Leadership Learning Community Board Members
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Cynthia Chavez
Phil Li
Donna Stark
Caesar McDowell
Kathleen E. Allen
Gladys Krigger Washington
Kelly Hannum
Eugene Eric Kim
Don Lauro
Sonia Ospina
Ashok Regmi
Cynthia Chavez • Executive Director, LeaderSpring
Ms Chavez brings 21 years of experience in public policy development, management, and community building. Previously, she was a respected organizational development and diversity consultant, specializing in planning and governance for nonprofits and foundations (1996–99). Ms. Chavez was a member of the professional staff of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (1990-96), where she helped launch a collaborative among three national foundations to promote giving and volunteerism in communities of color. She also served as executive director of an international nonprofit organization and was responsible for generating $4 million in scholarships for low-income students (1991-95). She was awarded a Warren Weaver Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (1989), and a Jesse Unruh State Assembly Fellowship from the California State Assembly (1981). In the early 80’s Ms. Chavez achieved consensus on statewide policies in youth employment, K-12 education, affordable housing, and consumer protection - while working on behalf of lawmakers of the San Francisco Bay Area. She was then appointed to the Governor’s Subcommittee on Youth Employment. Ms. Chavez is a volunteer member of a grant making committee of the United Way of Alameda County, and a board member to both the National Hispana Leadership Institute and the San Francisco Bay Girl Scout Council.
Philip Li • Managing Director, Changing Our World
Donna Stark • Director of Leadership Development, The Annie E. Casey Foundation
As Director of Leadership Development at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Donna is responsible for coordinating the Foundation’s leadership development programs. This includes designing, developing and managing the Foundation’s Children and Family Fellowship and Fellowship Alumni Network, designing and implementing the results-based Leadership in Action project, managing the development of the Foundation’s work on sustaining mission critical organizations, with an emphasis on leadership transitions and financial sustainability, coordinating professional and career development for junior staff, supporting and advancing public sector and neighborhood based leadership development. The Director of Leadership Development is a member of the Foundation’s Management Team.
In addition to her leadership development portfolio, Donna co-manages the Foundation’s effort to deeply embed a results and accountability culture at the Foundation and with Foundation partners and she is the Site Team Leader for the Making Connections initiative in Indianapolis.
Prior to her appointment as Director, Donna was a Senior Associate in Planning and Development, where her work focused on the development of the Foundation’s Making Connections initiative, implementation of the Foundation's Five-Year plan (1997-2001) and coordinating the work within the Planning and Development unit. Specifically, her responsibilities included developing and implementing accountability strategies for the Foundation and oversight responsibility for the development of the Foundation's annual budget. She still retains responsibility for some aspects of this work. Prior to her work in Planning and Development, she worked on issues related to comprehensive state level human services systems reform.
Before joining the Foundation in 1993, Donna was the first State Director of the Children and Family Systems Reform Initiative for the State of Maryland. Her primary responsibility was to direct Maryland's interagency effort to restructure the service delivery systems of all state departments serving children and families. She also directed the development of local governance models implementing reformed service delivery systems.
Prior to her position with the State of Maryland, Donna taught at the Ohio State University and the University of Maryland and directed several private, non-profit organizations that provided both community based and residential services to children and adults.
Donna Stark received her Ph.D. in Counseling and Human Development from the Ohio State University.
Caesar McDowell • Executive Director, MIT Center for Reflective Community Practice
Ceasar L. McDowell is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Community Development at MIT and Director of MITs’ Center for Reflective Community Practice. He holds an Ed.D. from Harvard University. His research and teaching interests include the use of mass media and technology in promoting democracy and community-building, the education of urban students, the development and use of empathy in community work, civil rights history, peacemaking and conflict resolution, as well as testing and test policy. He also serves as chairperson of the Algebra Project, co-founder of The Civil Rights Forum, and co-chair of MIT’s Campus Committee on Race Relations.
In addition, Dr. McDowell has extensive experience in the area of public engagement and the design and conduct of civic conversations that create opportunities for individuals from minority and poor communities to be included in a cross-generational and cross-racial public discourse. Dr. McDowell has served as an advisor to several national foundations and developed programs for public discourse and conflict resolution among educators from Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland. Dr. McDowell was a 1991 W. K. Kellogg National Leadership Fellow.
Among his accomplishments are; Establishing the first satellite distance learning system in Arctic Alaska, founding the Civil Rights Telecommunication Forum, to address the civic rights issues in telecommunications policy. Chairing the Nation healing and reconciliation conference in Omagh Ireland initiated the dissemination strategy now widely used in public television to link public dialogue with national broadcast. Designed the outreach strategies for several national broadcast including America's War on Poverty, The Great Depression, Cadillac Desert, and Breakthrough: Minorities in Science.
Dr. McDowell’s publications include:
- “Seeing the Unseen: Race, Class, and Gender in Science Education Research.” Journal of Negro Education. 1990
- “Democratic Education: Imagery, Language, and Culture.” The International Journal of Social Education. 1996
- “Standardized Test and Program Evaluation: Inappropriate Measures in Critical Times.” In A. Madison (ed.) New Directions for Program Evaluations: Minority Issues in Program Evaluation. Jossey-Bass. 1992
- “To Fight Swimming with the Current: Reclaiming Movement History.” (with P. Sullivan) in T. Perry, T and J. Fraser (eds) Freedom’s Plow: Teaching for a Multicultural Democracy. Routledge, Chapman and Hall. New York. 1993
- “Technology and Democracy: Reasons for Concern.” Education Bulletin, Harvard University. 1996
Kathleen E. Allen • Allen & Associates
Dr. Kathleen Allen is President of her own consulting firm, Kathleen Allen and Associates. In her consulting practice she specializes in leadership coaching and organizational change work in human service non-profit organizations, foundations, higher educational institutions, and collaborative networks.
Dr. Allen has written and presented widely on topics related to leadership, human development, and organizational development. She has co-authored (with Dr. Cynthia Cherrey) Systemic Leadership: Enriching the Meaning of Our Work, has written many articles, and contributed to a variety of monographs and books over the years. She is a contributing author to Leadership Reconsidered: Engaging Higher Education in Social Change (2000).
Dr. Allen is a skilled facilitator of organizational change and organizational development. The earmarks of her work are the creation of shared ownership of the results of a change project, long-term sustainable change for the organization, and a higher degree of capacity for the staff members with whom she works.
For the past 12 years she has consulted with a wide variety of Foundations in the area of leadership and innovation including W. K. Kellogg Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Sierra Health Foundation, the Blandin Foundation and others. She serves on the Board of the Leadership Learning Community, and is a Senior Fellow at the Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. Previously she was the Vice President of Student Development at the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota. She has a doctorate from the University of San Diego, CA in Leadership.
Gladys Krigger Washington • Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation
Gladys Krigger Washington is the Senior Program Officer of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, a private family foundation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Babcock Foundation helps people and places across the southeastern United States to move up and out of poverty and to achieve greater social and economic justice. The Foundation supports organizations and networks working in low-wealth communities that are poised to expand their scale of impact and are working across race, ethnic, economic, and political differences to build just and caring communities.
Gladys works with Babcock applicants and grantees in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. She has directed the Foundation’s programs in grassroots leadership development and community problem solving. Before coming to the Babcock Foundation, Gladys was a Program Officer for the Community Foundation Serving Coastal South Carolina in Charleston, South Carolina. Gladys holds degrees from the College of Charleston and the Universities of Charleston and South Carolina. She is married, the mother of four and grandmother of three.
Kelly Hannum • Enterprise Associate, Center for Creative Leadership
Kelly is an Enterprise Associate in the Global Leadership and Diversity and Design and Evaluation groups at the Center for Creative Leadership. She conducts research and evaluation on leadership development concepts and initiatives. In addition to her work at CCL, Kelly has been involved in research and evaluation projects with organizations such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University, and the Bowman Gray School of Medicine. She has presented her work at a number of conferences such as those sponsored by the American Evaluation Association, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and the Psychometric Society.
She holds a bachelor's degree in history and German area studies from Guilford College and a Ph.D. in educational research, measurement and evaluation from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Eugene Eric Kim • Founder and Executive Director, Blue Oxen Associates
Blue Oxen is a think tank devoted to improving collaboration and
knowledge management. I have written for a number of publications, including Scientific American, PricewaterhouseCoopers's Technology Forecast, and Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History (Fitzroy Dearborn 2001), and am working on my second book, a history of free software entitled, Software, Money, and Liberty: How Source Code Became Free.
I am currently the Guide for the Web Services DevChannel, a community for software developers interested in Web Services. I wrote the Bookmarks column for Web Techniques (now New Architect) from March 2000 to February 2002, and am the author of the book, CGI Developer's Guide (Sams.net 1996).
I worked as an independent consultant from July 1999 to December 2002, specializing in software development, project management, strategic analysis, and knowledge management. From July 1996 to July 1999, I served as the Senior Technical Editor at Dr. Dobb's Journal. I received an A.B. in History and Science from Harvard University in 1996, and graduated from Polytechnic School in 1992.
Don Lauro • Senior Program Manager, David and Lucile Packard Foundation
Don Lauro has been with the Packard Foundation Population Program since 1998. Within the Population Program, Don serves as the team leader for India and co–team leader for Domestic Reproductive Rights. He developed and provided program officer support for grantmaking in Nigeria from 1998 to 2004. For Future Leaders, he identified and supported population and family planning leaders in each of the program's focus countries. Don also oversaw the development and phaseout of the Population-Environment grantmaking initiative.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Don lived and worked in Liberia, Thailand, Australia, Hawaii, Cote d'Ivoire, and Morocco, as well as on the East Coast. Throughout the 1980s, Don was on the faculty of Columbia University at the Center for Population and Family Health, and in the 1990s he worked for John Snow, Inc.
Don has a B.A. in history and an M.A. in demography from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in demography/anthropology from the Australian National University. Don sits on the executive steering committee of the African Grantmakers Affinity Group and speaks French and Thai.
Don has authored several articles including most recently, Future Leaders for Reproductive Health: Approaches and Experiences within Developing Countries (coauthored with grantees for leadership programs) Building Leadership Bridges; International Leadership Association, 2004 and Quality of Care in Family Planning Services in Morocco (coauthored with Lisanne Brown, Mustafa Tyane, Jane Bertrand, et al). Article in Studies in Family Planning, vol. 26, No. 3, May/June 1995.
Sonia Ospina • Associate Professor and Faculty Director, New York University
Sonia Ospina is Associate Professor of Public Management and Policy and Faculty Director of the Research Center for Leadership in Action at NYU. She has taught foundations of nonprofit management, managing public service organizations, qualitative research methods, the theoretical foundations of applied research, women in management and human resources management.
Her work is grounded on institutional analysis and organizational theory and spans both the US and Latin America. Her research explores how responsibility is negotiated and distributed among stakeholders participating in collective problem-solving in society and in organizations and its impact on democracy. Her current interests include social change leadership as public leadership; the dynamics of collaboration across sectors, organizations and communities of practice (i.e labor/management; academics/practitioners); the role of civil society, community participation and nonprofits in governance; and evaluation of public sector performance (governmental and social accountability initiatives).
Professor Ospina currently directs a Ford Foundation sponsored multi-year, national research project on social change leadership in the United States. Her 1996 book Illusions of Opportunity: Employee Expectations and Work Place Inequality (Cornell University Press) explores how public employees make meaning out of the experience of inequality and the implications for organization and management. Her co-edited books on public management reform in Latin America (2003 and 2004) focus on the changing relations of accountability for governmental performance, given large-scale reform in the region.
Professor Ospina earned her Ph.D. in Sociology and a Masters in Public Policy and Management from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Ashok Regmi • Program Manager, International Youth Foundation
A Nepali native, Mr. Regmi joined the International Youth Foundation as Program Manager for Youth Action Net in 2002. Prior to working at IYF, he was the Research Assistant at the Center for Civil Society Studies at the Institute for Policy Studies, Johns Hopkins University. In Nepal, Regmi worked with members of the Nepalese Parliament in addressing youth issues in his country, and pioneered Kathmandu FM, where he conducted radio programs on social issues. A leader in youth leadership and engagement, Regmi has spoken and led sessions at such venues as the Pan European World Summit on Information System meeting in Romania, USAID/EGAT conference in Washington DC, the United Nations, and the CIVICUS World Assembly. Regmi, who is fluent in English, Nepali, Hindi and Urdu, earned his Masters in Public Policy from Johns Hopkins University, where he founded the Cooperative Learning Exchange Group.
