Humanitarian and Development NGOs
Ramaswami Balasubramaniam, MD, M.Phil., is a physician who 25 years ago, as a young medical student founded the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement and was its President & CEO till recently. SVYM has more than 60 projects in the sectors of health, education and community development spread across the state of Karnataka in Southern India and its activities reach out to nearly 5 million people. He was an Expert member of the Review Committee of the 10th five-year plan of the Planning Commission of India and is currently a member of the Karnataka Vision 2020. He has also served as a Chair and Visiting Professor of the Vivekananda Chair of the University of Mysore. He is the Editorial Advisor of the International Journal of Heath Management and has various publications to his credit. Currently he is at the Harvard Kennedy School on a Mason Fellowship.
Nonprofits in China
Dr. Z. Charles Cheng grew up in China, and has been educated in Tsinghua University (China), National University of Singapore, MIT and Harvard. He has obtained a Bachelor degree and a PhD degree, both in Electrical Engineering, an Executive Certificate in Business Administration, and is currently pursuing his Mid-Career MPA degree in Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He has many years of experience in non-profit leadership and practice, and has founded a few China-US oriented non-profit organizations. His professional focus is energy technology research, innovation, education, commercialization, and public policy. He has been a visionary technologist for over 15 years in IT and clean energy area, with over 60 technical articles and over 40 pending and issued patents. He has received a number of awards, including #1 in Jiangxi Province in the 1st Chinese Physics Olympiad, IEEE George Smith Award, Best Paper of the Year at IEEE EDL (as the lead author) and many scholarships and fellowships.
Justice and Human Rights
Carolina Larriera brings the experience of NGOs, government, and United Nations work. Before joining the Hauser Center she was involved with South-South cooperation, looking into how the government of Brazil implements its lessons learned and develops stronger ties with Portuguese speaking countries in Africa and Asia, especially East Timor. Before that she opened and ran the regional office for Latin America of DNDi, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, a Swiss NGO which is an offspring of Medecins Sans Frontieres. For seven years she worked with the United Nations in post-conflict situations, during the 3-year transition which led to the independence of East Timor, and the political 2003 mission to Iraq. She was also a professor at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica and IBMEC in Brazil.
Philanthropy
Kara Waddell was the China Director for Operation Blessing International, a faith-based NGO focused on poverty reduction, disaster relief and assistance programs. The organization has operated in more than 105 countries providing goods and services in excess of US$1.7 billion. Kara focused the China operations towards a community development approach and secured strategic partnerships with the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation and the China Charity Federation. In China, she worked closely with corporate and private foundations on program implementation as well as legal and tax issues in the PRC. Kara has lived in China the last 12 years and serves as a Board Director with Bethel Foundation for the Visually Impaired, as an Advisor for Coalition for Migrant Children, and as Special Advisor to the Committee on Child Welfare with the China Social Work Association. Kara is an honors graduate of Duke University. She is married and has two young boys.
MPA/MPP Hauser
Fellowship
Cathryn Clüver is second-year MPA student with a focus on non-profit management and comparative immigration policy. She comes to the Kennedy School after a ten-year career in journalism and communications, during which she covered European business and politics, urban development and immigration issues as a producer and writer for CNN-International in Atlanta and London and a number of public policy journals. She served on the management team of the non-profit think tank, the European Policy Centre in Brussels, Belgium before working on public policy issues (demographic change, urban competitiveness) for a large European consulting company. Cathryn graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in International Relations from Brown University and holds a Master's Degree in European Studies from the London School of Economics.