Leading Through Volunteer Work

Meet Alumni Association Vice President Ray Joseph ’90

BY JANA F. BROWN

On a January day in 1990, then-Sixth Former Ray Joseph ’90 and several friends led 400 or so SPS community members on a 2.5-mile march down Pleasant Street to the New Hampshire State Capitol to urge the state to adopt the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Earlier in the day, Joseph had spoken on the subject in Chapel; when he arrived in downtown Concord, he presented a petition to the chair of the New Hampshire House of Representatives and delivered another speech, this time on the steps of the State House.

“It was a defining moment for me,” Joseph recalls, “about being able to galvanize people for change.”

Today, Joseph continues to lead through his volunteer work with charter schools and through his engagement with St. Paul’s School. Since 2021, he has served as chair of the School’s BIPOC Alumni Advisory Council, a group established to celebrate and advance inclusiveness among the alumni community. On July 1, Joseph began a three-year term as vice president of the SPS Alumni Association. In that capacity, he will serve alongside President Caroline La Voie ’88, with a goal of increasing engagement.

“It’s about bringing as many people into the tent as possible,” Joseph explains. “How do we make it more participatory? How do we help alumni feel like the Alumni Association is theirs?”

As a New York native who came to SPS through the Oliver Scholars program, Joseph had a wonderful academic experience at the School and made many close friendships. But, he adds, it was not always easy being a student of color at a New England boarding school in the late 1980s.

“It’s hard to divorce [my experience] from the rites of passage of being a teenager,” he says. “At some point, one of my friends challenged me that my view of St. Paul’s was probably outdated. I said to myself, ‘You know what? He’s probably right.’ So I decided to get involved and refresh my experience.”

In addition to the BIPOC Alumni Advisory Council, which has included planned programming for alumni of color, in 2021 Joseph was appointed to the Alumni Association Executive Committee. Through that experience, he says, he has been able to see the School from a new perspective, including witnessing the intention behind policies and strategic planning. He’s particularly impressed with the student-centered approach and the support system that exists today.

“That’s not to say the School wasn’t student-centered [before], but its programming around supporting students and their maturation through high school didn’t exist when I was there,” Joseph says, pointing to the Living in Community (LinC) curriculum as just one example. “As part of that, there’s also more dialogue about the differences we all bring to the School, whether it’s socioeconomic or race. The School has a much more dedicated infrastructure [for that] now.”

Outside of his work with his alma mater, Joseph is a married father of two girls, a long-suffering fan of the New York Knicks and an avid biker. He’s also a financial services professional, currently serving as head of research in the asset allocation division of Fidelity Investments. A dedicated community leader, he chairs the board at Bold Charter School in the Bronx. He previously served as board chair of the Odyssey Charter School in Altadena, California, and of Future Leaders Institute Charter School in New York and has sat on the Posse Foundation Los Angeles Advisory Board and the board of the Oliver Scholars.

The last of these, he says, has been a theme throughout his life. “[The Oliver program] instilled in me a culture of giving back, a culture of community service and servant leadership.”

Joseph looks forward to continuing that ethos in his new role with the SPS Alumni Association. “No matter what your experience was at SPS,” he says, “I want people to know you can come home to the Alumni Association because you’ll find friends there.”