Tiffany Faykus, executive director
BY TAYLOR WILLIAMS and IAN MacCALLUM
NNB Student Reporters
ST. PETERSBURG – On one side of the window, a woman and three small children were digging through a dump outside an abandoned factory.
On the other side, a woman with a gin and tonic in her hand sat by the pool of a five-star hotel.
Until that moment 14 years ago, Tiffany Fakus was happy with her life as a $100,000-a-year executive for a multimedia software company. She was taking a break from a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, when she happened to look out the window.
“I looked away and tried to ignore it,” said Faykus, now 43. But when she returned to the conference she couldn’t shake the image of the woman, the children and the dump.
“What am I doing on this side of the glass?” she thought to herself.
“It was so profoundly impactful,” she said. “Nothing felt right after that. The little things that didn’t use to bother me now did.”
The glance out the window in Baku became a look into Faykus’ future.
Within a few months, she had resigned from her corporate job and begun an odyssey that eventually brought her to St. Petersburg, where she is executive director of the Heart Gallery of Pinellas and Pasco, a nonprofit organization that matches foster children with adoptive families.
The Heart Gallery showcases the pictures and stories of hard-to-place children in the belief that “there’s a family out there for every kid,” Faykus said.
It is her job to raise money and public awareness. “It’s all about spreading the word,” she said.
Over the last five years, she said, 176 children have been adopted through the Heart Gallery. Watching a judge preside over an adoption is the most rewarding part of her job.
“I played a part – however small, I played a part,” she said. “There’s one judge that says, ‘It is my pleasure to make official what love made true.’ ”
Many of the matches don’t lead to adoption, however. The Heart Gallery’s children are generally older. Some have physical disabilities or emotional problems. Some have siblings and they can’t be separated. There is, Faykus acknowledged, “a 40 to 50 percent fail rate.”
“When kids don’t get adopted, it’s the worst part of my job,” she said. “When I tuck my (own) kids in at night, I think, Who is tucking in those kids?”
Over the last five years 176 children have been adopted through the Heart Gallery.
Faykus grew up in a religious family that believed in giving back to the community. Although they frequently moved, her mother found causes to champion at every stop – Meals on Wheels, a wheelchair sports camp, a national charity organization for mothers and daughters.
“I remember playing in the church library while she was cooking the meals,” said Faykus.
Her parents started a foundation they called WGG (for With God’s Grace), she said. “That says my family. That’s how I was raised.”
As a teenager, Faykus dreamed of a career in theater. That carried her to New York City, where she majored in theater and history at New York University and appeared in several off-Broadway plays.
It was in New York that she met her husband, Preston, who was there on an internship. They lived in Russia and then Budapest, Hungary. That’s where she landed the corporate job that eventually took her to Baku and what she calls her “aha moment” – the sight of the woman and children in the dump.
When she, her husband and their three children – now 12, 10 and 8 – moved to St. Petersburg several years ago, Faykus said, she was not enthusiastic about the city.
That changed as they got settled and joined a church and she began volunteer work. In 2012, she became executive director of the Heart Gallery.
Now Faykus looks at the world through a different window.
When a promising adoption falls through, she said, she tries to remain upbeat. She sees value in serving a cause she embraces passionately. The biblical guidance her mother and father stressed still rings in her head:
“To whom much is given, much is expected.”
NNB reporters Jennifer Nesslar and Jaime Luna contributed to this report.
