Anne Baker is Vice President of the National Peace Corps Association. She has a B.A. in Physics from Amherst College and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she concentrated in international education. She has ten years of teaching experience at the high school level: two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher of physics, mathematics and physical science in the Fiji Islands and eight years as a mathematics teacher at St. George’s School in Newport, RI, where she was also the Director of Cultural Affairs and an International Student Advisor. At St. George’s, she founded, developed and facilitated a student-led organization for global education and community outreach. She first came to NPCA to develop its global education program, Global TeachNet., which today continues to support K-12 educators in bringing global issues to their classrooms, schools and communities. She is currently a co-facilitator of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) Global Education Network.
Mary Brownell is a reading specialist and middle-upper school humanities and English. She had taught at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy and Abington Friends School in Philadelphia. She has taught the Global Education strand as part the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at SCH. Mary facilitated a workshop on middle school global collaboration at the Asia Society Conference on Global Learning and, with her students, demonstrated their work as part of the International Global Education Conference. As a member of iEARN, she has written middle school CCSS for the Kindred Family Project and has participated in iEARN webinars on differing aspects of developing global partnerships including Competing Standards: Project-Based Learning , CCSS Aligned With iEARN Projects and Change Over Time: Future Ready. Linked With The Past. She has received residences at Hedgebrook Writers Colony for Women in Washington and the Abroad Writers Conference in France as well as being the recipient of NEH fellowships for the study of Petrarch, Milton, and 20th Century American woman writers. She has been awarded funding from the Leeway Foundation of Philadelphia as well as the Pennsylvania Council of The Arts. Awards include honors by the Yeats Society of New York, Comstock Review, Robert Frost Foundation, National Writers Union, the Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize from the University of Massachusetts, and others. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Pivot, Comstock Review, GSU, Margie, Wind, InkPot, The Same, BigCity Lit and many other journals.
Jen Chapin is a songwriter, singer and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a B.A. in International Relations from Brown University, and has also studied at Berklee College of Music, and in Mexico and Zimbabwe. As a music teacher at Brooklyn Friends School, she developed middle school music curricula based on creative listening and improvisation, as well as a high school course on the “History of Black Music.” She serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors of World Hunger Year (WHY) and is a member of WHY’s “Artists Against Hunger and Poverty” program.
Stefanie Ortiz-CidlikA visionary strategist and change catalyst, Stefanie Ortiz-Cidlik has over 20 years of non-profit leadership experience. On March 18, 2019, she assumed the role of Executive Director of iEARN-USA (International Education and Resources Network) Stefanie began her career raising funds for environmental and citizen rights organizations. Since then, she focused her career on youth development organizations, spending several years in the alcohol, tobacco, drug, and delinquency prevention field where she led a team that trained school teachers, guidance counselors, and other youth workers to deliver a nationally-awarded prevention program. Most recently, as the Chief Executive of USA Girl Scouts Overseas, Stefanie led Girl Scouts’ overseas operations and a team on three continents that brought the Girl Scout Leadership Experience to girls and families in nearly 90 countries around the world.
Stefanie has always been passionate about issues that impact women and youth. She served multiple terms on the Lancaster County, Nebraska Women’s Commission during which she started and hosted a television talk show focused on topics that impact women. In 2007, she represented GSUSA at an international HIV/AIDS Prevention and Advocacy conference at Sangam World Centre in Pune, India. She’s had the honor of serving as a member of GSUSA’s delegation to the WAGGGS (World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts) World Conferences in Hong Kong, China, and New Delhi, India. Stefanie remains active in local, national, and international organizations to advance opportunities for women and youth. When she’s not advocating for youth and women, she enjoys tennis, traveling, and the theatre.
Alison Meares Cohen is the Senior Director of Programs for WhyHunger, a non-profit organization supporting grassroots organizations implementing innovative, community-based solutions to hunger and poverty and participating in movement building. Alison is responsible for helping to develop and steward WhyHunger’s organizational vision and strategy and its implementation through its Grassroots Action Network, Nourish Network for the Right to Food, and Global Movements programs. Prior to joining WhyHunger, Alison served as the Northern Program Manager for Heifer International. From 2001 – 2008 she was responsible for developing partnerships throughout the northeast and midwest regions with local communities and like-minded organizations to build sustainable food systems where limited-resource families, communities and beginner farmers –both rural and urban — have access to healthy food and income-earning opportunities. Prior to transferring to New York, Alison served as the director of Heifer International’s first urban agriculture program based in Chicago, Illinois for five years. Alison has a master’s degree in Sociology from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and a bachelor’s degree in English and French literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For the past twenty-five years she has worked with farmers and communities in West Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada and the United States. Alison lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters with whom she started the PS 29 Food and Farming Initiative that hosts a school vegetable garden and works to improve the quality of food served in the cafeteria.
Carol Gose DeVine is the retired Head of the Caedmon School, where she worked from 1970 until 2007. As the Head of School, Carol oversaw the development of Caedmon as one of the most diverse independent schools in New York City. This essential aspect of Caedmon informs its mission and, in Carol’s mind, is the best environment in which to educate young children about social justice issues. Carol did her undergraduate work at Albertus Magnus College, completed her Montessori training with the St. Nicholas Montessori Program in London, and received an M.A. and an Ed.M. from Teachers College, Columbia University. Carol served as a Director on the Board of the Guild of Independent Schools, as a member of the Accreditation Commission for the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS), and also as a Board member on the NYSAIS Board of Trustees. Carol and her husband volunteered at a shelter for homeless women in Brooklyn, N.Y. for 19 years, readily involving their two children in this work from the age of three. They credit this experience for their children’s current interest in social justice issues.
Rex Enoch recently retired as Manager of Adult Education Programs for Heifer International. Prior to coming to work for Heifer in 1997, he was Professor of Sociology and Director of International Studies at the University of Memphis (UofM). He has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas. He has been active in international and development education for many years. While at UofM, he also served as Director of the Tennessee Governor’s School for International Studies, and was very active in a variety of local and state-wide programs with an international focus. His interest in international development brought him to Heifer International. He initially was the Global Education Manager at Heifer Ranch, one of Heifer’s learning centers which is located near Little Rock, AR. Heifer’s learning centers offer a variety of programs focusing on the root causes of hunger and poverty as well as programs that focus on caring for the earth. Heifer’s five (5) learning centers host between 60-70 thousand visitors each year who are exposed to Heifer’s messages through their unique experiential educational opportunities. For the past few years he has focused on programs that are aimed at Heifer’s volunteer support base around the country, with specific emphasis on connecting with college and university education programs. He will continue to focus on developing these programs for higher education institutions for the immediate future.
Martin C. Fergus, is Associate Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Fordham University. While at Fordham he taught courses that focused on domestic and international poverty, grassroots development, globalization, and issues of Peace and Justice Studies. In 1998 he received the Outstanding Teaching Award in the Social Sciences from Fordham College at Rose Hill. Among his papers, published articles and book chapters are “Land and Hunger: A Simulation Exercise,” “Poverty, Domestic and International: Is There a Connection?” and “International Justice and the World Hunger Problem.” During parts of his tenure at Fordham he served as chair of the political science department and as director of Fordham’s peace and justice studies program. While living in New York he was for three decades an active member of Bread for the World, serving six years on its national board of directors. He also served for ten years as chair of the world hunger committee for the Metropolitan New York Synod of the Lutheran Church (ELCA). Since retiring from Fordham in 2007, Dr. Fergus has resided in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he remains active in Bread for the World and in the antihunger efforts of his local congregation.
Joan Dye Gussow is the Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emerita and former chair of the Columbia Teachers College, Nutrition Education Program, lives, writes, and grows organic vegetables on the west bank of the Hudson River. Long retired, she is still co-teaching her course nutritional ecology at TC every fall. She is author, co-author or editor of five books including The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology and This Organic Life. In November, 2010, Chelsea Green published her latest book Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life and Vegetables.
Judy (Linebaugh) Huynh graduated from Michigan State University in 1968 with a B.S. degree in Dairy Science and an M.A. in Curriculum and Instruction in 1992. She taught 4th grade at the International School in Vietnam for 2 years, and 6th and 7th grades at Palo Community Schools for 19 years, retiring in December of 2007. In 2003, she was named Michigan Social Studies Educator of the Year for Middle School. In 2009, she received the Glen L. Taggert award for Community Contribution to International Understanding from Michigan State University. She serves as a volunteer for Heifer International and was on their Educators Advisory Council, helping develop their new Global Education Resource Kits. Judy is a member of LATTICE (Linking All Types of Teachers to International and Cross-Cultural Education), RESPECT (Refugee Education Sponsorship Program – Enhancing Communities Together), iEARN (International Education and Research Network, and Delta Kappa Gamma Teachers sorority. She has been a 4-H leader for over 30 years and serves on the 4-H State Global and Cultural Education Committee. She went to Vietnam on a Fulbright Hays Group Program Abroad in 2004 and was the curriculum director for a Fulbright Hays Group Program Abroad to Ecuador in 2008. At the present time, Judy is a member of “The Box” team at the Ionia County Intermediate School District and does professional development in service learning and in global education in Michigan, in the United States, and in other countries. Judy is married to Han Huynh, a native of Vietnam, and they have three sons – Khoi, Eric, and Jason.
Stephanie Kempf has taught in public and private schools in New York. She has a Masters Degree in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and is a member of the advisory board of World Hunger Year (WHY) as well as the Board of Overseers of St. Meinrad Archabbey. Ms. Kempf developed a reading and writing program for women in East Harlem using a grant from the Department of Education. She is the author of Finding Solutions to Hunger: Kids Can Make A Difference published by World Hunger Year and the forthcoming Through the Looking Glass, a teacher’s guide to restoring the female image in art, literature and film. She has conducted research for film scripts and was the supervising editor of the documentary, The Big Bang, directed by James Toback and featured in theaters nation-wide, on PBS, BRAVO and the BBC.
Velma LaPoint is Professor of Child Development in the Department of Human Development and Psychoeducational Studies, School of Education at Howard University in Washington, DC. Dr. LaPoint teaches graduate and undergraduate courses related to youth development, education and human services, and youth/families and public policies where titles include Children and Adolescents Placed at Risk, Diverse Youth and Families, Youth and Consumer Culture, and Diverse Families and Public Policies. After earning a doctorate in counseling at Michigan State University as a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH/NIH) pre-doctoral fellow, Dr. LaPoint completed post-doctoral fellowships in Child Development at the NIMH and two Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) fellowships in (a) research on the social and emotional development of Black children and (b) child development research and public policy. Dr. LaPoint has conducted and conducts research on children’s development in varying contexts such as families, schools, the marketplace, human service settings, and other community settings:
(a) academic achievement and social competence of black and underserved middle and high school students, (b) commercialism’s influences on diverse youth, especially youth of color and low-income youth, (c) career development and programming among youth, and (d) parental incarceration and children’s development. She has authored or co-authored several in venues such as the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Directions in Evaluation, Journal of Black Psychology, National Association of Secondary School Principals, Journal of Negro Education, and the Encyclopedia of Cross Cultural School Psychology. Dr. LaPoint has presented at conferences such as the American Psychological Association, American Education Research Association, Society for Research in Child Development, American Society Criminology, Children’s Defense Fund, National Black Child Development Institute, Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood, Association of Black Psychology, American Correctional Association, and the 2001 Surgeon General’s Conference on Children’s Mental Health/U.S. Public Health Service. She has provided commentary to media outlets such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Voice of America, JET Magazine, and Pacifica Radio. Dr. LaPoint holds memberships, affiliations, and provides service to national and local organizations such as the American Psychological Association, American Education Association, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood, Alliance for Childhood, and the Washington Waldorf School.
Ava McCall is Professor and Department Chair, Curriculum and Instruction Department, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She has a Ph.D. in curriculum and Women’s Studies from Indiana University. For 13 years she was an elementary teacher in South Bend, Indiana. She has also been a teacher educator since 1987 and departrment chair since 1999, mostly at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She teaches social studies methods for elementary education majors and supervises clinical students. In the social studies methods course, McCall encourages preservice teachers to integrate real world issues into the social studies curriculum as part of her emphasis on multiculturalism and social responsibility. During the past few years, her students have engaged in social action projects dealing with the issue of hunger and poverty within the local community. She has written over 35 articles and book chapters on caring in education, feminist pedagogy, feminists in higher education, challenges and possibilities as a feminist department chair, students’ responses to a multicultural, social reconstructionist approach to social studies methods, improving social studies education, and teaching multicultural state history. McCall co-authored Teaching State History: A Guide to Developing a Multicultural Curriculum published in 2003 by Heinemann Press and has written six articles for the Finding Solutions Newsletter since 1999.
Dana Mortenson is the Co-Founder and CEO of World Savvy, a national education nonprofit working to educate and engage youth as responsible global citizens. World Savvy supports change agents in K-12 education to create more inclusive, adaptive schools that ensure all young people can develop the skills and dispositions needed to thrive in a more diverse, interconnected world. World Savvy programs provide support at three critical levels to deeply integrate global competence into teaching, learning and culture: student engagement, teacher capacity and school and district leadership support. Since 2002 she has led the organization through significant national expansion, reaching nearly 730,000 middle and high school youth and nearly 6,000 educators across 26 states and 12 countries, from offices based in Minneapolis, San Francisco and New York.
Dana is an Ashoka Fellow, was named one of The New Leaders Council’s 40 under 40 Progressive American Leaders, and was winner of the Tides Foundation’s Jane Bagley Lehman award for excellence in public advocacy in 2014. She is a frequent speaker on global education and social entrepreneurship at high profile convenings nationally and internationally, and World Savvy’s work has been featured in PBS, theThe New York Times, Edutopia and a range of local and national media outlets covering education and innovation.
Christina Schiavoni is an activist and scholar originally from the US and currently based in The Hague, Netherlands. She is working toward her PhD at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, where she is focused on food sovereignty and the right to food. Christina completed her BS at Cornell University with majors in International Agriculture and Natural Resources. In the decade prior to joining ISS, she was deeply engaged in food sovereignty efforts as an organizer and advocate in the US and at the global level. These include involvement in the 2007 Nyéléni Global Forum on Food Sovereignty, the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty (IPC), the Civil Society Mechanism of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), and the launching of the US Food Sovereignty Alliance as well as the Food Sovereignty Prize, now in its seventh year.
Recent research projects include evaluation of the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM) of the UN Committee on World Food Security, as well as a study of the impacts of agricultural investment on the right to food of small-scale farmers in Tanzania, and she continues to follow (and support, as possible) efforts toward food sovereignty in the US. Her dissertation research is focused on “the politics of ending hunger.” Her publications include articles in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Monthly Review, Development, and Globalizations, among others–most importantly, the KIDS newsletter!
Bridget StoutBridget Stout is the Director of Human Resources at Left/Right. She has a diverse background in studying business, art history, and Italian studies. Her intellectual curiosity about people and organizations drives her passion to create happy and meaningful workplaces. Before joining the Left/Right team, she spent six years as the Director of Human Resources at a nonprofit organization in the global education field.
Although she’s originally from Pennsylvania, Bridget now lives in Upstate Manhattan where she strives to provide HR support to her family. Along with her daughter and husband, she volunteers at her local school and even feeds stray cats. When she isn’t problem-solving in the office or throughout her community, you can find her sailing on the Hudson River or curled up with a fiction novel.
Dana Herman was born and raised in Lansdale, PA. She currently lives in Nashville, TN where she is pursuing a degree in biochemistry at Vanderbilt University (’22). Since she was a child, she has been very energetic and passionate about helping others in various capacities.
Beginning with her participation in iEARN (International Education & Resource Network) as a 5th grade student, she has become aware of the struggles many people in this world face, particularly those living in countries other than the United States. Touched deeply by their experiences, she decided to pursue medicine as a career, specifically oncology. Currently she shadows surgeons at Vanderbilt’s breast cancer clinic and is interning in the university’s oncology research lab where designs are created for more accurate 3D breast cancer models (organoids).
Dana’s goal is to do everything with happiness and passion, to create a life that helps, inspires, and empowers those around her. She hopes that her work in helping to create 20 lesson plans for Finding Solutions to Hunger is just the start of a lifelong journey to serve. Dana eagerly awaits her future with iEARN and the chance to meet more people in this organization.
