Jay Augustine
Pastor, Professor, Author and AdvocateHarry Broadman
Managing Director Berkeley Research Group, LLC and Faculty Member, Johns Hopkins UniversityLinda Grais, Treasurer
Former President and Chief Executive Officer, Ocera TherapeuticsJessica Herzstein, Vice Chair
President, Environmental Health Resources, PCMike Honda
Former United States CongressmanElizabeth (Liz) Hume
Executive Director, Alliance for PeacebuildingAnne Labovitz
Professional Artist, Educator, and Arts ActivistShaila Manyam, Secretary
Senior Vice-President, Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW)Chris Mitchell, Chair
Vice President, Global Government Relations, IPCEva Rodriguez Bellegarrigue
Founding Director of Partners El SalvadorSalim Suleman, Ad Hoc Member
Entrepreneur, and Former CEO of African MultinationalsThe Reverend Dr. Jonathan C. Augustine (a/k/a Jay Augustine) serves as senior pastor of St. Joseph African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Durham, NC and as national chaplain of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. He has a proven history of leadership in addressing some of the 21st century’s most pressing social issues. Immediately prior to his current pastoral assignment, Augustine served as senior pastor of Historic St. James AME Church in New Orleans (1844), the city’s oldest predominately black, Protestant church, and as an adjunct professor at Southern University Law Center.
A former civil rights litigator, he successfully represented a class of plaintiffs in Carter v. St. Helena Parish School Board, one of the oldest desegregation cases in the United States, originally filed by Thurgood Marshall, then-counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He served in the administration of Louisiana’s 55th governor, as executive counsel & director of legislative affairs for the Louisiana Workforce Commission, and in locally elected office as vice president of the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board. He is a silver life member of the NAACP.
Augustine earned an economics degree from Howard University, along with an active duty commission as a U.S. Army infantry officer. After four years of decorated military service, he earned his Juris Doctorate from Tulane University and served as a law clerk to Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Justice (then-Associate) Bernette Joshua Johnson. He later earned his Master of Divinity from United Theological Seminary, before completing a fellowship at Princeton Theological Seminary, and earning his Doctor of Ministry degree at Duke University.
Dr. Broadman is Managing Director of Berkeley Research Group a global consulting firm that helps leading organizations advance in three key areas: disputes and investigations, corporate finance, and strategy and operations. Broadman also serves as Director of Johns Hopkins University’s Center on Global Enterprise and Emerging Markets at the university’s graduate School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington DC, where he is also a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute. A veteran operational advisor to C-suites and corporate board of directors, Broadman has been CEO and managing partner of Pro Global Partners LLC, a transaction advisory firm. In mid-January 2015, Broadman stepped down as Senior Managing Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where he founded and led PwC’s Management Consulting Emerging Markets Business Strategy Practice.Over his 34 year career, Broadman has developed deep expertise in multinational corporate strategy; negotiation of trade and foreign direct investment transactions; private equity deal origination and fund-raising; sovereign wealth fund performance; infrastructure project finance; anti-corruption compliance; and economic development policy.
Broadman has worked in virtually all of the advanced countries and most emerging markets, including China; India; Russia and the CIS; Eastern and Central Europe and the Balkans; Brazil and much of Latin America; most of East Asia; throughout Sub-Saharan Africa; and parts of the Middle East. Prior to PwC, Dr. Broadman was Managing Director and served on the Investment Committee at Albright Capital Management LLC, an alternative strategy investment fund dedicated to emerging markets; Managing Director at Albright Stonebridge Group, a global consultancy chaired by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; a senior official at the World Bank Group, where he managed some of the Bank’s largest operations in China, Russia, the Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Earlier, he served in the Executive Office of the President as US Assistant Trade Representative, where sat on the Board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) as well as on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS); Chief of Staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in the White House; Senior Professional Staff on the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, then chaired by Senator John Glenn; Assistant Director of Resources for the Future, Inc.; Consultant at the Rand Corporation; Fellow at the Brookings Institution; and on the faculties of Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University.
Broadman received an A.B. in economics and history, magna cum laude, from Brown University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is a life-time Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Member of the Bretton Woods Committee. He serves in several non-executive board of director roles, including on the Board of Directors of The Corporate Council on Africa, the Board of Directors of Partners for Democratic Change, and the Board of Advisors of the Global Business School Network.
Broadman has published several books, the most recent being Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier, as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed economics, foreign policy and law journals.
Linda Grais, MD, JD was President, Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors of Ocera Therapeutics (OCRX), a biopharmaceutical company developing novel treatments for gastrointestinal and liver diseases, from 2012 until its acquisition by Mallinckrodt in December, 2017. Dr. Grais has extensive experience in the healthcare field as a physician, biotechnology entrepreneur and investor. Previously, she was a Managing Member at InterWest Partners, a venture capital firm investing in drug development and medical device companies. Dr. Grais was a founder and executive vice president of SGX Pharmaceuticals (SGXP), which pioneered the integration of genomics with high-throughput protein structure determination to accelerate drug discovery. SGXP went public on NASDAQ and was acquired by Eli Lilly in 2006. Prior to founding SGX, Dr. Grais worked in the corporate practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she represented healthcare companies in venture financings, public offerings and strategic partnerships. Dr. Grais trained in Internal Medicine and Critical Care Medicine at Yale and the University of California, San Francisco, and was an Assistant Clinical Professor of Internal Medicine and Critical Care at UCSF.
Dr. Grais received a B.A. from Yale University, Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, an M.D. from Yale Medical School, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She has served on several advisory boards, including the Master’s Degree in Translational Medicine at UCSF, Yale Healthcare Advisory Board, and the Stanford Law School Board of Visitors. Dr. Grais currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Arca Biopharma, Inc. and PRA Health Sciences, Inc. She has received numerous honors, including the American Liver Foundation’s 2015 Salute to Excellence Award.
Dr. Jessica Herzstein’s career in global public health has focused on the health of workers and the workplace and on preventive medicine in communities. She has developed and implemented health promotion and disease prevention programs for workers and families in developed and developing countries with goals of improving the health of populations, and reducing acute and chronic disease and disability. She has worked in countries throughout Europe, southeast and central Asia, and North and South America to assess environmental hazards, improve health knowledge, and foster healthy and safe behaviors, all within radically varying legal, regulatory and cultural frameworks.
For almost two decades she served as global medical director at a Fortune 200 chemical and equipment manufacturing company where she developed innovative approaches to manage and respond to a wide range of local, regional and global worker and community health threats ranging from acute industrial or environmental exposure hazards, to threats from TB, HIV and hepatitis, to rapidly growing rates of noncommunicable diseases. She led global health crisis planning and the response to pandemics including SARS and H1N1. Dr. Herzstein previously oversaw U.S. worker health surveillance in the Department of Defense, worked with USAID in international partnerships to build sustainable environmental health expertise and capacity in Eastern Europe, and held academic positions at two medical schools.
Most recently, Dr. Herzstein served a 4 year term on the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a panel of specialists in primary care and preventive medicine appointed by the US Department of Health and Human Services, where she remains a consultant. This body sets the standards for screening and counseling for medical service delivery in the United States, with international influence as well. In addition to in depth reviews of science to develop evidence based recommendations on important conditions ranging from breast and colon cancers to tuberculosis and depression, she led a work group on communication and dissemination, developing tools to assist professionals and consumers with decision making.
Dr. Herzstein is currently working as a consultant on environmental health and population health. She is an advisor to a major public private partnership in Mexico charged with reducing obesity and diabetes. She is a Professorial Lecturer at the George Washington Milken Institute of Public Health. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine’s Forum on Public Private Partnerships on Global Health and Safety which leverages the power of partnerships and cross sector collaboration to address a range of health needs among vulnerable populations, migrant workers and lower and middle income countries.
Dr Herzstein holds a medical degree from Yale University where she also received a masters in public health, specializing in environmental health. She completed training in internal medicine and preventive medicine at UCSF and at Harvard.
Retired Congressman, Mike Honda, served in the United States House of Representatives for 16 years. During his tenure as a legislature, Honda quietly attained positions of authority in the House Democratic Caucus, serving on the party’s Steering and Policy Committee and rising to a seat on the House Appropriations Committee. An advocate of tolerant and inclusive policies, Honda led the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and helped found the LGBT Equality Caucus.
During his childhood in California, Honda’s family was among 7,000 individuals sent to the Granada War Relocation Center in Colorado under the policy of Japanese-American Internment. Honda remained imprisoned even after his father joined the U.S. Military Intelligence Service (MIS) in 1943 to teach Japanese to American servicemen. After the war, the family returned to the Bay Area and settled in San Jose.
Honda later joined the Peace Corps and graduated from San Jose State University before working as a teacher and principal throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1971 Honda joined the San Jose planning commission and served for a decade, later serving on the San Jose school board for nine years (1981–1990) before winning election to the Santa Clara county board of supervisors. In 1996 Honda was elected to the California state assembly, representing San Jose, before later representing his district in the United States Congress.
Elizabeth (Liz) Hume is the Executive Director at the Alliance for Peacebuilding. She is an international lawyer and a conflict expert with more than 25 years of experience in senior leadership positions in bilateral, multilateral institutions and NGOs. She has extensive experience in policy and advocacy and overseeing sizeable and complex peacebuilding programs in conflict-affected and fragile states in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa.
From 1997-2001, Liz was seconded by the US Department of State to the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo as the Chief Legal Counsel and Head of the Election Commission Secretariats. In these positions, she was responsible for developing the legal framework and policies in support of the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords and UN Resolution 1244. After 9/11, Liz worked for the International Rescue Committee in Pakistan and Afghanistan where she established and managed the Protection Department for Afghan refugees and returning IDPs. Starting in 2004, she served in leadership positions and helped establish the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID developing programs and policies to improve the USG’s ability to address the causes of violent deadly conflict. In 2007, Liz was the Chief of Party for Pact where she managed a USAID funded conflict resolution and governance program in Ethiopia. She also served as a Technical Director at FHI 360 where she managed a USAID funded peacebuilding and governance program in Senegal with a focus on the Casamance one of Africa’s longest-running civil wars.
Liz is also an experienced mediator, and she is a frequent guest lecturer and author on conflict analysis and peacebuilding in conflict-affected and fragile states.
Liz holds a BA from Boston College, a JD from Vermont Law School, and a MA in Negotiation, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding from California State University, Dominguez Hills. She lives in Falls Church City, VA with her husband in a much cleaner and quieter house since their twin girls went to University.
Anne Labovitz is a contemporary artist whose work addresses themes of human connection, the immersive power of color, and radical care in art. Labovitz’s research-based practice combines painting, sculpture, light, installation, mixed media and social practice to address ideas by activating color and light in large-scale immersive work. As part of Labovitz’s artistic praxis, she connects to communities through artistic intervention, activism, anti-racism, and public co-creation.
She is Artist Founder and Producer at 122 Conversations: Person to Person, Art Beyond borders currently installed in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport at Terminal 2. Labovitz’s significant project, 122 Conversations: Person to Person, Art Beyond Borders (2013-2019) toured six sites, six countries, and Labovitz collaboratively worked with more than 2,500 people.
Labovitz was a participant in the initial cohort of the Woke Coach and a founding member of Racial Equity Committee at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). Her current long-term social practice project is the I Love You Institute, an artist-led site-specific project urgently working with communities to address today’s world creatively. It combines art-making, social justice, radical kindness, and relational listening to normalize, saying “I Love You” as an alternative to division and conflict.
Shaila Manyam is a Senior Vice-President and leads international public affairs at Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW). In her role, she advises clients ranging from global organizations to national governments/world leaders and foreign companies on strategic communications, political risk mitigation, trade and tariff issues including CFIUS and FIRRMA, reputation management, crisis communications and thought leadership/stakeholder strategy. She joined BCW’s Washington, D.C. office following a 12-year career as a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State focusing on Haiti, the Middle East (including Iraq, Syria and regional counterterrorism), Washington, D.C. and the United Nations.
The recipient of multiple awards for service, including five Superior Honor Awards from the State Department, Shaila served as a spokesperson on behalf of U.S. embassies and missions and the President’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. She has advised Cabinet-level national security officials, journalists and Members of Congress on Middle East bilateral and regional security and political strategy, economic policy, multilateral diplomacy, public diplomacy and media, refugees and migration issues. She has also represented the United States at UNESCO for communications, press freedom and technology issues, served as the Special Advisor to the Under Secretary of Political Affairs on International Organizations/UN issues, and was deployed to Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, receiving recognition from the Smithsonian Institution for her work supporting post-disaster cultural heritage recovery. Prior to joining the State Department, Shaila was a Partner and Global Communications Director at Ogilvy, focusing on strategic communications, youth marketing and interactive media.
Shaila was born in Canada and grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. She graduated from Smith College with honors, double-majoring in Economics and Government, and received a Masters’ of Science from the London School of Economics. Shaila speaks six languages, including French, Arabic and Spanish. She is a member of the Global Leadership Council at the Meridian International Center.
Chris Mitchell is Vice President of Global Government Relations at IPC, the leading trade association for electronics manufacturing. In this role, he is responsible for development and implementation of the organization’s global advocacy efforts and public policy agenda with a focus on issues related to trade; industrial policy; workforce; and environment, health and safety. Chris also oversees IPC’s expanding research program which includes the organization’s longstanding statistical programs.
Chris was most recently a director at Prime Policy Group, a leading Washington, D.C. government relations firm. He previously spent nearly a decade working for members of Congress from the State of California for whom he handled technology, trade, and transportation issues. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from The George Washington University and a Master’s degree in philosophy from San Jose State University and currently serves on the board of directors for PartnersGlobal and the Fabretto Children’s Foundation.
As the director of the Partners Center in El Salvador, Eva worked extensively with local communities, civil society organizations, and government agencies to promote peace, security, and social justice in the country. She developed and implemented innovative peacebuilding and mediation programs and networks that had a real impact on the ground and built strong relationships with local and international partners and stakeholders. Eva is currently a peace fellow with Rotary Peace Foundation at Uppsala University Peace Center in Sweden.
As a member of the board of directors, Eva will bring regional expertise and perspective, program design and implementation experience, community engagement skills, and a commitment to diversity and inclusion. She has committed to promoting collaborative and participatory approaches to peacebuilding, and to working with local and international partners to address the root causes of conflict.
Salim Suleman is an award winning telecommunications executive acknowledged internationally for launching one of the largest satellite telecommunications networks in Africa, iWay Africa. He is a serial entrepreneur and true visionary with a strategic mindset and proven performance in leading organizations through change and building cohesive teams of talented professionals that consistently deliver exceptional growth and profits in extremely challenging operating environments.
A specialist in corporate strategy and change management, Salim is adept at scaling and growing companies while motivating culturally diverse teams. He has led and motivated multinational team of 1,700 employees and distributors spanning 26 countries to achieve phenomenal growth in sales and revenues.
Salim’s 35 year career spans start ups in aviation, telecommunications, oil and gas, and agriculture sectors, including mergers and acquisitions and preparing mature businesses for sale.
Salim ‘s success at iWay Africa was built on taking businesses across African borders in order to create the critical mass for growth. Operating in 26 countries through subsidiaries and distributorships, iWayAfrica was one of the 20 most recognized brands in SSA. The company was acquired by the Naspers Group in 2007 resulting in returns to the shareholders including OPIC of 5 x investment in five years.
He is a Board Director of the Simba Corporation, a Kenyan conglomerate that operates car dealerships, 5 Star hotels and lodges, vehicle assembly plants, and real estate development. Salim served as a Board director of the National Oil Corporation of Kenya and was Chairman of the Finance and Strategy committee taking the parastatal from a 6 gas-station distribution to a 200+ gas-station distribution company from 2006-2009.
Salim is a graduate of HEC/University of Oxford joint program with an MS in Consulting and Coaching for Change as well as the University of Oxford Advanced Management Program and Strategic Leadership Program.