Member Monday

Mike Best is a Property & Casualty agent specializing in commercial insurance for small businesses in NJ and NY. Mike holds industry respected designations as a Commercial Lines Coverage Specialist, a Construction Risk Insurance Specialist, and as a Management Liability Insurance Specialist.

Kimone James is the Founder and CEO of The Amazing Help, a non-profit organization, and serves as its Board of Directors. She is also the CEO of Biz Start Up LLC that provides small business/non-profit formation, document preparations, career coaching, and notarization to Title and Mortgage companies. Before starting The Amazing Help and Biz Start-Up, she remotely operated a child care and preschool center in her home country Jamaica as the Founder and Executive Director, she also served on its board of directors and was responsible for the bookkeeping and human resource. Kimone studied with Penn Foster and Passaic County Community College.

Waikiki has 25 years of experience as a Senior Level Leader in commercial real estate construction and development management. Waikiki has provided project underwriting support information prior to asset acquisitions; provided lender financing support information; interfaced with community and zoning boards; coordinated inspections and approvals with building department officials to secure timely certificates of occupancy; assisted with joint developer agreement negotiations; provided full scale project budgets; bid, negotiated and awarded all project vendor contracts; established and managed construction and development cost and schedule controls on both the Owner and Contractor’s side of the project.

Pat Saporito is a SCORE mentor and chair of the outreach committee for the Northeast Chapter of SCORE, which services Bergen & Passaic counties. She works with business and community partners including chambers of commerce, libraries and economic development organizations helping small businesses start up or grow their businesses. 

Kevin Roman is the Walk Manager for the Alzheimer’s Association: Greater New Jersey Chapter, and covers northern NJ. Our signature event, the Walk to End Alzheimer’s, is on October 14th at Overpeck Park, Ridgefield Park, where we bring awareness and fundraising to support our vision - a world without Alzheimer’s.

Winston M. Meikle, MSN MBA HCA CCRN-CSC/CMC is an accomplished healthcare executive with a wealth of experience in critical care nursing, administration, and education. His professional aspirations are to achieve the highest levels of practice in professional nursing, continued education to complete a Doctor of Nursing Practice, and use this to help worthy organizations achieve their goals.

Mary K. Blanusa leads the Northern New Jersey Community Foundation (NNJCF) as Executive Director and brings with her extensive experience in organizational management, collective impact, strategic planning, and program development & implementation in philanthropy and nonprofit fields. NNJCF, based in Hackensack, is a non-profit organization working to improve local communities through philanthropy and programs in arts, environment, education, civic engagement, and public health.

Caryn Starr-Gates is a professional copywriter working in advertising, marketing and public relations. She writes for all media—print, broadcast, and digital—for a broad range of clients across many industries, for consumer and B2B accounts.

Frederic has over 32 years’ experience in the field of technology. Over the years he has developed expertise in application development, big data, security, compliance, open source technologies and IT consulting. As a junior in college he started a company and did consulting work with several fortune 500 such as Reuter, Time Warner, AT&T, BNP Bank, and Columbia University Medical Center.

Bruce Heyman is the President of Metropolitan Window Fashions, with locations in Paramus, Green Brook, Livingston, Lebanon and Green Brook. Serving both the retail customer and the design trade, Metropolitan offers Free in-home decorating services for custom draperies, motorized shades, blinds, shutters and reupholstery.