CBGL Collaborative Steering Committee

Bibi Al-Ebrahim has been part of the Amizade team for the past four years, and her current role as Education Director has two primary focuses; 1) she supports community partners to prepare for and implement global service learning programming in the Navajo Nation, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, and Appalachia, and 2) she is the lead on Amizade’s equity programming which focuses on creating opportunities for underrepresented youth in global education. Prior to Amizade, Bibi spent over a decade working and living in Ecuador with her wife. At the start of her tenure in Ecuador, Bibi worked as a Peace Corps volunteer. After receiving her masters degree in Public Health from Tulane University, she returned to Ecuador as the Director for Manna Project International for a few years before transitioning into the Training Manager role at the Peace Corps. Today, Bibi calls Pittsburgh and San Miguel de Los Bancos, Ecuador home, working from both locations at different times of the year. Whether in Pittsburgh or Ecuador, Bibi is surrounded by a lot of immediate and extended family – which is just the way she likes it!

Samantha Brandauer has passionately devoted her career to international education. As Associate Provost and Executive Director of the Center for Global Study and Engagement at Dickinson College, she oversees campus internationalization efforts, global learning initiatives, operations and services including education abroad and international student and scholar services. Samantha’s professional experiences include working at the Institute of International Education; the University of Maryland; Brown University; Study Abroad in Scandinavia-Copenhagen, Denmark and Gettysburg College. Her research interests lie in the study abroad gender gap, intervention in student learning abroad, development and assessment of intercultural competencies and building inclusive, just and sustainable global communities. In addition to numerous conference presentations, she has been interviewed on her research and areas of expertise in The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, International Educator, and Education Dive. She currently serves on the SIT Partnership Council, the executive team of Global Engagement in the Liberal Arts, the API Strategic Academic Advisory Board and served on the 2020 NAFSA Simon Award for Campus Internationalization Selection Committee. Samantha has a MA in International Communication from the School of International Service at American University.

Caitlin Ferrarini serves as the Collaborative’s Director of Evaluation and Assessment. She is a PhD student in the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as a student advisor in the Honors College at UMass Boston. Before starting her doctoral studies, Caitlin worked in Colombia for five years as the Executive Director of WorldTeach Colombia and an Education Advisor with Fulbright Colombia. Caitlin’s research interests include international education which promotes social action, experiences of host community members, and the inclusion of non-dominant student groups in experiential education abroad programs.

Eric Hartman, Co-founder and Editor, is the Executive Director of the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haverford College. Eric advances a critical understanding of global citizenship through research and practice with global learning and community development. He has written for several peer-reviewed and popular publications including The Stanford Social Innovation Review, International Educator, Tourism and Hospitality Research, and The Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning. Eric has served as executive director of a community-driven global nonprofit organization, Amizade Global Service-Learning, and taught on human rights, transdisciplinary research methods, and globalization in global studies programs at Arizona State University and Providence College.  He co-founded both globalsl.org and the global engagement survey, initiatives that advance best practices in global learning and cooperative development within community-campus partnerships.

Richard Kiely, Co-Founder, is a Senior Fellow in the Office of Engagement Initiatives (OEI) at Cornell University. He served as inaugural director of the Center for Community-Engaged Learning and Research (2011-2015) in support of Engaged Cornell.  In 2002, Richard received his PhD from Cornell University and from 2002-2006, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Policy and Administration at the University of Georgia. In 2005, he was recognized nationally as a John Glenn Scholar in Service-Learning for his longitudinal research that led to the development of a transformative service-learning model.  Returning to Cornell in 2006, served as the faculty director of the Cornell Urban Scholars Program (CUSP) and the Cornell Urban Mentor Initiative (CUMI), two, university-wide interdisciplinary service-learning cohort programs located in the Department of City & Regional Planning. Richard continues to write, consult and conduct workshops and institutes in many different areas of community-based global learning. He is the co-founder of globalsl.org, a multi-institutional hub supporting ethical global learning and community-campus partnerships and co-author of the book, Community-Based Global Learning: The Theory and Practice of Ethical Engagement at Home and Abroad (2018).

Erin Sabato is the director of international service and learning within the Department of Cultural and Global Engagement at Quinnipiac University, Hamden, CT. She oversees all short-term faculty-led and community-engaged global learning programs for the university. Prior to this role, she was the director of programs with the Albert Schweitzer Institute, also at Quinnipiac University. Sabato has extensive experience living and working in Central America and earned her Master of Arts in Media, Peace and Conflict Studies at the United Nations mandated United for Peace in Costa Rica.

Sarah Stanlick, PhD, is an Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She was the founding director of Lehigh University’s Center for Community Engagement and faculty member in Sociology and Anthropology. She previously taught at Centenary College of New Jersey and was a researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School, assisting the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power. She has published in journals such as The Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, The Social Studies, and the Journal of Global Citizenship and Equity Education.  She co-chairs the Imagining America Assessing Practices of Public Scholarship (APPS) collective, which focuses on democratically-engaged assessment practices to empower and transform systems, communities, and individuals. She is a member of SSSP and the GlobalSL Steering Committee. Her current interests include transformative learning, global citizenship, health & human rights, and technology’s impact on our relationships and capacity to build community.

Cynthia Toms is an assistant professor of Global Studies and Kinesiology at Westmont College, as well as Director of Global Studies Fellows and the Global Health in Uganda Semester. Her research focuses on global service learning, development, and higher education. Since 2013, she has partnered with the Food Bank of Santa Barbara County and is the principal investigator for a USDA supported projected addressing food security among at-risk Santa Barbara County youth.

Kelly Brannan Trail is the Director of Education Abroad at the University of Dayton. Her current areas of focus include diversity and inclusion in education abroad, advancing ethical engagement with communities, and incorporating critical global issues into education abroad programs. From 2012-2015, she developed and managed Antioch University’s Community Development in Cameroon program and co-taught the introductory community development course with a colleague from Buea University. She earned her Ph.D. in International Development from the University of Southern Mississippi.

Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler is Interim Associate Provost of Academic Excellence, Director of the Center for Research on Global Engagement (CRGE), and a professor of psychology at Elon University. As a teacher-scholar-mentor, Maureen has a sustained commitment to fostering students’ inquiry-based learning during high-impact practices such as undergraduate research and study away. She examines and disseminates ways that faculty mentors support students’ learning and engagement in various sociocultural contexts, with a particular focus on what makes these experiences high quality. As Director of CRGE, Maureen works to foster innovative, interdisciplinary, inter-institutional collaborations and research on global engagement (international and domestic). One recent collaborative project explored how students engage difference while studying off campus, and how these experiences may influence their identity, worldview, future pathways, and ways of interacting with others upon return to the home campus.

Faith Valencia-Forrester is a Senior Lecturer, and currently Director of the Service Learning Unit at Griffith University. Faith has combined her media experience, degrees in Arts, Law and Business, and completed her PhD in inclusive work-integrated learning with a view to developing an inclusive and diverse student cohort capable of changing the media landscape for the better. Her work focuses on social justice and actively demonstrates inclusion and equity in media representation. Her research projects have been instrumental in developing engaged reciprocal connections between the university and the community. Faith’s last large-scale service-learning project was a series of  multidiscipline virtual Social Impact Projects addressing homelessness, digital inclusion, mental health, empowering people of all abilities and the environment. She also volunteers at a local community legal centre.

Andria Wisler has served as Executive Director of the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching, and Service (CSJ) at Georgetown University since January 2013 and since 2008 as a faculty member for the Justice and Peace Studies Program. Born and raised in the United States, she received her Ph.D. in Comparative and International Education from Columbia University and master’s in International Educational Development and Peace Education from Teachers College. Andria’s interests in global service learning include the pedagogy of immersion and innovative ways to support learning from experience through online reflection and community-building. These interests stem from her own global learning, notably in Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Turkmenistan, Tanzania, Syria, and Turkey, the latter for the 2010 semester with 15 undergraduates. Andria co-created an online credit-bearing course called Intersections of Social Justice, that supports students’ learning from experience in their global summer internship placements; this course will be replicated for Master’s level students in Summer 2020.