Common Fire's Founders

• Kavitha Rao Kavitha Rao is a member of the Board of Directors of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest and oldest interfaith nonviolence organization in the world, and is the lead facilitator for FOR's Nonviolent Youth Collective, leading workshops and week-long anti-oppression and nonviolence trainings for young adults. Through the years she has worked as a facilitator or consultant with several organizations including Be Present, the Center for Whole Communities, and the Circle of Life Foundation.

  Kavitha is a yoga teacher, thrilled to share with others this practice that has fueled and sustained her own activism, helping her to ground her work from a place of love and creative action rather than merely anger and reaction.

  After working on environmental justice issues in the Bay Area, Kavitha became an International Correspondent for the Odyssey's World Trek for Service and Education, traveling for 2 years to over 30 countries, reporting on history, culture, and contemporary issues of countries overlooked in most American textbooks for the Odyssey's free educational website that was used by over 5,000 teachers and 60,000 K-12 students. She has worked with grassroots organizations around the world and is humbled by the immense commitment and vision she has witnessed from people unwilling to accept that the violence, injustice, and poverty that may surround them is the only way things have to be.

• Jeff Golden harkens from the Rocky Mountains of Idaho but has lived and traveled extensively around the world, most significantly in Latin America, including a year on a Fulbright in Venezuela, and notably as an Earthwatch Educational Fellow with the Spanish Dolphins Program.

  He came to the Hudson Valley by way of San Francisco. There he was Founder and Executive Director of Odyssey Internet Treks for Service and Education, a non-profit creating progressive online content on culture and politics worldwide (worldtrek.org & ustrek.org). That work earned him the State Department's Millenium International Volunteer Award in 2000 and an Ashoka Fellowship Nomination in the field of Education. Prior to that he taught high school in San Francisco's Mission district, primarily teaching about the political history of Latin America as part of the Spanish bilingual program.

  He came to upstate New York in 2001 to serve for three years as the Executive Director of the Jonas Foundation, a 75-year old non-profit that runs Camp Rising Sun, one of the world's foremost international youth service programs. He has been dedicated full-time to Common Fire since then, though rumor has it that there have been sightings of him playing guitar, writing, dancing joyfully into the wee hours of the morning, and playing chess with his grandmother.

Other Members of the Board of Directors

• Tiffany Brown has always been passionate about finding ways to communicate compassionately and effectively across differences, and her starting point was how to communicate across racial difference. She has worked with the anti-racist group, Women As Allies, as well as the national civil rights organization, the NAACP, in the Southeast Regional office's Prison Project in Atlanta, Georgia. It was in Atlanta that Tiffany connected with and became active with an organization called Be Present, Inc. Through Be Present, Tiffany became familiar with YES!, an organization that connects, inspires and empowers young changemakers. She moved to Santa Cruz, CA, to work with them and is currently a Program Manager there.

  Within a year Tiffany had co-founded the Community Alliances Initiative, a local group that works across difference. Tiffany has facilitated a series titled Being Multiracial, sponsored by the local Santa Cruz branch of the NAACP, and she has also co-facilitated Mom’s & Kids Club through the Walnut Avenue Women’s Center, working with the children of parents who are survivors of domestic violence. Tiffany loves to cook, enjoy whole foods, and host little gatherings. She has been known to cut a rug, and wants more of that in her life. She currently resides in Santa Fe, NM.

• Maryrose Dolezal is the national program coordinator of the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Nonviolent Youth Collective. Maryrose travels nationally, speaking, training and facilitating with a team of youth facilitators at Peacemaker Training Institutes and national anti-oppression trainings. Maryrose believes that change always happens through relationships, that national organizing is most powerful when it supports grassroots organizing, and that the processes of our work will dictate the outcome. To this end, she is experimenting with nonviolence as an anti-racist white person. Maryrose serves on the board of STORY (Strategy Training & Organizing Resources for Youth), lives in Minnesota, and is working on her MA in Nonprofit Management. Maryrose also serves as the STORY Board rep on the smartMeme Board of Directors.

 

Special thanks to Matthew Powell who did the flash on the home page for us! We highly recommend him! mpow540@gmail.com