so I’ve always been an active volunteer. … I don’t want to be painted as a Goody-Two-Shoes: the need to get involved was how I was raised. It was just part of the deal. Any little thing you do for another human being comes back twofold.”
On Maura Banta, from Sean Rush:
Sean Rush, CEO of Junior Achievement Worldwide, is former GM of IBM’s global education business.
What drives her:
“Her absolute belief in education. Maura represents IBM well, but she absolutely believes in education and that’s what drives her.”
What people don’t know:
“She was the captain of the Mount Alvernia High School basketball team (in Newton).”
Maura’s greatest assets:
“She has this underlying tenacity with an overlay of wonderfully diplomatic, interpersonal skills. She has that passion that successful people have, with the personal skills to get people to rally around whatever she wants to get done."
If she were doing something else:
“She’d be perfect for just about any number of public-policy-type jobs. She has those great personal skills to influence people. She’d also make a great doctor.”
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