As the founding President & CEO of the Roy & Patricia Disney Family Foundation, she partnered with the family’s 25-person, multi-generational board to develop and launch LA’s newest progressive family foundation dedicated to creating an inclusive society and economy for the most vulnerable. With an initial endowment of $150M and an annual budget of $7.5M, Sylia built a values-based family enterprise with extensive family engagement and cohesion.

Disney prepared her for creating The Generative Group, Sylia’s consulting practice serving as a trusted advisor to ultra-affluent families and their family offices. Through her firm, she has launched three new values-aligned family foundations, each in the $100M to $400M range. She also co-created Think Money First!, a board and executive training and coaching program on full-cost budgeting, fundraising, high-performing governance, and change management, to strengthen over 250 grantees' CEOs and board chairs.

Sylia credits her expansive knowledge of the power of philanthropy to the 8 years she served as the Chief Operating Officer at the Annenberg Foundation, a $1.6B multi-generation family foundation with an annual grant budget of $80M and 90 staff. She launched the Foundation’s headquarters in Los Angeles, scaled operations, and built the management team. She then pivoted to spearheading innovative initiatives and programs, including the Annenberg’s $35M/year responsive grantmaking program; the Annenberg Space for Photography, LA’s newest cultural destination, with over 150,000 annual visitors; Annenberg Alchemy, a nationally recognized nonprofit leadership and board development program that trained over 2,000 nonprofit CEOs and board chairs; and LA n Sync, a regional cross-sector collaboration securing over $300M in federal and philanthropic investment for Los Angeles.

Her dedication to nonprofit capacity-building stems from her firsthand experience delivering life-changing education services to foster youth and their caregivers while serving as Vice President of Human Development & Youth Services at The Community College Foundation. Under her leadership, over 150 staff carried out 11 distinct social welfare programs serving over 15,000 foster youth and their caregivers across 55 community colleges. Recognizing the importance of quality front-line caseworkers, she launched a fee-for-service, nationally recognized Training Institute that delivers strength-based, family-centered training and certifications to over 1,000 county agency personnel annually.

She continued championing the importance of nonprofit board leadership, effectiveness, and financial sustainability as the interim CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice SoCal. Together in partnership with the board and staff, they led the successful financial turnaround of one of the nation’s largest legal aid organizations, with over 100 staff and an annual operating budget of $15M. Her leadership stabilized the organization’s financial health and allowed it to recruit and onboard its permanent CEO.

Sylia’s business acumen comes from her career at Arthur Andersen, LLP, where she honed her financial and tax expertise as a CPA for 6 years. She then pursued an MBA in strategy from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. She is a certified governance and executive coach (BoardSource, IPEC, ICF) and a highly skilled change-management facilitator, trained by Robert Gass, Founder of the Social Transformation Project and Rockwood Leadership Institute.

Sylia is an active voice in the sector, serving on advisory councils, speaking at national conferences, and mentoring emerging philanthropic leaders.