Our Board of Directors

GlobalGiving Foundation

Thomas Bird

Tom Bird is founder and president of the venture partnership Farm Capital Services, LLC. He was CEO of Farm, Inc. from 1988 until 1999, operating a venture-backed Silicon Valley information management firm that eventually provided data storage and retrieval services for more than one thousand clients. Tom is a trustee of the American University in Bulgaria, and also serves on the board of Microfinance International Corp and B Lab. Tom did his undergraduate work at Dartmouth College, and then went on to earn an MBA from Stanford University and a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard University. He frequently teaches a workshop at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that captures the essence of the Divinity School experience for interested MBA students and alumni.

Robert Kushen

Robert Kushen is the Executive Director of the Harvard Pepfar Program, an HIV treatment program operating in three countries in Africa and serving 75,000 patients. Formerly, he served as Director of International Operations at the Open Society Institute, New York, where he was responsible for supervising program and grant making operations, crisis management, strategic planning and budgeting for a philanthropic network in over fifty countries. From 1999-2002, Rob served as Executive Director of Doctors of the World, a non-governmental organization committed to addressing health care problems caused by human rights abuses. He has also served as an Attorney-Adviser to the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. Rob is a member of the New York Bar Association and the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Boards of several non-governmental organizations, including the Mental Disability Advocacy Center and EmPower Foundation. He is the author of a number of publications in the area of human rights and non-profit law. Rob holds a B.A. from Harvard College in Russian and Soviet studies and a J.D. from Columbia University.

Dennis Whittle

Dennis Whittle is currently the Chairman and CEO of ManyFutures, Inc. Before joining the World Bank in 1986, Dennis worked in the Philippines with the Asian Development Bank and with USAID. Until October 2000, Dennis was part of a troika that led the World Bank's Corporate Strategy and Innovation units. From 1992-1997, he led a variety of initiatives in the Bank's Russia program, including housing reform and energy efficiency projects. From 1987-1992, Dennis was an economist in the World Bank's Jakarta office advising the Indonesian Ministries of Finance and National Development, and managing projects in the agriculture and forestry sectors. Dennis graduated with honors in religious studies from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and did his graduate work in development studies and economics at Princeton University. Dennis also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

ManyFutures, Inc.

Dennis Whittle

Please see above, GlobalGiving Board of Directors: Dennis Whittle.

Debra Dunn

Debra is currently working as an Advisor to Social Ventures around the world and an Associate Consulting Professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford University. Debra Dunn left HP in June of 2005 after 22 years. For the last 3 years of her career at HP, Debra was Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Global Citizenship, a role in which she had leadership responsibility for HP's global citizenship efforts. Through the efforts of her team, HP received widespread recognition and numerous awards globally for leadership in Global Corporate Citizenship. Debra holds a bachelor's degree in comparative economics from Brown University and a master's degree in business administration from Harvard Business School. She serves on the Boards of the Skoll Foundation and B Lab and the Faculty of Sustainability.

Mari Kuraishi

Mari Kuraishi is currently the President of the GlobalGiving Foundation. She joined the World Bank in 1992 where she managed and created some of the Bank's most innovative projects. Along with GlobalGiving co-founder Dennis Whittle and their teams, Mari organized the first series of strategic forums with the World Bank's president and senior management, and the first ever Innovation and Development Marketplaces. She also designed a range of investment projects in the Russia reform program, including a large-scale residential energy efficiency project, structural adjustment loans, and the World Bank's first legal reform project. In addition to her native Japanese, Mari also speaks Russian, German, Italian, and French. She has an undergraduate degree in history from Harvard University, and did graduate work in Russian and Japanese history and politics at Harvard and Georgetown Universities. Mari also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

Chris McGoff

Chris McGoff is the CEO of The Clearing. The Clearing is a management consulting company that knows how to facilitate resolution of technically and socially complex problems. Over the last 25 years Chris has played a substantial role in a broad spectrum of complex problem solving. Chris's client list includes most of the agencies of the U.S. Federal Government as well as a wide range of organizations including IBM, AARP, Consol Energy, DuPont, the United Nations, and Boeing. Chris previously served as Vice President and Director of SRA Consulting and as CEO of Touchstone Consulting Group, Inc., acquired by SRA in April of 2005. Chris is a professor at the University of Maryland, Graduate School of Public Policy. He received a B.S. in Biochemistry from University of Scranton and a M.S. in Environmental Chemistry from Texas Tech University. Chris and his wife, Claire Newman have 6 children and live near Washington DC.