Justyna Lesniewska-Guterman is the coordinator of the Rebuilding Alliance Fair Trade Store project. She joined the Rebuilding Alliance in October, 2009 and made significant improvements in running the business, resulting in a 3-fold increase of profit. Just to name a few: new labels were designed for each product, the sales tracking and inventory system was improved, and margin analysis completed. Justyna engaged distinguished mentors including Reem Rahim, co-founder of Numi Tea, Dana Atallah-Gagan, a past fair trade and tourism product manager for the World Bank’s Middle and Near East region, and Jeff Williams of ElaConsulting. Justin Ali, an accountant and MBA with over twenty three years experience, has joined Justyna’s team.
Justyna was awarded Master of Arts in field of sociology by the University of Warsaw, Poland. In her studies Justyna focused on the organizational factors that determine effectiveness of benefits granted by social security agencies. She gained office experience working for Professor M.D. Willa Hsueh, chief of Endocrynology Department at UCLA Medical School as an assistant, and the Polish Chamber of Architects as their foreign relations assistant. Most recently, Justyna worked for the project office at Avaya, Poland where she supported the country service manager, project managers and service implementation engineers.
For 3 years, Justyna has been volunteering for a Polish NGO called Fundacja Swietego Mikolaja (www.mikolaj.org.pl ), a award-winning leader for professional social campaigns in Poland to support foster families, single mothers as well as mothers in the workforce. Justyna is greatly interested in working to increase social capital in socially diverse communities. Because she has lived in many different countries (Libya, Kuwait, Portugal, USA), as well as observed a rapid growth of multiethnic groups in her homeland, she believes that only through a dialog and multicultural education it is possible to overcome challenges faced by contemporary societies.
