Sonya Kay Blake is the president and chief executive of the Valley Economic Alliance.
In her role, she helps facilitate economic development in the San Fernando Valley. She previously was director of Community Business in Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Office of Economic Development.
Blake has an art background. She studied art history at Yale University and “knew that the career would only be in New York or in Los Angeles.” Blake, whose parents are from Jamaica, was raised in Connecticut. She says she came to Los Angeles on vacation and “loved it so much that I didn’t go back” to Connecticut. She says she appreciated that art collectors in the area start their own museums to showcase their collections.
She knows taekwondo. Her brother owns a karate studio and taught Blake when she was a kid. Today, she has a green belt in the Korean martial art practice. While she doesn’t practice much anymore, Blake says she would “like to get back to it.”
Blake learned to fly trapeze as part of a public service announcement for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. In the ad, a trapeze artist fell into a safety net: “It was a metaphor that the organization was a safety net for our community,” Blake says. The budget for the piece was $100. Blake got a trapeze school to donate a trapeze artist by joining the school and learning to trapeze. “There’s a video of me falling through the air and screaming on the way down,” she adds. The PSA went on to be nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award.
She loves ice cream, but doesn’t always indulge her sweet tooth. Blake says pistachio and Rocky Road are two of her favorites, but she hasn’t had them in a while because “they cost too much in Weight Watchers points.” Instead, Blake enjoys fruit tarts with sugar-free pudding and other healthier dessert options.
She is close with other Garcetti alumni. Blake says the pandemic and civic unrest at the time “brought us together.” She sees people from Garcetti’s team individually every few weeks and as a group on occasion as well. “We’re still doing the same work, we are still mission aligned and thankfully our paths are still aligned,” she says.
— HANNAH WELK