Philadelphia — What does it take to lead one of America’s oldest zoological institutions, and then turn that experience toward one of Philadelphia’s most urgent human challenges?<\/p>\n
In the Season 4 premiere of Overheard with Ajay Raju, Ajay sits down with Vik Dewan, former Director of the Philadelphia Zoo, for a conversation that moves fluidly between the art of leadership and the demands of civic conscience. Vik reflects on the philosophy that guided his tenure at the Zoo, a practice of active listening, deep stakeholder engagement, and the patient, pragmatic work of building community trust alongside institutional growth.<\/p>\n
But the conversation doesn’t stop at the Zoo’s gates. Vik shares how that same leadership ethos led him to his next chapter: a groundbreaking collaborative initiative bringing together select nonprofits in the Kensington neighborhood to confront, with pooled resources and hard-nosed pragmatism, the interlocking crises of housing scarcity, addiction, and economic vulnerability that have long defined the community’s struggle.<\/p>\n
It’s a portrait of a leader who believes that the skills honed in one arena, patience, coalition-building, strategic clarity, translate directly into the most difficult work a city asks of its citizens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Philadelphia — What does it take to lead one of America’s oldest zoological institutions, and then turn that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[91993,91990,10547,91991,69,71,70,91992],"class_list":["post-209693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-91993","tag-ajay-raju","tag-no-ta","tag-overheard","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-vik-dewan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}