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Getting to know the CAN team!
CAN was founded in 2009, by a group of volunteers who met while working for grassroots nonprofits in Kenya. They had the privilege of working with exemplary and visionary community leaders, and decided to band together to create an organization that would allow them to follow in their example in promoting social justice. Throughout the two years, CAN has maintained its vision of strong community participation and direct working relationships with local community based organizations with the help of a small, dedicated team of volunteers.
We are inspired by the community leaders in Kenya we work with, who achieve so much with so little and make our work possible. Working with them helps our projects feel organic to local conditions, and building these global relationships based on mutual respect makes the whole endeavor worthwhile. – Santiago Perez
Maggie Woo
Born in beautiful Vancouver, Canada, Maggie is currently finishing up a masters degree in medical anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her research explores the politics of food security and local experiences of hunger in Coastal Southeastern Tanzania. The research project aims to explore strategies to make development and global health projects work with communities and their local situations and perspectives. She has previously traveled to East Africa in 2009 with McGill University and then backpacked from Cape Town to Cairo afterwards. During the trip, she fell in love with Africa and became very interested in the lives and stories of people there. She began working with CAN in 2010 when she and her partner, Bryan Kinshella, embarked on an amazing journey kayaking for three months from Vancouver to Ketchikan, Alaska to raise money for the chicken coop project in Western Kenya. She is inspired by the incredible strength and creativity of her friends and colleagues both within CAN and with partners in East Africa.
Santiago Perez
Born in Mexico City, where he lived for fourteen
years, and where he would eventually like to settle,
Santiago moved to Canada for high school. He pursued his undergraduate education at McGill University in Montreal, graduating with a Bachelor's in Sociology. In 2009, Santiago traveled to Kenya on an academic engagement with McGill, after which he remained for eight months. He worked at a Microfinance institution in Western Kenya, where he met other volunteers who together would become the founding team of the Community Alliance Network. He has been the Financial Officer of CAN for the last two years and is proud of what the organization has been able to achieve in that time. He is currently pursuing an MBA Majoring in Statistics and in Sustainable Business. He works at the Midtown Manhattan Small Business Development Center, which provides support to entrepreneurs in defining, financing and better managing their businesses. His specialties include entrepreneurship, quantitative analysis, non-profit management and Microfinance.
Erin Coughlan
Originally from Massachusetts, Erin completed an undergraduate degree at McGill University in
Canada, with which she was able to travel to East
Africa for the first time. While in Kenya, she carried
out research on land tenure, drought, and climate
change with Maasai pastoralists,
and has since completed a Master's degree in Climate and Society. Currently, she is working as a consultant in the Community Resilience Department of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Nairobi, Kenya.
Crystal Maria Scialla
One of the Community Alliance Network's newest members, Crystal graduated from Princeton University in 2005 with a bachelor of arts in public and international relations, and from Columbia Law School in May 2009. Upon graduation from law school, Crystal volunteered with a non-profit organization in Western Kenya,
where she helped to develop and lead health education seminars for women
in rural villages, and where she met the founding members of the Community
Alliance Network. She subsequently worked for two years as an associate in
the litigation department of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, and is currently serving
as a Rockefeller Brothers Fund fellow in non-profit law at the Vera Institute of
Justice in New York City.
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