CfC Team & Partners

CfC TRAINERS

Moacir Barbosa
Mo is the Assistant Director for Training and Capacity Building at Health Resources in Action - HRiA (formerly the Medical Foundation) and has been the program coordinator for BEST Initiative since the program’s inception in 1999.  Prior to joining HRiA, he was Program Coordinator for the Fellowship Center in St. Louis, MO, Director of the Area 4 Youth Center in Cambridge, MA and Supervisor for the Moore Youth Center in Cambridge.  As a practitioner, his work focused on expanding opportunities for youth and building equitable relationships between youth and institutions.

Mo has long been involved in efforts to bring about peaceful and just-full resolutions to the issues that we face locally, nationally and globally. His efforts have included work on anti-nuclear proliferation issues, apartheid, global warming, dumping (local and international), water resources, racism, sexism, homophobia, militarization, just economic development, gang violence, sustainable health promotion, youth involvement, community solutions, geo-political issues, and many more issues. His current work in the Area 4/Port neighborhood of Cambridge focuses on violence and other community issues. Mo is a member of numerous Advisory Boards and Task Forces in the community and has worked on various political campaigns at the local and national level.

Mo Barbosa holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in African and African American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Toni Blackman
Toni Blackman is the first hip-hop artist to be designated as an American Cultural Specialist and Hip –Hop Ambassador by the U.S. Department of State. She is an educator, published author, award-winning performer, and has been recognized with fellowships visiting over 15 countries including Senegal, South Africa, Taiwan, Cote d’Ivoire and Angola. Toni’s extensive communication arts background includes experience in training development, design and implementation, as well as, professional public speaking and on-air experience. Toni is an Independent Hip Hop Educational Consultant.

Roberto Cremonini
Roberto Cremonini has over 15 years of experience in the field of knowledge management.  In 2001, driven by a desire to apply his expertise in the social sector, he began working with nonprofits and foundations.  Roberto joined the Barr Foundation as Chief Knowledge & Learning Officer in October 2003.

His current interests include collaboration technologies, dashboards, and social network analysis. He began his career at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Roberto received his EE, summa cum laude, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University ofBologna. He holds an MBA from the MIT, Sloan School of Management. He is on the Technology Advisory Board of Cambridge College, the Communications Advisory Board of AGM and - since March 2008 - on the Board of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO). 

Cassandra Siegars Goldwater
Cassandra began her work career in the nonprofit sector teaching internal and external stakeholders the workings of the standards-making process involved in creating and revising the national fire codes, editing standards’ copy and developing marketing materials for the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).  After 6 years with the organization, she became the manager of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts household hazardous waste program – administering grants, acting as the spokesperson for household hazardous waste policy in Massachusetts locally and nationally, and providing public education materials to the public.

After the birth of her son, Cassandra became a freelance editor and continued her lifelong learning in business and writing classes.  She decided to pursue an MBA to further her understanding of the similarities and differences between the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors.  This lead to a job in a small marketing and public relations consulting firm where her role as account manager required researching business sectors and introducing start-up firms to the media.  She also holds an MFA and has been teaching/coaching graduate students working on word/image projects, English composition to Lesley undergraduates and Art Institute of Boston honors students, and a group of veterans who test at lower than a 9th grade language skill level.  In addition, she has worked with the Paper Picker Press as a resident and visiting artist – across multiple grades – using art to support literacy.

Mathew Schwarzman
Mat Schwarzman, is the Project Director of CrossroadsProject. He has been a student, practitioner, instructor and writer in the field of community-based arts since 1985. He has helped establish arts education programs for teens, college students and adults across the United States. He holds a doctorate in Learning & Change in Human Systems from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Currently, he is directing Creative Forces, a youth educational theater company in New Orleans. For more information, visit www.xroadsproject.org.

H. Mark Smith
H. Mark Smith is the YouthReach Program Manager at the Massachusetts Cultural Council, where he has been since 1996. The MCC’s YouthReach Initiative is a state-wide effort to bring substantive out-of-school arts programs to young people in need-young people at risk of not making the successful transition from adolescence to young adulthood. YouthReach is recognized nationally as an incubator for highly effective out-of-school programs in the arts.

A seasoned facilitator, Smith has led workshops for a host of organizations throughout Massachusetts and beyond. He has been a review panelist for the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Kentucky Arts Council, the Ohio Arts Council, the South Carolina Arts Commission, the Vermont Arts Council, the Afterschool for All Partnership, the Black Ministerial Alliance, and Americans for the Arts.

Smith brings to the MCC a combination of experiences in the arts, education, social service, and business. He holds an MA in directing from Emerson College and was Executive Director of the Loon and Heron Theatre, a theater for young people based in Brookline, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 1989.

In his off hours, Smith is an avid journaler and some-time poet. He was ordained a Deacon in the Episcopal Church in 2006 and serves at the Episcopal Boston Chinese Ministry, where he works primarily with teens who are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. He has lived in the Boston area for 30 years, and woven in among his professional years in the arts, he has been a classroom teacher, a social service caseworker, a textbook editor with Houghton Mifflin Company, and operations manager for an electronic art and production firm.

Doris Sommer
Doris Sommer is Ira Jewell Williams, Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literature, and Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish. Her interests include: 19th-century narrative in Latin American women’s literature, ethnic literature, and bilingual aesthetics. She is the author of Billingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004), Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (1999), and Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1993). She is the editor of Cultural Agency in the Americas (2005) and Billingual Games: Some Literary Investigations (2004). Professor Sommer is also Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative.

The Cultural Agents Initiative’s ‘Paper Picker Press (PPP)’ is an instructional program for teachers in schools and after-school centers to adopt and adapt techniques that enhance higher order thinking through hands-on engagement with literature. The program offers units of instruction that invite economically disadvantaged students to explore literature as recyclable material, re-writing classic texts through creative techniques that incorporate visual and performing arts. PPP also encourages students to display their work in public performances, art exhibits, and entrepreneurial activities that involve the local community and feature dialogue between established writers and young people.

Emily Ullman
Emily Ullman is an independent consultant, teaching and directing in education and nonprofit
settings throughout Boston. Teaching Theater for Social Change, the Performance of Literature and Communications she works to develop strategies for widespread transformation through the arts.

Most recently she co-developed the Paper Picker Press Creative Literacy Program with Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, and coordinated summer arts programming at Project Hip Hop. She also teaches at Wentworth Institute of Technology and Emerson College.

Before moving back to Boston, Emily Graduated from Eastern Michigan University (EMU) with her Masters in Communications/Performance Studies, and went on to teach full time at EMU while directing Collaborative Performance Institutes for teenagers in Detroit.

Laurie Jo Wallace
At Health Resources in Action - HRiA (formerly The Medical Foundation), Laurie Jo has spent the last 20 years promoting healthy communities in Boston. In her role as the Director of Training and Capacity Building, she has special expertise in the areas of youth development, as a provider of training and support to numerous programs, coalitions, and youth serving agencies in the Boston region, Massachusetts and nationally. She is also the Director of the national BEST Initiative in Boston, a professional development program of support and training for youth workers focusing on the youth development approach. She has contributed to and written youth development and peer leadership curricula and facilitated strategic planning and organizational development initiatives for a variety of youth and other community groups. She particularly has expertise in peer leadership program development, youth/adult collaboration, conflict resolution and alcohol, tobacco and other drug prevention.

Presently she is coordinating large contracts with such clients as the Massachusetts SADD chapter and the province of Ontario, Canada. She serves on the Massachusetts Peer Helpers Association Board of Directors, as a board member of MissionSAFE, a youth agency, and as a parent board member of the Epiphany Middle School, both in Boston. She has also presented at a variety of national conferences, including The American Public Health Association Conference, the National Network for Youth Conference and the National Peer Helpers’ Association Conference.

Her career in youth development and public health promotion follows a 10-year career teaching high school English, French and organizing student activities.

CfC STAFF

Julia Gittleman, Ph.D., CfC Evaluator
Julia is the Principal at Mendelsohn, Gittleman & Associates. After beginning her career as a direct service provider, Julia spent more than a decade planning, designing and managing programs. Before forming Mendelsohn, Gittleman & Associates with Tom Mendelsohn, Julia spent eleven years at Crittenton Hastings House, where she held a number of positions, most recently as the Chief Program Officer/Vice President of Programs.

Over the past few years, Julia has focused primarily on program design and evaluation, best practice and policy research, staff management and multi-agency collaborations. Her clients have included The Boston Foundation, The Barr Foundation, Boston’s After School for All Partnership (now Boston After School & Beyond), Boston Children’s Chorus, YouthBuild Boston, Boston Children’s Museum, International Institute, The Hyams Foundation, The Medical Foundation, City of Boston’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Project Bread, Child Care Resource Center, Inc., West End House Boys & Girls Club, MissionSAFE, Tufts University, New England Literacy Resource Center, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, SABES, and Parents United for Childcare (now BostNet). Julia has a doctorate in social policy from the Heller School at Brandeis University. Her research has concentrated on welfare, substance abuse and family policy.

Lana Jackson, CfC Pilot Project Advisor
Lana Jackson-an artist, arts administrator, and teaching artist is a builder of community social capital. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Massachusetts College of Art and a Masters of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A recipient of numerous awards including the Camille Hanks Cosby Fellowship award, attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting in Maine where she studied with Anish Kapoor, Jessica Stockholder and painter Jacob Lawrence prior to his death in 2000.

Lana as a teaching artist, has taught middle and high school in Boston Public Schools as well as a public art Foundations course three years for MassArt. She wrote the Fine Arts Department curriculum for Boston Latin School’s 2005 accreditation and has sat on many art/culture boards statewide including Art All-State for Worcester’s Art Museum, Boston Globe Scholastic Art Award committee and Boston Plan for Excellence.

Formerly Grants Manager and Director of Boston’s Cultural Council for the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Lana recently held the position of Arts & Culture Coordinator for Boston After School & Beyond, a public/private partnership with the city of Boston. In that capacity she connected people to resources, across six very distinct worlds, under the umbrella of the Arts & Culture Initiative. Some of Lana’s network capacity-building projects included the development of a standardized out-of-school time Curriculum Guide, the Arts/Sports Provider’s Annual Showcase, Providers Arts Resource Center at ExCL Recycle Center and support for expansion of Hyde Park Arts Initiative network.

Returning to her “teaching and artmaking” roots, Lana is founder and CEO of the newly launched agency, PUSH CART ART-teaching artists providing quality art programming for senior communities throughout Massachusetts.

Klare Shaw, Barr Foundation
Klare Shaw - is a Senior Advisor for Education, Arts and Culture at the Barr Foundation. The Barr Foundation is dedicated to the quality of life in greater Boston. Formerly, Shaw was Executive Director of The Boston Globe Foundation, where she had been employed for almost a decade in several positions. She joined the Globe in 1990 after two years in charge of Boston contributions for the Bank of New England, NA. Prior to that, Shaw was head of community arts and education at the agency now known as the MA Cultural Council. Earlier nonprofit employment is as follows: Action for Boston Community Development, the Children’s Museum/Boston, and the YWCA - Aswalos House. Long involved with many local nonprofit agencies, she currently serves on two nonprofit boards and the steering committees of several local funding collaboratives.

Christine Lamas Weinberg, CfC Pilot Project Manager
Christine Lamas Weinberg is an independent consultant in Philanthropy and Projects in the Arts. She has over a decade of experience working with non-profit organizations and corporations, and has spent the last five years working on strategic grantmaking, research, and project management and evaluation for major Foundations in Boston.

Prior to becoming an independent consultant, Christine worked with New England Foundation for the Arts and Philanthropic Advisors, LLC., where she managed a portfolio of projects in arts education, cultural diversity, public art, and international affairs. As part of her job, she has also participated in numerous proposal review panels in the New England region, and has co-moderated convenings and meetings with grantees. In the summer of 2003, Christine worked with Barr Foundation on a research project about out-of-school-time opportunities for Boston youth that helped advance the Foundation’s strategy in the areas of arts and culture.

Before moving to Boston, Christine worked in marketing and special events for Arthur Andersen and Mobil Oil Corporation in Peru. Besides serving as a liaison between the clients and the company, her responsibilities included creating and implementing marketing strategies, organizing events, and promoting corporate responsibility.

Christine holds a B.S. in Communications and Journalism from the University of Lima and a M.S. in Arts Administration from Boston University.

CfC PROJECT PARTNERS