Strategic Planning Senior Advisors

Thank you to our strategic planning Senior Advisors, who graciously donated their time, expertise, and insights to develop our strategic plan.

Tony Brown, Co-Director, Hart Leadership Program, Duke University
Joyce Bylander, Special Assistant to the President for Institutional & Diversity Initiatives at Dickinson College, International Institute for Sustained Dialogue Board of Directors
Martin Davidson, Chief Diversity Officer and Associate Dean, University of Virginia, Darden School of Business
John Dedrick, Vice President of Programs, The Kettering Foundation
Ande Diaz, Associate Dean and Director of the Intercultural Center, Roger Williams University
Rick DeJesus, Vice President of Student Affairs, Saint John Fisher College
John Esterle, Executive Director, The Whitman Institute
Chris Gates, Executive Director, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE)
Chris Gergen, Director, Enterprising Leadership Initiative, Duke University
Rich Harwood, President, The Harwood Institute
Matt Leighninger, Executive Director, Deliberative Democracy Consortium
Martha McCoy, Executive Director, Everyday Democracy
Deepa Narayan, Director, Moving Out of Poverty, Global Development Network
Nancy Thomas, Director, The Democracy Imperative

Advisory Board

The SDCN Advisory Board was initiated in the summer of 2008 in order to help support SDCN's programmatic work and organizational development.  If you are interested in providing support to the SDCN Advisory Board or would like to receive information about membership, please contact us.  The following individuals currently serve on the SDCN Advisory Board:

Ava graduated from the University of Virginia in 2007 with a B.A. in History.  She spent four years with Sustained Dialogue while at U.Va.  During her time with Sustained Dialogue, Ava served as a member, moderator, Vice Chair, and Chair.  Ava holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Clark Herndon graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005 as a Jefferson Scholar and with a degree in Civil Engineering. Clark led UVA's Sustained Dialogue program in 2004, after spending three years as a dialogue participant and moderator. Following graduation, Clark served as a Program Director with SDCN and has since served as a member of SDCN's Advisory Board. Clark is originally from Nashville, TN. Clark spent three years working in management consulting with Bain and Co. in Atlanta before returning to the University of Virginia, where her received an MBA at the Darden School of Business on his second Jefferson Scholarship. He returned to Bain and Co. in 2011 as a consultant. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and daughter.

Samar Katnani graduated from the University of Virginia in 2004.  While at UVa, Ms. Katnani was one of the founding members and moderators of Susatined Dialogue in 2001 and served as Vice-Chair of the organization from 2002-2004.  As an Arab-American, she also founded the Jewish-Arab Sustained Dialogue.  After graduation, Ms. Katnani was selected as a Teach For America corps member and taught sixth grade in the Bronx in New York City for three years.  Leaving the classroom was difficult for her, but in 2007 Ms. Katnani moved to Missouri to attend Washington University in Saint Louis School of Law, where she served as a Senior Staff Editor on Law Review. She received a J.D., magna cum laude in 2010. Ms. Katnani has continued to support Sustained Dialogue Campus Network by working on facilitator training materials and serving on the Advisory Board.  Ms. Katnani is currently an Associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Stein & Hamilton.

Tessa McEwen has been an advocate for racial equality and social responsibility for the last 10 years.  After founding the University of Notre Dame chapter of Sustained Dialogue, Tessa has since graduated and worked with the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue (IISD) as Program Director for the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network (SDCN).  She wore multiple hats as dialogue trainer, speaker/presenter, and mentor for student leaders engaged in Sustained Dialogue across the country.  Her post-graduate education includes a certificate-degree in Dialogue, Deliberation and Public Engagement from Fielding Graduate University and training in organizational leadership from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University.  She holds a Bachelor's degree in Sociology and a minor in Public Relations.  Tessa currently lives in Chicago, working as the Director of Marketing, Communications & School Relations for Midtown Educational Foundation.  She devoted her free time as a member of Pax Christi USA's Anti-Racism Team and as a Character Education teacher for inner-city 7th grade girls before giving birth to her beautiful daughter Via Lourdes.  Tessa still considers herself a newlywed to husband Jelani and is now enjoying life as a new mommy!

Jelani was a member of the founding team of the Sustained Dialogue program at the University of Notre Dame.  After graduation, he served as an Americorps volunteer in Boston and taught writing and public speaking at Urban Prep Charter Academy in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago.  Jelani joined the Mikva Challenge in the summer of 2008 and currently directs the Issues to Action program.

Teddy Nemeroff graduated from Princeton University in 2001, with a degree in Public Policy and International Affairs, and from Columbia Law School in 2009.  Teddy co-founded the first campus SD initiative at Princeton in 1999.  After completing two years in management consulting with Bain and Co. in 2003, he moved to Pretoria, South Africa, where he served for three years as an Associate of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue and worked to build the Dialogue Unit at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), as well as the Campus SD Network of Zimbabwe.  Teddy served as a member of SDCN's Management Team during its inception and has since served as a member of SDCN's Advisory Board.

Jason Owens graduated from Colorado College in 2006, where he majored in History and founded CC's SD program. From Aurora, Colorado, Jason spent a year and half following graduation as a Fellow at the El Pomar Foundation, a private foundation based in Colorado Springs that works to strengthen Colorado through grant-making and community stewardship. After leaving El Pomar Foundation Jason worked for the Democratic National Convention Committee in Denver as the Associate Director of Public Programs. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 with a Masters of Public Administration. Jason has served as an alumni trainer for SDCN and says that the people he has met through Sustained Dialogue are what keep him invested in SDCN and working to see it continue to grow.

Priya Parker is a founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network.  As an undergraduate student, she founded the second Sustained Dialogue program at the University of Virginia in 2001.  Parker served as Program Director for SDCN in 2004-2005 in Washington D.C., and Sustained Dialogue consultant to the Dalai Lama's peace foundation initiative Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace, in New Delhi from 2005-07.  She has conducted workshops on Sustained Dialogue on over 20 university and high school campuses in the US, as well as in American communities, in India, South Africa, and Zambia.  From 2006-2008, Priya was a policy analyst for Parliamentary Research Service in New Delhi to 750 Members of Parliament in India.  Priya is a member of the Steering Committee of the US-based National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation.  She interned in the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.  Priya is currently a Public Service Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and pursuing a Master in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an MBA at MIT Sloan. 

Dr. Hal Saunders worked in the U.S. Government for 25 years under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.  He served on the National Security Staff in the White House (1961-74) as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State when he flew on the Kissinger shuttles (1974-75); as Director of Intelligence and Research in the State Department (1975-78); and as Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs when he participated in drafting the Camp David accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty (1975-78) and helped negotiate the release of American hostages from Iran (1980-81).  Since leaving government, Dr. Saunders has participated in several non-official dialogues, including the Dartmouth Task Force on the Russian-US Relationship, which he currently co-chairs.  From those experiences, he conceptualized the five-stage process of Sustained Dialogue and the concept of relationship.

Dr. Saunders serves as Director of International Affairs at the Kettering Foundation and President of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue (IISD).  He is author of The Other Walls: The Arab Israeli Peace Process in a Global Perspective; A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts; and Politics Is about Relationship: A Blueprint for the Citizen’s Century.  A fourth book on the history of Sustained Dialogue is forthcoming.

Dr. David Tukey is a neuroscientist at New York University Medical Center.  His research focuses on synaptic plasticity in the context of learning and memory and neurodegeneration.  An active citizen, Dr. Tukey is a regular contributor to the FoxNews Strategy Room and serves on the the boards of the Princeton Prize in Race Relations and the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue (IISD).  Prior to joining the IISD board, he was a founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network.  During the 2008 presidential election, Dr. Tukey managed the McCain-Palin campaign in the NY/NJ region, serving as Deputy Regional Campaign Manager.  Dr. Tukey hales from Hamilton, NJ and holds a PhD in neuroscience from NYU and a bachelor's in molecular biology from Princeton.