Naomi Waibel

Naomi Waibel, Consultant, Korngold Consulting LLC, has significant international experience in project management, regulatory law and cross-cultural relations. With language skills in Japanese and German, Naomi has lived and worked in the United States, Europe and Asia in for-profit and nonprofit sectors. In 2011, Naomi was hired to complete an external review of the application of the EU Takeover Bids Directive for the European Commission. Through this project, she worked with legal experts, stakeholders, top European companies and national supervisory authorities across twenty-two EU member states and nine non-EU countries. The final report has been adopted and published by the Commission and used as a basis for recommending revisions to the Directive.

Naomi has also worked as a project manager and consultant for Mobile Technologies LLC, most notably working on the initial launch of Jibbigo, a mobile speech translation app for iPhone and Android. She continues to advise the company on marketing strategy as well as development of its humanitarian efforts.

In addition to her international work, Naomi has also spent several years working in the independent music business during a key shift in the industry due to illegal online downloading. From these experiences, she brings knowledge of how to adapt to modern challenges as well as converting such challenges into opportunities.

Naomi holds a J.D. from New York Law School and a B.A. in Economics and International Affairs from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Naomi has also studied at Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata, Japan where she was involved with nonprofits such as Mekong Watch, Group 21 and Transcend International. During law school, Naomi specialized in regulatory law, working at the NYLS Securities Arbitration Clinic and serving as a judicial intern for Judge Leo Gordon at the United States Court of International Trade. Naomi is also an alumni of the Law Without Walls program, where she focused on ways to increase transparency in international arbitration. 

Committed to public service, Naomi has done pro bono work for the New York Domestic Violence Project and collaborated with the Asian American Bar Association of New York to develop an outreach program to educate vulnerable minority communities on investor rights and responsibilities. Most recently, Naomi has volunteered her time to assist small business owners in lower Manhattan following the devastation from Hurricane Sandy.

Dr. Debra Beck

Dr. Debra Beck brings experience and expertise as an educator, trainer and facilitator. Debra has served on, and consulted with, nonprofit boards at the local, state, regional and national levels. More than 30 years of service on boards has given her a strong understanding of the special challenges and rewards of governance.

Debra is an experienced facilitator and trainer, specializing in mission-driven nonprofit board development, strategic planning, and team building. Special focus across her work is generative governance: encouraging boards to ask big questions and seek creative solutions that advance their organization’s vision of the future. Her adult education background also provides the foundation for focus on building collective governance capacity by creating an environment that values learning in all of its forms.

Debra writes a popular board-focused blog, the Laramie Board Learning Project. She also hosts an online site supporting the special leadership responsibilities of board presidents (http://boardpresidents.wikispaces.com/), a resource created to support a workshop she presented at the American Bar Association’s Bar Leadership Institute.

She also is an award-winning distance educator, with more than a decade of experience teaching online courses on nonprofit management and leadership. She creates media-rich environments accommodating a range of learning needs. Currently, Debra is an adjunct faculty member for universities in Wyoming and Pennsylvania.

Debra received the Center for Creative Leadership’s 1997 Kenneth E. Clark Award for best graduate leadership paper for research based on her master’s thesis in organizational communication. That research explored the relationships between a nonprofit board and executive director.

Debra’s dissertation (in adult and postsecondary education) was titled “The Practice of Generative Governance: A Case Study Exploring Board Learning in Context.”

Madeline Boccuzzi

Madeline Boccuzzi brings experience in international program development, strategic planning, fundraising, financial management, and project management to the team. Her experience is drawn from her work in nonprofits, higher education, and international government.

Madeline recently completed the Master of Science in Global Health program at Duke University, where her fieldwork and thesis research took to her Laos where she worked with the World Health Organization and the The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to evaluate the country's HIV and malaria supply chains.  Her research findings are helping guide the country's health systems strengthening strategies and were submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals.

Madeline served as an officer on the board of directors of a nonprofit engaged in HIV/AIDS prevention work in East Africa. Her involvement with this board followed her experience working in a Tanzanian village teaching HIV education to school children, village leaders, and community members. Madeline is proficient in Swahili.

Prior to graduate school, Madeline worked for the Consulate General of Canada in Los Angeles in their Trade and Business Development department. Before moving to the west coast in 2009, Madeline worked for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York City, where she was the Project Associate for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum. Previously, she worked at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where she was the Office/Program Manager for the Division of Postgraduate Education.

Madeline graduated magna cum laude from Colby College with degrees in Women’s Studies and Science, Technology, and Society.

Dr. Daphne A. Kenyon

Daphne A. Kenyon, Ph.D. has over twenty-five years of experience in research, education, public policy, and board governance in the field of public finance. She serves as principal of D.A. Kenyon & Associates, a public finance consulting firm and as a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. At the Lincoln Institute, she has published several reports, the most recent of which is Payments in Lieu of Taxes: Balancing Municipal and Nonprofit Interests, and presented the conclusions of these reports at various meetings across the U.S. She organizes educational seminars for state legislators and a mentoring workshop for junior economists.

Kenyon serves on three boards, including the New Hampshire State Board of Education, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s New England Public Policy Center Advisory Board, and the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit, nonpartisan body made up of governors, legislators, state agency heads, and members of elected boards. Kenyon was appointed to the New Hampshire State Board of Education and the Education Commission of the States by New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch.

Kenyon’s prior positions include president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, professor and chair of the Economics Department at Simmons College, senior economist with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Urban Institute, and assistant professor at Dartmouth College. The courses she taught most frequently are public economics, introductory microeconomics, and econometrics. Her research and consulting have focused on state and local public finance, education policy, economics of nonprofits, health care policy and taxation. She has published widely in journals, books and monographs, and is the co-author of two books: Coping with Mandates (with Michael Fix) and Competition among States and Local Governments (with John Kincaid), both published by the Urban Institute. Kenyon earned her B.A. in Economics from Michigan State University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan.