Our People
Founder + ExecutiveDirector
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Mia Birdsong, she/her, is a pathfinder, author, and facilitator who steadily engages the leadership and wisdom of people experiencing injustice to chart new visions of American life. She has a gift for making visible and leveraging the brilliance of everyday people so that our collective gifts reach larger spheres of influence, cultural and political change, and create wellbeing for all of us.In her book How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, Mia maps swaths of community life and points us toward the promise of our collective vitality. In “More Than Enough,” her podcast miniseries from The Nation, she expands the guaranteed income movement by tapping into the voices and visions of low-income people.
Mia is a Senior Fellow of the Economic Security Project, a Future Good Fellow at Institute For the Future, and an inaugural Ascend Fellow of The Aspen Institute.
Program Manager
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Sonia Bhansali, LCSW, she/they, is a builder who expands the capacities of changemakers and facilitates action to dismantle antiquated systems that do not serve the holistic well-being of communities. While in New York City, she spent 13 years across integrated practice areas in mental health, non-profit, and higher education building programs and partnerships to collaboratively shift cultures. Rooted in a systems theory approach, she is tirelessly dedicated to elevate the experiences and work of people of color. Before joining Next River, Sonia founded and spearheaded the creation of the first career office for graduate students at NYU Silver School of Social Work. Most importantly, while there she formulated and led collective efforts to address racism and white supremacy structures at NYU as an institution.
Her most challenging lessons were learned as a frontline advocate for families and individuals navigating structurally-biased legal, medical, and child welfare systems. She constructs programs infused with purpose and has developed co-curricular hospital and university professional development programs and content such as cultivating self-awareness and developing an anti-oppressive lens in social work practice. Additionally, she utilizes creative and nourishing outlets such as laughter, as a Certified Laughter Yoga Leader; embodied practices; and her training in deep insight meditation. She was honored to be the recipient of the 2020 NASW-NYC Aquamarine Award for her advocacy and program development work to support students of color and also is the Founder of the award winning affinity group NYU Mothers of Color. When Sonia is not loving up on her little kiddos, she enjoys quality time with her people, daytime adventures, and dancing!
Interim Managing Partner
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Teddy Zmrhal, he/him, is committed to elevating humanity in business. Taking a relationship-centered and design-minded approach, he has co-founded startups and non-profit boards, grown teams, and (re)built organizations within IDEO and Salesforce. In his current role as Global Vice President, Design and Innovation at Salesforce, Teddy leads a cross-disciplinary team responsible for connecting 1500+ designers across the company, shaping a design practice that embeds social values, and scaling design practices across Salesforce’s 100,000+ person ecosystem.
As a serial global design leader, entrepreneur, intrapreneur, advisor, investor, mentor, and learning designer, Teddy creates and nurtures initiatives with room to grow into themselves. Always facing forward, always taking the long-view, he has the endurance and commitment to work at the speed of trust.
Inside and outside of work, Teddy invests his time, energy, and attention in opportunities that center equity. He sits on the Board of Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet, the Advisory Board to the Board of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, and the Board of Next River. He is most proud of his curious and thoughtful son, Edison.
Experience Designer
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Van Newman (they/he) is a Black, queer, transmasculine screenwriter, creative strategist, and community builder. Through their decade-long strategy career across various startups and advertising agencies, Van has harnessed a unique, forward-thinking curiosity and power that allows them to bring words to life through a multitude of worlds, mediums and concepts. Van's work lies in connecting dots, closing gaps and creating spaces that don’t exist through building products and cultivating communities that live across the digital and the physical for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people.
Strategist + Storyteller
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Madeline Davis (she/her) is an idea-shaper, wordsmith, and strategist, whose non-linear career path has taken her through art, business, technology, and non-profit spaces. While varied in context, her work consistently orients around stories – rooting in her belief that narrative holds unique power to structure our relationships to each other, our environments, and ourselves. From supporting artists in Berlin to developing an equity-centered design philosophy for Salesforce, Madeline is driven toward opportunities to make the world a more creative and just place to be. She finds her joy by taking slow walks in the mountains, long drives through the desert, big bites of in-season produce, and soft moments with the people she loves.
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Allison Cook, she/her, is a strategist and story whisperer. She is an executer of grand visions and small feats whose work spans mediums and timezones.
With a robust background in communications and strategy, Allison has a knack for distilling complicated information into something digestible. She is a maker of media of all sorts - from crafting op-eds, to producing videos, and working behind the scenes at conferences.
A California native who loves her kid, liberation, and pop music, Allison strives to love generously and read closely.
Strategist + Storyteller
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Wynndeé (she/her) is a curious creative and executive strategist who prides herself on adeptly supporting the forward motion of our most prized visionaries.
With almost two decades of experience in executive strategy and support across multiple fields, she prides herself on leaving people, communities, and companies better than she found them. With a knack for dissecting the details while capturing the big picture, she is able to use her background in digital strategy, storytelling, and project management to tackle our loftiest goals.
Wynndeé is dedicated to doing the work necessary to give her Black and queer communities a soft place to land and bloom. When she isn't soaking up the sun at the beach or perusing Black owned bookstores, she’s spending time with her chosen family or binging a sci-fi series while building legos.
Executive Assistant
Our Board
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Jamie Allison, she/her, is devoted to building a healthy, just, and vibrant society, one in which we work creatively and collaboratively to bring the benefits of inclusive community to all. Before joining the Walter & Elise Haas Fund as its Executive Director in 2018, Jamie helped lead the S. H. Cowell Foundation. She started there as Program Officer in charge of Youth Development in 2006. Her portfolio at Cowell steadily grew to encompass affordable housing and program-related investment management as she took the role of Senior Program Officer in 2012, then as Vice President of Programs in 2016.Jamie earned undergraduate degrees in Political Science, Economics, Spanish, and Humanities from the University of Tennessee and went on to receive her Masters from the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Her breadth of civic involvement includes serving on the board of The Whitman Institute, a philanthropy focused on promoting trust and equity, and serving as faculty for Northern California Grantmakers’ New Grantmakers Institute.
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Nwamaka Agbo, she/her, is the CEO of the Kataly Foundation and Managing Director of the Restorative Economies Fund (REF). In her roles, Nwamaka collaborates with the Kataly team to lead the foundation’s day to day operations, while holding the community-centered strategy and vision for REF.
With a background in community organizing, electoral campaigns, policy and advocacy work on racial, social, and environmental justice issues, Nwamaka is deeply committed to supporting projects that build resilient, healthy, and self-determined communities rooted in shared prosperity.
Prior to joining the Kataly team, Nwamaka built an independent consulting practice guided by her framework on Restorative Economics. As a consultant, she provided technical assistance and strategic guidance to community owned and governed community wealth building initiatives like Restore Oakland, Black Land & Power, and others. Her work with these community driven projects led her to providing trainings and advisory services to donors, foundations, and impact investment firms including institutions like The San Francisco Foundation and RSF Social Finance. Nwamaka has served as a fellow for the Center for Economic Democracy and the Movement Strategy Center. She proudly serves on the board of Thousand Currents, Restore Oakland, Inc. and Resource Generation.
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Glen Galaich (he/him) joined the Stupski Foundation as CEO in 2015. Glen leads the overall strategy of the Foundation and oversees the programmatic focus areas and operations. Glen previously served as CEO of The Philanthropy Workshop, whose mission was to educate, inspire, and activate a peer network of effective, engaged, and innovative philanthropists. His career in strategic philanthropy started with the founding team of the Global Philanthropy Forum, where he was responsible for launching the first and second Conferences on Borderless Giving. He also served at Human Rights Watch as the deputy director of development for North America, where he had strategic oversight of the Human Rights Watch Council, a network of supporters and opinion leaders committed to raising money for, and awareness of, human rights in five major cities.
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Malkia Devich Cyril, they/them, is a writer, public speaker and award winning activist on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation, and collective grief; and is the founding and former executive director of MediaJustice — a national hub boldly advancing racial justice, rights, and dignity in a digital age. In 2002, Malkia Devich Cyril helped coin the term “Media Justice”, and in 2019 declared that one significant goal of the Media Justice movement was to “fight for a future where we are all connected, represented, and free.”
After more than 20 years of media justice leadership, Malkia now serves as a Senior Fellow at both Media Justice and at Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, while spearheading new projects to transform public narratives on race, power, and collective grief in a digital age. Malkia’s writing has been published in The Atlantic, Wired Magazine, CNN.com, The Washington Post, The Guardian, In These Times, the Nation, McSweeney’s, TechCrunch, the Progressive, Truthout and We Will Not Cancel Us — a book by adrienne maree brown, among many others. Additional appearances include documentaries Outfoxed (2004), Miss Representation (2011), 13TH, the acclaimed documentary by director Ava Duvernay (2016), and Free For All: Inside the Public Library (2020).
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Natalie Foster, she/her, is the President and Co-founder of the Economic Security Project, a network dedicated to advancing a guaranteed income in America and reining in the unprecedented concentration of corporate power, and a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative.
Prior to that she was the CEO and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, a platform for people–driven economic change. Natalie served as digital director for President Obama’s Organizing for America (OFA) and the Democratic National Committee. She built the first digital department at the Sierra Club and served as the deputy organizing director for MoveOn.org. She’s been awarded fellowships at the Institute for the Future, Rockwood Leadership Institute and New America California, and is a board member of the California Budget and Policy Center, Liberation in a Generation, and Next River. She grew up in Kansas and is raising her family in Oakland, CA.
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Sabrina Hersi Issa, she/her, is a human rights technologist and angel investor committed to leveraging innovation as a tool to build power and unlock opportunity and dignity for all. She does this through her work in technology, media, and investments.
Sabrina is a Race and Technology Fellow at Stanford University’s Digital Civil Society Lab and is Chief Executive Officer of Be Bold Media, a global innovation agency that helps changemakers chart their moonshots and build bold futures. Sabrina is an opinion contributor to MSNBC and NBC News on technology, power, and human potential. She leads Future Well, a fund dedicated to the well-being of communities of color, investing in companies and leaders dedicated to keeping Black and brown people alive, well, and thriving. Sabrina is a VC-in-Residence with Pipeline Angels. She created the Bold Prize.
Sabrina served on the Board of Directors for the Project on Middle East Democracy and NARAL Pro-Choice America. She advises Run for Something, VOW for Girls, and Tech Congress. Sabrina is a graduate of Ohio State University where she studied International Relations & Diplomacy, Political Science, Women Studies, and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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Cat Willis, she/her, is the Founder and Executive Director of the Tannery World Dance and Cultural Center. She is originally from Rochester, N.Y., where she began her dance education with Garth Fagan Dance, with whom she studied extensively for six years. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Dance from SUNY Brockport. Cat has served on the Arts Council of Santa Cruz Grants Advisory Committee, the Arts Council of Santa Cruz grants panel, and County Park Friends Advisory Committee. She received the 2014 Gail Rich Award for her excellence in arts leadership in Santa Cruz County. Her cross cultural studies and work in the dance arts have led her to West Africa and Jamaica where she lectures at the Edna Manley School of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston.
Cat's dedication to racial justice and equity spans a lifetime of education, community organizing, and activism through the platform of arts and culture. She was the 418 Project’s 2009 Artist in Residence and the Theatre Bay Area’s CA$H grant recipient in dance for her evening-length dance production Diaspora, Food for Thought: Roots, Ritual, Re-imagined; an exploration of ancestral wisdom, racial trauma, and a re-imagined Black Diaspora in the American experience. She is a founding member of the Santa Cruz County Black Coalition for Justice and Racial Equity and is founding director of the Black Health Matters Initiative alongside community partners; County Park Friends, United Way of, NAACP Santa Cruz Chapter, Blended Bridge, and the SCC Black Coalition for Justice and Racial Equity. She currently sits on the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County RISE Together leadership circle and the Santa Cruz County's Commission on Anti-Racism, Economic & Social (CARES) Justice.
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John L. S. Simpkins (he/him) is President and CEO of MDC, an organization working on behalf of racial equity and economic mobility in the South. Previously, he served as VP Aspen Global Leadership Network at the Aspen Institute. Prior to that, he was an executive with Prisma Health, where he led collaborative, evidence-based efforts to promote health innovation, access, and equity. He also is a Senior Lecturer at Duke Law School. John was appointed to the Senior Executive Service in the Obama Administration where he served as general counsel for the U.S. Agency for International Development and deputy general counsel for the White House Office of Management and Budget. Before joining the government, he was of counsel with Wyche, P.A., visiting assistant professor of law at the University of Victoria, and an assistant professor at Charleston School of Law. He continues to work as a consultant and researcher in comparative constitutional law and constitutional design. John received his AB in government from Harvard College and a JD and LLM in international and comparative law from Duke University School of Law. He is a Fellow of the fourth class of the Liberty Fellowship.
