School of International Studies
The Global Center Advisory Board
The Advisory Board is a rich resource base of accessible professionals which contribute to the Center’s strategic positioning in a leadership role within this growing new global movement. Collectively, they provide an interactive forum for review and assessment of Center benchmarks, monitoring of programmatic impact and institutional sustainability, and future visioning.
Charles Ansbach
Charley Ansbach is a Managing Consultant for the Western United States and Asia for the Skystone Ryan Corporation, the leading international fundraising and management consulting company in the world. Mr. Ansbach speaks regularly on emerging issues of large scale fundraising, corporate partnerships and social entrepreneurism. He has helped organizations raise millions of dollars to support worthy causes, has created successful corporate sponsorship programs, designed major public/private partnerships and created nationally recognized social entrepreneur projects. Mr. Ansbach serves on a variety of Boards of Directors and was voted an “Outstanding Fundraising Executive of the Year” by his peers in the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
Martin Burt
Martin Burt founded Fundacion Paraguaya and brought an innovative microcredit program to Paraguay in 1985, while the country was under dictatorial rule that made citizen initiatives a particularly challenging and even dangerous undertaking. Over the years, Fundacion Paraguaya has supported 35,000 micro entrepreneurs who create 19,000 new jobs each year, and it has taking on innovative and entrepreneurial challenges through a Junior Achievement program that builds the skills of young entrepreneurs. Its agricultural school is breaking new ground by demonstrating that well-managed, sustainable agriculture can be profitable and by helping young people learn to think of themselves as rural entrepreneurs. Martin Burt is a Pacific alumnus and is currently a visiting professor of Social Entrepreneurship. He has been recognized with the following international awards: Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, Inter-American Development Bank Award of Excellence for Social Enterprise, Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award.
Ron Cordes, Board Chair
Ron Cordes is a senior executive with Genworth Financial, Inc., a $ 100 billion global insurance and investment firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange with over 15 million customers and operations in 24 countries. In addition, Mr. Cordes is President of the Cordes Family Foundation, which provides both grants and investments on a global basis in the areas of social entrepreneurship and microcredit. He holds a Bachelor's Degree from the University of California, Berkeley, was a recipient of the 2005 Ernst &Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and is the author of "The Art of Investing and Portfolio Management," published by McGraw-Hill in 2004.
Margee Ensign
Dean School of International Studies and Associate Provost for International Initiatives
Tim Freundlich
Tim is a highly regarded innovator in new financial instruments in the community development and social investment sector. Over the last ten years, he has served in a number of capacities at Calvert Social Investment Foundation, including his current role as Director, Strategic Development. While there, Tim conceived of and launched Calvert Giving Fund - the socially responsible donor advised fund, was instrumental in building the $110 million Calvert Community Investment Note retail registered security (with more than a quarter billion dollars invested over this period into 200+ entities globally, all of them nonprofits or social enterprises of one kind or another), and has helped launch Calvert Community Investment Partners, an analysis and asset administration group for community development and social enterprise investment, with approximately $50 million under administration. He received a BA from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the University of San Francisco. Tim spends much of his free time as an advisor to various non-profits, including Social Venture Partners International, where he was a national Board Member, and a Founding Partner of SVP Bay Area. He is also a Strategic Advisor to xigi.net, an emergent landscaping environment for the social purpose capital market. He is an accomplished social entrepreneur in his own right.
Joe Johnson
Joe Johnson worked in banking for 36 years. His last three assignments were as President of troubled community banks that required substantial restructuring to return them to profitability. During his career he also taught bank management, small business finance, and analyzing financial statements. Upon his retirement in 2005 he has taught at Pacific in the Masters Program both entrepreneurship and organizational behavior. He also consults with small businesses and banks. He is on the board of an organization that supports Microfinance Institutions in Central America. Joe is also on the board of the School of International Studies.
Heidi Kuhn
A cancer diagnosis and successful treatment prompted Heidi Kuhn to want to give back to the less fortunate and to live close to and nurture the land. Inspired by the international campaign to ban land mines, she founded Roots of Peace in 1997 at her family’s home in the California wine country. The organization takes practical steps toward sustainable development and enduring peace by converting minefields to vineyards, agricultural fields and safe migration corridors for wildlife. Roots of Peace has helped renew production in Croatia’s wine-growing regions. In Afghanistan, it has removed 100,000 land mines and proved farmers could earn more growing grapes than poppies. The model is being extended to additional provinces in Afghanistan and Angola. Heidi Kuhn is a Pacific alumna and a winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.
Jonathan Lewis
Jonathan C. Lewis is Founder and CEO of MicroCredit Enterprises, where he works full-time on a pro bono basis to address global poverty issues. MicroCredit Enterprises is an innovative, open source, not-for-profit venture which leverages private capital to make tiny business loans primarily to impoverished women in developing countries. The MicroCredit Enterprises model takes advantage of economic guarantees in the developed world to provide capital for microcredit.
Previously, Mr. Lewis was founder and President of the Academy for International Health Studies and also founded the International Summit on Public-Private Health Sector Partnerships. He has served as CEO of the California Assoc. of HMOs, Chief Budget Advisor to the President of the California State Senate, Member of the Cabinet of the California Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Chief of Staff for three California commissions in the fields of health, education and tax policy. He was the founding Chair of Freedom from Hunger’s distinguished Ambassadors Council and a founding Initiator of the Alliance for Fair Microfinance. He is currently a Member of the Advisory Boards for the Global Philanthropy Forum, the International Center for Corporate Accountability and several social entrepreneur companies. He has also been the founder/owner of a public policy consulting firm, real estate investment company, public interest citizens’ group (tax reform) and contemporary art gallery.
Gillian Murphy
Gillian Murphy has directed the San Joaquin Delta College Small Business Development Center (SBDC) since 1989, providing consulting, training, and resources to the business community in a four-county region. Gillian also directs the Statewide SBDC Hub which provides assistance to the 25 community college-based SBDCs throughout California. In 2001, Gillian was honored by the Sacramento District SBA Office with the Women in Business Advocate award and in 2002 was named Small Business Advocate by the Stockton/San Joaquin African American Chamber of Commerce and received a similar award from the San Joaquin County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2007 . In 2004 and again in 2007 she was presented the State Star Award by the National Association of Small Business Development Centers. Gillian currently serves on Rep. Jerry McNerney’s Small Business Advisory Board.
Royce Nicolaisen
Royce has more than 25 years experience in global trade and since 1991 has served as Chairman and CEO of Otis McAllister, Inc., a multi-million dollar international food and beverage import/export corporation founded in 1892. Otis is headquartered in San Francisco, with regional offices in Hong Kong, Mexico City, and Bangkok, and commercial operations in over 80 countries. Otis is among the first corporations to integrate social entrepreneurship criteria into their corporate grant program. Royce is a graduate of Columbia University and has served on boards of several agricultural and trade organizations. Royce is a member of the Lafayette-Orinda Presbyterian Church and an active member there of the Global Development Committee that funds sustainable development projects in Guatemala and other international programs. He is in the process of forming his own family foundation to support social entrepreneurship initiatives.
Dave Peery
Dave Peery is a director and vice president at the Peery Foundation, a family foundation based in Palo Alto, California. After working in the commercial real-estate business, he has turned his attention to bringing about social change through the work of the foundation. The Peery Foundation focuses on the field of Social Entrepreneurship, believing that Social Entrepreneurs are key protagonists for solving today's global challenges. Dave earned a B.A. in Latin American Studies in 2005 from Brigham Young University, and has studied abroad in England, Israel, Paraguay and Ecuador. He and his wife Lillie have two boys, and recently welcomed their third child, a girl!
Paul Rice
Paul Rice is the President & CEO of TransFair USA, the only third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the United States. Previously, Paul worked for 11 years as a rural development specialist in the Segovias region of Nicaragua, where he founded and led a highly successful coffee cooperative called PRODECOOP. With this inspiration, Paul returned to the United States and in 1998 he opened TransFair's first "national headquarters” in a one-room office in a converted warehouse in downtown Oakland. Since the launch of the Fair Trade Certified™ label nine years ago, TransFair has established Fair Trade as the fastest growing segment of the US specialty coffee industry. In 2000 Paul received the prestigious international Ashoka Fellowship for his pioneering work as a social entrepreneur. He was honored by the Klaus Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship as one of the world's top 40 Social Entrepreneurs in 2002 and a recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2005. In 2007 Paul accepted Fast Company/Monitor Group's 2007 Social Capitalist Award on TransFair’s behalf for the third year in a row. Paul holds an Economics and Political Science degree from Yale University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
Warner Woodworth
Warner Woodworth is a social entrepreneur and professor of organizational behavior at the Marriott School, Brigham Young University. He has been a leader in the global movement to prepare a new generation of college-age social entrepreneurs for fighting poverty. Using his courses and the university as a social enterprise incubator, he has spun off over 40 humanitarian projects in the past 15 years- providing capacity building mechanisms such as literacy, healthcare, microfinance, appropriate technology, and worker-owned co-ops. Over the last decade, Warner has been a founder, board chair, or director of Enterprise Mentors, HELP International, and the UNITUS Microfinance Fund as well as 13 other non-profit organizations that have established income-generating family microenterprises for self-reliance in 22 countries. Collectively, Warner, his students, and their associated non-profit organizations have raised over $10 million for microfinance, trained 140,000 micro-entrepreneurs in small business skills, and served more than a million impoverished microcredit clients in India, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and many other countries.
Sakena Yacoobi
Sakena Yacoobi founded the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) in 1995 to restore educational and health programs in Afghanistan that were dramatically cut during 30 years of warfare. The organization’s 18 Women’s Learning Centers provide services to more than 350,000 Afghan women and children each year. Its 16 Educational Learning Centers have trained 10,000 teachers and have provided school supplies to thousands of young Afghan students, while its university has prepared 180 students for careers as community leaders. AIL plans to expand its teacher training programs and its partnership network to 100 new community-based organizations, ultimately training 3,300 new teachers and improving the health of 500,000 women and children. Sakeena is a Pacific alumna and a winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.