Associates and Staff

Nina Benjamin (Associate) is a South Africa Gender at Work team member and the Gender Programme coordinator for a labour support organization called the Labour Research Service (LRS) based in Cape Town.

Michel Friedman (Senior Associate) has worked as a feminist and social development activist for the past 25 years in a wide range of sectors, including violence against women, rural, urban and environmental development, land reform, organizational change and capacity building of women writers. She has worked as a facilitator, researcher, writer and program manager. She has been managing the Gender at Work programs in South Africa since 2004 and co-facilitated the Action Learning Program in the Horn of Africa with Senior Associate, David Kelleher, in 2006-2008. She is committed to further developing the integration of body, mind, spirit practices into Gender at Work's approach.

For almost twenty years, Rex Fyles (Program Manager)  has supported the organizational development of civil society and social justice organizations based in Canada, Southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central America, Cuba, and South Asia. He has been teaching development studies courses at the University of Ottawa since 2007 and is currently responsible for managing international internships and field research courses. He grew up on the west coast of Canada and since has lived, studied and worked in Québec, Brazil, France, Mozambique and South Africa.

Fazila Gany (Associate) works on the South Africa Team at Gender at Work and has worked for ten years at a local NGO in PMB where she was a project coordinator and was a part of the first round of the Gender at Work process as a participant. Her background includes working with gender issues and gender violence. She is also a trained mediator and facilitator for alternate-to-violence programs. Fazila holds a certificate in participatory development, and a BCOM Honours in conflict resolution and peace studies. She is currently completing her Master’s in (Adult) Education.

Malini Ghose (Associate) is one of the founder-members of Nirantar, a resource centre for gender and education in New Delhi, India. She has worked in the fields of gender, education and institutional development for nearly 20 years in various capacities – as a grassroots practitioner, trainer, material and curriculum developer, researcher and activist. She has provided technical assistance to government and NGO interventions, been involved with policy development, written, presented and advocated on issues related to gender and other economic, social and cultural rights in both national and international forums. She has worked on institutional development issues with different civil society organizations. Malini has an M.A. in Political Science from the New School for Social Research, New York. She has a B.A in Economics from Presidency College, Calcutta University, India.

Ray Gordezky (Associate) works on the East Africa Team at Gender at Work, and has spent twenty-five years designing and facilitating change processes that have helped diverse groups and organizations collaborate on complex challenges and open up new futures. Working in a number of countries with business, government and community-based organizations, he has helped numerous NGOs, for-profit and government organizations turn the potentials they dreamed of into the realities they live in. Ray specializes in development of organization capacity and leadership for large-scale change. He is a faculty member of the Canadian Organization Development Institute and the Canada School of Public Service. Recent publications include chapters in The Change Handbook, 2nd Edition, and The Handbook on Large Group Methods, both published in 2007.

Mahlet Hailemariam (Associate) has worked as a development practitioner for the past 16 years. For Oxfam Canada, she was a deputy Program Manager of Partnership for Cross-sectoral Engagement (PACE) Program in the Horn of Africa. She coordinated and organized regional workshops and consultations that brought together PACE’s partners in Somaliland, Sudan and Ethiopia. Mahelet has coordinated the translation, publication and dissemination of OD materials in Arabic, Amharic, and Somali languages. She organized and facilitated OD trainings (including strategic planning, networking, gender equality, facilitation skills, constituency building, etc .) Mahelet was also responsible for an action research project on Volunteerism in Ethiopia. This initiative on volunteerism was awarded with the first Bill McWhinney Award of Excellence in International Development from Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in 2003.
 

Jeremy Holland (Senior Associate) has been variously a social development consultant, university lecturer and trainer for the past 15 years with research and advisory experience in the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He works on poverty and policy analysis; monitoring and evaluation; gender analysis; rights-based approaches; participatory governance; political economy; and participatory and combined research methods. Recent publications include Empowerment in Practice: From Analysis to Implementation and a sourcebook called Tools for Institutional, Political and Social Analysis of Policy Reform.

Praneeta Sukanya Kapur (Associate) has been working in the field of development since she finished her Masters Degree in Social Work in 2005. She started by working at the grassroots-level, going on to work with Oxfam and most recently with The Hunger Project, an organization that works with women elected to village ‘Panchayats’ (Councils). Issues she has engaged with in the course of her work include women’s leadership, capacity building, violence against women and savings & credit, amongst others. She has a mix of program and management skills, both areas in which she has had equal experience.

David Kelleher (Co-founder and Senior Associate). He has been an independent organizational consultant for more than three decades working with NGOs, governments and UN agencies. He is the Afghanistan Coordinator for Amnesty International (Canada) and an associate faculty member at Royal Roads University. He has co-authored a number of books and articles on organizations and on gender equality.

Madhavi Kuckreja (Associate) has been part of the Gender at Work team in India as a facilitator, and has recently come on board as an Associate. For most of her career, Madhavi has worked in a community-based organization, Vanagana (in rural Uttar Pradesh), which focuses on women’s rights, women’s skills development in alternative technology, violence against women and collective feminist organizing around caste-based discrimination. Madhavi also mentors and supports other feminist Dalit and Muslim groups in Uttar Pradesh and has conducted trainings on gender equality and violence against women for women and men in North Sri Lanka and Darfur. In her other life, she is also an entrepreneur, running a crafts and weaves shop that markets products of NGOs and crafts persons from all over India.

Andrea Lindores (Associate) is a development practitioner and facilitator with almost 20 years experience working on social justice and rights-based development issues. She works with international NGOs and civil society organizations on monitoring and evaluation, organizational development and practice, and organizational learning. Over the years, she has had the privilege of working with organizations in the Americas, the Horn of Africa, Southern Africa, West Africa, South and South East Asia, and Australia. Andrea is currently working with CARE on monitoring and evaluation, organizational learning and knowledge sharing.

Kalyani Menon-Sen (Associate) is a feminist activist, researcher and adult educator based in Delhi, India. She has over 25 years of experience in working with a range of organizations - from grassroots women's groups to NGOs, development agencies and government programs - and helping them in building organizational capacities to advance women's rights. She has also been involved for several years in efforts to develop tools and methodologies for economic literacy at the grassroots. Her focus is on building links between advocacy for change in macroeconomic policies, and communities who are directly experiencing a crisis of survival but have not so far been able to locate their experiences in the macro context of economic policies.

Tania Principe (Director, Programs and Operations) holds a a Master of Arts in Sociology and Equity Studies from the University of Toronto and a BSc in Natural Resource Management and International Development. She has worked extensively in international women's human rights and locally in food and social justice work. She has spent considerable time living and working abroad namely in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Senegal. In the past she has worked with AWID in various capacities and most recently she worked in a senior management capacity with one of Toronto's largest Food Banks and Food Access agencies. Her other full-time job is parenting her young sons.

Aruna Rao (Co-founder and Executive Director) is a gender and institutional change expert with over 25 years' experience of addressing gender issues in a variety of development organizations, primarily in Asia. In addition to serving on the boards of CIVICUS and AWID, she has consulted widely with UN organizations, academic institutions, and development NGOs on gender and development and organizational change issues and written extensively on gender and institutional change.

Solange Rocha (Associate) is an international consultant in the areas of community organzing, organizational development and capacity building for feminist social movements as well as health policy and democracy. She has worked with UN Women and Forum Mulher and Oxfam in Mozambique, as well as with the Feminist Institute for Democracy in Brazil. Solange holds a PhD in social work and has undertaken research projects relating to gender equality and HIV/AIDS in Mozambique, Brazil and South Africa. She is the author of several books on topics relating to health, women's rights and social movements.

Joanne Sandler (Senior Associate) was until recently the Deputy Executive Director for Programmes of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). She has worked with international organizations and women's groups worldwide for the past 27 years, with a focus on organizational development, strategic planning and economic justice. She has also served on the Board of Directors of a number of international and domestic organizations, including the Breakthrough, Association for Women's Rights in Development, Gender at Work, and Women Make Movies. Prior to her work with UNIFEM, Joanne worked as a consultant to international and U.S.-focused women’s rights organizations, including many UN organizations, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Global Fund for Women, the National Council for Research on Women, the International Planned Parenthood Federation-Western Hemisphere, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Rieky Stuart (Senior Associate) is a consultant in international development. She has worked in this field since the late 1960s. She has worked and lived in Africa and Asia and Canada as a teacher, development programmer, consultant and manager. She was Executive Director of Oxfam Canada from 1999 to 2005. She previously served as Deputy Director for the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, and also taught at St. Francis Xavier University’s Coady International Institute. She is currently a board member of CIVICUS.

Nosipho Twala (Program Associate) at Gender at work, ensures the smooth running of the South Africa projects. A community worker, educator and feminist activist, she is also the co-founder of Vukani-Tsohang Africa, a women’s self-help project; a member of Remmoho Women’s Forum; and an assistant researcher for the LRS, where she does research on gender in the workplace. Nosipho’s passions include working with the community, especially women, and helping develop new strategies for organizing women.

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