System messages
Our Board of Directors
| Kath Connolly | Cynthia M. Gibson | Rusty Stahl |
| Ami Dar | Stephen D. Kahn | Sandy Stonesifer |
| Bob Giannino-Racine | Michael D. Smith |
Kath Connolly
Kath Connolly is an educator who has explored public engagement and creative practice in community-based settings, on college campuses, and in public schools. As the director of partnerships at The Learning Community, a new charter school in Central Falls, RI, she focuses on enriching elementary teaching and learning by connecting the school to the larger community.
Before she joined The Learning Community in 2005, Kath worked for 10 years at the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University, where she created Careers in the Common Good, a nationally recognized program that encourages young people to become community activists and pursue public interest careers. She was also involved in fellowship programs and projects related to public education, the arts, and advocacy.
She has been a designer at a children's museum, a public-policy researcher, the director of a grassroots school-reform network, and a consultant to community groups, schools, and colleges. She appears frequently at conferences and workshops across the country.
She currently serves on the boards of Farm Fresh Rhode Island, BSR 88.1 FM, the Brown University Summer Leadership Institute, and Action Without Borders. She is the founder of a progressive greeting card company, Card Carrying Liberal, and has served on boards and as a volunteer for numerous organizations advocating for civil rights, youth, and the arts.
Kath, a resident of Providence, RI, is a graduate of Brown University and an avid student of paper engineering, bookbinding, and other art forms.
Ami Dar
Ami is the founder and executive director of Idealist.org. Built in 1996 with $3,500, Idealist has become one of the most popular nonprofit resources on the web, with information provided by 70,000 organizations around the world and 100,000 visitors every day. Ami was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Peru and in Mexico, and lives in New York.
Bob Giannino-Racine
Bob Giannino-Racine is the Executive Director of UAspire (formerly known as ACCESS, the Action Center for Educational Services and Scholarships), the leading provider of financial aid advising and scholarships for Boston Public School Students. UAspire works to ensure that every graduate of the Boston Public Schools has the financial information and resources necessary to achieve their dream of a college education. Since its founding in 1985, UAspire has provided financial aid information and scholarships to thousands of Boston's students, helping them realize their higher education goals and giving them a better foundation for a successful and productive future.
Bob has 16 years of experience within the Boston nonprofit community. Prior to joining UAspire, he served as the Vice President of Business Development and Government Relations at Jumpstart for Young Children, a Boston-based national nonprofit organization that engages college-aged young people in service. While at Jumpstart, Bob held several senior level management positions, including three years as Executive Director of Jumpstart Boston—where he oversaw a threefold increase in the organization's impact on the city's children. Bob's previous experience includes being involved in the start-up of a number of other successful nonprofit ventures and a stint in the for-profit sector with Procter and Gamble. As a product of the Somerville Public Schools and a graduate of Harvard College, Bob knows first-hand the need for high quality advising services and the value of scholarship support in making a difference in one's life.
In addition to his work with UAspire, Bob serves on the Board of Directors of Idealist, is a member of the Selection Committee for the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Partnership Award for Campus-Community Collaboration, and has served as an advisor to the Institute for School/Community Collaboration. Bob also serves an an Alumni Interviewer for Harvard.
Bob resides with his family in Concord, MA.
Cynthia M. Gibson
Cynthia Gibson is an independent consultant specializing in public policy research and analysis, program development, strategic planning, marketing, and communications for several national nonprofits and foundations. Clients include Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Goldman Sachs Foundation, Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy, National Conference on Citizenship, The Case Foundation, NetAid, Center for Community Change, Academy for Educational Development, St. Anselm College's Institute of Politics, Management Assistance Group, Carnegie Council for International Ethics, Tufts University, Campus Compact, AFS-USA, Ron Brown Scholars Program, and others.
Previously, Gibson served as a program officer at Carnegie Corporation of New York in the area of Strengthening U.S. Democracy, overseeing two national subprograms in Strengthening the Nonprofit and Philanthropic Sector and Youth Civic Engagement, both of which she developed. During that time, she authored two publications—From Inspiration to Participation: Strategies for Youth Civic Engagement and (with Peter Levine) The Civic Mission of Schools—that became standards for the civic learning field and the basis of a national advocacy campaign and federal legislation for better school-based civic education.
Earlier in her career, Gibson was a consultant on nonprofit and philanthropy strategic planning, research and communications for a variety of foundations and organizations, including Annie E. Casey Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Open Society Institute, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, National Institute of Health, and Citizens Committee for Children. Gibson also has served in senior staff positions at the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, the Ms. Foundation for Women in New York, and the Partnership for Democracy (formerly The Youth Project). As an associate at People for the American Way, Gibson produced several videos with television producer Norman Lear and created the nation's first videotape library on ultrafundamentalism.
In addition to speaking and publishing widely on nonprofit strategy, citizenship, education, philanthropy, and social policy, Gibson teaches at the New School University's Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy; is a senior fellow at Tufts University; and has served on numerous advisory committees, selection panels, and boards, including The Nonprofit Quarterly, Public Allies, and the Center for Voting and Democracy. In 2003, Gibson was selected by the NonProfit Times in its "Power and Influence Top 50 Leaders."
Gibson has a B.A. in psychology from Pennsylvania State University (Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude); an MSW from Catholic University of America; and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. The topic of her dissertation focused on nonprofit advocacy, membership, and representation ("In Whose Interest: Do National Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations Represent the Under-Represented?").
Stephen D. Kahn
Steve is a retired partner in the New York office of the Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP law firm.
Steve has practiced all areas of intellectual property law for more than 40 years, including litigating patent, trade secret, copyright, and trademark disputes and dealing extensively with counseling and transactions involving intellectual property of all types. Steve has been involved in intellectual property issues arising in the context of the internet and e-commerce and has also negotiated many computer software development and licensing agreements, including a major computer system acquisition for the New York City Department of Education for use in Special Ed record-keeping in 2008.
Steve is an adjunct professor of law at New York Law School, teaching courses in all areas of intellectual property law, and has taught patent law as a Visiting Lecturer at the Yale Law School. He has also lectured on computer software protection at Yale and served as Chairman of the Committee on Information Technology Law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Finally, he has lectured on the impact of intellectual property law on climate change negotiations now underway around the world.
For many years he has been active in pro bono legal work, including for Idealist, Save the Children, The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Ashoka, Oxfam, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Lincoln Center, and other organizations.
Steve's academic background is as follows:
Yale University, B.E. (summa cum laude) (1964).
Yale Law School, LL.B. (1968).
Michael D. Smith
As Vice President of Social Innovation at the Case Foundation, Michael works with the CEO and senior leadership team to set the programmatic direction of the Foundation and manages a portfolio of social investments and partnerships designed to spark civic participation, promote participatory philanthropy, and expand giving.
Michael’s current major areas of focus include leading the Foundation’s efforts to tap “citizen-centered” approaches to civic engagement and philanthropy; America’s Giving Challenge, an initiative designed to spur online giving and train nonprofits to leverage social media; and myriad economic development efforts in the West Bank through the U.S.-Palestinian Partnership.
Before joining the Case Foundation, Michael helped build national initiatives aimed at bridging the “digital divide” as a Program Officer at the Beaumont Foundation of America and a Regional Program Manager at PowerUP: Bridging the Digital Divide, Inc. Michael has also served as a senior program and communications staff member at a Massachusetts Boys & Girls Club, was an aide to U.S. Congressman Richard E. Neal and has a B.A. in Communications from Marymount University.
In addition to serving on many industry committees and taskforces and writing and speaking on the Foundation’s areas of expertise, he is currently on the boards of Philanthropists for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) and Public Allies.
Rusty Stahl
Rusty Morgen Stahl is founding executive director of Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy. EPIP is a national network of young and new philanthropic professionals that seeks to strengthen the next generation of grantmakers, in order to advance effective social justice philanthropy. Rusty was part of a group of foundation professionals, trustees, and donors who started the group together in 2001 after meeting up at the Council on Foundations conference. Rusty took on the role of coordinating the group while working his foundation job. He is grateful to Urvashi Vaid, Christopher Harris, and Mike Edwards for enabling him to pursue this idea while working for them.
Before beginning work for EPIP in 2002, Mr. Stahl worked as a Program Associate at the Ford Foundation in the Governance and Civil Society Unit. At Ford, he was honored to support a team engaged in grantmaking that aims to expand social justice philanthropy, increase the impact of community organizing, and nurture the nonprofit sector.
Rusty holds a Masters of Arts in Philanthropic Studies from Indiana University, the first such liberal arts-based degree program. Rusty arrived at the Center after having the great luck of being selected for the Jane Addams Fellowship, which is no longer in operation. During his graduate studies, Rusty volunteered in the Indianapolis community, and was one of the founders of the Central Indiana Jobs with Justice coalition. As an undergraduate at The George Washington University, he worked as an AmeriCorps member serving local senior citizens, and volunteered in a variety of political, social, and economic justice efforts.
Stahl serves as a board member of Changemakers, a national public foundation that supports innovative social change philanthropy. He sits on the board of Idealist.org, the global nonprofit web portal. He is a member of advisory committees for the Third Millennium Philanthropy and Leadership Initiative (a project at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy) and The Grantmaking School (a project housed at the Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University).
Mr. Stahl lives in New York City. He is originally from Philadelphia, PA.
Sandy Stonesifer
Sandy Stonesifer is Special Assistant to the President of the ONE Campaign, a global advocacy organization based in Washington DC. ONE fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa, by raising public awareness and pressuring political leaders to support smart and effective policies and programs. Before joining ONE, Sandy worked at the Center for Global Development, wrote a column appearing on Slate.com, and served as Program Manager of the UCSF Turnaway Study where she managed a multi-million dollar national study designed to describe the socioeconomic and health effects of denials of care for women experiencing unintended pregnancies.
Sandy graduated from Brown University with honors in Biomedical Ethics. In 2009, she was selected by the Stanford University Center for Social Innovation to participate in a two week nonprofit management program in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, focused on leading strategic change, developing organizational effectiveness, and finding innovative solutions to social problems. She also serves on the board of Health Leads, a nonprofit that places undergraduate volunteers in hospital clinics and mobilizes them, in partnership with providers in urban clinics, to connect low-income patient with the basic resources—such as food, housing, and heating assistance—that they need to be healthy.