Mission Statement
Event Schedule
Panelists

Panelists

  • CONOR BOHAN is the founder and executive director of Haitian Education and Leadership Project (HELP), an organization that provides funds for Haitian students to attend universities. The organization began with one student in 1996 and today supports 120 university students. Additionally, Bohan was deputy director of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Haiti, and director of Haiti Programs for the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
  • CAMILLE CHALMERS is the leader of Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development (PAPDA). PAPDA is a coalition of nine popular and non-governmental organizations with solid ideology pertaining to sustainable development, food sovereignty and debt cancellation. Chalmers co-authored Haiti: Responses and Alternatives To Structural Adjustment in 1998. Prior to working with PAPDA, Chalmers taught economics at the Université d’État d’Haïti. He also spent five years as general coordinator of Caritas Haiti.
  • MEGAN COFFEE is the founder of TiKay and an infectious disease specialist who formed a TB inpatient and outpatient ward at the General Hospital after the earthquake.  Coffee holds a PhD from Oxford University and an MD from Harvard.  Prior to the earthquake, she was an infectious disease fellow at the University of California San Francisco.
  • BRIAN CONCANNON directs the Boston-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH). Mr. Concannon lived in Haiti from 1995 to 2004, working for the United Nations and for the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, Haiti’s largest public interest law firm. He is a graduate of Georgetown Law School and Middlebury College, and has received Fellowships from Harvard Law School and Brandeis University and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Canisius College. He is on the Editorial Advisory Board of Health and Human Rights: An International Journal.
  • NANCY DORSINVILLE is the senior policy advisor for the UN Office of the Special Envoy to Haiti (OSE), where she targets policy regarding vulnerable populations, including internally displaced persons, orphans and vulnerable children, the handicapped, and gender mainstreaming. Trained as a medical anthropologist, she conducted a countrywide diagnostic of the health care system in Haiti in conjunction with the Haitian Ministry of Health (MSPP) and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and has done extensive fieldwork with Partners in Health.
  • CHENET JEAN-BAPTISTE is Executive Director of ITECA (The Institute of Technology and Capacity Building), which promotes alternative development in rural Haiti.  Jean-Baptiste holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle and is a professor at the Université d’État d’Haïti.
  • JONATHAN KATZ is an American journalist and author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. Katz became the Associated Press correspondent in Haiti in 2007 and was living in Port-Au-Prince at the time of the earthquake in January 2010. He remained in the country to report on the failure of the recovery process, chronicling the issues of delayed foreign aid and the cholera epidemic. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
  • BENJAMIN KRAUSE is Country Director for J/P Haitian Relief Organization (J/P HRO), the international NGO founded and lead by Sean Penn in response to the 2010 earthquake.  Beginning as an emergency response team of volunteers, today J/P HRO has evolved into a professional organization dedicated to supporting the residents of the camps they manage and surrounding areas transition from life as internally displaced persons to durable, sustainable and prosperous communities through their programs in Medical, Camp & Relocations, Engineering & Construction, and Community Development.
  • MATTHEW MAREK was the Head of Programs for the American Red Cross in Haiti. He is a graduate of Penn State with a degree in Economics, and spent time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Haiti before joining the American Red Cross.  He currently works for the American Red Cross in Trinidad/Tobago.
  • FATHER JOSEPH PHILIPPE is an ordained priest who founded Fonkoze in 1994. Fonkoze is a non-profit organization which provides micro-finance loans to poor Haitian women. Father Joseph is also the founder of the Peasant Association of Fondwa (APF) and in 2004 founded the University of Fondwa.  Philippe holds a Master of Divinity from Catholic Theological Union, Chicago.
  • MICHÈLE PIERRE-LOUIS was Prime Minister of Haiti from September 2008 to November 2009. Since 1995, Pierre-Louis has served as executive director of the Fondation Connaissance et Liberté (FOKAL), an independent Haitian foundation supported by the Open Society Institute. She received an M.A. in Economics from Queens College of the City University of New York.
  • VIJAYA RAMACHANDRAN is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD), where her work focuses on donor accountability, private sector development, and development interventions in fragile states. Prior to joining CGD worked at the World Bank and in the Executive Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations. She is the author of “Haiti: Where has All the Money Gone,” and Africa’s Private Sector: What’s Wrong with the Business Environment and What to Do About It.
  • MARIE MARTHE SAINT CYR is the CEO of the Lambi Fund, one of largest organizations funding grassroots development in Haiti. She is the Founding Executive Director of Iris House (a center for women with HIV/AIDS in Harlem).  St. Cyr also served as the Deputy Commissioner of Human Rights for the city of New York, and headed the New York AIDS Coalition.
  • MARK SCHULLER is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and NGO Leadership Development at Northern Illinois University. He is also affiliated faculty at Faculté d’Ethnologie at the Université d’État d’Haïti. His recent publications include Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs and Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake.
  • YASMINE SHAMSIE is Associate Professor of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University and a fellow at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean at York University . Dr. Shamsie’s research examines the interventions of international actors in Haiti as well as Canadian foreign policy debates on Haiti. She is the co-editor of Haiti: Hope for a Fragile State and author of numerous articles on Haitian economic development and reconstruction.
  • TATIANA WAH is the Director of Haiti Programs at the Center of Globalization and Sustainable Development, Earth Institute, Columbia University. She has worked in Haiti with the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation as the Privatization Program Administrator for the Haitian government.  Wah teaches a course on fragile states at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and is the author of Haiti’s Development through Expatriate Reconnection: Conditions and Challenges and In Search of Consensus after 200 years: Haiti’s Social System Structure and Development Challenge.