With over 10 years of experience in the financial services industry, Shelby Sutter provides comprehensive financial planning and long-term investment advice to successful individuals and entrepreneurs, community organizations, multi-generational families, charitable foundations, retirement plans, and a wide array of businesses to make meaningful impacts on her clients’ daily lives. Shelby’s focused her career on advocating for her clients throughout every chapter of their financial lives. She prides herself on finding solutions for her clients’ seemingly unsolvable problems while providing a reassuring and knowledgeable presence throughout their unique journey.
Shelby is passionate about building successful, long-term, relationships with her clients to help them achieve their own custom blueprint to financial independence A.K.A. “Well-th”. She has a diverse and unique background which allows her to deeply understand the psychology of money and how our money stories (the ones we inherit and the ones we tell ourselves) affect us throughout our entire lives.
A Las Vegas transplant since 2015, Shelby serves her local community in many ways and believes in supporting Southern Nevadan initiatives. She is committed to serving as a leader and an example of philanthropy in our community. She has extensive experience consulting to non-profit organizations as well as contributing as a member of board leadership. In addition to her role as Project REAL’s Board President, Shelby also serves on the executive committee and board of directors for the Young Leaders Society (powered by the United Way of Southern Nevada), and is an active member of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Executive Leadership Volunteer Team.
Kimberly brings nearly a decade of communications experience to her volunteerism with Project REAL and her role as a Public Relations Specialist with Interdependence Public Relations. Her career began in journalism at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada’s largest daily newspaper, where she started as a general assignment reporter and grew to become an entertainment columnist. She is now a Nevada Press Association award-winning writer.
Kimberly was the head of public relations for a global tech company, where she oversaw a team of PR and social media specialists and producers in Las Vegas, as well as agency partners in Japan, Southeast Asia, South Africa and France. She simultaneously served as the spokesperson for an in-house brand, one of the world’s largest dating sites, and traveled between New York, Los Angeles and London for media interviews and to host events.
As the face of the brand, Kimberly appeared in many domestic and international TV and radio programs, as well as newspapers and magazines, including Bloomberg, Business Insider, Forbes, and most recently, The Portal podcast with Eric Weinstein, Managing Director of Thiel Capital. In the same role, Kimberly was responsible for all outside productions involving the brands, and has also worked with BBC, 60 Minutes, VICE and several highly regarded documentary film crews.
Kimberly is passionate about finding the human-interest aspect in every storytelling opportunity. Her experiences afford her unique perspective of the world of communications, because she has worked on all sides to share information. Since 2016, Kimberly has played a direct role in nearly all news & media coverage Project REAL has received thanks to her generous volunteerism with our organization.
Project REAL’s Executive Director Mike Kamer has been serving the mission of Project REAL since 2016. Mike’s 10+ years of experience in program development & management have allowed Project REAL to significantly increase the number of students we serve and the number of tools available to serve them with.
Mike work began with Project REAL in March 2016, when he was hired as our Program Director. After spending the first three months learning Project REAL’s offerings while finishing out the school year, he spent his first summer with us developing our organization’s current model, the Sequential Education Program. This allowed the organization to more effectively serve students by creating multi-year planned interactions with them, increasing the likelihood that students would have at least one Project REAL experience each year. This approach – combined with a program redesign that worked to add ‘field trip like memories’ to every Project REAL experience students have – has led to our work having long-term impacts on student behavior, and increased their academic performance in the civics education topics we provide lessons for.
In his free time, Mike volunteers throughout the community, mentors our past employees and interns, and leads Nevada Nonprofit Network and it’s Nerdy Nonprofit Nights – a social group for nonprofit professionals in Southern Nevada that aims to increase collaboration among our regions pubic service organizations.
Corporations, government agencies, and other nonprofits have all seen the value of our work and rose to the challenge of ensuring Project REAL continues to serve the students of Nevada. We acknowledge and are grateful for these organizations for the grants and donations they provide to help make our work possible. We are also fortunate enough to have the support of key philanthropic individuals without whom we’d be unable to continue serving Nevada’s students. We’d like to take a moment to thank some of those organizations and individuals now.
Premier Sponsors & Donors
Clark County Fiscal Recovery Fund
Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant
Friends of Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept. Foundation
US District Court, District of Nevada’s Attorney Admissions’ Fund
Select Sponsors & Donors
Cirque Du Soleil
NV Energy Foundation
Savant Investment Partners
United Way of Southern Nevada
Essential Sponsors & Donors
The Molasky Group of Companies
Sam & Lexy Lionel
Sponsors
The Gratitude Project
Jewish Nevada, Nevada’s Jewish Federation
Nevada Humanities
Speedway Children’s’ Charities
Benefactors
Kamer, Zucker, & Abbott
Lovee & Bob Arum
Stephen & Andrea Wynn
Steve Lawrence
Summer Business Institute
Supporters
American Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division – Nevada Chapter
Based in Las Vegas, our Regional Coordinator for Southern Nevada is responsible for nearly all program service delivery. While our Executive Director handles direct service to Clark County’s urban core and surrounding rural communities, our Regional Coordinator takes on all other service needs throughout Southern Nevada, from recruiting new schools to leading our courthouse fieldtrips, REALReady classroom presentations, and relationship violence prevention experiences.
Our Northern Nevada office is staffed by a rotating team of interns provided by the University of Nevada, Reno who occasionally are kept on as part-time employees. This team is responsible for ensuring Project REAL provides continuous service in the northern parts of Nevada, including our REALReady presentations and courthouse fieldtrips. They also regularly make contributions to our ‘additional content’ law blogs.
Project REAL always welcomes inquiries about traditional volunteer opportunities, however the majority of volunteer hours served with us are performed by interns, teachers, and law-professionals. We would like to take a moment to highlight the unique and invaluable ways these groups serve Nevada’s children through Project REAL.
The teachers who volunteer to bring our materials and experiences into their classrooms are essential to our success. Principals and school administrators do contact us with requests for our services (and we gladly respond to those requests), however the majority of our services are delivered to students by the teachers who took the initiative to bring Project REAL into their classrooms.
Lawyers, Judges, Clerks, and Law Officers…. Teachers are 45% responsible for Project REAL’s success, and people in these and similar positions make up another 45% (that leaves 10% of the lifting for us to do).
Officers are not just responsible for co-teaching our materials about laws and the consequences of breaking them to students, they also take on the challenge of winning over the students’ hearts and minds during difficult times in our nation.
The many judges, lawyers, and courthouse staff who allow us to bring up to 90 students into Nevada’s courthouses nearly every day of the week are the only reasons our field trips are so invaluably interactive – otherwise these trips would just be tours of empty buildings were it not for them. Their volunteerism goes well beyond the passive allowance of our presence of course – most of these volunteers go above and beyond, taking time out of their day to speak with the students and answer their questions. They allow our field trips in their courts, they provide the opportunities for us to give those trips, and best of all, they greatly improve upon the experiences we offer.
Our organization has the benefit of hosting a wide-range of interns, all of whom have make significant contributions to our work. Interns help to improve the ways our fieldtrips run, contributed to new activities we’ve developed, created administrative tools that have allowed us to make notable gains in our efficacy, and much more. When you see the credits pages in our printed materials, you can get a sense of just how much impact these amazing individuals create during their time at Project REAL.
Project REAL has numerous needs that can be addressed by individuals in the community joining us as volunteers. Our volunteer program is currently ‘under construction’, so for now those opportunities are on hold. If you are interested in joining our program, EMAIL US HERE and we will notify you as soon as our program begins onboarding new volunteers.
In the first fifteen years of service, the majority of our work took place in the classroom. Thanks to program expansions and new opportunities that developed, today our resources are in use at summer camps, afterschool programs, community centers, and even family development classes aimed at adults. We take pride in the growing list of education programs, community groups, and nonprofit partners that are taking part in our work educating and empowering the students of Nevada.
We serve a diverse range of students throughout Nevada, and are dedicated to having an equally diverse team to serve them with. We are firmly committed to ensuring the students we serve are being helped by people from within their own communities whenever possible.
We go beyond the generic sentiment of having a non-discrimination policy – we actively recruit from the communities we serve. All resumes and applications are reviewed and prioritized in batches, with identifying information removed to prevent any unconscious bias from influencing those decisions. Resumes are not the end-all evaluation tool in our team development process either – we also take candidates’ potential for professional development into consideration when making decisions about additions to our team.
If you would like to help support our commitment to these practices and philosophies, consider joining our Diversity and Inclusion committee that provides guidance on administrative policies and our academic content. Visit the volunteer section of our site to learn more.
