Board and Staff

Yumi Sera has over twenty years of experience focused on strengthening civil society organizations and managing innovative grantmaking and learning programs. She has worked for NGOs, development agencies, and philanthropic organizations, including ten years at the World Bank where she coordinated the Small Grants Program and Grants Facility for Indigenous Peoples. Yumi has written monographs on youth development, gender, and international grantmaking. She was the author of IFIP’s grantmaking guide and GrantCraft’s international grantmaking guide for intermediary organizations. As a volunteer for Conversations with the Earth Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change, she developed curriculum for high school students. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Senegal. She has a Master’s from the Yale School of Management and a Bachelor’s in Psychology. She is as a trustee of the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

Jessica Brown is Executive Director of the New England Biolabs Foundation, an independent, private foundation whose mission is to foster community-based conservation of landscapes and seascapes and the bio-cultural diversity found in these places. Prior to joining the Foundation she was Senior Vice President for International Programs at the Quebec-Labrador Foundation/Atlantic Center for the Environment (QLF), responsible for its capacity building and peer-to-peer exchange activities in diverse regions. Over the past two decades Jessica has worked in countries of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. A member of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), she chairs its Protected Landscapes Specialist Group, and is a founding member of the ICCA Consortium, concerned with advancing recognition of Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas. She serves on the governing board of Terralingua. She has published widely on topics related to stewardship of cultural landscapes, civic engagement in conservation, and governance of protected areas. Jessica has an M.A. in International Development from Clark University and a B.A. in Biology and Environmental Studies from Brown University.

Andrea M. Dobson, C.P.A is the chief operating & financial officer of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation where she oversees the investment, finance, accounting, human resources, operating, and information technology functions of the Foundation. WRF is dedicated to improving the lives of all Arkansans in three interrelated areas of education, economic development, and racial and social justice. Recognizing the broadness of that mandate, WRF focuses its work on the people and communities with the least wealth and opportunity, using its resources to understand the problems contributing to poverty in Arkansas and developing a long-term action plan to address the underlying issues. Andrea is responsible for ensuring WRF generates sufficient revenue to achieve its programmatic objectives and maintains good stewardship of its financial resources. Andrea leads the Foundation’s efforts in mission investing, and provides support to the Finance and Audit Committees of the Board. She is committed to addressing the issues related to poverty, racial and social justice, education, and community development, through sound fiscal policies and transparency. Before joining the WRF team in 2000, Andrea was the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Central Maryland Farm Credit Agricultural Credit Association. Andrea graduated from the University of Michigan. She serves on the Boards of the Neighborhood Funders Group, the Arkansas Single Parent Scholarship Fund and the Southeastern Council on Foundation’s Audit Committee as well as on the Finance and Audit Committee of IFIP’s board.

Ms. Galina Angarova is a representative of the Buryat peoples, a Russian indigenous group. Ms. Angarova is Tebtebba’s Policy and Communications Advisor based in New York representing Indigenous Peoples’ Major Group at the UN. Previously she has worked as a Russia Program Director at Pacific Environment and her work concentrated on issues of climate change and impacts on IP’s subsistence resources in the Arctic, resource extraction and impacts of development on indigenous and local communities in Siberia and the Russian Far East. She led highly effective international and local grassroots efforts to block pipeline construction in the Altai region of Siberia, which threatened indigenous Altaian’s sacred sites and untouched wilderness, to close a toxic paper mill on Lake Baikal in Siberia, and to stop plans to construct a hydro-dam that would flood the ancestral lands of indigenous Evenk peoples in Western Siberia. Galina received an Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship from the US Department of State to complete a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the University of New Mexico in 2002.

Manaia King (Tainui, Ngāti Haua and Ngāti Koroki Kahu Kura), is deputy chairman of the JR Mckenzie Trust Board, and chairman of Te Kawai Toro the Trust’s Maori Development Committee, Te Kawai Toro. He was appointed to the board in November 2012 as the NZ Law Society representative and was made deputy chairman of the board in November 2013. Manaia is a lawyer who specializes in public health. He is employed by the New Zealand Ministry of Health as the Manager of the Chronic Diseases Team. It is responsible and accountable for an annual budget of approximately $120m which is used to commission prevention and health promotion programs in the areas of tobacco, nutrition and physical activity, alcohol and drugs, and sexual health.

Anne Henshaw joined Oak Foundation in September 2007 as a marine conservation programme officer in the North Pacific and the Arctic with a primary focus on grant making in Alaska. She has a special interest in building capacity for indigenous community-based conservation, co-management and international governance. Prior to joining Oak Foundation, Anne was a visiting Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Bowdoin College from 1996-2007, and director of Bowdoin’s Coastal Studies Center from 2000-2007. Anne holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University and a B.A., magma cum laude, from the University of New Hampshire in anthropology. The results of her work have been published in a variety of peer reviewed journals and international venues including the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and the International Panel on Climate Change.

Peter Kostishack is Director of Programs for Global Greengrants fund. He has worked for many years supporting communities and indigenous organizations in defense of their rights, territories, and natural resources. Prior to coming to Greengrants, he coordinated the Amazon Alliance, a coalition of indigenous and non-governmental organizations protecting the Amazon Basin. He has also been a community mapper, researcher, blogger, activist against mega projects, and consultant to funders and organizations on how to partner with indigenous peoples’ organizations. Peter has an MESc in Social Ecology and community development from Yale University and a B.A. in Biology from Harvard University.

Angela Martínez is the Senior Program Officer for Latin America at American Jewish World Service (AJWS), leading, shaping and overseeing the civil and political and natural resources rights grantmaking strategies in the region. She is a native Spanish speaker from Mexico City with 20 years of experience working with and accompanying the local efforts and agendas of Indigenous and Afro-descent people social movements and grassroots organizations as well as bringing the voices of women, youth, indigenous and afro-descent peoples to international policy forums. Angela launched and led the Latin America and Caribbean Program on Comprehensive Sexuality Education at the Mexican Institute for Family and Population Research. She has designed, implemented and evaluated sexuality, gender, sexual and reproductive rights, and health programs with diverse populations throughout the region and the United States. She has trained and successfully negotiated with governmental officials from the Education and Health Ministry in the region to advance sexual and reproductive rights agendas. Angela has several publications and training manuals on sexual and reproductive health and rights to her name and has also conducted ethnographic research and published its findings.

Sonja Swift directs the Windrose Fund and serves as an active trustee for Swift Foundation, working programmatically as well as on aligning the foundation’s mission with its investments. She is also on the board of Oakland Institute. Sonja has field experience from across the Americas covering a range of issues including food sovereignty, extractive industry resistance and indigenous land rights. She has consistently advocated for more coherency and accountability in philanthropy and is further engaged in efforts to revive place-based economies. She has a BA in Cultural Ecology from the University of California Santa Cruz and a MA from Goddard College with a focus on creative writing, trauma and embodiment studies. Writing is her creative medium for grappling with the complexity of our times. She grew up on a subtropical fruit farm and longhorn cattle ranch in the central coast foothills of California and calls home in both San Francisco, California and the Black Hills, South Dakota.

Monica Aleman Cunningham is a senior program officer on the Ford Foundation’s BUILD team, working to advance the foundation’s efforts to support and develop stronger, sustainable, and more effective social justice organizations and networks across the globe. Her areas of concentration in BUILD are Latin America; Civic Engagement and Government; and Gender, Race, and Ethnic Justice.

Previously, she was based in the foundation’s East Africa office, where her grant making focused on increasing the capacity of national, regional, and global groups and supporting national and regional networks to advance a constitutional framework that protects the rights of women and other minorities, increases the participation of women in governance structures, and consolidates the infrastructure of the women’s rights movement. In addition, Monica led grant-making efforts to explore the links between customary laws and customs as they relate to women and sexual expression, using culture and religion as key entry points into understanding social change.

Before joining the foundation in 2011, Monica was executive director of the International Indigenous Women’s Forum, a network of organizations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Her extensive background encompasses expertise in community organizing, social movement building, and participatory monitoring and evaluation, all honed through her work over the years with national, regional, and global organizations.

Suzanne Benally is currently the executive director of Cultural Survival. She came to Cultural Survival from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she served as the associate provost for institutional planning and assessment and associate vice president for academic affairs. She was also a core faculty member in environmental studies and a member of the president’s cabinet. Before starting at Naropa in 1999, she was deputy director and director of education programs at the American Indian Science and Engineering Society and director of the Institute on Ethnic Diversity at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. She has been a teacher at the university level and has served as a consultant to philanthropic foundations, nonprofit organizations, and many higher education institutions. Additionally, she has worked extensively with American Indian communities. Her interests, teaching, and passions are focused on the relationship between land, spirituality, and people as reflected in stories, and in environmental issues and Indigenous rights.

Lourdes Inga has several years of experience in philanthropy with deep expertise in international grantmaking. At The Christensen Fund as Manager of Grants Administration and Learning Systems, she established and grew the Grants Administration team and developed and oversaw policies and practice for Christensen’s grassroots grantmaking approach. She also worked in the initial plan, design and the sharing of knowledge from Christensen’s grantmaking. Prior to The Christensen Fund she was with The Global Fund for Women where she served as Program Associate for the Americas and Asia programs and later created the Grants Administration function. Lourdes is very active in philanthropic and nonprofit communities, serving as a Board Member of Saphichay, a Peruvian non-profit focusing on revitalization and empowerment of indigenous practices and people by braiding indigenous and mestizo communities. She is founding Board Member of EDGE Funders Alliance and former Board Member of Grantmakers without Borders. Among other contributions, she is an active member of Grants Managers Network, has served on TechSoup’s NGOSource Advisory Council; and was Board Member of Manos Unidas Contigo Peru, a local diaspora group supporting youth in Peru. Born and raised in Lima, Peru, Lourdes earned a BA in Latin American Studies and an MA in International Relations. She is committed to gender equality, indigenous rights, environmental issues and friendly cross-border philanthropy practices.

Ashley Hernandez has extensive experience in non-profit work both nationally and globally across several areas including policy, research, event organizing and advocacy. Ashley graduated from the University College London, with a master’s degree in Social Development Practice. Her master’s thesis focused on the evaluation and monitoring of gender empowerment and equality programs that are driven by the goal of social transformation.

As program coordinator for the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, she worked on the revitalization of low-income areas through the development of worker owned cooperatives. Additionally, she managed the start-up of the Texas affiliate of the Restaurant Opportunity Centers United, and assisted with research and policy work for several campaigns around increasing the minimum wage. She partnered with NGOs Practical Action and Kisumu Informal Settlement Network on the development of an advocacy strategy, which focused on the impact of city planning decisions on the livelihoods of informal market traders in Kisumu, Kenya. Most recently, she has been working with the Moremi Initiative for Women’s Leadership in Africa (Moremi) as a strategic program intern. With Moremi, Ashley focused on building capacity for the organization’s leadership programs and events, including the prestigious MILEAD fellowship.

Ashley’s motivation is to be part of organizations that empower communities to aspire for social change through bottom-up development. Her aim is to help facilitate this process through resource mobilization, building networks and coalitions, and implementing a rights-based approach. She is excited to start her new role as Program Associate with the International Funders for Indigenous Peoples.