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Sonny is married to Julia Harris and father to two wonderful young women who are answering for themselves the timeless question posed by Mary Oliver of "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" [Which he himself is still answering!]
Sonny's career has spanned the nonprofit, for profit, and government sectors, with the common thread being strategically examining conventional thinking and norms to transform mature organizations and to create new enterprises. Sonny’s work is guided by a deep commitment to values-based work environments and in a belief in taking his work but not himself seriously (and more recently, trying to 'slay the dragon of the ego' - to borrow from Joseph Campbell).
Sonny is currently the CEO of the nonprofit, the Center for Expanding Leadership & Opportunity (CELO). CELO emerges from nearly 20 years of research and is an enabler to the future of learning by providing innovative leaders in education and nonprofits with researched-backed data and tools to measure and benchmark the development of 34 capacities (i.e., competencies) in young people, as well as identifying and recommending contextually appropriate, evidence-based practices to accelerate development. Incubated within the Aspen Institute, CELO was launched in July 2023 and is committed to a world where all students regardless of zip code have access to high-quality learning experiences to develop the essential human competencies to thrive personally, professional and within their communities.
The majority of Sonny's career was within the private sector, including spending almost 15 years at the Fortune 125 company, Exelon Corporation, leading various departments and divisions during periods of inflection, including: retiring Exelon’s coal generating plants as the President of Exelon Power and transitioning into renewables; designing and executing Exelon’s cost management program during the Great Recession; and as the company’s first Chief Information & Innovation Officer, founding an Emerging Technologies department to systematically identify, pilot and scale innovative technologies within Exelon. He also served on the Executive Committee at Exelon.
After Exelon, Sonny was an early employee and founded and led the Energy Division at Uptake Technologies, a unicorn AI start-up that leverages IIOT data to detect and predict component failures in missions critical industrial assets.
Sonny began his career at The Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, where he conducted research on youth and neighborhood development programs in inner- cities. He later served as an Assistant to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, leading the conceptualization and creation of World Business Chicago, the City’s public-private economic development organization, and was appointed a White House Fellow by President Clinton, where he served as a senior aide to the Deputy Director of the Office of Management & Budget. He later co-chaired the regional panel of the White House Fellows in Chicago from 2009-2020.
He has long been drawn to working with and supporting social entrepreneurs, including being a founding member of the Chicago Childrens Theatre, and chairing organizations such as Interfaith America, the Invisible Institute, and Project&. He currently is a distinguished executive in residence at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, spending most of his time trying to convince students that there are lives are not over if they don't become an investment banker or consultant.
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