About Active Plus
We work with our community to create a culture of healthy and active living.
At Active Plus, we are passionate about creating positive change in the lives of children and teens. We believe that early exposure to new activities and ideas can inspire young people to explore new possibilities and help them to develop lifelong skills and passions. Our mission is to provide opportunities for young people to engage in activities and programs that promote physical fitness, mental wellness, and personal growth. Through our programs, we hope to foster a sense of community and empowerment that will inspire our participants to reach their full potential and become leaders in their own lives and in their communities. Join us in our mission to empower the next generation!
Meet the Board
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EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & FOUNDER
Tarik Kitson is a seasoned healthcare leader with a strong commitment to improving community health and wellness. With over 17 years of experience in the healthcare arena, Tarik currently serves as a healthcare administrator at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he has been instrumental in developing and implementing innovative healthcare programs that have improved patient outcomes and enhanced the overall patient experience.
In addition to his work at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Tarik is also the President and Co-Founder of Active Plus, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the physical, mental, and emotional health of at-risk youth in local communities. Tarik's passion for promoting healthy living and ending the obesity epidemic led him to co-found Active Plus in 2013, after witnessing the lack of resources available to children while volunteering at a school in East Harlem.
Tarik's leadership and dedication have earned him numerous educational accolades and community activism awards. He is a proud graduate of SUNY Geneseo, where he was a four-year collegiate basketball star, and Columbia University, where he obtained his Masters of Public Health degree. Tarik's extensive experience and unwavering commitment to health and wellness make him a true leader in the healthcare field.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS, CHAIR
David Corona has over 20 years extensive experience in the fitness and health industry. He is the founder of Start-Living, LLC, a growing New York City based concierge company specializing in a unique blending of fitness and therapeutic services. START specialists work with doctors and physical therapists to assist with any post rehabilitation needs.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS, TREASURER
Mr. Charles has worked with various organizations and causes in the Harlem community for the past decade. He currently works as a Bookkeeper at 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East and a licensed real estate professional. His vast network of local leaders and organizations in the community has been very beneficial for the growth of Active Plus.
Wayne obtained his BS in Business and Administration with a concentration in Management from SUNY New Paltz. Wayne was introduced to Active Plus through his involvement with Rotary International. At the time he was president of the club and collaborated with Active Plus on community events in the Harlem community.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Dwayne Norris has been a financial service professional at New York Life for twelve years. Dwayne is a constant donor to nonprofit organizations, but gets the most satisfaction from hands on community service work. Dwayne volunteers time to assist at shelters in the city and hand out meals at food pantries. Through his involvement with Active Plus, Inc. and the Rotary Club he has provided health & fitness workshops to the youth and parents in the community and continues to be an advocate for living a healthy lifestyle. Dwayne is a martial artist who has been training in Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do since 2008. Each week he volunteers his time to teach classes at New York Martial Arts Academy to new students and his peers.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
An Asheville, North Carolina native, Dr. Graeme attended undergraduate at Appalachian State University where she majored in Exercise Science. She spent two years prior to medical school in the field of medical research including work with pediatric diabetes, exercise immunology and adult hypertension. After attending medical school in Blacksburg, Virginia at Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, she completed a 3 year residency in Family Medicine at MAHEC in Asheville, NC.
Following residency, Dr. Graeme and her husband who is also a family medicine physician spent a year doctoring and adventuring in New Zealand. She returned to the area and joined NBFM in October 2019. In her free time, you can most likely find her and her husband on a hiking trail with their infant daughter and dog Annabelle. Her other personal hobbies include running, biking and reading.
Dr. Graeme has contributed to articles about pediatric diabetes and exercise recovery in professional journals through her work at both Appalachian State University and The Medical University of South Carolina. Board certified in the specialty of Family Medicine, she is also an active board member for the Western Carolina Medical Society.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS,
BOARD SECRETARY
Carrie Torres is Vice President of the Department Empowerment, Compliance, and Opportunity for New York State Homes and Community Renewal, with a mission to build, preserve, and protect affordable housing and increase homeownership. Carrie's objective is to promote equitable access to economic opportunities for minority and women owned business enterprises plus service disabled and veteran owned business enterprises by eliminating barriers to their participation in NYS contracting. She is currently serving on the Governor’s Interagency Taskforce on Health Equity and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She was previously a Senior Advisor and Strategic Projects Manager for the Fund for Public Housing and the New York City Housing Authority. A public/private partnership where she led fundraising initiatives to develop and support resident programs for over 500,000 residents in North America's largest public housing authority. Carrie is an Adjunct Professor of Data Analytics in the Management & Information Technology Department at St. Francis College and Graduate Consumer Analytics Program at LIM College.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Salmaan "Sal" Javed is a recent NYC transplant and loves all things fitness, finance, and food! Sal is VP of Finance at a fintech company called Reshop and has spent his career in various finance and investing roles. He previously lived in NYC, spending three years doing investment banking and felt the pull to come back! He is a huge basketball fan, along with running, hiking, and tennis. Sal believes in the power of sports, fitness, and wellness to build communities up, especially with kids and schools.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Dr. April Joy Damian is an epidemiologist, health services researcher, and classically trained public health professional with expertise in health equity, social determinants of health, psychiatric epidemiology, and mixed methods. She currently serves as the Vice President and Director of the Weitzman Institute, a research, education, and policy center dedicated to quality improvement and primary care transformation, with a particularly focus on vulnerable populations. Dr. Damian concurrently serves as a Senior Scholar for Health Equity at AcademyHealth, and holds faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Wesleyan University. She provides thought leadership on numerous national committees, including as an appointed Member of the National Academies Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Forum for Children's Well-Being, Chair of the National Academies Healthy Parenting in Primary Care Collaborative, Member of the Committee on Advocacy and Public Policy (CAPP) and Membership Committee at AcademyHealth, and former inaugural Vice-Chair of the Health Equity/Patient Reported Outcomes/Community Engagement Committee of NIH's RECOVER initiative. Dr. Damian previously served as the Director of Quality Innovation at the National Quality Forum (NQF), where she spearheaded the expansion of NQF’s portfolio on social determinants of health quality measures, and co-led the NQF Measure Incubator®, an innovative effort that facilitates efficient measure development and testing through collaboration and partnership, and addresses important aspects of care for which quality measures are underdeveloped or non-existent.
Dr. Damian completed her PhD in the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Masters in Medical Sciences at Harvard Medical School. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelors of Arts in Ethnic Studies, Highest Honors. She has received numerous recognitions in honor of her role as a social change agent, including the Harry S. Truman Scholarship, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Community Well-Being Warrior Award, and an honorarium from the University of Delaware.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Kate Reilly is the Chief Operating Officer and a Managing Director for PJT Park Hill, a global capital raising and advisory services firm headquartered in New York. Kate is responsible for all aspects of the operations of the group which includes 175 employees across four countries. Prior to joining PJT Park Hill in 2015, Kate served as an attorney within The Blackstone Group’s Legal & Compliance department where she managed various litigation and regulatory matters for the firm in addition to providing legal and compliance support for Blackstone’s M&A, Restructuring and PJT Park Hill groups.
Kate graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. in English Literature and received a J.D. from New York Law School. Kate was a Division I Track & Field athlete while at Dartmouth. She has been an active DEIB Committee member for her daughters’ school for the past 3 years and has been focused on DEIB initiatives at her current firm. Kate strives to make an active lifestyle as part of her daily life and has run several marathons and half-marathons across the country including the NYC marathon.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Angela Solk is a Managing Director with Alvarez & Marsal Corporate Performance Improvement in Miami. She specializes in agencies in the media, advertising and entertainment industry. Her primary areas of concentration are client growth and partnership development, media operations, tech platforms, streaming, ad tech and start-ups.
With more than 20 years of experience in consulting and industry, Ms. Solk is an experienced team, revenue and brand leader with a demonstrated history of winning, building and growing businesses from start-ups to enterprises. She has successfully led, developed and launched Fortune 100 brands, brand and agency partnerships, first-to-market solutions, strategic and operational programs and high-performing teams.
Ms. Solk’s notable assignments include launching multiple new categories and brands for P&G globally and embedding data and insights into their media buying and planning processes while at WPP and Publicis. While at WPP she led billion-dollar pitches for Coke, M&M Mars, Sony and VW. At WPP she spearheaded the GroupM team that expanded JBP's beyond trading to include soft benefits, data and alpha opportunities changing the way JBP's with platform partners got created. While at WPP Angela realized platforms could change the way they sell and deliver to agencies and wrote the JD to go lead Spotify's agencies and accounts team leading it to $1B in revenue within 3 years.
She started her career client side in strategy, marketing, media and advertising at Calvin Klein. She them went onto lead the branding, strategy and marketing efforts for Avaya globally and was a part of the leadership team for Nokia helping to launch their own retail stores and stores with stores taking the brand to a top 5 global brand consistently.
Prior to joining A&M, Ms. Solk spent two years with Blippar, a tech company specializing in AR and SaaS, where she most recently served as Managing Director/President. In this role, she owned all P&L responsibility for sales, customer success, creative development, FP&A, marketing, culture, staffing and strategy to lead the business to Fortune 1000 clients globally.
Ms. Solk earned a bachelor’s degree in consumer studies and marketing from Syracuse University and a master’s degree in marketing research (honorary) (MSMR) from The University of Texas. She is an advisor for Until There Are Nine, a Board member of Active plus and a founding member of Chief.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Gati Dharani- is a pharmaceutical executive, with 20 years of experience in healthcare consulting, marketing and strategy. She also is an investor and advisor to healthtech startup companies, with specific interest in companies focused on equity and women’s health. Gati has an undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Tufts University and a Master in Public Health from Columbia University. Gati comes from a large family of immigrants who have successfully established themselves in the US as doctors, engineers, lawyers and entrepreneurs. She credits her own success to opportunities that were shown to her by mentors and programs focused on uplifting students from lower socio-economic environments.
Gati currently reside in Manhattan with her two young daughters and husband. Her current role is at Pfizer in business development and her husband is an orthopedic surgeon, serving patients in Brooklyn. The couple is proud to share a similar background and continuously look for opportunities to give back. Their two daughters attend public school in Battery Park City and are also passionate about volunteering and community service. Gati and her family are excited to be a part of the Active Plus community!
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We are located in Manhattan, NY and offer programs to all NYC communities.
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Yes, we are always looking to collaborate with other organizations and schools in the NYC community.
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Yes! Our services are always free for the students and their families.
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Our focus is 5-18 year old’s.
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We employ certified former educators, as well as other qualified instructors who have undergone thorough screening and background checks by the Department of Education.
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Please do not hesitate to contact us through our Volunteer or Contact Us page.
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Our Programs are funded through grants or by school contracts, individual and corporate donors.
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Each of our youth coaches and instructors is required to successfully complete the comprehensive Active Plus Academy Training program prior to engaging with any students.
