Staff
Sharon Charnell Gherman, President/CEO
Sharon Charnell Gherman is President and CEO of The Funding Exchange, Inc. /Alaska Funding Exchange, and has been nationally recognized for her innovations in program development and implementation. She has more than 30 years of professional experience with strengths in program planning and evaluation, strategic planning, and individual and organizational capacity building.
As Executive Director of the Alaska Challenger Learning Center, Sharon developed several innovative corporate training programs using the Challenger space simulator and established residential, day and custom camp programs and a residential Teacher’s Institute.
As Outreach Coordinator of the Alaska Science & Technology Foundation she administered ASTF's K-12 educational programs, including the popular Direct Grants to Teachers program -- competitive $5,000 grants to Alaska K-12 teachers for innovative math, science & technology classroom projects.
Sharon worked with rural Alaska communities beginning in 1992 as an economic development consultant, and as a grant writer helped to tie portions of Alaska’s Interior together through successful telecommunications grants in the 1990’s. She traveled throughout the rural Interior of Alaska teaching interviewing and work readiness skills to village high school students, and served as the state’s Rural Specialist in the Alaska School to Work program. In the early 1990’s she worked as an informal educator and contract specialist with the Alaska 4-H program.
When she’s not working on AFE business from her office in Fairbanks, you can find Sharon out in the garden and greenhouse. She’s a Master Gardener and loves the smell of dirt and anything green. She also loves to fish and read and spoil the kids and grandkids she shares with her husband Ron.
Ron Gherman, Vice President 
Ron Gherman, AFE’s Vice President, IT and Educational Specialist, is one of those educational creatures no one understands but every parent appreciates – an administrator and former middle school teacher. With more than 38 years as an educator and administrator in both Ohio and Alaska, Ron brings particular expertise to The Funding Exchange in the fields of education and technology.
Ron has served as Executive Director of Instructional Technology Services for the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District and as Director of Technology in Marion, Ohio, where he was responsible for the overall coordination of the school district’s instructional technology integration and the training of teachers, other staff and students in the use of technology in the educational process. He has taught elementary, middle, high school, college, and currently is assistant-principal at North Pole High School. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Education from the Ohio State University, a Master’s Degree in Educational Administration from Bowling Green State University, and completed the coursework for a Master’s degree in Computer Curriculum and Supervision from Ashland University.
Ron’s innovative “Marriage Unit” has taught thousands of middle school students to use Microsoft Office programs while learning adult living and career skills. When teaching, one of his favorite semester activities was reading the evaluation forms from his students about the Marriage Unit, where they declare they’re NEVER getting married and who would want kids, anyway??!
Ron and Sharon love to build and remodel houses (usually theirs, but not always), and if he has any say about the matter, you’ll find him fishing at the nearest lake or river.
Cynthia M. Adams, Senior Consultant
Cindy founded the Alaska Funding Exchange in 1992, and then went on to launch GrantStation in 2001, an internet web site and online database of funding sources. She continues her close association with AFE as Senior Consultant.
Cindy is President/CEO of GrantStation, and has more than 35 years of fundraising experience in Alaska. She served as Director for Development for the Economic Development Center at the Fairbanks North Star Borough for five years, has served on numerous State Boards and Commissions, as well as served on the board of several foundations in Alaska and nationally. Cindy has taught hundreds of grant writing workshops, written several grant writing/research workbooks, and continues to assist organizations both in-state and nationally identify and secure funding.