Terms Of Reference Podcast

Dr. Beryl Levinger is a highly regarded development professional, distinguished professor and chair of the Development Practice and Policy program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

With a career that includes senior positions such as the President of AFS Intercultural Programs, Senior Vice President of CARE and Vice President of Save the Children, Beryl draws on a rich array of experiences to teach classes and deliver consulting across the five issues of evaluation, capacity development, strategic planning, education and health. A former vice chair of both Pact and InterAction, Beryl has worked in nearly 90 countries and, for the past 15 years, she been research director or co-director of Save the Children's State of the World's Mothers Report, a publication that offers a comparative perspective on the health, education and gender issues faced by girls and women throughout the world. Beryl has won numerous international awards for the quality of her contributions to the field of development.

Nick Martin is the founder and CEO of TechChange, a Washington DC-based social enterprise that provides tech training for social change. The TechChange training model has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Economist, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Nick is a PopTech Social Innovation Fellow, an Ariane de Rothschild Fellow, and an International Youth Foundation Global Fellow. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown and George Washington Universities where he teaches graduate courses on Technology for Social Change, Technology for International Crisis Response, and Mobile Phones for International Development.

Peter Mousaferiadas is a composer, conductor, producer, award-winning leader and executive director of Cultural Infusion, an Australian organization committed to building cultural harmony and wellbeing through a range of sustainable arts and engagement programs for schools, youth and communities.

Cultural Infusion's programs use intercultural contact to catalyze positive change to a broad audience. For example, Cultural Infusion’s education program “Discovering Diversity” is delivered to more than 200,000 students annually.

Michael Ketover is a highly experienced independent consultant currently working with the Peace Corps, USAID/Ghana and a USAID implementing partner.

Michael is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer and AmeriCorps/ VISTA alumni. He was hired by the Peace Corps in 2000 as a program and training director for Papua New Guinea and Ecuador. He has also served as interim country director at 11 Peace Corps posts for a total of four years and as Senior Advisor to the CFO at Peace Corps Headquarters focused on internal controls and agency risk assessment.

Before and after Peace Corps, Michael worked as a senior inspector at the Department of Commerce’s Office of the Inspector General, as an evaluator of USAID and MCC international development programs, as a corporate lawyer and human rights and poverty law attorney, and in emergency and disaster response. Most recently, Michael worked on a USAID/Feed the Future project in Ghana and on criminal justice strengthening activities in El Salvador and Mexico

Lori Thicke has worked in languages for over 20 years. In 1986 she founded the Paris-based Lexcelera, a translation company which today has offices in Paris, London, Buenos Aires and Vancouver. In 1993 she co-founded Traducteurs sans frontières to provide pro bono translations to support global aid work.

In 2010, Lori founded Translators without Borders, now the world’s largest community of humanitarian translators. Translators without Borders supports global aid organizations by donating millions of words of professional translations each year. With the creation of its translator training center in Nairobi, Kenya, Translators without Borders is actively taking down language barriers to knowledge for some of the world’s most disadvantaged people.

Alessandra Pigni has run the blog Mindful Next, since 2011, to help aid workers build resilience, prevent burnout and keep sane while serving others in the field.

Trained as a clinical psychologist, she has worked as a psychologist with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders and as a consultant with local and international NGOs spending a good part of the last seven years in Palestine. She is currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford working on a book on aid workers' wellbeing.

David Hess was commissioned as a U.S. Foreign Service officer with USAID in 1980. During his career with USAID, he served as Project Development Officer in the West Africa regional office in Cote d’Ivoire, Rural Development Project Officer in Peru, Director of the Alternative Development Office in Bolivia, Program Officer in USAID’s Africa Bureau in Washington, D.C., Supervisory Program Officer in Guinea, Environment and Energy Officer in India, Supervisory Program Officer in Rwanda and Deputy Mission Director in Mozambique. His final USAID assignment was Director of USAID’s Office of Natural Resources Management in Washington, D.C. Since retirement in 2006, Hess has worked for Conservation International as Vice President for Asia programs; the Millennium Challenge Corporation as Senior Director for environmental and social assessment; International Resources Group Senior Manager for the environmental and natural resources division; and USAID/PPL Bureau as consulting Senior Adviser for strategy and project design. He currently serves as a consulting senior adviser for strategy, project design and monitoring and evaluation for USAID Tanzania.

Tina Cornely is the founder of the non-profit organization Bridging Humanity - an organization dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty through holistic solutions. In particular, Tina focuses her work on her recently published 9 Steps To Eradicate Poverty, which provides practical solutions for agriculture, self medical care, energy production, water purification, repurposing of trash, family planning, hygiene and environmental protection.

Prior to founding Bridging Humanity, Tina was the Director of Technology of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and former Operations Director of the Miami Art Museum.

Birgitte Jallov is an independent communication and media specialist and the founder of Empowerhouse.

Since 1980, she has worked with community radio for development, empowerment and social change. This includes the development of a series of special tools, organisation forms and methodologies for community organisations to enact change in more than 60 countries and 250 assignments over the years.

Patrick Meier is the author of the book Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response. He directs the Social Innovation Program at the Qatar Computing Research Institute where he and his team use human and machine computing to develop "Next Generation Humanitarian Technologies" in partnership with international humanitarian organizations. Patrick has a PhD from The Fletcher School, Pre-Doc from Stanford and an MA from Columbia. He blogs regularly at iRevolutions and you can follow him at @patrickmeier.