Introducing 2021 Changemaker Institute Mentors

Máille Faughnan has a PhD in international development, specializing in community development organizations and social innovation.  Maille’s scholarly work is interdisciplinary, integrating qualitative, ethnographic methods and case study approaches to understand the cultural dimensions of global development institutions and innovation processes. Her field research in urban and rural areas of New Orleans, Central America, and East Africa spans topics such as gender and social entrepreneurship, cultural development programs, design thinking for reproductive health, the diffusion of design thinking through capacity-building, critical service learning and community engagement.

Dana M. Reed  is the Executive Director of Upturn Arts, an organization she founded in New Orleans in 2010 under the initial name Hope Stone-New Orleans, as an offshoot of Hope Stone-Houston, and under which name the organization operated until its rebranding in 2015. Under her direction, Upturn Arts has grown from one employee – Ms. Reed herself – to a 30-plus professional teaching artists, apprentices, interns and full-time program staff. From 2010 through 2019, the arts program has grown from teaching 23 children at one location, to a year-round program registering over 1,200 opportunities.  One opportunity equals 30 hours of arts instruction or one week of camp.  In 2020, she successfully created and executed a free virtual arts program that includes over 50 online lessons and provided 600 art kits to families.

Mentee: Pass Dat Joy, Shaymaa Shaymaa Abdalal, PhD Candidate, Public Health and Tropical Medicine

Rafe Steinhauer, M.Ed/M.B.A. is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College teaching design thinking/human-centered design and practicing education design. His mission is to help people co-create the world in which they and others want to live. Before Dartmouth, he was a lecturer at Princeton University, teaching classes on Creativity, Innovation, and Design. At Princeton, he started the Tiger Challenge program, in which teams of students, advisers, and community partners worked on multi-year design thinking for social innovation projects such as tackling lead poisoning in Trenton, localizing the food system in Princeton, NJ, increasing access to care in Philadelphia, improving college matriculation and graduation rates of public school alumni in New York City, and increasing Princeton University’s percentage of contracts with minority and women-owned businesses. Rafe has also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Design Thinking at Tulane University through the Taylor Center for Social Innovation & Design Thinking.

Mentee: Viva La Musica, Darianna Videaux Capitel, MA Latin American Studies

Sally J. Kenney has served as director of the Newcomb Institute and held the Newcomb endowed chair since 2010. She is a faculty member in the Political Science Department and an affiliated faculty member in the law school. Her research interests include sexual assault on campus, women’s imprisonment, women and leadership, gender and judging, judicial selection, feminist social movements, women and electoral politics, the European Court of Justice, exclusionary employment policies, and pregnancy discrimination. Her latest book is Gender and Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter. A native of Iowa, Sally J. Kenney earned a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Iowa, a B.A. and M.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.  From 1989-1995, she held a joint appointment in Political Science, Women’s Studies, and Law at the University of Iowa. She served on the faculty at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs from 1995-2009 where she also directed the Center on Women and Public Policy.

Mentee: Women in Global South, Mehr Manzoor, PhD Candidate, Health Policy and Management

Adam Aronovitz is the Director of Global Routes, an innovative, value-driven, experiential international education called by The New York Times calls as “one of the most respected [organizations] in the field.” Over the past 50 years, Global Routes has led 10,000 high school and college students to participate in community service, adventure travel, cross-cultural, and language immersion programs to prepare emerging leaders with the tools, skills, and confidence to thrive in our interconnected world.

Adam has lived, worked, traveled and served in more than 90 countries, has more than 20 years under his belt as an educator, and was the co-founder and co-director of The Cookbook Project, a food literacy and cooking education organization that reached schools and community organizations in 35 states, 22 countries, and impacted a projected 15,000 youth.

Mentee: @tlantic Archives, Sedrick Miles, PhD Candidate, Latin American Studies

Andrew Ward, PhD, is the Co-Founder & Chairman of iKnow Concert Series, the largest free music festival in East Africa focused on HIV awareness, culture sharing and economic development. Six years strong, the concert series has run in five cities in two countries, has hosted over 300 performers and has administered over 25,500 HIV tests to 175,000 concertgoers.

Andrew Ward grew up in Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, and Virginia. He attended Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia where he earned his B.A. in Religion. He then taught the History of English Literature at Polonia University in Częstochowa, Poland for three years while earning his M.Ed from Framingham State College’s European campus and moonlighting as a lounge singer. He moved to New Orleans in 2004 and earned both his M.S. and PhD in International Development from Tulane University. Along the way, Ward worked as a tour guide of the French Quarter and volunteered to help establish and direct several nonprofit organizations in the New Orleans area including Voices for International Business and Education, which operates the International High School of New Orleans. He is also founder and director of the Wahida Unity Project, which uses music and the arts to bridge the divide between the US and the Islamic World).

Mentee: Operanauts, Vidhatri (Vid) Raturi, BA, Neuroscience