Staff

Tsedey Betru
Program Officer, CPER
Before joining PIP, Tsedey Betru served as the Director of DMI Scholars at the DrumMajor Institute for Public Policy, a   non-partisan,  non-profit think tank generating the ideas and research that fuel the progressive movement.  As Director of DMI Scholars,  Tsedey has built and led a national program focused on increasing and diversifying the pool of young adults equipped to engage in progressive public policy work to advance social change efforts. Previously, Tsedey provided research support to PolicyLink on their Equitable Development Toolkit and the Center for Social Inclusion’s Diversity Advancement Initiative. Tsedey also led national and local mobilization campaigns with young people for the Fannie Lou Hamer Project of the National Voting Rights Institute and the 7th Street McClymonds Neighborhood Improvement Initiative of the San Francisco Foundation, campaigns that aim to build the capacity of youth to become agents of change in their communities. She is a current Fellow at the Council of Urban Professionals and a former Fellow of the Coro NY Leadership Center. Originally from Ethiopia, attended Cornell University and New School University and currently serves on the board of Achieving Leadership’s Purpose.

Cathy Block
Executive Assistant
Prior to joining PIP, Cathy worked for nonprofit organizations in the fields of social justice and the arts.  Her  most recent position was at the Center for Reproductive Rights which uses the law to advance reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right that all governments are legally obligated to protect, respect, and fulfill.  Before that, she worked at the College and Community Fellowship, an organization that the goal of helping formerly incarcerated women earn college degrees. She majored in literature and media studies at New York University.  She has volunteered for the Vietnam Children’s Fund and the Burma Project.  She currently volunteers in Brooklyn for the  Animal Resource Coalition.

Nanci Champlin
Operations Coordinator, Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation
Nanci Champlin joined the FCCP team in September 2009. Throughout the last 15 years Nanci has provided outreach, administrative, development, communications and program support to some of Oregon’s most effective nonprofits. In her seven years at the Fund for the Public Interest/OSPIRG, Nanci participated in the successful Campaign Finance Reform and Bottle Bill ballot initiatives. She helped broaden the cultural dialogue about environmental issues through street-level arts programming at Orlo, and developed a sustainability plan for a local green design and architecture firm. In March 2009, Nanci celebrated passage of new Wilderness protections for some of Oregon’s iconic wild places – the culmination of her nearly eight years at Oregon Wild.

Don Cipriani
Senior Program Officer, Just and Fair Schools Fund
Don’s background spans immigration legal aid, classroom teaching, state education and juvenile justice policy reform, and international research, evaluation, advocacy, and technical assistance on children’s rights. As a teacher, Don has taught from pre-K through high school, bilingual classes, Special Education classes, and classes inside high-security juvenile detention and correction centers. He worked as a consultant for 10 years with international organizations on a wide range of child protection issues in Asia, the Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, and the United States, including as UNICEF’s interim global focal point on justice for children. Don is the author of “Children’s Rights and the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility: A Global Perspective” (Ashgate, 2009). He holds a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and earned a Ph.D. in Law from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Henry Der
Senior Program Officer, Four Freedoms Fund
Prior to joining the Four Freedoms Fund, Henry served as the senior program officer at the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, establishing its immigrant rights program. For more than 22 years Henry was the Executive Director of the San Francisco-based, membership-supported Chinese for Affirmative Action, working to promote the civil rights of Asian Americans and other racial minority groups in employment, education, voting and access to public services. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, Henry has also served as Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction at the California Department of Education. He was appointed by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to be the State Administrator to bring Emery Unified School District out of fiscal bankruptcy. Long active in community affairs, Henry most recently led coalition efforts to promote equal educational opportunities and access for immigrant students at the City College of San Francisco, including the construction of a permanent Chinatown/North Beach campus facility.

Beatrice Hinton
Program Assistant, SCIF
Prior to joining PIP, Beatrice worked at Citizen Schools, serving as a second-shift middle school teacher in East Harlem. She has worked as a Community Development intern with Reto Juvenil Internacional, a Costa Rican based NGO that carries out community based volunteer projects across Central and South America. Beatrice has also held internships with Teach For America and the United States Senate. In 2008 she joined the Obama Administration’s first class of interns as part of the The White House Internship Program. In this capacity, Beatrice worked on broadening the women’s advocacy agenda through the Office of Public Engagement and the White House Council on Women and Girls. Beatrice is a recent graduate of The University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, where she received her B.A. in Urban Education Policy.

Angela Kahres
Program Assistant, U.S. Human Rights Fund
Angela comes to PIP by way of the Picower Foundation, where she served as a grants assistant. She graduated magna cum laude with departmental honors in English from Wagner College, where her activities included founding a club focused on encouraging interfaith dialogue on campus and collaboratively developing a course involving travel to Israel for students to gain hands-on understanding about the conflicts in the area. She has also traveled to Bangladesh, where she worked with classmates to collect water samples from rural villages affected by arsenic contamination of drinking wells.

Channapha Khamvongsa
Founder and Director, Legacies of War
Prior to joining PIP, Channapha worked in the Peace and Social Justice Unit of the Ford Foundation, the Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership at Georgetown University, the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, the Bill and Melinda Gates Millennium Scholars Program and the National Asian Pacific Center on Aging in Seattle. In 2004 she founded Legacies of War, a special initiative of PIP. She received her master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University. Channapha was six years old when her family fled Laos to the U.S. in 1980.

Edisson Marmolejo
Finance Manager
Edisson has more than 22 years of experience handling accounting and finance matters for the not for profit sector. During the last three yeas prior to joining PIP, Edisson served as controller for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. For more than 14 years Edisson was Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ senior accountant, monitoring an Endowment Fund and a Pension Fund worth $80 million and $50 million respectively. Edisson earned a bachelor of business administration from Baruch College and a master of science in accounting from New Jersey City University.

Alejandra Martinez
Program Assistant, Four Freedoms Fund
Before joining PIP, Alejandra facilitated computer literacy classes and immigrant rights workshops with the Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA) in Providence, Rhode Island. She has also created a short and long-term membership recruitment strategy for the ONA. In 2008, Alejandra received training from the Center for Third World Organizing and interned as a community organizer at the Transnational Institute for Grassroots.

Lisa Mendes
Staff Accountant
Lisa has over six years of experience in nonprofit accounting and finance. Prior to joining PIP in 2009, she worked for the Women’s Prison Association for five and a half years as an Accounting Specialist and Staff Accountant. Lisa graduated from Medgar Evers College and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting.

Ly Nguyen
Program Assistant, Communities for Public Education Reform and Fulfilling the Dream Fund
Prior to joining PIP in 2008, Ly completed a one-year internship with the William Penn Foundation’s Children, Youth, and Families program area. Ly is a member of the Fellowship for Emerging Leaders in Public Service, a development program of the Research Center for Leadership in Action at NYU Wagner that brings together emerging leaders working in public service positions throughout New York City. Ly graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in sociology and Asian American studies.

Raven Pease
Receptionist

Raven made her debut in the nonprofit world with Public Interest Projects. Before that, she was an executive assistant in the aerospace and finance sectors, where she coordinated support for multiple directors. Her professional background includes experience in planning and executing corporate events and conferences. She holds a BA in Theatre Arts from Point Park University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Justin Restauri
Program Associate, U.S. Human Rights Fund
Before joining PIP, Justin worked as an organizer at the United Steelworkers Union and as a research assistant at the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. Justin graduated from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a bachelor’s degree in individualized study concentrating on globalization, immigration and community organizing.

Lori Rosenblatt
Director of Operations and Human Resources
Prior to joining PIP, Lori worked as a licensed fertility nurse for 20 years in New York, where she also served as executive assistant, managed the medical office staff, and provided patient assistance and training. Lori, a native New Yorker, graduated from Queens College and Mandel Medical School. She currently volunteers with children with cancer at an Uptown NYC hospital.

Jill Savitt
Director, Genocide Prevention Project
Jill advises NGOs on advocacy and communications initiatives and directs the Genocide Prevention Project, which seeks to build political will to address mass atrocity crimes. In 2007, when Jill joined PIP, she founded and directed Dream for Darfur, a public advocacy initiative to urge the Chinese government to take specific actions regarding the Darfur crisis in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Games. The New York Times Magazine profiled Jill and the initiative in March 2008. From 2001 to 2007, Jill was the Director of Public Programs at Human Rights First, where she designed and supervised efforts to address the crisis in Darfur, global refugee and asylum policies, and US interrogation policy. Jill has taught a course on human rights advocacy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She began her career as a reporter for WAMU, the NPR affiliate in Washington, DC. She graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University.

Tashie Sloley
Administrative Assistant, Four Freedoms Fund
Tashie has over two years experience working in the non-profit sector in an administrative capacity, including her work as an Administrative Assistant with NYC Parks & Recreation, Urban Park Rangers where she assisted with organizing and facilitating events and activities for the public. She is currently working towards a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from St. John’s University.

Jordan Thierry
Program Associate, FCCP
Jordan Thierry jumped into non-profit advocacy in 2003 with both feet and hasn’t looked back since. He credits this to his rich experience at the University of Oregon, where he co-directed the Student Multicultural Center and became a highly active leader on campus. Jordan went on to earn his M.A. from Howard University, and continued his commitment to social change as a program coordinator at the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation in Washington, DC, and later as an educator in Newark, NJ.

Natalie Weng
Fiscal Sponsorship Program Assistant
Natalie brings experience in both corporate and public service positions. She has held internships with law firms such as Davis Polk and Wardwell LLP and Proskauer Rose LLP. As a Labor and Employment intern at Davis Polk, she assisted lawyers with a wide variety of projects. She has also worked for the City of New York Human Resources Administration Adult Protective Services, where she accompanied caseworkers to the homes of at-risk clients in Lower Manhattan and Mid-town, serving as an interpreter for Cantonese Chinese-speaking clients. Natalie is a recent graduate of Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Government.

Lindsey Yoo
Program Assistant, CPER
Prior to joining PIP, Lindsey worked as a Legal Assistant for Sanford Wittels & Heisler, LLP, where she assisted lawyers with a wide variety of employment discrimination suits. While interning at the Brennan Center for Justice, she supported the Center’s efforts to develop a strong, nationwide network of community-oriented public defenders. Lindsey graduated magna cum laude from New York University, where she received departmental honors in East Asian Studies for her extensive research on gender and class issues in China and South Korea.