Boldly Go team

Grace Amponsah

Grace strongly believes that every person irrespective of their background should have access to adequate resources in order to thrive and live a life of dignity. Her previous and current experiences which span across Business, Non-Profit and International Development has demonstrated this philosophy.

Whiles pursuing her undergraduate degree, she dedicated her time volunteering with numerous development projects including but not limited to Leap Africa (as a speaker empowering children especially girls in rural areas to stay in school), Starfish Aid (where she spent her time building libraries and teaching children in remote areas with no portable water, electricity and internet services), and the Let Girls Learn Initiative organized by IBM and Peace Corps as a mentor. In her Junior year, fueled by her personal story as a young woman from an economically disadvantaged background, Grace started the Bowney Initiative, a non-profit organization in Ghana that envisions a world where all girls have access to resources to unleash their full potential.

Prior to dedicating majority of her time at the Bowney Initiative, Grace worked as a Faculty Intern for Foundations of Design and Entrepreneurship at Ashesi University, a VP for strategic Growth and Business Development at Engboxx, a start-up Fintech firm in Ghana, and a researcher at the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Beijing office writing a discussion paper on the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Migration in Africa.

Through her leadership and work, she was awarded the 2015 Dalai Lama Fellowship, 2016 Bryon Fellowship, 2019 Milead Fellowship, 2019 Compassionate Leadership Fellowship, and a 2020 Empowered to Educate Fellowship. Grace holds a degree in Business Administration from Ashesi University as a MasterCard Foundation Scholar and a Msc. in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar. Grace is from Ghana.

Xiaowen Han

Xiaowen aspires to live boldly and believes in human connection. Xiaowen has worked for the Department of Global Communications at the United Nations headquarters for three years. She worked as the UN ambassador to the public, giving substantive, up-to-date and accurate lecture tours in both English and Chinese about peace and security, development, human rights, and international affairs. She created themed tours focus on women, highlighting gender equality issues and women’s contribution to global development. She also worked closely with UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth on several youth engagement projects including Young Leaders for SDGs.

Prior to the UN, Xiaowen had extensive experience working in the field of education. She was a product manager at AI Lab of TAL, making interactive online courses for K-12 students. In New York Public Library, she provided students from low-income families in Bronx with mentorship and daily academic support. She also oversaw and ran High School Academy at NYU Shanghai to prepare high school students for university education. During college, Xiaowen worked at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies (TBC) where she taught Chinese language and culture to students and scholars from all over the world, as well as managed culture-immersive programs. Xiaowen has obtained a Master of Management Science in global affairs from Tsinghua University in 2021, as the fifth cohort of Schwarzman Scholars, and a Master of Arts in international educational development from Columbia University in 2018.

Naaima Khan

Naaima Khan is a consultant and Owner and Principal of Create Good consulting, where she consults with organizations to help them achieve more effective, equity-centered strategy and evaluation planning.

Naaima has worked with nonprofits for 10+ years as a strategic planner/facilitator, content creator, grant program manager, evaluator and equity/inclusion leader. She holds a master’s in Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Naaima specializes in helping clients center equity in their strategic planning and evaluation by applying principles of antiracism, human-centered design and restorative practice. Naaima served as an advisor to St. Olaf College’s Lutheran Center for Faith, Community and Values and serves on the board of the Minnesota Evaluation Association.

She facilitates restorative justice circles to help divert community members from the court system.

Jeff Kutash

highlights

• Former Executive Director, Peter Kiewit Foundation: $450m place-based private funder.
• Former McKinsey consultant, built and led foundation strategy group’s San Francisco office and education practice.
• Six years of on-the-ground education experience as a teacher in the South Bronx and a nonprofit director in Harlem.

bio

Jeff Kutash started his career as a Teach For America corps member, teaching math at a public bilingual middle school in New York City. His students were all recent immigrants, and while he was teaching them math, they were teaching him the importance of hard work to overcome adversity and achieve big dreams. He left the classroom to revive the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, a dormant nonprofit serving youth in Harlem and Washington Heights. Jeff grew a small mentoring program into a college success pipeline that helped hundreds of youth finish high school, go to college, and get a degree. One of his proudest moments was when an early participant in his program finished college and became a teacher in the neighborhood she grew up in.

Between creating college prep programs and visiting students in their homes to help with college applications, Jeff married his college sweetheart, Jessica. Together, they went off to Harvard Business School — Jessica to advance her career in marketing, and Jeff to pick up a business skill set he thought was needed in the social sector. After getting his MBA, Jeff joined McKinsey & Company where he worked with financial services, tech, manufacturing, and retail clients. Helping Fortune 500 companies with their most critical business issues honed Jeff’s problem solving, communication, and client service skills, which he took with him to join The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm that helps funders and nonprofits create social impact.

In 2005, Jeff was recruited by The Seed Foundation to help open public college preparatory boarding schools in California. Jeff secured major pledges from donors, gained school district approvals, built broad community support, and ran legislation to fund the schools. And while the California budget crisis at the time put the project on hold, the groundwork was laid for The SEED School of Los Angeles, which will open its doors in 2022.

Jeff then joined Foundation Strategy Group (FSG), a nonprofit consulting firm focused on effective philanthropy and social impact. It was the perfect opportunity to combine his background in consulting with his entrepreneurial mindset. For the next seven years, Jeff led FSG’s San Francisco office, growing the team from two to over 30 professionals. He launched and built FSG’s national education practice, overseeing scores of consulting engagements with leading corporations, foundations, nonprofits, school districts, and government agencies. A few projects he is particularly proud of include helping reestablish New Orleans’ education system after hurricane Katrina and leading a statewide effort to reform New York’s juvenile justice system.

In 2013, Jeff and his family moved to Omaha, Nebraska where he became the CEO of the Peter Kiewit Foundation, a place-based private funder. Jeff crafted the foundation’s first strategic plan focused on education-to-career pathways, economic opportunity, and thriving and inclusive communities; transformed the foundation’s approach to grantmaking and evaluation; and retooled all operational functions. Jeff was responsible for $25-30M in annual grantmaking and led the foundation’s programmatic initiatives, community engagement, and operations. In that role, Jeff helped catalyze a $300M riverfront redevelopment, launch a regional transportation plan, and develop a statewide initiative on college success. After seven years at the foundation, Jeff left to found Boldly Go Philanthropy.

Jeff holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He has served on the boards of the Greater Omaha Chamber, College Possible, National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, and Great California Public Schools.

Jeff speaks around the country and writes on topics of effective philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, urban core and rural community development, effecting social change, and education.  He is author of multiple papers and case studies including “Structuring Post-Secondary Scholarships to Increase Student Success,” “The School Turnaround Field Guide,” and “Practices From the Portfolio: Case Studies on Effective Education Practices.”

Jeff and Jessica are the proud parents of three awesome kids – Gabriel, Theara, and Holden. As a family, they love to travel, mountain bike, snowboard, and hike. In those rare moments when he is not working or coaching his kids’ sports teams, Jeff can be found curled up on a couch with a great book.

Patricia Mayorga

Patricia (Pah-tree-see-ah) Mayorga began her career in business in logistics and marketing roles before pursuing her passion to advance social justice. She led a suite of education and workforce initiatives in her hometown for the Greater Omaha Chamber including scaling an award-winning youth career exploration program. Most recently, she helped to modernize foundation operations and executive engagement for the Kiewit Companies Foundation. Under her leadership Kiewit also launched their first employee donation matching program – Kiewit Gives.

Patricia obtained a Certificate in Corporate Social Responsibility from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a B.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She is currently pursuing a Master’s in Business Administration from Southern Methodist University as a Forté Fellow in Dallas, TX where she currently resides.

Sarah McMillian

Sarah lives by the motto “leave a place better than you found it.” Most recently, she was a Business Development Lead at the environmental engagement SaaS company, Temboo. She developed the go-to-market strategy for a new product and designed environmental data collection systems for community-based, government and private organizations. At Walmart eCommerce, Sarah created a new model for identity-based employee resource groups that was replicated across several US offices. Previously, Sarah was the Business Development Lead at Saathi, an Indian biodegradable sanitary pad brand. She led the brand’s product launch and managed a NGO partnership to donate 25K pads to rural women and girls. Prior to Saathi, Sarah was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant to Bahrain where she taught research skills and English language courses. She will graduate with her MMSc in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University in summer 2021, and has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.

Kyle Peterson

HIGHLIGHTS

• Former Executive Director, Walton Family Foundation: over $600 million in grantmaking per year.
• Built and led Foundation Strategy Group (FSG) for 14 years: advisor to philanthropists around the world.
• Ten years of global development experience in Africa: on-the-ground training for impact.

BIO

Kyle Peterson joined the Peace Corps right out of college and fell in love twice – first with his wife, a fellow volunteer, and the second time with the adventure of making a difference. While in Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps, Kyle helped farmers plant over 100,000 oil palm trees, witnessed a rich culture and heritage, experienced unjust inequities, and was inspired by everyday heroes.

The experience sparked an interest in Africa, international development, and solving big problems through business-like approaches. After getting business and public policy master degrees at the University of Texas, Kyle joined Population Services International (PSI), a non-governmental organization pushing the boundaries on social marketing, a new approach to social change at the time. Kyle went to Rwanda, six months after the end of the country’s genocide, as country director to restart PSI’s program shut-down during the war. He established a family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention program. Two years later, he started PSI’s social marketing program in Zimbabwe, the epicenter for HIV in Southern Africa in the mid-1990s. Kyle launched a number of novel health programs through the private sector — including a network of HIV counseling and testing sites and insecticide treated mosquito bed nets — that averted thousands of cases of HIV/AIDS and malaria.

Interested in private sector approaches, he signed on with Monitor Consulting to learn the strategy-making ropes, moving from Zimbabwe to Boston. He was soon in Wichita managing a competitiveness study for the firm’s founder, Harvard Business Professor, Michael Porter. He went back to Rwanda and started a multi-year project advising President Kagame and the Cabinet on the country’s economic strategy.

In 2001, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer had just started a new type of consulting organization — Foundation Strategy Group (FSG) — to help philanthropists be more effective. Kyle helped to launch and lead FSG over the next 14 years. While at FSG, Kyle built the global development and health practice areas and led over 150 consulting engagements for foundations, companies, and nonprofits. He also served on FSG’s board of directors and helped with big idea pieces, such as “Catalytic Philanthropy,” “Collective Impact,” and “Shared Value.”

The Walton family was searching for a new leader of their family philanthropy and Kyle signed on as the head of the 30 year-old Walton Family Foundation, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2016. In the role, he oversaw the transformation of one of the nation’s largest family foundations to support $600 million in annual grant making, across education, environment, and economic development program areas. He also supported the philanthropic projects of all Walton family members, which included establishing new charitable vehicles. He helped to create a think tank serving the Heartland and was the founding board chair for two groundbreaking charter school facility revolving loan funds. He strengthened the profile of the organization with a new mission and vision and values; led a diversity, equity, and inclusion assessment and organizational change effort; and built new collaborative relationships with other funders.

Kyle has a BA in international studies from the American University, an MBA from the McCombs School of Business (University of Texas), and an MPA from the LBJ School of Public Affairs (University of Texas). He has served on several boards during the last decade, including Foundation Strategy Group, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Global Health Council. He is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Kyle is a frequent speaker on family and institutional philanthropy, corporate social engagement, and international development. He is author of several field reports including “Ahead of the Curve: Insights for the International NGO of the Future” and “Competing by Saving Lives: How Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Companies Create Shared Value in Global Health” and articles such as “Lobbying for Good” featured in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He contributed the chapter  “Social Enterprise and Innovation in Emerging Markets” with Leslie Crutchfield in the 2016 book, Innovation in Emerging Markets. 

When not working, Kyle loves to travel, hike, and mountain bike with his wife, Maury, and teenage son, Finn.

Miti Shah

Miti Shah is a CONNECT Program Fellow through the University of Texas at Austin. She is a fifth year PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an international student from India, where she completed her Bachelors and Masters in Psychology before moving to the US to pursue a career in Social Psychology. Her research interests broadly include prosocial behavior, collective action, and language. She also consults part-time at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, working with nonprofits and philanthropic organizations to provide strategy, evaluation and insights.

The CONNECT program seeks to activate learning from data and build both capacity and interest in greater data, measurement and evaluation capacity within community organizations. The program achieves this through personalized, high-touch intake with nonprofit organizations who have data and evaluation projects, recruitment of skilled graduate students (masters and doctoral) at the University of Texas, student fellowships to recognize program participation, an online platform and matching to ensure a good fit between organization and student, and customized project support leading to high-quality, actionable deliverables.

Sara Surani

Sara Surani has cross-sector experience working at the intersections of gender equity, health, education, environment, and poverty alleviation. Sara graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Social Studies and Global Health and recently completed her Masters in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University in China as a Schwarzman Scholar.

She is Co-founder of a health education program in South Texas called iConquer focused on educating over 20,000 young children about healthy living as well as Co-founder of a start-up called Nayaraq focused on dismantling gender equity through storytelling workshops. She has previously spearheaded mental health initiatives in Boston, designed public health programming for the Zika virus outbreak in Nicaragua, implemented programming for a tuberculosis intervention in Peru, and researched maternal and child mortality in Tanzania. She has worked with community empowerment and entrepreneurship globally, collaborating with organizations including the government of Oaxaca, Mexico. In 2018, through a Fulbright Fellowship, Sara worked with remote communities in the Amazon jungle on youth empowerment, education, and public health, and helped start the first public holistic education school in Peru.

She is currently working with the New Mexico Department of Health, leading educational training for community health workers across the state and designing strategies to make health care resources more accessible for communities most impacted by systemic racism.

Jana Tian

Jana has grown up across a diverse set of cultures.  She is a Slovenian-British-Chinese citizen and speaks three languages. She is passionate in “making a sustainable living commonplace.” She has 5+ years of experience in project management across sustainability driven initiatives. Previously, she has worked as a Partnership Manager in Unilever (industry leader in S&P DoW Jones Sustainability Index). In parallel, she has dedicated herself in not only preserving the planet for future generations but building communities where everyone belongs, feels safe, and their individual voices heard, valued, and respected.

Jana has worked with numerous NGOs including Caritas to provide access to clean water in rural areas of Tanzania, Steppingstones in Shanghai to provide access to equal education for migrant children, World Economic Forum (WEF) to promote a more circular economy in China, and Borneo government to build rural schools in remote villages. Her higher education includes a bachelor and a master’s degree in chemical engineering from Imperial College London. In summer 2021, she graduated with her second master’s MMSc in Management of Science in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University, as the fifth cohort of Schwarzman Scholars. People would say Jana is a warm, bubbly individual who loves sharing anything from a hot chocolate to a cake.