Uwe Kitzinger
Uwe Kitzinger, CBE/Commander of the Order of the British Empire,
A refugee from Nazi Germany, Uwe Kitzinger was educated at Balliol and New College Oxford, where he was elected President of the Oxford Union. In 1950, he graduated with a 1st class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1951.
He was appointed the first British economist of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in 1951. In 1956 he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of Nuffield College, where he became a prominent advocate of British adhesion to the European Community.
He took various sabbaticals during his time at Nuffield: first in 1964/5 to the University of the West Indies as Visiting Professor of International Relations and consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation to advise on training diplomats and economists for the newly independent countries of the Caribbean.
In 1969/70 he was invited to Harvard as Visiting Professor of Government taking over the seminar on European Politics from Henry Kissinger who had been called to the White House; then in 1970-73 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris.
When Britain joined the European Union in 1973, he was appointed Political Adviser to the first British Vice-President of the Commission, Sir Christopher Soames, who carried the chief responsibility for the Community’s external relations. In 1976 he was appointed as the Dean of the Management School INSEAD in Fontainebleau. Then in 1983, he negotiated the foundation of Templeton College, Oxford, of which he became the first President.
Uwe was active in various other spheres: in 1967-70 he founded and chaired the Committee on Atlantic Studies; from 1982 to 1987 he was founding Chairman of the Major Projects Association of leading international finance and engineering companies engaged on macro-projects like the Channel tunnel; he served on the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) 1973-84, the National Council of the European Movement 1974-76 and the Council of Oxfam 1983-91. Kitzinger was also a member of the British University Committee of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe in Lausanne.
He founded the Journal of Common Market Studies in 1962 and wrote many books, including German Electoral Politics 1960, The Challenge of the Common Market 1963 and Diplomacy and Persuasion 1973 and in 1998 co-edited Macro-Engineering and the Earth.
Uwe is a very close friend and adviser. I met him in 1993 when he was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard a position he held until 2003. He was an enthusiastic supporter the Institute’s academic initiatives, and served on the Institute’s External Advisory Board until I retired in 2016.
With his wife Sheila he founded “Lentils for Dubrovnik” in 1991, a charity to deliver essential supplies to refugees in Croatia. In 1998 he was elected President of the Federation Britannique des Alliances Françaises and now serves as Patron of Asylum Welcome and Chairman of GARIWO, a campaign for civil courage in the Balkans.
He introduced me to his remarkable courageous friends, the Yugoslavian human rights activist, Svetlana Broz, https://www.humanityinaction.org/person/svetlana-broz/ and General Jovan Divyak, https://en.gariwo.net/righteous/the-righteous-biographies/former-yugoslavia/exemplary-figures-reported-by-gariwo/jovan-divjak-7505.html allowing us to send many of our students into Bosnia on distinctive research projects.
Uwe participated in may IGL forums, notably in a powerful Brexit panel during the last symposium of my directorship in 2016, “The Future of Europe.”
He is a fantastic raconteur, and I always envied my students who I selected to crew for him on his wooden ketch, The Anne of Cleaves, sailing the Adriatic coastline and cruising the Mediterranean
He often hosts me in London, and at his home in Standlake Manor, Oxfordshire.
David Dapice
David Dapice is an emeritus economics professor who was in the Tufts Economics Department from 1973 to 2017. He continues to work in the Vietnam and Myanmar Programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He has worked widely, particularly in Southeast Asia, as a development economist. His education included a BA from Williams College in political economy and a PhD from Harvard University in economics. Since 1989, when he began working with the Vietnam Program, his work has centered on Vietnam, Myanmar and Indonesia. Previously, he had focused on Indonesia, India and Thailand.
David was our formidable and caring faculty liaison for the Institute for decades. Preserving the Institute’s independence, and participating in scores of programs and advising scores of our students as their thesis, independent, or directed study, he was an indispensable ally and critic. His recommendations were eagerly sought after.
A brilliant scholar, strong-minded, creative, noted as an independent thinker, he was at times, quietly provocative, and possessed a wry rapier wit. He is a friend of tremendous loyalty and unflinching in his criticism of herd or ideological thinking. We shared many battles and many laughs
Richard Jankowsky
Richard Jankowsky is the Chair, and Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology, in the Department of Music of Tufts University.
Through long-term fieldwork-based methods, Professor Jankowsky's research revolves around the intersection of music and power in North Africa, particularly music's capacity to give voice to underrepresented populations, to articulate religious sentiment, and to serve as a flashpoint for debates over cultural, religious, and political identities. His music analytical work explores issues of repetition, density, and transformation in contemporary trance rituals. His book Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia (University of Chicago Press, 2010) received three honorable mention awards for book prizes from academic societies in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and North African Studies. His most recent book, Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form (University of Chicago Press, 2021) examines the important yet virtually undocumented role of women and underrepresented minorities in North African trance healing musics and theorizes the capacity of ritual musical form to make social, devotional, and therapeutic interventions. His articles appear in the journals Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Analytical Approaches to World Music, and the Journal of North African Studies. He authored the North Africa and Middle East chapter of the textbook Excursions in World Music and the Music and Ritual chapter of the reader Critical Themes in World Music. He is editor of the Middle East and North Africa volume of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Musics of the World and is co-editor of the Brill book series Studies on Performing Arts and Literature of the Islamicate World. He is a two-time National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and a recipient of fellowships from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Fulbright Program.
Rich was an extraordinary student in the EPIIC year on The Future of Democracy. He presented his research on jazz and democracy at a concert evening where Chick Corea and Gary Burton, the famed jazz icons performed on behalf of the Institute, to a packed audience at Cohen auditorium.
Chick that evening also sat in on the piano for a special performance of Rich’s original composition, Habibi, which he dedicated to the Institute. It was one of the most memorable moments of my 30 years at Tufts.
For Rich, my undergraduate student, to return to his alma mater, Tufts, after his Fulbright year in Tunisia, gaining his PhD at the University of Chicago, and teaching at SOAS in London, to become a tenured faculty member and Chair, is a powerful, meaningful trajectory for me to witness. To have had a minor role in his education, the privilege to write some of his recommendations, and then to benefit from his generosity and knowledge, as he mentor subsequent generations, is profoundly gratifying.
Rachel Svetanoff
Profile
Rachel Svetanoff is a social entrepreneur, activist, and futurist with a history of supporting initiatives that align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She has contributed to mobilizing resources for over 120 organizations across 40 countries.
Through entrepreneurship, Rachel founded the SDG advocacy youth organization Global Futurist Initiative™, the community development consortium Project Energy for Life Cameroon Consortium, and her consulting practice Protea Consulting, LLC. Through consulting, she works for institutions such as BluScope Consulting, Sesame Workshop, Johnson & Johnson, Friends of the Global Fund Against HIV, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and UNA-USA award-winning fashion designer Berny Martin. For example, as the Foundations Partnerships Consultant for UNICEF USA, Rachel supported a $300 million portfolio by working with organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and UN Foundation to align on safeguarding children’s and youth rights worldwide.
Rachel holds appointments that have also enabled her to promote the SDGs including the following: International Monetary Fund as a Youth Fellow, United Nations Association of the USA as the Global Goals Ambassador Lead, U.S. Global Leadership Coalition as an Indiana State Advisory Committee member, and Foreign Policy for America as a Next Gen Delegate.
Rachel also holds a Visiting Associateship of Policy & Practice at the University of Notre Dame Pulte Institute for Global Development where she conducted U.S. policy research on the SDGs. Her presentation, journal article and blog publication can be found here. Receiving numerous appointments and 31 awards, Rachel is a sought-out speaker and actively contributes to publications on matters concerning youth, sustainable development, and human rights. Her most recent award received was the 2024 Domer Dozen distinguished program for Notre Dame alumni (which Sherman, among several colleagues, nominated her for).
Recent Professional History
Rachel has taken on many opportunities in promoting youth. One noted event was her 2024 keynote panel where Rachel spoke for the United Nations Foundation Our Future Agenda program alongside the UNA-USA Advisor Sophia Kianni and the U.S. Youth Observer to the United Nations Ose Ehianeta Arheghan. This event was entitled the “National Vision for 2100 Intergenerational Townhall.”
Rachel was a member of the Major Group for Children and Youth for the UN Summit of the Future where she can be seen speaking to H.E. Mr. Brian Christopher Manley Wallace, Permanent Representative of Jamaica and H.E. Ms. Yoka Brandt, Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of the Netherlands on issues related to the well-being of youth and future generations. She was also invited by the Future Generations Commissioner of Wales to attend the Future Generations Forum, UNECE Forum on Engagement and Sustainable Development, UN SDSN Youth side event, UNESCO Youth Forum, and other high-level engagements on youth and future generations.
Additionally, Rachel is an active member of the United Nations Association for the USA where, now the GGA Lead, she previously was the Global Goals Ambassador for SDG 17.
In 2023, Rachel was selected as one of six finalists for the AFS Young Global Citizen Award sponsored by DHL and presented by AFS Intercultural Programs. The AFS Award for Young Global Citizens recognizes young people for their commitment to improving the global community and whose actions contribute to a more just, peaceful, and tolerant world. The Permanent Mission of Malta to the United Nations was the lead endorser for the celebration of International Youth Day on August 11, 2023. The International Youth Day celebration took place at the UN with 800 young leaders and participants from around the world in attendance. The AFS Youth Assembly Delegates were included in the celebration of International Youth Day at the UN.
Above is a snapshop of Rachel at the UN and AFS Youth Assembly in 2023. Photo 1: Rachel at UNGA. Photo 2: Rachel with SDGs at the UN HQ. Photo 3: Rachel speaking at International Youth Day at UN HQ. Photo 4: from left to right - Julia Samson, Andrea Cuellar Medina, and Rachel. Photo 5: Rachel on UN webTV. Photo 6: Celebration of proclamation for AFS Youth Assembly Day signed by Mayor Jerome Adams of New York City. Photo 7: from left to right UNA USA Youth Obersever Ose Ehianeta Arheghan, White House Office of the First Lady Deputy Associate Director Himaja Nagireddy, Julia and Rachel. Photo 8: Rachel right before her Young Global Citizen Award presentation. Photo 9: Rachel with all award finalists. Photo 10: Rachel and Julia Samson at AFS Youth Assembly in Convene. Photo 11: Rachel recognized as Youth Ambassador. Photo 12: Rachel pointing to Global Futurist Initiative as a program partner. Photo 13 and 14. Rachel’s presentation on youth upskilling for the future. Photo 15: Youth Assembly culture festival.
In her previous work at UNICEF USA, Rachel helped the organization steward partners to meet health several thematic needs including systems strengthening, infectious disease aid, sexual and reproductive health, nutrition, education, climate action, gender equality, emergency aid, and innovation impact. Seen below is Rachel’s visits to both the New York City and Washington, D.C. offices.
Snapshot of Rachel’s year with UUSA featuring the Foundations Partnerships former Vice President Lorin Kavanaugh-Ulku (photo 2), team members Katie Beirne, Hana Sahar, Carisha Pranyoto (photo 3), Rachel and Carisha at the UN General Assembly side panel on the state of Tuberculosis with Indonesia’s Minister of Health (photo 4)
After attending the 2023 UNA-USA Leadership Engagement Summit seen below to advocate to her state representatives in Congress about the need of continued and sustainable U.S. leadership with the United Nations, Rachel, in collaboration with various actors, is set to organize a Midwest SDG Summit in Indiana as well as partner with various engagement areas to spearhead the localization of the SDGs in the country.
Above is a snapshot of the 2023 UNA-USA Leadership Engagement Summit from meeting Trebuchet mentor Julia Shufro (photo 1); photo of Rachel on the first day of the conference (photo 2); taking photos with her Indiana advocacy group (photo 3); UNA-USA’s President Rachel Bowen Pittman (photo 4); Grassroots Advocacy Manager Maria Amalla (photo 5); Senior Associate of Youth Engagement Rachel McCave (photo 6); Senior Director of Programs & Policy Farah Eck (photo 7); UNA-USA Youth Observer to the UN Himaja Nagireddy (photo 8); meeting Sen. Mike Braun’s Legislative Assistant Sydney Cox (photo 9); meeting Rep. Jim Baird’s Legislative Assistant Tanner Brown (photo 10); meeting Sen. Todd Young’s Legislative Assistant Gavin Laffoon (photo 11); meeting various UNA-USA youth leaders (photo 12-19); Rachel at UN Foundation HQ (photo 20).
In May 2023, Rachel was also selected to become a Visiting Associate at the University of Notre Dame, where she received her MS in Global Health. In this role, she is collaborating with faculty members, including Dr. Paul Perrin, at the Pulte Institute for Global Development to establish a strategy for implementing legislation that commits the United States to support the SDGs by building local capacity for data systems that measure progress towards meeting the Goals. In this work, Rachel has had the opportunity to meet with the Office of Federal and Washington Relations as well as the Washington Office of the Keough School of Global Affairs to glean insights from university staff who have worked with members of Congress to collaborate on issues that advance the university’s research portfolio as well as provide a venue on programming, teaching, and outreach in the D.C. area.
Above is a snapshot of Rachel at the University of Notre Dame in July 2023: Rachel meeting Pulte Institute for Global Development Executive Director and USGLC State Advisory Committee member Michael Sweikar, Pulte Institute Director of Evidence & Impact Dr. Paul Perrin (photo 1); Rachel reuniting with MSGH ‘15 classmate and former roommate PhD candidate/ Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar Lupita Quintana (photo 2); Rachel and Lupita reuniting with Eck Institute for Global Health adjunct professor and former advisor Lacey Ahern (photo 3); Rachel meeting MSGH ‘16 alumni and founder of Cameroonian-based Jumbam Family Foundation Desmond Jumbam (photo 4).
Rachel, nominated by Sherman, was also selected to become a U.S. Global Leadership Coalition Next Gen Global Leader and a Foreign Policy for America NextGen Initiative delegate for their 2023 cohorts. Both programs are influential Washington DC-based networks of businesses, NGOs, national security specialists, and foreign policy experts that Rachel is leveraging for her SDG advocacy work.
As part of the US Global Leadership Coalition’s 2023 Global Impact Forum, Rachel was back on Capitol Hill just two days after her first visit on behalf of UNA-USA to support a strong commitment to maintaining the international affairs budget as a matter of national security, economic prosperity, and strong leadership on the global stage. Seen below is her involvement with the program’s biggest event of the year.
Snapshot of Rachel at the USGLC 2023 Global Impact Forum including a photo of Rachel at the reception before the first day of the forum (photo 1); US State Department’s Special Envoy on Youth Issues and former Iowa Congresswoman Hon. Abby Finkenauer (photo 2); USGLC Next Gen Leader and founder of nonprofit Girls Leading Africa Giftie Umo (photo 3); USGLC Founder Liz Schrayer (photo 4); USGLC Next Generation Leaders Program Director Emily French (photo 5); USGLC Program Associate Anna Krebs (photo 6); Mohamed Abdel-Kader, Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director for the Innovation, Technology and Research Hub, USAID (photo 7); photo of Dr. David Walton, U.S. Global Malaria Coordinator (photo 8); photos of Rachel and the Indiana delegation meeting with Legislative Assistants to Rep. Gregg Pence (photo 10), Rep. Frank Mrvan (photo 11), Rep. Andre Carson (photo 12), Sen. Todd Young (photo 13), Sen. Mike Braun (photo 14), Rep. Victoria Spartz (photo 15), and two photos of the team before and after activities (photos 15 and 16).
Rachel has held many past appointments including, but not limited to, the following: AFS Intercultural Programs 28th Youth Assembly Ambassador, YOUNGA Youth Delegate, One Young World Youth Digital Delegate, Youth Delegate for the 27th Youth Assembly, young alumni advisory board member for Purdue University’s Vice Provost for Student Life, and strategic advisor to InternetBar.Org Institute.
Prior to her Domer Dozen honor, Rachel became a 2023 Purdue Rising Professional, inducting her as a Purdue Distinguished Young Alumna. With this recognition, she is becoming one of Purdue University’s most decorated young alumni with over 10 honors and scholarships presented to her throughout her Boilermaker journey.
Snapshot of Rachel’s induction ceremony and programmatic activities for the 2023 cohort of the Purdue University Rising Professionals Early Career Distinguished Young Alumni program.
Convisero: How does it function?
A case study of trust-building interactions for strategic impact
Above is a snapshot of Rachel’s UNGA week where she met numerous individuals from the following institutions: UNICEF USA, Concordia, Johnson & Johnson, Catou, Africa Diaspora Network, Wall Street Green Summit, New York Stock Exchange, Empow’HER, Unite for Health Foundation, Women’s World Banking, Schmidt Futures, World Benchmarking Alliance, Sustainable Finance Podcast, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Goalkeepers, among many others.
Rachel joined The Trebuchet community from working alongside Sherman as a member of the Pugwash movement. Both individuals were on the same Board at Student Pugwash USA, yet it was not until they had the opportunity to connect directly to get to know each other’s work more expansively nearly two years into Sherman’s advisory role at Student Pugwash that it was understood that there was much more overlap and alignment in efforts.
Rachel, Sherman, and Jeff, April 2022
Rachel helped operationalize many of The Trebuchet’s programmatic activities throughout 2021 (as well as occasionally in present day). Even before Rachel took on the operations role, she was introduced to many of The Trebuchet Convisero community members, most prominently Jeffrey Aresty, President and Founder of InternetBar.Org Institute (IBO). Rachel’s journey with IBO began because of her past role at Johnson & Johnson’s CaringCrowd, which Sherman thought could help IBO with fundraising. Because Rachel was also on the Board of the nonprofit J.B. Dondolo, Inc. who hosts an annual international song competition, Sherman thought there was additional overlap with the model and mission of PeaceTones (an IBO initiative). PeaceTones was an initiative that began with Sherman’s collaboration with Jeff at Tufts’ Institute for Global Leadership, which Sherman led for thirty years.
Less than a year later, Rachel became the Co-Founder of the social enterprise Global Futurist Initiative™. She brought Sherman onto the initiative’s advisory board as Global Futurist Initiative went beyond the scope of Pugwash. Upon meeting Global Futurist Initiative’s Co-Founder, Julia Samson, Sherman invited her also to be part of the Convisero mentor network. Global Futurist Initiative has recently merged with ImpactVest to become the philanthropy arm of the company, operating as a nonprofit subsidiary. In this merger, Rachel will be starting her new role in May 2023 after the completion of her consultancy for UNICEF USA.
Rachel Svetanoff and Jeffrey Aresty, March 2022
As IBO’s past Executive Director from 2021-2022, Rachel worked with Curt Rhodes who started collaborating with Jeff at Sherman’s invitation. Sherman and Questscope have a longstanding relationship; many of Sherman’s interns have intervened and become professionals at Questscope in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp.
Curt’s organization Questscope and IBO are partners on a Web3 project called Data as Truth & Art (DATA). Sherman introduced Sasha Chanoff, the founder of RefugePoint, to Jeff and Curt, initially because of Sasha’s connections to the Patrick McGovern Foundation for funding the DATA project. In this manner, Sherman had also connected Rachel with Sasha, whose 10-year anniversary of RefugePoint she attended. It is through this project that Sherman connected the photographer Richard Sobol to IBO and Questscope. He was interested in creating digital assets for IBO, particularly related to the PeaceTones initiative within the context of climate justice.
Diving deeper into climate justice, Sherman introduced Rachel to Peter Droege who supported her becoming a LEAP fellow at Peter’s organization, the Lichtenstein Institute for Strategic Development. Coincidentally, near the same time, Sherman’s intern Julia Shufro was working on a research project over the summer pertaining to climate justice and the feasibility of the creation of international criminal court for environmental crimes. Learning about this assignment, Sherman convened Julia Shufro, Peter Droege, Julia Samson, Boaz Wachtel, Duncan Pickard, Julian Agyman and Rachel together (all of whom are part of the mentor network) to serve on Julia Shufro’s group of advisors. This group formed a loose coalition looking to gain momentum on creating a people’s tribunal for environmental justice. Rachel and Julia remain good friends and colleagues given their work intersecting as fellow members of the UN system.
While there are strings to follow to integrate the environmental justice movement with IBO’s climate justice mission, there are additional overlaps with Rachel’s work at IBO and other human rights efforts. Because IBO’s work also focuses on civic engagement, she was introduced to Marcy Murningham, another LEAP fellow. In a similar manner, Sherman also connected Rachel with Hussainatu and Hassanatu Blake, Sherman’s former students at Tufts and now Convisero mentors. They are currently serving as external advisors to the IBO-partnered Project Energy for Life Cameroon Consortium.
Snapshot of PEFL Cameroon activities including the packing and shipping of the humanitarian aid boxes, the delivery and testimonials of the boxes, the training of how to use the medical devices and solar panel kits, and the visit of Elvis Ndansi, Founder of Unite for Health Foundation at Purdue University in May 2023.
Project Energy for Life Cameroon is similar to IBO’s other current effort, Tech for Justice Ukraine which works to help meet the needs of Ukrainians by increasing access to opportunity and justice for the long-term in addition to short-term relief.
When Sherman started his colloquium at Sai University in 2021, Curt, Jeff, Julia Samson, and Rachel were invited to be the first guest panel alongside George Mathew and Amitai Abouzaglo (both mentors). George and Rachel met before the lecture since they shared programmatic activity through music. George is the Founder of Music for Life International, and Rachel as overseer of PeaceTones. George and Curt also know one another, working together in the past and again introduced by Sherman.
Cody Valdes has been an instrumental help to Sai University as its Senior Tutor for Sherman’s class and for the overall institution. Jamshed Bharucha (mentor), is the new President of the university with whom Rachel shared a brief correspondence. Two of Sherman’s newest interns, Shaheer Rahman and Ravi Patel, serve as his teaching assistants. Rachel helped interview these two students as well as his other interns Ingyin Khine, Ashleigh Mahabir, and Liz Shelbred. Ingyin and Ashleigh volunteered their time at IBO for the Spring 2022 semester. Ingyin was a project management assistant to the Project Energy for Life Cameroon consortium and Ashleigh was a social media assistant to IBO’s Ukrainian response project.
From left to right: Rafael Reisz, Rachel Svetanoff, Jeff Aresty, and David Schleiker (2022)
Knowing that Rachel’s work with youth is integral as an intersecting point across all her efforts, Sherman acquainted her with Christopher Ghadban (mentor). She also met Ananda Paez through Sherman as well as Nithyaa Venkataramani, Ajaita Shah, Lumay Wang Murphy, Patrick Schmidt, and Talia Weiss. Due to a catch-up call between Sherman, Jeff, and Rachel, this led to the re-connection between Rafael Reisz (mentor) and Jeff who have known each other for more than 15 years when Jeff first formed IBO. Rafael, now a Professor of Management at the Hult International Business School, is currently working with Rachel on IBO’s business strategy.
There was a full-circle moment between Rafael and Jeff, and the same was true when Sherman had Rachel meet Talia Weiss (mentor). Talia was interested in learning about Rachel’s history with Pugwash when, at Sherman’s instigation and advocacy, she became an International Student/Young Pugwash representative. Rachel left Pugwash after 10 years of service also alongside mentors David Guston, Ezra Friedman, and Steve Miller who currently are in the Pugwash network, but she is always willing to pass along opportunities that come across her desk for Talia and ISYP.
Because Rachel is on call ad hoc, she finished helping Sherman support Patrick Schmidt’s 2022 Congressional campaign. She most recently assisted in the initiation of a Trebuchet operation alongside fellow mentor Eva Armour. Through this effort, she also met Sherman’s newest intern cohort Grace Spalding-Fecher, Sandenna, McMaster, and Grace Patrice.
Organically, Rachel is even meeting Convisero mentors without overtures just because her network now overlaps with Sherman’s. Most recently, she met Justin Hefter of 30 Birds Foundation to whom are in touch with one another. Rachel has also met Soshana Grossman and Sarah Arkin due to intersections and alignments in work, particularly from consulting and governmental relations standpoints, respectively.
Snapshot of Rachel’s Purdue Pugwash activities as a student from 2013-2018 including hosting Eli Lilly & Co. Vice President of Marketing, Emerging Markets Nancy Lilly (photo 1); IU School of Medicine Professor and Rachel’s Research Advisor Dr. Robert Stahelin (photo 3); Astronaut David Wolf (photo 5); and President of University of Virginia Dr. Tim Sands (photo 8).
The Trebuchet team, October 2021
I first became acquainted with Rachel while serving on the board of Student Pugwash USA. Rachel began attending Convisero webinars where she came to learn about our community and its involvement with driving progress towards a more sustainable and humane future. She now proudly serves as a mentor for aspiring leaders, shakers, and changemakers to help elevate each other and the world around us. I have rarely met somebody so young who is so accomplished in the context of extraordinary initiative and the capacity to create. Diligence, intelligence, dedication and a massive passion to embrace daunting challenges mark this woman.
For Sherman:
Complex, interconnected, and “serendipitous” (as Sherman would say): this is how the Convisero network functions. I would have never come across these many connections and opportunities if it wasn’t for this network of caring mentors. Meeting Sherman was unexpected, unannounced, and unassuming in the best way possible. Being able to meet him, Sherman’s wife Iris, and The Trebuchet interns in October 2021 was nothing short of fun and meaningful. Working with Sherman has opened my mind by teaching me more about the world than I could have ever anticipated. He has helped me amplify my voice to advocate for what I believe in through his genuine support. Lastly, he inspired me to be true to myself by demonstrating that it is okay to be just that and show others that you truly care about your work and the people who are part of it. A true role model, mentor, and nakama.“
For the readers who made it down here: (2024)
If any of you have found this golden nugget, you can count on my surprise and admiration of your loyalty. First coffee is on me! I may be the only person in this community from Indiana, and certainly the only one from the Gary/Merrillville region. Where I come from is foundational to the reason I am here because I would not be who I am today otherwise. It is also why I am addressing you, the reader, because I know what feels like to struggle between identifying with where you came from versus where you are today, wondering if anyone would accept the whole of you.
It has taken time to process and love both parts of myself but as a result, I realized that if I can put up those barriers, I also have the power to break them down.
It is because of Sherman and his community that those barriers started weakening, moving the scaffolding away from walls and towards building human connections. The community had started becoming a part of me to where I now refer to them as any of my own colleagues, friends, and even family. Convisero truly lives up to its mission to break down barriers and build bridges because they all — especially Sherman — have helped me do exactly that, with hard work and perseverance no less. And should you join in what I am proud to say our community, I hope you find yourself moving forward with the creation of your own bridges.
Lucas Kello
Lucas Kello is Associate Professor of International Relations and co-Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security at Oxford University. His publications include The Virtual Weapon and International Order, “The Meaning of the Cyber Revolution: Perils to Theory and Statecraft” in International Security, and “Security” in The Oxford Companion to International Relations . His forthcoming book, Striking Back, considers how western nations can fight back to preserve the international order against relentless technological aggression occurring below the threshold of war – i.e., in the realm of what he calls “unpeace,” a term that he coined in his first book. The new book "delves into recent history to reveal the failures of the present policy in preventing and punishing cyberattacks and other forms of technological aggression. Drawing upon case studies and interviews, Kello develops a bold new solution—a coordinated retaliation strategy that justly and effectively responds to attacks and deters further antagonism. This book provides an approachable yet nuanced exploration of national security and survival in the twenty-first century."
I have known Lucas since 1995 when I helped him conceive and sponsor his research trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the aftermath of the Dayton Accords. He specifically was engaged in helping to document the destruction of Bosnian cultural, architectural, and religious institutions and sites. We worked with Harvard University’s Andras Riedlmeyer, the Agha Khan bibliographer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Fine Arts Library Foundation, and the noted war crimes expert Professor Cherif-Bassiouni who charged the Milosvic regime with "cultural genocide."
Lucas and I have collaborated and interacted closely over many years of friendship. I was one of his sponsors for his Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and Technology when he was my Institute’s INSPIRE Fellow. He helped run and participated in several of the Institute's professional workshops, most recently during the 2016 EPIIC year on The Future of Europe.
Together that year we created a chain of acknowledgement to honor the renowned Professor Stanley Hoffmann who was Lucas' senior honors thesis advisor at Harvard College, alongside his close Oxford colleague and Stanley’s longtime friend Professor Kalypso Nicolaïdis. Stanley had been my friend and advisor for many years, starting with his Advisory role to my publication Leviathan: Middle East Politics and Culture in the late 1970's.
Lucas was the liaison for my appointment as a non-resident research associate in Oxford University’s Centre for International Studies.
Ben Paganelli
Originally from Upstate New York, Benjamin “Pags” Paganelli graduated from the United States Air Force Academy with a B.S. in International Affairs. He spent the next 22 years in operations, training, and strategic planning, during which he earned an M.S. in International Relations and eventually served as an Assistance Professor of Political Science at the Air Force Academy.
Ben’s military career centered around operations (qualified in the F-4E, RF-4C, F-111F/G, F-15E, and T-39) and leadership at the tactical level. In 2004 he completed the NATO Strategic Planning Course, and he spent the next three years as NATO’s Strategic Air Planner for the International Security Assistance Force (Afghanistan) and standing up the first NATO Response Force, before finishing his first career in the classroom.
While faculty at USAFA, Ben started the Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES) chapter there. ALLIES is a program initiated at the IGL, and Ben worked closely with us, and with Gregg Nakano, the first intellectual ramrod of ALLIES - to support student leaders from six universities and three military academies work and study together, conduct Joint Research Projects (JRP), and forge life-long relationships. When Ben left the Air Force, he was named an INSPIRE Fellow at the IGL, and served as the ALLIES national advisor for the next five years, which included advising and participating in the 2012 JRP to Rwanda.
As a principal and Senior Consultant for Viable International Applications Unlimited, LLC, Ben has worked with educational, government, corporate, and non-profit organizations to improve their cross-organizational and cross-cultural relationships. He adjuncts at Tacoma Community College, and has lectured or taught at a dozen or so institutions to include The Belgian War College, US Air Force Special Operations School, Technion (Israel), Boston University, the University of Colorado, Seattle University and the University of Puget Sound.
Ron Haviv
Ron Haviv is an award-winning photojournalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker and co-founder of the photo agency VII, who has been dedicated to documenting conflict and raising awareness about human rights issues around the globe.
In the last three decades, Ron has covered more than twenty-five conflicts and worked in over one hundred countries. He has produced an unflinching record of the injustices of war and his photography has had singular impact. His work in the Balkans, which spanned over a decade of conflict, was used as evidence to indict and convict war criminals at the international tribunal in The Hague. President George H.W. Bush cited Haviv’s chilling photographs documenting paramilitary violence in Panama as one of the reasons for the 1989 American intervention.
His work has been featured in numerous museums and galleries, including the Louvre, the United Nations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. His photographs are in the collections at The Houston Museum of Fine Arts and George Eastman House amongst others as well as numerous private collections.
His film work has appeared on PBS’s Need to Know and Frontline as well as NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight. He has directed short films for ESPN, People Magazine, Doctors Without Borders, Asia Society and American Photography. Haviv’s music videos have been on the MTV Europe and Sol Musica channels in Spain.
His first photography book, Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, was called “One of the best non-fiction books of the year,” by The Los Angeles Times and “A chilling but vastly important record of a people’s suffering,” by Newsweek. His two other monographs are Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul and Haiti: 12 January 2010.
Ron has helped create multi-platform projects for Doctors Without Borders' DR Congo: The Forgotten War and Starved for Attention, Unicef's Child Alert for Darfur and Sri Lanka and the International Committee of the Red Cross's World at War.
Ron is the central character in six documentary films, including National Geographic Explorer’s Freelance in a World of Risk, in which he speaks about the dangers of combat photography, including his numerous detentions and close calls. He has provided expert analysis and commentary on ABC World News, BBC, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America and The Charlie Rose Show.
Ron has been an inspiration to our students for years. As part of my last year on The Future of Europe, commemorating 10 years of VII and IGL collaboration and the 30th anniversary of the Institute for Global Leadership he joined he colleagues, the world’s leading photojournalists from the VII Photo Agency to explore their coverage of the continuing migration and merging of societies and cultures through a series of presentations and panels featuring recent work from the Syrian refugee crisis and discussion with academic experts followed by a day of hands on workshops.
For the Institute’s 20th Anniversary Ron help orchestrate and participated in:
Questions without Answers
A Photographic Prism of World Events, 1985-2010
Photographs by VII
Questions without Answers, a major exhibition co-organized by the Tufts University Art Gallery, Tufts’ Institute for Global Leadership, and VII Photo Agency, presents a wide range of photographs that portray defining moments of the post-Cold War period and their aftermaths. From the Fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11, 2001, to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans and Congo, Chechnya and Gaza, among other conflict zones, this timely, landmark exhibition features 125 photographs by 16 photographers affiliated with the renowned VII Photo Agency, newly printed for the occasion, many displayed for the first time. Also included is one Oscar-nominated short docudrama by Antonin Kratochvil.
Responding to the earthquake which devastated Haiti in 2010 we organized this effort with Ron on behalf of Partners in Health who have an extraordinary history of aiding the people of Haiti.
By Kanupriya Tewari
13 January 2010. As darkness envelops Haiti’s people, a community’s songs filter through the air. Moving though the capital city, a photographer comes upon a small medical clinic tucked within the shadows. The bodies of the dead are piled outside the health care center. A number of people are trying to sleep in the building’s congested courtyard despite their evident pain—they lack medicine, food, and supplies. Drawing closer, amidst the dirt and debris, a Haitian woman wrapped in a blue bed sheet extends an outstretched hand in a desperate plea for help. Her pain touches the photographer, who immortalizes the scene.
“Great photography demands questioning,” says Sherman Teichman, Director of the Institute of Global Leadership (IGL) at Tufts University.
From the small inquiries—who is this woman? What has she suffered? —to the larger, more thought provoking questions—where are the medical supplies? What can I do to help her? How can I lift her up and onto her feet once again?
This philosophy, one that pushes people to question the causes behind images, guided collaborators from the IGL and de.Mo Design Company as they compiled photographs and words for Haiti: 12 January 2010, a striking sixteen page folio publication. More than six months after the Haitian earthquake, as media attention slowly shifts to new stories, it becomes easier for people to forget about Haiti’s suffering. This folio provides a needed reminder; it compels people to continue to think about Haiti.
Because all proceeds from folio sales are donated to Partners In Health (PIH), people who purchase the work are not only continuing to think about Haiti, they’re committing to action. Get the folio of Haiti: 12 January 2010.
Photographer Ron Haviv, a co-founder of VII Photo Agency humanizes Haiti’s tragedy through images like the woman in blue reaching out for help. “They allow you to absorb the overwhelming aspect of the disaster as well as relate on a one-on-one level,” says Haviv. “Images are potent because they are immediate and urgent, but they also require context,” Teichman adds. Simon Winchester’s introduction, “Catastrophe, Nature, God and Understanding” provides context, shaping the folio’s powerful narrative.
Though this innovative effort was initiated immediately in response to the earthquake in Haiti, the story behind the folio’s production actually precedes the disaster.
Human rights are central to the IGL’s mission. The Institute challenges students to look beyond traditional humanitarian models that focus on giving impoverished people only food, water, and shelter, and instead to explore the broader social frameworks behind poverty. With this focus on global inequities and iniquities, each year the IGL’s EPIIC (Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship) program explores one central global dilemma: a broad theme that provides the intellectual space for students to explore complex issues. In 2004-2005, EPIIC chose the theme of Oil and Water—it was in December 2004 that the earthquake in the Indian Ocean struck, triggering a tsunami that killed around 230,000 in the region. The parallelism between the theme and tragedy were evident, as were the effects of the disaster itself, leading the IGL to leap into action and produce its first collaborative folio. As the Institute was preparing for this year’s 2010 EPIIC program, Haiti was leveled by a devastating earthquake. The collaborators reacted with a similar sense of urgency.
Ron Haviv landed in Haiti less than 24 hours after the quake. The folio offers a visual testimony to Haviv’s experience; it captures the trauma of January 12 in sixteen unbound posters (36 x 54cm each). Its unique format, as designed by Giorgio Baravalle, founder of the de.Mo Design Company, allows the viewer to absorb each page individually or to hang the entire project on the wall, creating a powerful document that spotlights the earthquake’s aftermath. It is ideally suited for galleries, high schools and universities, and people with a strong appreciation for world-class photojournalism or design.
Choosing PIH as the organization to receive all of the folio’s proceeds demonstrates the collaborators’ commitment to maintaining a long-term partnership with PIH—in 2002, the IGL began this partnership by awarding its Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award to PIH co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer. Part of the award entails that the Institute continue to partner with its recipient over the coming years. “We chose PIH because we have tremendous admiration for the fact that PIH works with its sister organization, Zanmi Lasante, in Haiti in such a sustainable way, and has been committed to Haiti for so long,” Teichman adds.
Understanding that the Haitian earthquake is a long-term crisis, the collaborators want to focus their fundraising efforts on an area where less attention might be centered. Folio proceeds support PIH’s mental health and psychosocial services initiatives, which attend to the Haitian people’s inner, invisible wounds.
This unique picture essay ultimately compels us to question, and to remember January 12, even as time elapses. As Teichman says, it is “of-the-moment, yet also timeless.”
Ron is currently photographing the war in Ukraine. We will be providing periodic updates of his work.
March 2, 2022: “A Brief History of Ukrainian Heroes.”
Sarah Arkin
Sarah Arkin is the Policy Director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democratic staff, where she also covers the Middle East and North Africa. Previously, she was Foreign Policy Advisor to U.S. Senator Bob Menendez. Prior to that she was U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Senior Policy Advisor, covering foreign policy and associate staff of the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee. Previously, Sarah served in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, covering a range of issues including human rights, religious freedom and women's rights. Sarah worked as a research assistant at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University and the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University and received a Boren National Security Education Program Fellowship in Cairo in 2012 studying Arab and researching the effectiveness of civic education initiatives in post-Mubarak Egypt
Before all that, she worked as a journalist and photojournalist, winning a Virginia Press Association Breaking News Award in 2009. She has lived in Israel, Kenya, and Uganda. She has a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from Tufts University and an M.A. in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University.
At the Institute she was a wonderful member of the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) program: Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism.
She was one of the talented founders of EXPOSURE, our Institute project for documentary studies dedicated to the advancement of human rights.
Peter Droege
Peter Droege directs the Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development (LISD), the global advisory and research organization for the rapid transition to regenerative communities, cities, regions and infrastructure. Professor Droege serves also as President of Eurosolar, the European Association for Renewable Energy, and as General Chairman, World Council for Renewable Energy. A recipient of the European Solar Prize in Education, Peter initiated the Chair for Sustainable Spatial Development at the University of Liechtenstein while holding a Conjoint Professorship at the Faculty of Engineering, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Newcastle, Australia. An inaugural member of the Zayed Future Energy Prize jury and Expert Commissioner for Cities and Climate Change for the World Future Council he also served on the Steering Committee of the Urban Climate Change Research Network hosted at Columbia University's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and CUNY. He has taught and researched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and Planning, at Tokyo University as Endowed Chair in Urban Engineering at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, and as Lend Lease Chair of Urban Design at the University of Sydney. Professor Droege has authored or edited numerous books, including Intelligent Environments (Elsevier 1997), Urban Energy Transition, 1st Edition: From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Power (Elsevier 2008), The Renewable City (Wiley 2006), 100% Renewable - Energy Autonomy in Action (Earthscan 2009 and Routledge 2014), Climate Design (ORO Editions 2010), Regenerative Region: Lake Constance Energy and Climate Atlas (oekom verlag 2014), co-editing Regenerative Räume (oekom verlag 2017).
I have known Peter for decades, initially attracted to discourse on ideas and on martial arts (he’s a black belt in judo). We worked together in the early 1980’s in a symposium on Secrecy and Disclosure. He was the Institute’s outward bound guest and INSPIRE fellow on the EPIIC’s 20th anniversary year, on “Oil and Water.” While in residence at the institute, he wrote his first book “Renewable City: A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution” in 04’. The dedication of that book reads as follows “this guide is dedicated to all who work on a more advanced human habitat - as a means of sustaining human life fairly, without eroding this fragile earth’s natural support basis on which it is founded, but in helping nurture it back from the brink.” Peter was the first person to really help me understand the concept of sustainability of sustainability and the fragility of our ecosystem. He mentored many of our students. I joined LISD as a Senior Fellow upon becoming Emeritus, in charge of developing LEAP, the LISD Embedded Action and Practitioner Program. Together, we are engaged in developing curriculum with Harvard’s International Relations Council.
Nick Birnback
Nick Birnback is currently the Director of Strategic Communications for United Nations Peacekeeping at the UN Headquarters in New York City He was previously the Chief of Public Affairs for the Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support, in addition to serving as the Chief of Public information and Chief of Staff for the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS).
He began his career with the UNDP as a public information officer for the United Nations observer mission in Liberia, starting a 25 year journey with UN peace operations. He has worked in a number of capacities, both in the field and at Headquarters, including as Special Assistant to the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General at the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea, an Information Officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone, a Civil Affairs Officer and Special Assistant to the Deputy Commissioner of the UN Mission’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.and an information Officer and Acting Spokesman for the United Nations Mission in East Timor. He has also worked as an External Relations Officer for the UN Department of Political Affairs’ Electoral Assistance Division. Among his areas of expertise are peacekeeping, strategic communications and military affairs.
Nick has received a number of awards and commendations throughout his career, including the UN medal, which he was awarded in 1998 for his actions during a riot in the Hercegovci town of Drvar.
In his typical pithy manner, Nick has characterized the Peacekeepers' jobs as "the last stop before hell," and has made it explicit that the Peacekeeper's role is not fighting wars, but rather assisting in building institutions in troubled countries and protecting the population in the transition.
Nick studied at Tufts with me as a very thoughtful, inquisitive, and challenging member of my EPIIC, Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship colloquium on “Confronting Political and Social Evil.” He was a superb student, graduating Magna Cum Laude, with Summa Cum Laude for his thesis in History and international relations which he accomplished in an unusual short amount of time. He was also a scholar-athlete. A Tufts Varsity baseball player, he was also a sabre fencer, my fencing weapon, and some of the our more delightful email exchanges often included simulated bouts of attacks, ripostes, and counter-attacks.
But we fused over ideas. His honed his intellect, continued his formal education, earning a Masters in Public Policy from Princeton University.
After graduation Nick was awarded a prestigious Herbert Scoville Jr Peace Fellowship providing him an opportunity to gain a Washington perspective on key issues of peace and security (His accepting this award was particularly pleasing for me. “Pete” Scoville was an ally and core participant in the MX missile citizens action forum that I created and held at MIT in 1981).
We communicated often. One day a terse email came in my in-box from East Timor, “Pray for me. They are shooting at us” His UN headquarters in Dili, East Timor was under siege by pro-government militias. It was soon followed by a jarring email from his mother, who informed me that he had never heard of the place until he took a course with me. I ruefully remembered assigning an article by Noam Chomsky.
His mission, UNAMET, was awarded the 2000 Elie Wiesel award for Humanitarianism for Nick’s, Ian Martin’s, and other senior UN staff’s courageous intervention during the siege, refusing to be evacuated to Darwin, Australia, until all the Timorese people under their protection were airlifted out as well. Two of his emails back to New York Headquarters during the tense negotiations he shared read, “This is not Schindler’s List,” and “This is not Darwinian survival of the fittest.” Nick’s response stayed true to his typical honest, blunt, understated persona.
I had the honor of successfully nominating Nick for the highest alumni recognition from Tufts University, the Light on the Hill Award I also brought Nick back to Tufts as an invaluable member of our Institute’s Voices from the Field gathering in 2012, and to award him the Institute’s Distinguished Alumni Award, in the presence of General Romeo Dallaire.
He surprised me in turn, presenting me with his heavy personal distinctive Blue Helmet, lugged all the way from Somalia. Chillingly for me, his blood type is written on the back. (I will send this picture later)
Nick and I have a fun relationship and I would be remiss to post this without a sense of his singular, irreverent verve – he wrote this about himself when I asked for his bio:
Growing up in the independent and sovereign republic of Brooklyn, Nick’s real passion is writing about food and New York, the city that sent him out into the world with a chip on his shoulder and the belief that he belongs in any room and a sense that anything is possible with the right amount of hustle.
Chief of Staff, MINURSO - Mission for the UN Referendum in Western Sahara
Sasha Chanoff
Sasha Chanoff is the founder and executive director of RefugePoint, a humanitarian organization that finds lasting solutions for the world’s most at-risk refugees and supports the humanitarian community to do the same. He is the co-author of From Crisis to Calling: Finding Your Moral Center in the Toughest Decisions, with a foreword by David Gergen. He is a recipient of the Schwab Foundation / World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the Harvard Center for Public Leadership Gleitsman International Activist Award, the Charles Bronfman Humanitarian Prize, and is an Obama White House Champion of Change. He has received social entrepreneur fellowships from the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Ashoka, and Echoing Green. He is a member of New England International Donors, and is an advisor to The Good Lie Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Warner Bros. film The Good Lie about the resettlement of the South Sudanese Lost Boys and Girls. He is a Goodwill Ambassador for the Aurora Forum, which includes the Million dollar Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity. Prior to launching RefugePoint in 2005, Sasha consulted with the UN Refugee Agency and worked for the International Organization for Migration. He holds an M.A. in Humanitarian Assistance from The Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition, Science, and Policy, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.
RefugePoint is recognized for creating new models for humanitarian response and influencing the field to expand solutions for refugees. In addition to the important work of improving the lives of individual refugees, RefugePoint works strategically to influence global refugee policy and practice. To accomplish this, they partner closely with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), governments, NGOs, and community-based organizations to build capacity and improve systems related to refugee resettlement and self-reliance. RefugePoint has capitalized on opportunities to disseminate best practices and led and joined global policy dialogues as well as training staff of other NGOs and UNHCR on RefugePoint’s resettlement and child protection methods.
RefugePoint has helped more than 80,000 refugees to resettle to the US, Canada, Australia and over a dozen countries around the world from more than 200 locations across Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and contributed to the 1.4 million refugees resettled since its founding in 2005. The organization also provides life-stabilizing and self-reliance services to thousands of refugees in Nairobi and has helped over 2,000 to “graduate” from needing humanitarian aid. Based on this success, RefugePoint has helped to lead a global effort, The Refugee Self Reliance Initiative, to advance refugee self-reliance globally.
I first met Sasha when in 1997, at a soccer tournament for refugees in the Boston area. More than 100 players, dozens of volunteers, and hundreds of spectators descended on Cambridge’s Danehy Park for a tournament that Sasha said enabled refugees to exhibit their strengths.
“He’s a remarkably engaging, charismatic young man, completely passionate and decisive about what he wants to do,’’ I said of him at the time. “He’s a wonderful fusion between a person who has a vision and someone who has the ability to enact the vision.
Brazilian, Haitian, Iraqi, Russian, Somalian, Sudanese, and Vietnamese soccer players came together last April to form the "World Citizens" and play the Tufts University soccer team as part of the "Game of Nations" day that concluded EPIIC's year on refugees, migration, and global security. Co-sponsored by EPIIC and Jewish Vocational Service, with support from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, this day brought together Tufts students, members of the greater Boston community and refugees and immigrants in the region for a day-long international festival of sport and music.
I had the honor of nominating Sasha successfully for the Bronfman Humanitarianism Award.
“Rather than simply building Mapendo’s own operations, Sasha is using his organization’s partnership relations with the US and UN Refugee Agency to affect fundamental change in the way refugee resettlement is handled altogether. This past fall, Mapendo and the UN Refugee Agency co-hosted a resettlement training for NGOs working across Africa, a landmark collaboration that intends to increase and broaden life-saving opportunities for refugees who live in perilous situations. In addition, Mapendo’s work with the UN Refugee Agency at the Geneva level aims to strengthen refugee resettlement and protection globally through enhancing and supporting NGO and UNHCR collaboration. What all this means is that Mapendo International is now recognized as a model for how resettlement can be done and is exerting a multiplier effect on the process. This is the essence of social entrepreneurship.”
We actually together conceptualized Mapendo International’s mission on a napkin in a pizzeria in Somerville’s Teele Square We helped seed Mapendo, and happily a few years later I introduced Sasha to Rick Wayne, one of my Board members at a Susan Sarandon soiree to benefit Sasha, and Rick became the Chairman of the Board of Refuge Point.
Sasha took on as his first employee Institute alumnus Matt Edmunson, who had created a significant Kakuma project with us.
Sasha and his wonderful wife Marni are close friends, and I take responsibility for encouraging their welcoming a pup into their family!
I have recently nominated Sacha and his wonderful organization, RefugePoint, to the Tallberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize. My nomination can be found below:
SECTION 1: CONTACT INFORMATION
First name of nominator: Sherman
Surname of nominator: Teichman
PLEASE TELL US IN YOUR WORDS WHY YOU ARE NOMINATING THIS PERSON.
The critical experience that shaped Sasha Chanoff’s life occurred in 2000 while on a refugee evacuation mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He and a colleague from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) had been sent to evacuate 112 massacre survivors from a compound outside Kinshasa, with orders to take only those on the list approved by the Congolese regime. At the compound, though, they found a group of 32 widows and orphans not on the list. Sasha and his colleague were confronted with a life and death moral dilemma- attempt to take the additional people and risk everyone’s chances at evacuation and survival or stick to IOM’s directive and leave the widow and orphan group to their fate. Despite his boss’ strict instructions that any deviation from the list would jeopardize the entire mission, Sasha and his colleague decided to attempt evacuating everyone. Against the odds, their effort succeeded. Sasha found his life calling in that experience, which led to his founding RefugePoint, an NGO dedicated to creating solutions for refugee communities in extreme danger. Under Sasha’s leadership, RefugePoint has made a reputation for devising and carrying out innovative resettlement and self-reliance programs that have reshaped humanitarian action and advanced solutions for refugees who would otherwise be stuck in limbo for years or decades. Sasha’s commitment to building solutions to the global migration crisis is sorely needed in the broken international resettlement system. Tens of thousands of life-saving resettlement slots went unused annually (250K in total between 2000-2014). Sasha’s vision for a re-imagined, more equitable and robust system has mobilized other NGOs, international agencies and national governments to carry out new programs enabling the most vulnerable refugees to resettle to another country if they could not otherwise survive safely. Today RefugePoint deploys staff across Africa and the world to identify refugees in need of resettlement and works closely with others to expand access. RefugePoint has directly helped resettle over 120,000 refugees, tripled refugee resettlement from Africa, and through training and influencing other organizations, UNHCR, and governments, contributed to 1.5 million resettled since RefugePoint began. In addition to reshaping refugee resettlement, RefugePoint focuses on shifting the traditional care-and-maintenance paradigm of refugee response to one of facilitating socio-economic inclusion and self-reliance. RefugePoint developed an innovative, holistic program in Nairobi, Kenya, to enable refugees to stabilize, build social and economic capital, and engage in dignified livelihoods. The program reaches approximately 10,000 refugees per year and has graduated more than 3,000 from dependence on assistance to sustainable livelihoods, a first-of-its-kind effort. Recognizing that the majority of refugees are stuck for decades in a host country and that 30 billion plus annually is spent on short emergency aid, RefugePoint then spearheaded, in partnership with others, the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI)—a global collaborative made up of practitioners, refugee-led organizations, and governmental, UN, philanthropic, academic and private sector actors. The Initiative aims to reach five million refugees in five years, build an evidence base of best practices, and spark a global shift in humanitarian response. Today the initiative has 100+ partners in 26 countries creating and measuring programs to advance self-reliance, is influencing the use of tens of millions of dollars in foundation and government funding, and has reached nearly 2 million individuals with self-reliance programming. The RSRI is leading the Global Refugee Forum pledging process to bring together global development actors such as the U.S. State Department and UNHCR in a unified effort to advance self-reliance opportunities for refugees. This is a unique catalyst role in the world for refugee self-reliance. RefugePoint’s method of program creation includes three phases: innovation to start a new program, demonstration and evaluation, and finally uptake by governments, UN and other actors to scale. RefugePoint has built new pivotal resettlement-related programs in recent years to respond to unprecedented displacement, including: 1) a labor mobility pilot project with the Canadian government, which is influencing other governments. 2) a family reunion project with the UN Refugee Agency and IRAP to reunite unaccompanied children and parents in the EU and other countries. According to the UN, these programs could reach two million people in the next decade. 3) the Afghan Sponsor Circle Program in the US, which contributed to other sponsorship models such as the U.S. Welcome Corp. At this unprecedented moment in history, with forced displacement at an all-time high, RefugePoint is building programs that re-think humanitarian action to help meet challenges greater than any since World War Two.
NOMINEES CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
Career history and employment experience (250 words) Sasha’s career as a social entrepreneur focused on working with the most vulnerable people began with the Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) as a refugee job developer. Sasha then moved to Kenya to work with the International Organization for Migration and consult with the UN Refugee Agency. Seeing that competition among agencies limited collaboration, he spearheaded an effort at JVS to share job leads and resources, which led to higher placements all around. The insight that supporting others leads to better outcomes for refugees has guided RefugePoint. Sasha’s collaborative approach has led RefugePoint to support locally-led organizations with funding, work with diverse stakeholders to improve refugee-response systems, build coalitions such as the RSRI, and play a distinct connector role between humanitarian action and philanthropy. Sasha has held a number of leadership roles in humanitarian philanthropy. He advised the Warner Bros. Film The Good Lie and worked with the producers to create The Good Lie Fund, which raised more than $750K for South Sudanese-led organizations. Sasha is also a Board Member of Network of Engaged International Donors Global, a philanthropic initiative of nearly 200 members to galvanize funding for international causes. Sasha’s career has also focused on centering refugee leadership and funding refugee-led organizations. He has introduced a number of refugee leaders to former U.S. Presidents, brought in refugees to serve as RefugePoint Board Members, created a pass-through funding mechanism at RefugePoint, and elevated voices and leadership of refugees in other ways. (237 words) Education and credentials (250 words) Sasha Chanoff is the Founder and CEO of RefugePoint. The organization has grown from a small program in Nairobi serving the most at-risk refugees into a global response organization working across the globe to build new pathways to resettlement and self-reliance. At RefugePoint, Sasha has convened a leadership team and built mechanisms committed to progressively improving how the organization operationalizes the value of being refugee-centered, by fostering a refugee-centered service delivery approach, supporting refugee leadership and solutions, shifting power dynamics towards refugees, and elevating visibility of refugee perspectives. Over half of RefugePoint’s Board of Directors are former refugees themselves or persons with proximate and lived experience. Furthermore, the organization established an Oversight and Accountability committee in Kenya and a Steering Committee for the Refugee Self Reliance Initiative that includes refugee leaders to help design and provide feedback on programming. As someone who plays a leadership role in the philanthropy and humanitarian space, Sasha regularly offers advice and guidance to philanthropists and other non-profit and business leaders, including taking on a role as a Goodwill Ambassador for the million dollar Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity. Sasha has a M.A. in Humanitarian Assistance from the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition, Science and Policy. He served as the commencement class speaker and centered his master’s thesis on “A New Paradigm for Refugee Group Resettlement: The Somali Bantu Case in Point.” Sasha also holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University. (246 words) Awards, recognitions, major publications (250 words) Sasha Chanoff is the co-author of From Crisis to Calling: Finding Your Moral Center in the Toughest Decisions, a leadership book about moral decision points that shape our lives, with a foreword by David Gergen. The lead story in the book is about the life and death decision he and a colleague faced in the Congo. Sasha has also shared that story at The Moth Mainstage events and on the NPR Moth Radio Hour. He is a recipient of the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the Harvard Center for Public Leadership Gleitsman International Activist Award, the Charles Bronfman Humanitarian Prize, and is a White House Champion of Change. He has received social entrepreneur fellowships from the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Ashoka, and Echoing Green. Sasha has also written many op-eds and articles published in various media outlets such as the Washington Post, USA Today, and others, and regularly appears in media. Sasha continually looks for ways to elevate other staff and refugee leaders themselves. Amy Slaughter, the Senior Strategy Officer, received the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award. Marty Anderson, the Geneva Representative, received the Child 10 Award on behalf of RefugePoint for its groundbreaking work to reunite unaccompanied children with their parents and build a new global program to do so. RefugePoint has had opportunities to bring refugee women leaders to the White House and to introduce them to President and Michelle Obama.
SECTION 4: ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
1. An Impossible Choice Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3WxFGr7720
The Congo evacuation operation mini-documentary and RefugePoint’s founding story.
2. https://twitter.com/NBCNewsNow/status/1453345113204215810
Interview on NBC Morning News about the Sponsor Circle Program for Afghans Based on the success of the Afghan Sponsor Circle Program, the U.S. later launched the Welcome Corp, a private sponsorship program through which Americans can sponsor refugees from around the world to come to US. Over the past year Sasha has been interviewed by the New York Times, NPR, AP news, and appeared in dozens of media outlets speaking about the Welcome Corp and refugee sponsorship. I’ve selected this NBC News clip to give you a sense of how Sasha speaks about refugee sponsorship in the media.
3. World Economic Forum (WEF) refugee labor mobility video, https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/946692529660000/
(This video highlights RefugePoint’s role, in collaboration with the Canadian government, to build a new refugee labor mobility program. Bahati Ernestine, a former refugee from Rwanda, is the featured speaker in this video alongside Sasha. Bahati is one of the first people to arrive in Canada through the program RefugePoint has built. RefugePoint has now hired Bahati to represent refugee labor mobility efforts on a global stage. She speaks alongside government ministers, the UNHCR High Commissioner for Refugees, and other leaders to ensure that refugee voices are represented in building labor mobility efforts. A short documentary about Bahati was just accepted into the Cannes Film Festival. Bahati’s growing prominence is another example of how RefugePoint works to elevate refugee voices and leadership in the sector. In addition to the WEF video, RefugePoint’s labor mobility work has been featured across Canada on CBC News, The National, and others recently.)
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a professor and South African National Research Foundation Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma at Stellenbosch University, focuses her research on trauma in the aftermath of gross human rights violations and on remorse and forgiveness that emerge in victim-perpetrator dialogues. Her work explores the transgenerational repercussions of apartheid and considers, in the wake of recent nationwide students’ protests in South Africa, whether notions of forgiveness and reconciliation carry the same meaning for the post-apartheid generation as they did during the transition after apartheid.
At Radcliffe, Pumla returns to the archive of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to think through the horrific violence in contemporary South Africa. Is this violence a reflection of “ghosts” from the past, the death of hope in the present, or a combination of both?
Looking at the possibility of repair and “healing” of what remains of violent histories and what continues transgenerationally, she will explore ways in which a sense of solidarity and responsible citizenship might be restored through what she terms “reparative humanism.” The project will culminate in a book titled “Aesthetics of Memory and Narratives of Repair.”
Pumla earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Cape Town. Among her honors are an honorary doctorate of theology from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, an honorary doctorate of law from Rhodes University, and a Christopher Award and the Alan Paton Award for her first book, A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).
Pumla was an incredible INSPIRE Fellow (Institute Scholar/Practitioner In Residence) in 2000 at the Institute. She taught the Institute's first summer course on the Politics of Reconciliation and Forgiveness. She mentored our students, hosted them in South Africa, and was the stimulus for a significant senior honors thesis in history “
Pumla’s integrity, sensitivity, ethical clarity, embrace of complexity and boldness of vision was inspiring for me in my own wrestling to transcend the impact of the Holocaust on my family. She was a wonderfully worthy recipient of our Dr. Jean Mayer Award for Global Citizenship.
Twenty years later we have renewed our friendship. She told me her Mayer plaque hangs proudly in her office, and we are presently working on a Convisero webinar on resilience and trauma with her, and another Convisero Mentor, Justine Hardy. We will be looking at ways to identify and prepare research interns for her,
In 2001 Pumla had written me:
I would like to explore ways in which we could replicate the approach you use at EPIIC. I have always been inspired by your idea of bringing people together from diverse academic, cultural, and political backgrounds to engage in vigorous discussions. I have no doubt getting black and white students at Stellenbosch, where I’ll be based next year to work on intellectually stimulating projects, that also have emotional and political implications would be such an amazing project.
Pumla has invited me to South Africa, and we are discussing ways in which the Trebuchet/Convisero approach might be brought to Stellenbosch University, especially given recent nationwide students’ protests in South Africa.
Pumla recently wrote a reflection on Desmond Tutu’s legacy, which was published in the Daily Maverick in January of 2022.
Amitai Abouzaglo
How did we first meet?
By means of serendipity, or mazal.
I first met Sherman and his longtime friend Tamar Miller at a small Cambridge gathering of activists dedicated to peace and justice in Israel-Palestine. That same gathering marks the initial moment in which I publicly articulated the idea that eventually bloomed into Embodying Peace. At the gathering’s conclusion, I walked up Sherman and commented that his attire was peculiarly similar to what I had been accustomed to see as Professor Homi Bhaba’s style. He then gifted me two invitations, one to become an Oslo scholar and the other, to continue the conversation about supporting Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding at his home. That same year I travelled to Oslo and clicked into the network I would later hear described as the Trebuchet. The story blossoms until this day.
What we have done together:
We have built a cluster of student-initiated, entrepreneurial-activist initiatives that grew out of the establishment of Embodying Peace, an international Fellowship of learning, volunteering, and innovating in support of civil society peacebuilding efforts in Israel-Palestine.
Our brainchildren include Jewish Movement for Uyghur Freedom and Embodying Justice. These efforts are driven by a commitment to forge relationship-based activism which break paths for action-centered solidarity, especially in the face of intractable challenges. Our language is Constructive Solidarity.
After connecting Sherman and Jerome to Harvard’s undergraduate International Relations Council in Fall 2018, we brought the Oslo Scholars program to Harvard. In spring 2019, we hosted a College Freedom Forum which connected Harvard students and faculty to HRF’s stunning community of human rights activists and supporters.
Michael Fischer
Michael M.J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at MIT, as well as Lecturer in Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. He trained at Johns Hopkins, the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago (PhD). He has taught at Chicago, Harvard, Rice, and MIT, serving as Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at Rice, and Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. He has done fieldwork in the Caribbean, Iran, India, and currently in Southeast Asia on new initiatives in the biosciences and biotechnologies
He works in four primary areas:
(1) The anthropology of the biomedical sciences and technologies He has worked with the Genome Institute of Singapore and the Human Geonome Organization (HUGO) on social and ethical issues associated with genomics and with capacity building in the Asia-Pacific region; and with the MIT- Indian Department of Biotechnology project to establish a Translational Medicine Institute in New Delhi on the MIT Health Science and Technology (HST) model. He has also helped the National University of Singapore to establish an STS cluster, and is engaged at the new Singapore University of Technology and Design to do the same. He co-edited A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories and Emergent Realities (with Byron Good, Mary Jo Good, and Sarah Willen).
(2) The anthropology of media circuits, with foci of regional attention to the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia. He has authored three books on Iran (Iran from Religious Dispute to Revolution, on the training of religious leaders in the seminary town of Qum; Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues between Postmodernity and Tradition (with Mehdi Abedi) on oral, literate and visual media in Iran; and Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges in the Transnational Circuitry (2004) on interpretations of the national epic, the Shahnameh, and the films of social repair after the Iran-Iraq war. More recently he has been tracking the explosion of arts and media in Singapore and Asia.
(3) Anthropological methods for the contemporary world with specially attention to the interface between science and technology and anthropology. He has publishedAnthropology in the Meantime (2018), Anthropological Futures (2009), Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (2003), and (with George Marcus)Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986, 2nd ed. 1999). He edits a book series (with Joe Dumit) on Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, and Anthropological Voices, which has 42 volumes out as of fall 2020
(4) Anthropology of comparative religions: stratification and Protestants in Jamaica (“Value Assertion and Stratification: Religion and Marriage in Rural Jamaica”); Zoroastrians, Shi’ites, Jews and Baha’is in Iran (Zoroastrian Iran: Between Myth and Praxis); class-linked religiosities in Iran (Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution) and the Muslim world (“Islam and the Revolt of the Petite Bourgeoisie”); interpretive debate and cultural critique in Shi’ism and Iran (Debating Muslims); autobiographical genres of religious leaders in Islam, Judaism, Jainism (“Portrait of a Mullah”; “Imam Khomeini: Four Ways of Understanding”; "Autobiographical Voices (1,2,3) and Mosaic Memory: Experimental Sondage in the (Post)Modern World” [al-Hallaj and Massignon; R. Nachman of Breslau and Arthur Green; Shabbatai Zvi and Gershom Scholem; Jain social worker Santabalji and Minister of State Navalbahi Shah).
Michael has been a wonderful friend since our undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins University in the mid-60’s. He advised me on many matters while I directed the Institute, from the applicability of the IRB process to the social sciences when we prepared our students for research abroad to helping to prepare and lead two distinctive, unique student delegation trips, one to Iran, another to Israel and the West Bank.
Mort Rosenblum
Mort Rosenblum, former chief international correspondent for the Associated Press and editor of the International Herald Tribune, now defines himself as “Reporter. Desert Rat/River Rat. Errant Quixote.” He runs the Mort Report: Non-Prophet Journalism, dividing his time among Paris, Provence, Tucson and reporting trips.
Rosenblum printed his first newspaper at six – “a pathetic biweekly,” he recalls -- on a toy press in his bedroom in Tucson. He edited his high school paper and, at 19, left the University of Arizona to work on the Mexico City Times and the Caracas Daily Journal. He returned to finish his degree and work on the Arizona Daily Star. He joined AP in Newark in 1965 and two years later, at 23, went to cover a mercenary war in the Congo. Since then, he ran AP bureaus in Kinshasa, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Paris.
He has written from seven continents on subjects ranging from war to tango dancing by the Seine. He covered the Biafra secession from Nigeria, Vietnam, the violent birth of Bangladesh, Central American mayhem, Israeli wars, the Iron Curtain collapse, Bosnia and Kosovo, and two Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, and Somalia, among other conflicts. In Argentina in the 1970s, he broke the first stories on the Dirty War. He wrote the first African famine stories in 1984. In 1989, he won an Overseas Press Club award and was short-listed for a Pulitzer for the fall of Romania. He danced on Red Square the night Communism died.
He edited the International Herald Tribune from 1979 to 1981 but returned to AP as a special correspondent, based in Paris, winning AP’s top reporting award three times. He left AP in 2005 and launched the quarterly, dispatches, with co-editor Gary Knight and publisher Simba Gill, then led an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists team on ocean plunder.
In summers, he worked with the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University, taking exceptional students to such places as Cambodia and Kashmir. For part of each winter he taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he is now professor emeritus.
Rosenblum has written 14 books and contributed to Foreign Affairs, Harpers, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, Le Nouvel Observateur, Monocle, Travel & Leisure, and Bon Appetit, among others. His honors include a 2001 Harry Chapin Award for a series on water, a Mencken Award for African Famine, a James Beard Award for OLIVES, and an IACP Cookbook Award for CHOCOLATE. He was the 1980 Council on Foreign Relations Edward R. Murrow fellow.
His French and Spanish are fluent; his Italian is passable, and his Portuguese is hysterical. He can say, “Don’t shoot, I’m a journalist,” in a lot of other languages. (Not that it helps.) He is married to Jeannette Hermann, world-class ambiance director and astrology writer. Their cat, Streak, is a neurotic but noble.
One of my first“ dates” with my wife Iris, was in the early 80’s when she accepted a ride on my motorcycle to sit in one my lectures at Emerson College where I was teaching a journalism course on covering international affairs. The book I had assigned and discussing was - Coups and Earthquakes (Harper Colophon Books)
At the Institute Mort was a powerful contributor to the development of our Exposure human rights photojournalism program. He was a superb teacher and mentored our students in our Exposure seminars including on site in Kosovo, Argentina, and Kashmir.
Since I had a great respect for Mort’s powers of observation I was chagrined when he described me in our Exposure publication Rebuild: Kosovo Six Years Later as appearing to have a “grizzly bear exterior,” but, he assures me, that was meant to contrast interior warmth … It has been a fun element of our enduing conversations.
Mort is the ideal person for a Convisero mentor. In his acknowledgments to one of his books, is Escaping Plato’s Cave: How America’s Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival (2007) He had the audacity to dedicate it to me in this manner:
My focus these days is on young people who care about a world they will have to manage and a noble old profession (journalism) they want to pursue.
He kindly added - In this regard, I am particularly grateful to a pair of committed world – savers, Jacqueline Sharkey of the University of Arizona and Sherman Teichman of Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership.
Our survival these days may loom as acutely from domestic threats, but Mort’s passion remains the same.
David Cuttino
David D. Cuttino served as Dean of Admissions, Enrollment and External Affairs at Tufts University. He was responsible of undergraduate admissions, financial aid policy, and the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership. He initiated the Tufts Institute for Leadership and International Perspective and a number of scholar programs including the Balfour Scholars Program for minority students and the Neubauer Scholars Program for students who reflect the capacity for “transforming intellectual leadership”. He also was Interim Dean of the College of Special Studies. He continues to serve on the External Advisory Board of the Institute for Global Leadership.
Prior to coming to Tufts, he was Associate Dean of Admissions at Georgetown University where he chaired the committees directing admission to the School of Foreign Service and the School of Business Administration. He developed and coordinated a Board of Advisors for an alumni admissions network and developed a successful scholarship program. Working with an educational foundation he instituted programs on foreign policy and the judiciary at Georgetown for approximately 10,000 high school students each spring involving national and international leaders.
He has developed a variety of unique programs including an Appalachian Semester program and a science seminar for high school teachers and students. He served as a trustee for the Henry David Thoreau Foundation encouraging undergraduates for leadership in confronting complex environmental issues and also served on the board of Opportunity Homes building and restoring homes for low-income families.
" Shortly after arriving at Tufts to lead the admissions effort, I began working with Sherman Teichman recognizing that the programs he was directing were uncommon among leading universities and offered a distinguishing university signature and the opportunity to make an important difference in the quality of education. We worked together to build ties to international universities, organizations and foundations and to expand and support unique university efforts in scholarly and pragmatic engagement to involve and prepare students to manage and direct insightful change. As the number of programs grew The Institute for Global Leadership was created and provides unique and intensive intellectual and experiential educational experiences across disciplines that are effective in preparing students to meaningfully and ethically confront complex global issues. He has continued to build bridges and bring people together across perspectives, disciplines and endeavors"
Together with fellow Board member Fred Berger, who we miss tremendously, we created Engineers Without Borders. Its first trip went to Tibet.
David’s qualities are hard to encapsulate - they are deep, meaningful and broad. A man of tremendous integrity, intellect, curiosity, vision, open-mindedness, an adventurous spirit combined with a courtly demeanor and impeccable appearance :). I was honored to work with him and report to him for years in admissions when he also held the portfolio as supervisor or director of special projects and admissions, of which the Institute was deemed one.
We traveled together to secure the “yield” of students the university really wanted to admit, across a broad spectrum of socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. David was to me the precursor of DEI with a sense of justice and fair-mindedness that one could only hope for in a dean of admissions. His staff loved him and most importantly admired him.
I was honored when he agreed to join the Institute board. He certainly knew about us almost from day one of his coming to Tufts, and I believe appreciated our maverick spirit and our distinctive sense of breaking boundaries and willingness to innovate along with him. I had the privilege of directing the Newbauer Scholars initiative, whose first class included Ben Harburg and others, including a student who accompanied the NSA’s Thomas Blanton to Cuba to record the first uncensored Russian documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Balfour program which enabled me to meet and mentor remarkable young scholars from relatively underprivileged, rural and urban highschools across the country. We had many interesting experiences together, but perhaps none more unique than meeting with Allan Goodman, the head of the International Institute of Education in New York City in Manhattan, opposite the United Nations the very moment the planes hit the World Trade Center, and we watched them crash on the IIE’s TV monitors. We were hustled out of the building by UN security and fled the city in one of the last rental cars as the convoys of the National Guard were passing us on the highway. David was a confidant, a sage advisor, always able to find silver linings and renew my optimism. We were in New York to discuss a novel program, Passport to Leadership, that would provide Tufts rising sophomores who had never had a passport, and therefore never been outside the confines of the US, to link with IIE schools around the world on a specific, unified theme (we chose the world’s rivers) to bond and research together and present at symposia around the world. We could never raise the funding in a post-911 world where funding went elsewhere and isolationism took hold. David, who was also a minister, encouraged me to invite theological students to the EPIIC Nuclear Era year as many clergy had outspoken views on proliferation and mankind’s survival.
Ina Breuer
Ina Breuer is Executive Director of New England International Donors, which is a unique peer-to-peer learning community of global donors, grant-makers, social investors and family foundations. NEID’s mission is to convene and empower donors to help address the world’s big problems and does so through approximately 35 events per year, two simultaneously run Giving Circles, and a bi-annual skill building Symposium. NEID offers its members an on-going learning journey that helps them learn, connect, inspire, and act as a community. This journey entails providing members access to leading experts in international development and philanthropy, to other donor peers and to safe spaces to learn from each other.
Previously Ina was the Executive Director of Beyond Conflict, where she worked for 17 years to help leaders in Middle East, Central America, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, South Africa and Sri Lanka address difficult challenges relating to reconciliation, conflict resolution and change.
Beyond Conflict was originally The Program on Justice in Times of Transition (PJTT) and was formally affiliated with the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University from 2006 to 2011. During that period Ina integrated over 60 students into the work of BC.
The PJTT’s association with the IGL actually goes back to the early 1990s, during which both organizations worked closely with the original practitioners and leaders that shaped the truth commissions and retributive justice institutions in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
One of the core efforts of PJTT while at the Institute was to create ACCESS, a joint mentorship program to mentor and foster a new generation of leaders in international diplomacy.
Another important collaboration was in the Institute’s unique Iraq Moving Forward Track II diplomatic effort.
The impact of this highly productive relationship continues. At Beyond Conflict Ina launched the Neuroscience and Social Conflict Initiative in 2008, which now forms the core of Beyond Conflict’s work and has led to a new area of inquiry at the intersection of brain science and conflict. This inquiry was inspired and led by an Institute for Global Leadership alumnus, and core member Trebuchet, Mike Niconchuk.
Prior to her work on conflict resolution, Ina was the Assistant Director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at the New School for Social Research in New York. In the early 1990s TCDS was a hub for dissident activity from countries in the former Eastern Block and was focused on helping universities rebuild social science departments throughout East and Central Europe, the former Soviet Union and Central Asia. Ina began her career at the Foundation for Civil Society in New York, where she was involved in educational, economic and environmental programming supporting civil society development in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the collapse of the Cold War. Ina is a German/US national that was born and raised in India and South Korea.
Ina is one of the most ethical, accomplished administrators and innovators. She enhanced our students' lives while at the Institute.
She was responsible for the suggestion and enactment of the expansion of the TILIP program, helping me redirect its energy from participation solely of Chinese universities in Beijing and Hong Kong to a wide array of university students coming from places as distinctive as Brazil, Canada, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Iraqi-Kurdistan, Israel, Rwanda, Singapore, South Africa, and South Korea. We did this with the intervention of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition (PJTT), linking us as a program to the Clinton Global Initiative. We did this with the intervention of one of the first INSPIRE fellows, Tim Phillips.
Likewise, she helped us develop ACCESS, a program that integrated very distinguished global diplomats, including Nobel Prize winner, Jose Ramos Horta of East Timor, and an academic-credit course led by former US Ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia William Luers.
She was extraordinarily important in revealing the bias and corruption of unfortunate administrative decisions. The first was to require the PJTT to leave our building and disassociate as allegedly a non-Tufts entity, whereas previous Tufts administrations had welcomed and embraced the program for 7 years.
Ina was responsible for this acknowledgement in the volume Beyond Conflict: “From 1999 to 2004, the Project on Justice in Times of Transition was based at Harvard University as a university-wide initiative affiliated with the Harvard Law School, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the John F. Kennedy School for Government and thanks, Phil Heymann for that incredible opportunity and wonderful partnership. The project was also lucky, thanks to the remarkable Sherman Teichman, to have a close, intellectually vibrant, and enormously supportive strategic partnership with the IGL at Tufts University from 2006 to 2013.”
Amir Soltani
Amir Soltani is an Iranian-American writer, journalist and activist.
Amir has worked in media, nonprofits, business and philanthropy, most recently as Executive Director of the Semnani Family Foundation, a foundation focused on poverty, health and human rights. His Iran work includes "Zahra's Paradise," a real-time online graphic novel about Iran's 2009 protests. It was recognized as a first in publishing, dissent and human rights activism, featured as part of "The Graphic Novel Renaissance" by Newsweek, nominated for two Eisner awards. Zahra's Paradise has been translated into 16 languages, and covered by news outlets around the world. In 2013, Zahra ran as a virtual presidential candidate in Iran's 2013 elections. She was the only female candidate to run on a human rights platform calling for an end to executions, equality for women and freedoms of speech, assembly and religion.
Amir's other publications include directing the research for the Ayatollah's Nuclear Gamble, a study on the human costs of military strikes on Iran's nuclear sites, as part of a campaign against an Iran war, and directing a study titled "Where is My Oil?" On Corruption in Iran's Oil and Gas Industry, part of a campaign against corruption in the Islamic Republic. His latest publication "The Keys to Paradise: Children, Martyrdom and War" appeared in the LA Review of Books. More recently, as a former board member of PEN Center, Amir has been working with PEN on international collaborations to secure the freedom of Nasrin Sotoudeh and other political prisoners in Iran.
Amir's film work includes DOGTOWN REDEMPTION, an Emmy-nominated ITVS documentary film about poverty in West Oakland honored with a Congressional Commendation. Amir is a producer on "Hold Your Fire," Stefan Forbes' acclaimed documentary film on racism and police violence in the United States, winner of the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns prize. He is a co-producer on Skin of Glass, Denise Zmekhol's documentary on Sao Paolo's tallest high rise favella; a co-producer on Delnaz Abadi's the Secret Fatwa, a documentary on the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran; and consulting producer on Jeff Kaufman and Marcia Ross's Nasrin, a feature documentary about Nasrin Sotoudeh
Amir studied history and international relations at Tufts University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Harvard University. He has a mutt named Louie.
Amir’s personal statement:
I trace my roots in human rights activism back to an encounter with Sherman Teichman, an educational visionary and entrepreneur who has since become a lifelong friend and mentor. I was amongst the first batch of students at Tufts to participate in an EPIIC course and symposium on International Terrorism in 1985. Sherman created the space in which I found my voice as an activist, a space where the intellectual, emotional and artistic could fuse as one," he says. "In a way, I joined Convisero--a radically new model for education 35 years ago. Education was not packaged by semester, discipline or even college. It was a lifelong quest that linked the generations. I did not know it then but I had become part of a community that dared to breathe life into the idea of a global citizenship."
Amir was selected by his peers, my students, to introduce the first symposium I conducted at Tufts in 1986, on International Terrorism. It was notable for many reasons. He was a freshman, and the majority of the students were seniors. Far more significantly he knew, and poignantly articulated the important distinction between terrorism and political violence, and thus the critical different ways to confront such violence, this from the personal experience of his family who had suffered under Khomeini and his conversion of Islam into a revolutionary ideology for purging his political opponents and purifying Iranian culture.
Our friendship endured over decades. He worked with me as an aide, mentored my students as a graduate TA, critiqued and influenced the evolution and growth of the Institute. Our contacts were many. We consulted over the years on human rights initiatives. He worked closely with our mutual friend Geralyn White Dreyfous on his documentary on race, class and poverty and I had the honor of being invited by Amir to accompany him to the Emmy ceremony at Lincoln Center, when I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting his wonderful family again. Most recently we collaborated closely over the Convisero webinar for Nasrin Soutedeh.
Jamshed Bharucha
Jamshed Bharucha is a prominent cognitive neuroscientist and innovative educator who has served in prominent leadership roles in higher education in the United States and abroad.
Currently he is Vice Chancellor of Sai University (SaiU), in Chennai, India’s youngest University, He previously was the inaugural Vice Chancellor of SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, India.
He is President Emeritus of Cooper Union, having served as its 12th President of Cooper Union from July 2011 through June 2015. After spending 2015-2016 at Harvard, Bharucha was appointed Distinguished Fellow at Dartmouth, where he taught in two departments: Education and Psychological & Brain Science
Previously Bharucha was Provost and Senior Vice President of Tufts University and Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Music and in the Medical School's Department of Neuroscience. Prior to Tufts he was the John Wentworth Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College. His research is in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, focusing on the cognitive and neural basis of the perception of music. He was editor of the interdisciplinary journal Music Perception and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
SaiU’s stated mission, is to “equip students with advanced skills to prepare them for the present and the future. Combining the academic rigour of traditional learning models with the pace and disruptive potential of technology, SaiU aims to accelerate pedagogic innovation and usher in a new era of learning in India.”
I will be joining Vice Chancellor Bharucha as SaiU’s Professor of Practice in International Relations, serving on SaiU’s International Advisory Board and advising in the creation of its Synaptic Institute of Interdisciplinarity. This initiative will resonate Synaptic Scholars, a program I created with Jamshed’s support and engagement at the Institute for Global Leadership when Jamshed was the Tufts University Provost.
The Institute created many innovative programs with his encouragement and involvement, Professor Turhan Canli’s workshop, Neuroethics and Homeland Security; our Track II diplomatic effort, “Iraq Moving Forward;” and of course, Tufts’ first intramural Cricket team.
Tovia Smith
Tovia Smith is an award-winning NPR National Correspondent based in Boston, who's spent more than three decades covering news around New England and beyond.
Most recently, she's reported on the pandemic and its fallout, and she has also reported extensively on the #MeToo movement and on the world of higher education.
Smith has extensive experience covering breaking news, including the Newtown school shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent trial, as well as the capture and trial of Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger. She's provided coverage of the gay marriage fight in MA, and the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, including breaking the news of the Pope's secret meeting with survivors.
Throughout the years, Smith has brought to air the distinct voices of Boston area residents, whether those demanding the ouster of Cardinal Bernard Law, or those mourning the death of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. In her reporting on contentious issues like race relations, abortion, and juvenile crime, her reporting pushes past the polemics, and advances the national conversation with thoughtful, nuanced arguments from all sides.
Smith has reported on seven consecutive New Hampshire Primary elections, the BP oil spill, and the Sept. 11 attacks. She has gone behind prison bars to interview female prisoners who keep their babies with them, and behind closed doors to watch a college admissions committee decide whom to admit. She embedded in a local orphanage to tell the stories of the children living there.
Smith has also chronicled such personal tales as a woman's battle against obesity and family businesses struggling to survive the recession of 2008, and the pandemic of 2020.
Throughout her career, Smith has won dozens of national journalism awards including a Gracie, the Casey Medal, the Unity Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Honorable Mention, and numerous honors from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Radio News Directors Association, and the Associated Press.
Smith took a leave of absence from NPR in 1998 to help create and launch Here and Now, a daily news magazine co-produced by NPR and WBUR in Boston. As co-host of the program, she conducted live interviews on issues ranging from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton to allegations of sexual abuse in Massachusetts prisons.
In 1996, Smith worked as a radio consultant and journalism instructor in Africa. She spent several months teaching and reporting in Ethiopia, Guinea, and Tunisia. She filed her first stories as an intern and then reporter for local affiliate WBUR in Boston beginning in 1987.
She is a graduate of Tufts University, with a degree in international relations, and a proud alum of the second cohort of the EPIIC program in 1986-7.
Quite simply, EPIIC taught me more than any other book, class or professor I’d ever encountered. I didn’t quite know it when I signed up for the program, but EPIIC was a lesson not only in politics and history, but also in morality, the search for “truth,” and personal leadership. And it prepared me for a life-long career in journalism.
One of my assignments was to help edit what we called “The Briefing Book:” a compilation of writings, news articles and essays on the Palestinian - Israeli conflict that would serve as background to those who would attend our Symposium. Knowing how difficult it would be to compose an historical narrative of the disputed region, we endeavored to create an “objective” timeline. But even there, our little committee of Israelis, Jews, Palestinians and Protestants haggled for hours about which events belonged in our “true” record of the past, and how far back in history our timeline should begin. In the end, we opted to omit the timeline, and instead printed an excerpt from E.H. Carr’s “What is History?”
“In the first place, the facts of history never come to us as “pure,” since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder... The facts...are like fish swimming about in a vast...ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in.”
This lesson still guides me every day. As a journalist, I find myself constantly straining to see a situation from another perspective. And I’m constantly challenging opposing parties to answer each other’s grievance.