Syndicate:
Staff
Project Staff: Robert Alvarez | Sarah Anderson | Phyllis Bennis | John Cavanagh | Chuck Collins | Karen Dolan | John Feffer | Netfa Freeman | Erik Leaver | Dedrick Muhammad | Qimmah Najeeullah | Miriam Pemberton | Sam Pizzigati | Saif Rahman | Marcus Raskin | Janet Redman | Emily Schwartz Greco | Sarah Schwartz Sax | Sanho Tree | Emira Woods | Daphne Wysham | Joy Zarembka
Non-Project Staff: Diana Alonzo | Farrah Hassen | Joia Jefferson Nuri | Nathaniel Kerksick | Saul Landau | Adwoa Masozi | Elizabeth Schulman | Sena Tsikata | Robin Weiss-Castro | Stephen Yirenkyi
Title: IPS Administrative Support
Starting as an intern, Diana worked with the Paths Project and the Bringing Pinochet to Justice Campaign. Under these projects she researched related information for both projects, and translated and edited articles and publications. Currently, besides being support staff for Dorian Lipscombe and IPS in general, Diana works on a variety of IPS projects including SALSA, Democracy Action Project, FPIF and the Break the Chain Campaign. For these projects she has researched relevant material, promoted lectures on current issues, and assisted in investigations on worker abuse cases.
Diana holds a BA in Spanish and a BA in Government & Politics from the University of Maryland. In the fall of 2002 she will be starting her Masters work in U.S. Foreign Policy with a focus on International Law at American University. She has volunteered for area Hispanic organizations promoting diversity in the workplace and educational advancement for minorities.
Project: Nuclear Policy
Title: Senior Scholar
Robert Alvarez is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., where he is currently focused on nuclear disarmament, environmental and energy policies.
Between 1993 and 1999, Mr. Alvarez served as a Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment. While at DOE coordinated the effort to enact nuclear worker compensation legislation. In 1994 and 1995, Bob led teams in North Korea to establish control of nuclear weapons materials. He coordinated nuclear material strategic planning for the department and established the department’s first asset management program. Bob was awarded two Secretarial Gold Medals, the highest awards given by the Department.Prior to joining the DOE, Mr. Alvarez served for five years as a Senior Investigator for the U. S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator John Glenn, and as one of the Senate’s primary staff experts on the U.S. nuclear weapons program. While serving for Senator Glenn, Bob worked to help establish the environmental cleanup program in the Department of Energy, strengthened the Clean Air Act, uncovered several serious nuclear safety and health problems, improved medical radiation regulations, and created a transition program for communities and workers affected by the closure of nuclear weapons facilities.In 1975 Bob helped found and direct the Environmental Policy Institute (EPI), a respected national public interest organization. He helped enact several federal environmental laws, wrote several influential studies and organized successful political coalitions. He helped organize a successful lawsuit on behalf of the family of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear worker and active union member who was killed under mysterious circumstances in 1974. Bob Alvarez is an award winning author and has published articles in prominent publications such as Science Magazine, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Technology Review and the Washington Post. He has been featured in television programs such as NOVA and 60 Minutes.
Project: Global Economy
Title: Fellow
Current Work: 1) Conducting research and writing on the impact of the international financial institutions and free trade and investment policies on inequality, poverty, environmental sustainability, and human rights. 2) research on executive compensation, particularly in the defense industry, and strategies for narrowing the pay gaps between CEOs and workers. 3) research to document how poverty in impoverished countries undermines jobs and the environment in the United States.
Sarah has written numerous studies, articles and books on global corporations and the social and environmental impacts of trade and investment liberalization. She sits on the steering committee of the Alliance for Responsible Trade and served on the staff of the International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission (“Meltzer Commission”), which presented their recommendations for World Bank and IMF reform to the U.S. Congress in 2000.
Prior to coming to IPS in 1992, Anderson was a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (1989-1992) and an editor for the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (1988). She holds a Masters in International Affairs from The American University and a BA in Journalism from Northwestern University.
Project: New Internationalism
Title: Fellow
The Middle East component of the Project challenges the drive towards U.S. empire in that region and beyond, focusing particularly on ending the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq, and supporting a just and comprehensive peace based on an end to Israeli occupation of Palestine. The United Nations component analyzes U.S. domination of the UN and attempts to strengthen the potential role of the UN as part of a new internationalism and the global resistance to empire. Since September 11, 2001, the New Internationalism Project has also been involved in assessing the root causes of, and critiquing Bush administration responses to, that tragedy.
IPS fellow Phyllis Bennis is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She has been a writer, analyst and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years. While working as a journalist at the United Nations during the run-up to the 1990-91 Gulf War, she began working on U.S. domination of the UN, and stayed involved in work on Iraq sanctions and disarmament, and later U.S. war and occupation in Iraq. In 1999 Phyllis accompanied a group of congressional aides to Iraq to examine the impact of U.S.-led economic sanctions on humanitarian conditions there, and later joined former UN Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, who resigned his position as Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq to protest the impact of sanctions, in a speaking tour. In 2001 she helped found and currently co-chairs the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation. She works closely with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, and since 2002 has played an active role in the growing global peace movement.
Project: Global Economy
Title: Director
John Cavanagh has been Director of IPS since 1998. In this capacity, he oversees programs, outreach, and organizational development.
John has a BA from Dartmouth College and a MA from Princeton University. He worked as an international economist for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (1978-1981) and the World Health Organization (1981-1982). He directed IPS's Global Economy Project from 1983-1997. He is the co-author of 10 books and numerous articles on the global economy.
Project: Inequality and the Common Good
Title: Director
Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy (IPS) and directs IPS’s Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He is an expert on U.S. inequality and author of several books, including Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity (New Press, 2005). He coordinates a national effort to preserve the federal estate tax, our nation’s only tax on inherited wealth. He co-authored with Bill Gates Sr., Wealth and Our Commonwealth, a case for taxing inherited fortunes.
In 1995, he co-founded United for a Fair Economy (UFE) to raise the profile of the inequality issue and support popular education and organizing efforts to address inequality. In 1997, he co-founded Responsible Wealth, a project of UFE to bring together business leaders and investors to publicly speak out against economic policies and corporate practices that worsen economic inequality. He was Executive Director of UFE from 1995-2001 and Program Director until 2005.
Karen Dolan is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and Director of the Cities for Progress and Cities for Peace projects based there. She holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Social Policy from the American University in Washington D.C. She has been a researcher, organizer, writer and activist in the peace and social justice communities for many years prior to joining IPS in 1996; she continues with public scholarship linked to movement-based activism. Karen collaborates with organizers and elected officials at the local level as well as with members of Congress and their staff. She participates in building economic and social justice coalitions at the local and national levels focused around a common, broad-based progressive agenda.
Karen’s activism at IPS has included organizing the Cities for Peace movement which facilitated the passage on anti-war resolutions in 170 towns and cities across America in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and is now facilitating a current movement to Bring the Troops Home Now. Karen has also organized town hall meetings, locally-based ad-hoc Congressional hearings, economic rights bus tours and coalition-building community meetings nation-wide in predominantly poor, low-income and minority communities. The purpose of this organizing has been political education for both citizens and policy-makers at all legislative levels, media attention, linking community-led organizations with policy-makers, and the building of a Fairness Agenda/People’s Platform, (see www.citiesforpeace.org) for transformation of our nation’s policies with adversely affect vulnerable populations.
She is currently directing a project that is solidifying the currently lose and disconnected alliances of community-led activists and locally-elected officials. They have built an organized network, Cities for Progress. This is a much needed national infrastructure that will facilitate the passage of the Fairness Agenda nationally and transform our nation’s policies from the bottom up.
Karen regularly appears in print and in broadcast addressing issues of peace and the domestic economy. Some of Karen’s publications include: Our Communities are Not for Sale; Paying the Price: the Mounting Costs of War in Iraq;A Failed Transition: The Continuing Costs of War in Iraq; and numerous articles on domestic economic issues online and in outlets such as The Nation magazine, Common Dreams and in op-ed pages of well-respected newspapers.
Project: Foreign Policy In Focus
Title: Co-Director
John Feffer is Co-Director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
He is the author of several books and numerous articles. He has been a Writing Fellow at Provisions Library in Washington, DC and a PanTech fellow in Korean Studies at Stanford University. He is a former associate editor of World Policy Journal. He has worked as an international affairs representative in Eastern Europe and East Asia for the American Friends Service Committee. He has studied in England and Russia, lived in Poland and Japan, and traveled widely throughout Europe and Asia. He has taught a graduate level course on international conflict at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul in July 2001 and delivered lectures at a variety of academic institutions including New York University, Hofstra, Union College, Cornell University, and Sofia University (Tokyo). He's been widely interviewed in print and on radio. He serves on the advisory committees of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea. He is a recipient of the Herbert W. Scoville fellowship and has been a writer in residence at Blue Mountain Center and the Wurlitzer Foundation. He currently lives with his partner Karin Lee in Hyattsville, Maryland.
Project: Social Action & Leadership School for Activists
Title: Program Director
Netfa directs the Institute's school for organizers. This project provides affordable courses covering all aspects of grassroots activism.
Netfa holds a BA in History from the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) and has been a political organizer/activist since 1985. He served as coordinator of the Committee for Political Education at the Pan-African Resource Center (1985-1989) and has worked as a phone-bank fundraiser for the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES 1988-1990). Netfa has been intimately involved with many movements such as the 1986 International Peace Gathering in response to the U.S. bombing of Libya and the Advocates Plus Save UDC movement (1997). Currently he is working with the People Before Profit Community Healthcare Project that is organizing DC residents to take their healthcare needs into their own hands, is a boardmember for both Empower DC and M.O.M.I.E.S. TLC, is US Liaison for the Ujamma Youth Farming Project in Gweru Zimbabwe, and is an organizer in the No War On Cuba Movement. Netfa is also a radio co-producer/co-host for Voices With Vision on WPFW 89.3 FM that airs Thursdays from 11am-12pm.
Articles authored:
Freedom or Farce? Examining the Varela Project
May 25: Celebration of An Aspiration
Zimbabwe and Pan-African Liberation
An interview with Netfa by Gregory Elich
From Negro History Week to Pan-African Historical Context
Zimbabwe: More Than Complicity of Silence
Title: IPS Carol & Ed Newman Fellow
Farrah Hassen is the 2008 Carol Jean and Edward F. Newman Fellow. Her projects include working on a film about the history of IPS, expanding her Master’s thesis on “Syria and the Iraq War” and publishing articles on US-Syria relations, US policy in the Middle East, Iraq, Iran and the Middle East peace process.
Born in the UAE, raised in the USA, Farrah holds a Master’s in International Affairs from American University’s School of International Service, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2007. She received her BA in Political Science at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where she was honored as the “Outstanding Political Science Graduate” of 2004. She served as IPS Fellow Saul Landau’s research assistant from 2001-2004 and interned for the Institute’s Global Economy project in 2002. Farrah received the Institute’s Seymour Melman Fellowship in 2005, which allowed her to travel to Syria and research US-Syrian relations, Syrian foreign policy and the nascent reform process. Among other experiences, Farrah interned at the UNDP office in Damascus in 2004, worked as Harry Belafonte’s executive assistant in New York and served as the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s (ADC) Southern California organizer in 2005. She also worked as a research assistant at the National Security Archive in Washington D.C., documenting the lead-up, entry and conduct of the 2003 war in Iraq by using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to access key documents. Farrah’s numerous political commentaries, movie and book reviews and poetic attempts have appeared in publications including Counterpunch, Progreso Weekly, The Progressive Media Project, ZNet, Foreign Policy in Focus, Creative Syria, Common Dreams and Race and Class.
Title: IPS Director of Media Relations
Joia Jefferson Nuri is the Director of Media Relations for IPS. She is responsible for informing broadcast, cable, print, and .com media about the work of Progressive Challenge, Cities for Peace, SEEN, the Pinochet Project, and IPS in general. Joia schedules media interviews and gives the media access to IPS Fellows and researchers.
Prior to joining IPS, Joia worked in Washington media for close to 30 years. She served as Senior Producer at C-SPAN, America's Black Forum, BET and WAMU. As an independent producer, Joia created the "grateful student" profiles seen in the United Negro College Fund's annual fundraising telethon. She also produced live specials for the Pacifica Radio Network. For more than a decade Joia was a network television technician for both NBC and CBS NEWS. Joia ended her technical career in 1985 as the Technical Director of CBS' FACE THE NATION. In 1991, Joia lived and worked in west Africa, reporting on the presidential elections in Ivory Coast and Nigeria.
Title: IPS Director of Online Communications
With creative Yin and technical Yang; Nate uses new media kung-fu to educate and inspire generation-spanning audiences on IPS' progressive policy campaigns. He designs, develops and maintains IPS and campaign websites. He's also responsible for design-intensive print material; e-mail campaigns; short flash and video productions; and IT strategy/support in the office. Working to ensure the Institute for Policy Studies gets more of the presence it deserves.
From 2004-06, Nate was lead Interactive Designer for Great Lakes Media Technology, and in 2003-04, Digital Video Editor with Mainly Editing. The majority of his career has been in freelance, where he has developed a diverse portfolio working with over thirty clients (largely non-profits and small businesses) including the Sustainable Endowments Institute; XS [Urban] Megazine; Kholer; Leinenkugel's; and Williams College.
Nate has also served as photojournalist in a Colombian human rights delegation; IT support for a Camden, NJ school reform campaign; case worker and after-school program director for a Washington, D.C. international housing shelter; and editor/producer on a nationwide video for the Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee.
Title: IPS Fellow
Saul Landau, an internationally-known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker on foreign and domestic policy issues, has been a fellow at IPS since 1972 and at TNI since 1974. He has written 13 books, thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and reviews and made more than 40 films and TV programs on social, political, economic and historical issues. Among his numerous accolades, Saul received the George Polk Award for Investigative Reporting and an Emmy for his 1980 film, "Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang" (with Jack Willis), as well as the Letelier-Moffitt Award for his human rights work. He won a Golden Apple award for "The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in Chiapas" as well as first prizes in many festivals with films about Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende and Subcomandante Marcos. He is Professor Emeritus at Cal Poly Pomona University.
Saul's weekly columns can be read on www.progresoweekly.com. His recent work includes the books The Business of America: How Consumers Have Replaced Citizens and How We Can Reverse the Trend (2004), The Pre-Emptive Empire: A Guide to Bush's Kingdom (2003) and the film "Syria: Between Iraq and a Hard Place" (2004). His latest book is A Bush and Botox World (2006, Counterpunch Press). Saul's new film, "We Don't Play Golf Here," which features poignant vignettes on Mexico and globalization, won the Roxie Award in 2007 for "Best Activist Video." It is available on DVD from roundworldproductions@gmail.com
Project: Foreign Policy In Focus
Title: Research Fellow
Erik is a Research Fellow with the peace and security program and serves as the Policy Outreach director for the Foreign Policy In Focus project. His current work includes conducting education and outreach on issues surrounding Iraq and multilateral institutions. In the last year he has been interviewed on numerous radio stations, done appearances on TV shows including MSNBC and ABC, and quoted in publications ranging from The Nation and The Washington Post to Al-Ahram (Egypt).
Erik holds an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of New Mexico. He worked with the Interhemispheric Resource Center in New Mexico on Foreign Policy In Focus before moving to Washington to continue his work at IPS in April 1999.
Title: IPS Office Manager/Receptionist
”What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.” - Frantz Fanon
”Culture, whatever the ideological or idealist characteristics of its expression, is thus an essential element of the history of a people. Culture is, perhaps, the resultant of this history just as the flower is the resultant of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production. Culture plunges its roots into the humus of the material reality of the environment in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors. History enables us to know the nature and extent of the imbalances and the conflicts (economic, political and social) that characterize the evolution of a society. Culture enables us to know what dynamic syntheses have been formed and set by social awareness in order to resolve these conflicts at each stage of evolution of that society, in the search for survival and progress.” - Amilcar Cabral, excerpt from National Culture
Project: Inequality and the Common Good
Title: Senior Organizer and Research Associate
Dedrick Muhammad is the Senior Organizer and Research Associate for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good. Dedrick's special area of focus is the domestic racial wealth divide particularly between African-Americans and white Americans. Dedrick Muhammad was a writer for the State of The Dream 2004, 2005, and 2008. He also co-authored with Chuck Collins a chapter in the Inequality Reader.
Dedrick Muhammad was the former National Field Director for Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network. He also was the Coordinator for the Racial Wealth Divide Project of United For A Fair Economy. Dedrick Muhammad writes regular opeds found on www.inequality.org and has been featured on Democracy Now, BET News, CSPAN, NPR, and many other radio and television shows.
Project: Break the Chain Campaign
Title: Case Worker
Qimmah Najeeullah is the Case Manager and Promise Central Project Coordinator of Break the Chain Campaign (BTCC). She has provided cultural competent and in-depth social service support to the clients of BTCC for almost three years. Prior to her current position, Qimmah was a Research Assistant for Community Mediation Centers of Maryland and an Assistant Instructor of English as a second language and employability skills at the Northwood Refugee Training Center in Silver Spring, MD.
Qimmah is a returned Peace Corps volunteer, having served in Turkmenistan, Central Asia and is currently an M.A. candidate in the International Peace and Conflict Resolution program at American University’s School of International Service. She was asked to join the board of directors at Community of Hope Health Services in April 2007 and recently celebrated her third anniversary with husband Muhammad, excited about the expectation of their second child.
Project: Foreign Policy In Focus
Title: Research Fellow
Miriam Pemberton is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, writing and speaking on demilitarization issues for its Foreign Policy In Focus project. She leads a group that produces the annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States.” Formerly she was editor, researcher and finally director of the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
With William Hartung of the New America Foundation she is co-editor of the forthcoming book "Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War" (Paradigm Publishers, May 2008).
Project: Inequality and the Common Good
Title: Associate Fellow
IPS associate fellow Sam Pizzigati has edited Too Much, an online newsletter on excess and inequality, ever since the publication first appeared in 1995. He has written widely on issues around the concentration of income and wealth, with op-eds and articles appearing in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times, and a host of other newspapers and periodicals.
A veteran labor movement journalist, Pizzigati spent 20 years directing the publishing operations of America's largest union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association. Over the course of his union career, he has also edited publications for three other national unions and co-edited the primary text on trade union journalism, The New Labor Press (Cornell University ILR Press). His latest book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (Apex Press), won an "outstanding title" of the year rating from the American Library Association (Choice, January 2006). Greed and Good examines just how concentrated wealth is poisoning every aspect of our contemporary lives, from our economy and politics to our health and our happiness.
Pizzigati, 59, lives in Maryland. He has served on the boards of directors of Progressive Maryland, the state's most important voice for working families, and United for a Fair Economy, the Boston-based national economic justice advocacy group.
Project: Foreign Policy In Focus
Title: Movements Coordinator
Saif Rahman is the Movements Coordinator for IPS and FPIF. His role includes using and translating IPS’s research and writing to help make the progressive movement more efficient, more diverse and more organized. He sits on the Steering Committee for United for Peace in Justice and a Coordinating Committee Member of the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition. His current work focuses on working with UFPJ and NYSPC to end the war in Iraq, the cancellation of debt of foreign countries, and to make corporations, such as Firestone, end their abuses of workers and the environment abroad.
Saif graduated from Wheaton College with degrees in Political Science and Philosophy. He came to IPS from Global Justice where he was a National Coordinator for the Student Campaign for Child Survival, which is one of the largest and fastest growing grassroots organizations working on the issue of children’s health and rights. He helped start the University Coalitions for Global Health and he also represented SCCS in the Global Action for Children coalition and to the FAIR network. He also spent time working with young students in Istanbul, Turkey. In college, Saif helped manage a free format, pro-free speech radio station and founded and was the president of the Community Action Team. Saif has worked on and publicly spoken and given workshops on about a variety of social justice issues from debt cancellation, to global health, to anti-militarization, nonviolence and power dynamics.
Project: Paths for Reconstruction in the 21st Century
Title: Co-Founder and Distinguished Fellow
Marc is directing IPS’s Paths for the 21st Century project. This includes producing a multi-volume book examining international organizations and politics, reviewing what we have learned from the 20th century of an emancipatory and liberatory nature to serve as guides for new models of equality and alternatives for the 21st century on questions of peace, economic and social justice, cultural rights, democratic reconstruction, and racial and gender equality. He is also currently serving as a professor at George Washington University. Marcus has also written extensively on the Presidents in the web exclusive Presidential Disrespect.
Prior to founding IPS, Marc was a member of the special staff of the National Security Council in President Kennedy’s Administration. He has served as advisor to the Episcopal Urban Bishops and as co-chair of the Issues Commission of the Progressive Alliance, a group of 150 public interest and labor organizations. He has also served as a member of a Presidential Commission on Education and advisor to the Bureau of the Budget and the Office of Science and Technology in the Executive Office of the President.
Project: Sustainable Energy and Economy Network
Title: Researcher
Title: IPS Director of Development
Elizabeth (Beth) has worked on development of progressive organizing and media projects since 1979 when she helped to found Congress For a Working America. Since 1990, she has served variously as chief development officer for In These Times magazine, the Independent Press Association, and the DC office of Advancement Project as well as consulting for numerous other media and advocacy efforts. She serves on the board of Directors of the Institute for Public Accuracy, the Alternative Press Center , and the Independent Press Association. She joined IPS in late 2005.
Project: Foreign Policy In Focus
Title: Media Director
Emily works on the Foreign Policy In Focus project as its media director. She edits op-eds and endeavors to gets them published in newspapers and online media and also edits some of the commentaries and reports FPIF publishes on its own site. Emily connects FPIF scholars and analysts with journalists seeking their expertise. She also teaches media strategy, primarily through FPIF and the IPS Social Action and Leadership School for Activists (SALSA)
Prior to coming to IPS in 2003, Emily covered foreign policy and economics in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as Washington and New York for the Dow Jones and Bloomberg News services She earned a M.S. in journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. in Latin American studies and history from the University of Texas at Austin. She has traveled extensively in Latin America, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. She and her husband Tommy have a baby and a toddler.
Project: Inequality and the Common Good
Title: Program and Administrative Associate, and Coordinator of the Jamaica Plain Forum and the Forum Organizing Project
Sarah Schwartz Sax is Program and Administrative Associate with the Program on Inequality and the Common Good. She also Coordinates the Jamaica Plain Forum, a regional film and speakers program in Boston, and the Forum Organizing Project. Current work includes providing support and training to start-up community forums, film and speakers programs around the country.
Prior to joining IPS, Sarah worked on food-justice and sustainable social systems. This work included management of both rural and urban Community Supported Agriculture programs dedicated to hunger relief and green job training. She has a BA from the University of Michigan in Social and Environmental Justice with a focus on community development and sustainable agriculture.
Project: Drug Policy
Title: Fellow
Sanho Tree is a Fellow and Director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. The project works to end the domestic and international “War on Drugs” and replace it with policies that promote public health and safety as well as economic alternatives to the prohibition drug economy. The intersection of race and poverty in the drug war is at the heart of the project’s work. In recent years the project has focused on the attendant “collateral damage” caused by the US exporting its drug war to Colombia and Afghanistan. Establishing humane and sustainable alternatives to the drug war fits into the IPS mandate as one of the major contemporary social justice issues at home and abroad. He was featured in the ABC/John Stossel documentary on the drug war and has also appeared on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Currently, he serves on the boards of Witness for Peace and the Andean Information Network.
Mr. Tree is also a former military and diplomatic historian and he has collaborated in the past with Dr. Gar Alperovitz on The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (Knopf, 1995). From 1996-97, he assisted entertainer Harry Belafonte and continues to work as an occasional consultant for him on international issues. He was also associate editor of CovertAction Quarterly, an award-winning magazine of investigative journalism. In the late 1980s he worked at the International Human Rights Law Group.
Title: IPS Development Associate & Letelier-Moffitt Memorial Human Rights Ceremony Coordinator
Sena Tsikata holds a B.A in Psychology and a minor in Political Science from the University of Delaware. Her prior work and continued interest include work community development and health advocacy and education through outreach media and theatre.
She is the Co-Founder of the DASA Dance Troupe in Newark, Delaware and also serves as a script consultant for Farmhouse Productions, a broadcast production unit in Ghana, West Africa.
Title: IPS Director of Finance
Robin serves as Director of Finance and Human Resources. Robin has a B.A. in history, Grinnell College. She also has more than 20 years' experience in Washington, DC, including work on Capitol Hill, social science research firms and the nonprofit sector.
Project: Foreign Policy In Focus
Title: Co-Director
Emira Woods is Co-Director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) is a think tank for research, analysis, and action that brings together 600 scholars, advocates, and activists who strive to make the United States a more responsible global partner. The Institute for Policy Studies is a multi-issue research center that has transformed ideas into action for peace, justice, and the environment for over four decades. Ms. Woods is an expert on U.S. foreign policy with a special emphasis on Africa and the developing world.
She has written on a range of issues from debt, trade and development to US military policy. Ms. Woods completed her undergraduate studies at Columbia University and her graduate studies at Harvard. Prior to joining IPS, Ms. Woods was Program Manager for the Committee on Development Policy and Practice at InterAction, serving as a principal staff contact for advocacy at the UN, the international financial institutions, USAID and Treasury. Previous to that, she served as Program Officer of Oxfam America's Africa program.
In 2007, Ms. Woods testified before Congress on international debt at hearings of the House Financial Services Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health.
Ms. Woods is a regular commentator on NPR’s News and Notes. She is a frequent guest on broadcast media including BBC, CNN, VOA, CBC, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the Diane Rehm Show, the Kojo Nnamdi Show and Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on issues related to U.S. Foreign Policy. She has hosted a WashingtonPost.com online chat and has published articles and op-eds in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine as well as the Miami Herald, the Christian Science Monitor, New York Newsday, The Nation, the Baltimore Sun, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
Ms. Woods serves on the Board of Directors of Africa Action, Just Associates, Global Justice and the Financial Policy Forum. She is also on the Network Council of Jubilee USA.Emira holds a BA in International Relations from Columbia , a certificate in Public Policy from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, a Master's in Government from Harvard, and is ABD in Political Economy and Government at Harvard. She recently was Program Manager for the Committee on Development Policy and Practice at InterAction, serving as a principal staff contact for advocacy at the UN, the international financial institutions, USAID and Treasury. She designed and implemented a strategic campaign around the Monterrey Financing for Development conference, working with both InterAction members and a broader coalition of Southern and Northern agencies. Prior to this position, she served as Program Officer of Oxfam America's Africa program, which involved outreach to the heads of major international institutions and grassroots groups in the most remote communities.
Ms. Woods has recently been interviewed on BBC, CNN, CBC, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer , the Diane Rehm Show, on Liberia and US-Africa Relations. She has hosted a WashingtonPost.com online chat and has published pieces in the Nation, the Baltimore Sun, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
Project: Sustainable Energy and Economy Network
Title: Co-Director
Daphne Wysham is a Fellow and board member of the Institute for Policy Studies, founder and co-director of the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network, a project of IPS , and founder and co-host of Earthbeat Radio, which airs on WPFW 89.3 FM in Washington and is being syndicated to other stations nationwide. SEEN conducted the initial research which drew attention to the disproportionate ratio of fossil fuel investments by international financial institutions, including the World Bank. Translated into numerous languages, these studies resulted in: demands for reform from members of the US House and Senate; hearings held in Italian Senate, Dutch Parliament; Italian Prime Minister and former Vice President Al Gore calling for reforms. SEEN launched an international campaign in 1998 that, in 2001, resulted in World Bank President James Wolfensohn calling for an independent study of extractive industries (EIR). The EIR called for the World Bank to phase out of fossil fuels immediately, and rapidly phase in renewable energy. She is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam; former editor-in-chief of Greenpeace Magazine; and associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is an energy writer for UPI, a board advisor to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Senior Fellow with the Sierra Club, and a member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice.
Ms. Wysham's analysis and critiques have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Grist, The Guardian, the Financial Times, and on BBC, NPR, and Marketplace, among others.
Title: IPS I.T. Associate
Stephen is the I.T. associate for IPS. His roles include server maintenance, maintaining workstation operability, installation of hardware and software, and general IT help-desk support. He is an IT "techie", who works to simplify the day-to-day computer related tasks of the IPS staff. His current work focuses on backing-up critical data, setting up an efficient print server, providing secure server policies, and syncing and confinguring staff smart-phones with an outlook server.
Stephen is on track to graduate from the University of Maryland College Park, A. James Clark School of Engineering, with a degree in Computer Engineering in December of 2008. Prior to IPS, his background comes from years of hands on networking, building custom computers, installation, and server maintenance. He is known around the MD and D.C. area as a specialized computer contractor for such organizations as the Ghanian embassy, the Law Offices of Brennwald & Robertson, Hyde Leadership Charter School, and residential computer services.
Project: Break the Chain Campaign
Title: Director
Joy Zarembka directs The Break the Chain Campaign, a coalition of legal and social service agencies, ethnically-based organizations, social action groups and individuals devoted to protecting the rights of the migrant domestic working community. The Campaign has primarily focused on domestic workers who have entered the United States through a special visa program that grants international bureaucrats and diplomats the privilege of bringing hired help in from overseas. Most of these domestic workers are poor women from developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America who enter the United States on temporary A-3 or G-5 visas.
Joy M. Zarembka was "born, bred and buttered" in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received her undergraduate degree from Haverford College and Master's degree from Yale University in International Relations. As a Student Professor at Haverford, she designed and taught the advanced-level course, "Sociology of Knowledge." Before coming to the Campaign, Joy had traveled to Burundi - a small country in Central Africa currently experiencing civil war - to conduct conflict resolution workshops between different ethnic groups there, while participating in a project to reconstruct a destroyed guesthouse. Joy has traveled widely throughout Eastern and Southern Africa.
In February 2002, Joy was named one of the Women's Information Networks's Young Women of Achievement for the year.