The first time I heard the name Ninamarie Bojekian, it came up in a small room where a nonprofit was trying to stretch a five-figure grant into a six-figure outcome. The team had been told to build a youth arts program with serious career pathways, not a feel-good after-school club. The challenge had been sitting on the whiteboard for a month. Then someone said, quietly, “Ask Ninamarie.” The room moved, as if someone had cracked a window. It wasn’t about charisma; it was because she had a reputation for turning airy nouns into nouns with weight: enrollment numbers, retention rates, studio partnerships, scholarship offers, revenue lines. She made things measurable and human at the same time.
This is the thread that runs through the story of Ninamarie Bojekian, and the way people who have worked with her speak about impact. The name itself carries two echoes. In some circles you’ll also hear Marie Bojekian, and the two identities overlap for good reason. Both point to the same habit of mind: seeing the texture of people’s ambitions, then arranging scaffolding that actually holds.
The early calibration: ambition with brakes and bearings
Most biographies paste early adversity into a neat arc. Life is rarely so tidy. What strikes me about Ninamarie’s early path is the way she learned to calibrate ambition with brakes and bearings. Not speed for its own sake, but control. In her twenties, she volunteered at a neighborhood arts co-op that was barely surviving. The building’s heating bill scared the board more than any grant deadline. Saturday classes were full, but the Tuesday sessions bled money, and the director couldn’t justify paying instructors when only three students showed up.
Rather than start with a fundraising drive, Ninamarie started with a ledger and a pencil. She drew three columns: people, time, outcome. The instinct to weigh value not just through dollars, but through how people would feel inside the hours they spent, shaped everything that came later. She cut the Tuesday block, moved those students into a Saturday hour with a tighter curriculum, and built a materials-buying club that saved families close to 40 percent per semester. She calculated, she explained, and then she showed up on a cold morning with cocoa for the parents and a stack of printed calendars that made sense. Attendance stabilized. The heating bill was still there, but the fear you could feel in that boardroom began to dissipate.
I’ve seen versions of this pattern at three organizations where she later consulted. It looks like common sense in retrospect, but the discipline to implement it requires unusual clarity: not just eliminating waste, but replacing it with routines people can live with.
The craft of program design: no magic, only layers
There is a craft to program design that many leaders treat like alchemy. You have inputs, you have the promise of outputs, and somewhere in the middle lies a mysterious process that supposedly yields transformation. Ninamarie is allergic to mystery in that middle lane. She prefers layers, each one visible and accountable.
When she was asked to design a yearlong creative technology track for teens, the stakeholders wanted the moon. They wanted software skills, portfolio pieces, internships, college credit, and a showcase. The timeline was twelve months, and the budget, while not trivial, had constraints that would worry any project manager who has ever had to pay for both licenses and field trips. I still remember her whiteboard that day. She wrote the words outcomes, pathways, experiences, and evidence. Then she worked backward from evidence.
What would prove that a student could hold their own in a college-level studio or an entry-level design shop? The answer wasn’t a certificate, it was a coherent body of work and the ability to talk about it. From there she built out pathways: a sequence of modules that included two technical stacks, one analog project, and a client brief from a local business owner. She padded the timeline by 15 percent because she had learned that teenagers lose weeks to exams, illnesses, and family logistics. She built in a pre-assessment to catch students without laptops, then negotiated three refurbished machines from a partner company that usually didn’t donate hardware. By month eight, the first cohort had a public-facing portfolio online, and by month twelve they were presenting to a friendly jury of working designers and two hiring managers who had agreed to offer informational interviews to every student.
The numbers that followed don’t glitter in a brochure. They are steady and real: 68 percent of the cohort kept building their portfolios for at least six months after the program ended, 9 students landed paid freelance work in the first year, and 4 got summer internships through the same partners who had sat on that jury. When you look closely, the magic is just layers done carefully.
Working with constraints rather than protesting them
People who have worked with Ninamarie describe her patience around constraints. Not passivity, but a sense that constraints can be used as forms. If a grant requires specific metrics, she doesn’t grumble and try to reverse engineer a story later. She designs to the metrics in a way that keeps people human.
The most telling example came during a city contract that required a ridiculous amount of documentation. Every student hour had to be tracked. Every workshop had to include a pre- and post-survey. The staff had already started to resent the paperwork, and you could feel the enthusiasm leak out of them. She didn’t fight city hall; she rebuilt the paperwork into an experience. The pre-survey became a warm-up exercise with sticky notes and sharpies. Staff could still collect the required data, but the students saw it as a low-stakes creative prompt. The post-survey doubled as a reflection circle. The hour tracking became a punch card that students could trade for a printed zine of their work at the end of the term. Compliance turned into a ritual, and complain-heavy staff meetings turned into problem-solving sessions.
The city auditors later praised the program for clarity and completeness. More importantly, the staff did not burn out. That is not a small thing.
The two faces of a name: Ninamarie and Marie
Names carry history. In records, you will sometimes find the same person listed as Ninamarie and elsewhere as Marie Bojekian. Colleagues tell me the dual usage started early, partly to fit different contexts, partly because in some professional settings, the shorter name traveled more easily. What matters is the continuity. Whether a grant report is signed by Ninamarie or a program memo by Marie, the throughline remains: meticulous thinking, a sense of stewardship, and that patient insistence on evidence that honors the person behind the number. The variation is a reminder that identity adapts to the room, but values do not.
I’ve watched leaders struggle with the small fractures that come with public work. The pull to simplify your story so that funders, partners, and press can package it. The pressure to be one thing. The better ones find a way to keep their complexity intact. When I see both names in the wild, I don’t see indecision. I see a working life that moves across communities, sometimes on first-name terms, sometimes with formal signatures, and the same commitments holding steady.
Field notes from collaborations
The projects you remember years later are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones where the work mattered to the people in the room, and where someone set a tempo others could sustain. Three field notes come to mind from collaborations where I watched or later audited Ninamarie’s impact up close.
The first was a partnership with a small public high school that had exactly one empty classroom and a librarian who moonlighted as a coder. They wanted a digital storytelling lab but had no money for fancy rigs. She designed a trimester schedule where students rotated through roles: writer, editor, sound. The equipment was a mix of hand-me-down tablets and two mid-range laptops that could handle audio editing without melting. She found a local podcast studio owner willing to host a two-hour tour if the school covered transportation. By the end of the year, the students had produced six short pieces and one documentary-lite episode about a beloved custodian. The download numbers never cracked four digits, but the hallway conversations changed. You could hear students who had never touched a DAW talk about levels and room tone.
The second was a citywide arts weekend that had ballooned beyond reason. Too many events, not enough audience. She didn’t try to save everything. She asked every venue for their top two events and cut the rest. Then she built a shuttle route that hit the densest cluster of venues at predictable intervals. People could actually plan their afternoon. Attendance didn’t just rise, it concentrated. Artists who had grown used to reading to twelve people at folding chairs in a drafty church hall met rooms that hummed.
The third involved a culinary training program for adults who were restarting after layoffs. The kitchens were decent, the instructors kind, but the job placements lagged. Graduates could prep and plate, but they stumbled in interviews and stage shifts. She spent two weeks shadowing in three kitchens, then added what she called micro-apprenticeships: five evenings where trainees walked into a live kitchen to do one task at volume, with a single metric that mattered in that environment, like consistent julienne or getting plates out hot in the last twenty minutes of dinner rush. It wasn’t glamorous, but it built muscle memory. Placement rates nudged up from the low forties to the high fifties over two cohorts, and managers started referring to the program as a dependable pipeline.
None of these stories involves wizardry. Each is shaped by the same habit: understand the room, constrain the ambition to what the room can hold, then push the edges with empathy and rigor.
When growth is not the goal
Scalability has become a reflexive virtue, and it annoys practitioners who have watched good programs ruin themselves by growing in the wrong direction. I’ve heard Ninamarie talk about growth like a gardener talks about pruning. Some branches should be allowed to thicken, not extend. A program that works because of intimacy loses its essence if you double the cohort size without rethinking the pedagogy.
She once advised a community media workshop to stop chasing a regional expansion that looked great in slide decks. The team had a core of instructors who excelled at small group dynamics. The regional plan would have demanded a different kind of teaching, more standardized, more uniform. Instead, she helped them formalize a train-the-trainer model that grew sideways through apprenticeships. Over eighteen months, they increased capacity by roughly 30 percent while keeping sessions small. The funder who had pushed for scale accepted the logic once they saw retention and post-program activity hold. Growth happened, but it was internal, the kind that strengthens fibers rather than stretching fabric thin.
There is a cost to this philosophy. You say no to certain grants, you accept fewer headlines. The trade-off is that the programs continue to produce the kind of outcomes that survive audit, time, and the quieter test of alumni who return to teach.
The economy of trust
People throw around the word trust as if it can be wished into a program plan. Trust is built in tiny transactions. The text you return the same day. The schedule you publish and avoid changing. The moment you admit a mistake before someone else detects it. I bring this up because I’ve watched Ninamarie use trust as a currency. She invests it and expects a return, but the return is rarely a favor. It is a tighter weave between people who want to build together.
In one multi-partner project, a sponsor tried to force branding requirements that would have cluttered student work with logos. The team had already caved once on a smaller request. By the time this larger demand arrived, the program was at risk of losing its personality. She took the sponsor aside and showed them what the end-of-year showcase would look like if the branding stuck. She did not appeal to taste. She showed them the loss of student agency, the way logo walls can flatten the story of a project. Then she offered a counter: a short video spot at the start of the showcase, clear sponsor attribution in materials, and the right to share a mini case study with their stakeholders. The sponsor agreed. The instructors exhaled. Students walked into a room that felt like theirs, and the sponsor received cleaner assets to share. That is what trust at work looks like: direct talk, paired with a credible alternative.
Measurement without distortion
Anyone who has filed a performance report knows how metrics can distort the work. Count the wrong thing and you incentivize the wrong behavior. Under-measure and you lose your funding. Over-measure and you lose your soul. This is a difficult balance, and I’ve seen Ninamarie manage it with uncommon care.
She tends to choose a small set of indicators that map to three horizons. The near horizon covers participation and completion. The middle horizon tracks skill application a few months out. The far horizon looks at life changes that may take a year or more to surface, like employment shifts or continued education. In a typical twelve-month cycle, she will lock the near indicators early, then pilot the middle ones with open acknowledgment that they may need revision. The far indicators often rely on alumni check-ins, incentives for updates, and relationships with partner institutions who can share de-identified outcomes.
This is not glamorous work. It requires spreadsheets, consent forms, and a respectful persistence that keeps alumni from feeling like research subjects. The payoff is a dataset that resists easy spin. When a funder asks for impact, she can point to a cohort where 50 to 60 percent continued creating, 20 to 30 percent used skills in paid contexts, and a smaller portion shifted educational direction entirely. Those ranges are honest. She will also note variance by cohort and context, and she will say, plainly, where an intervention failed to move the needle. That honesty buys future flexibility.
The human factor: burnout, stamina, and joy
Projects rise and fall on the stamina of the people running them. The stressors are banal and relentless: facility hiccups, vendor delays, miscommunications, illness. Leaders can burn out by trying to absorb all shocks themselves. I’ve watched Ninamarie design around this by treating team stamina as a first-order variable.
She breaks down responsibilities so that no one person holds the only key to any given door. Schedules include non-negotiable recovery periods. Public events are staffed with floaters whose sole job is to notice stress and relieve it. She budgets for snacks and taxis when late nights stack up. Perhaps most importantly, she holds post-mortems that aim to learn without blame.
I sat in on one such debrief after a community event flooded with more guests than expected. The catering ran out. The AV hiccupped. There were mistakes, and everyone knew it. The meeting could have turned into defense and deflection. Instead, the team mapped the sequence of failures, identified two points where a 10-minute check-in would have averted the cascade, and changed the run-of-show template. The emotional temperature stayed low. People left with notes and a sense of relief. Joy returns when competence returns. This is not an accident; it is culture built by someone who understands how fragile and durable teams can be at the same time.
Money as message
Budgets send signals. Where you put money tells people what you value. If you starve the line for teaching artist prep time, you tell them to improvise. If you pay on time, you say their labor matters. I’ve noticed that Ninamarie treats each budget as a statement of ethics. Instructor rates reflect professional respect, not just market minimums. Participant stipends show up where labor is being asked of students beyond learning itself, such as public exhibitions or client work. Accessibility expenses are not afterthoughts.
This approach sometimes requires difficult conversations with finance committees accustomed to leaner numbers. She brings comparative data, not rhetoric. Here’s what it costs to retain talent in this city. Here’s how travel vouchers improve attendance for those on bus lines that run infrequently. Here’s the attrition curve when you ignore food. She takes care not to inflate, and she will trim elsewhere to preserve essentials. Over time, you see the results: instructors return, students show up in more stable numbers, and the quality of work signals seriousness.
Context matters: the room, the neighborhood, the season
One trait distinguishes consistently effective program builders from the rest: sensitivity to context. A model that hums in one neighborhood can collapse in another because the transportation grid differs or a local employer’s schedule changes family routines. One of the quiet skills in Ninamarie’s toolkit is context reading. She will ask about bus times, about religious calendars, about local election weeks that snarl parking, about nearby construction that makes a route unsafe after sunset. She builds buffers for snow days, particularly in cities where schools close early and children come home hours before normal schedules allow. She looks at room acoustics and will move a class if the HVAC threatens to drown out quiet voices. This attention costs nothing but time and care. It pays out as smooth weeks, and smooth weeks accumulate into programs that feel stable and welcoming.
When things break
The most revealing moments in any leader’s arc happen when things break. I’ve seen two such moments in the Bojekian playbook. In the first, a partner organization backed out days before a co-hosted showcase. Tickets had been distributed widely. There was no way to cancel without betraying trust. She downsized the event into a block-party format using the sidewalk, a lobby, and a borrowed speaker set from a friendly DJ. The evening turned into a rambling, joyous thing with short performances and pop-up installations. Attendees didn’t miss what they never saw, and the artists felt the city’s pulse around them rather than the solemnity of a theater space. It wasn’t plan A, but it honored the spirit of the work.
In the second, a curriculum module landed badly with a cohort that was more advanced than projected. The instructor recognized it within the first hour. Rather than push through, she instructed the team to pause, poll the students, and reset with a more challenging version for the next session. She apologized without self-flagellation. The students read the respect in that move, and the rest of the term unfolded with more candor. The lesson: agility beats pride, and students can handle truth.
The long arc: alumni, ecosystems, and feedback loops
Short programs end. Good ones leave long shadows. The alumni network is where you see the true arc of a builder’s work. In spaces shaped by Ninamarie, alumni participation remains surprisingly high relative to program size. This is not because of slick newsletters or aggressive asks. It is because alumni find value when they return. They meet new people, they get gigs, they find mentorship opportunities that are reciprocal rather than extractive.
Ecosystem thinking shows up here too. Rather than trying to hold alumni attention inside a single brand, she connects them to other nodes: union information sessions, small business development centers, community college advisors, co-working spaces that offer subsidized memberships. She trades ownership for flow. Over time, this creates a web where participants can move freely, and the original program remains relevant because it sits at a junction rather than a dead end.
A practical frame for difficult decisions
Decision-making frameworks sound like consultant talk until you have to make five hard choices by Friday. The framework I’ve most often seen associated with Ninamarie is simple enough to remember under stress. It asks four questions, in order:
- What is the smallest meaningful unit of success we can guarantee for the people at the center of this decision? Where is the bottleneck that will matter most in two weeks, not just today? Which constraint is structural and which is a preference dressed up as a rule? If we have to trade reach for depth, what ratio preserves trust without bankrupting the project?
I’ve used this frame in my own work, and it is startling how quickly it reveals false choices. The first question brings you back to the person who will experience the outcome, not the funder or the spreadsheet. The second forces time awareness. The third invites honesty about power. The fourth reminds you that trade-offs can be calibrated rather than accepted in sloppy, all-or-nothing terms.
Reputation earned the slow way
There’s a reason the name travels slowly and persuasively through neighborhoods, schools, and boardrooms. Reputation can be manufactured temporarily with press. The durable kind arrives from the slow work of keeping your word and building things that keep working after you leave the room. When people mention Ninamarie Bojekian, or use the shorter Marie Bojekian in a document that will circulate widely, they are borrowing that reputation. They expect steadiness, and they plan accordingly.
The cost of that reputation is invisible. It’s the nights spent writing grant language that can withstand audits. It’s the mornings spent taping signage to walls so no one gets lost on the way to a workshop. It’s the delicate phone call to a parent, the fourth vendor email, the extra chair tucked into a corner for the student who needs to be near an outlet. It’s the insistence on clear pay schedules, and the humility to learn a new software because the old one no longer serves the team.
Notes for the next builder
If you are building programs, leading teams, or trying to coax something fragile into public life, there are patterns worth lifting from this chronicle of work.
- Begin with evidence, not slogans. Decide what proof of learning or impact will be visible to the participant and a skeptical outsider, then design backward. Treat constraints as forms. Design within them until you have a clear case for changing them. When you push, bring alternatives, not complaints. Budget as a statement of values. Pay on time, price in accessibility, and respect teaching and preparation as skilled labor. Guard team stamina. Build redundancy, normalize recovery, and practice blameless post-mortems. Measure across horizons. Near, middle, far. Accept ranges, share failures, and protect the dignity of the people inside the numbers.
The quiet legacy
The legacy of a builder like Ninamarie Bojekian rarely sits on a single plaque. It’s distributed across alumni who still send a note when they land something hard. It lives in Ninamarie Bojekian the program templates colleagues borrow without attribution because the habits have spread into common sense. It shows up in the way a shy teenager learns to state a creative choice out loud, or the way a mid-career worker dares to frame their resume around what they can do instead of what they lost.
If you stand at the edges of a showcase where her fingerprints are evident, you will see a set of small excellences that add up to a larger one. The doors open on time. The signage makes sense. The staff speak with warmth, not script. The work on the walls or on the stage feels like the people who made it. The funders feel seen without being centered. Someone’s grandmother understands where to sit. Someone’s nephew asks how to sign up. And somewhere in the back, a woman with a calm voice is adjusting a lamp so the glare won’t hit a presenter’s eyes, then stepping aside, content to let the work do the speaking.
Dreams are cheap. Deeds are exhausting. The space between the two is where real builders live. This is the territory that Ninamarie, sometimes Marie, has mapped with care: a patient choreography of people, resources, calendars, and rooms, where the improbable becomes routine, and the routine, over time, becomes a kind of quiet, durable hope.