About Us

Who We Are

Our Vision

We envision a world in which every East African community has the capacity to implement dynamic, sustainable solutions to the challenges they face.

Our Mission

Advancing community-led initiatives that improve education and public health in        East Africa.

Our Team

Global Partners is committed to advancing fair and equitable partnerships in
global development.

David Stare

David Stare

President

Anna Haight

Vice President

David J. Castenholz

Treasurer

Peter Verbiscar-Brown

Executive Director Emeritus
Nick Fusso

Nicholas Fusso

Co - Executive Director

Daniel Casanova

Director

Don Harris

President Emeritus & Secretary

Jeremy Walker, Esq.

Director

Alais Morindat

Advisory Board Member

Rene Bagaygay

Advisory Board Member

Arianna Clyde, CPA

Advisory Board Member

Linda Lea, PHD

Advisory Board Member

John Malago

Advisory Board Member

Mary Morindat

Advisory Board Member

Naome R. Ruhombe

Advisory Board Member

Amon Ariyo Tusingwire

Advisory Board Member

Roshan N. Kaderali

Advisory Board Member
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David Stare

Board member since 2009. David is founder and board chair of Dry Creek Vineyards. He received engineering degrees from MIT and Northwestern before moving to California where he attended UC Davis and founded Dry Creek Vineyard. After a successful 35 years in the wine business, Dave pursues the arts, travels, and serves on several community Boards.

Anna Haight

Board member since 2012 and former board member 2000-2004. Anna brings broad management and human resources experience through her 20+ years at a global Japanese owned conglomerate with its US headquarters in San Francisco. Anna has traveled with Global Partners to Africa three times in the last two decades deepening her commitment to community-driven development and education as proven ways forward for self-sustainability.  She currently provides consulting services to a variety of businesses as a partner in Groundwork in Mill Valley, CA.

David J. Castenholz

Board member since 2012, and former board president 1993-1998. David joined World Runners in 1979 and became a board member in 1989. Using marathons as a vehicle to raise funds, David became a major contributor to Global Partners for Development. Being deeply committed to making a difference in East Africa, David has significantly multiplied Global Partners contributions through his advocacy. His leadership was pivotal in the emergence of Global Partners for Development from World Runners. David has traveled to East Africa several times. A practicing attorney in the State of California since 1987, David holds a B.A. from Stanford University and J.D. from Boston University.

Peter Verbiscar-Brown

Returning board member 2012 and former executive director and board member of World Runners and Global Partners 1982 – 2010. A graduate of Loyola University, Chicago (BA) and the University of Hawaii School of Public Health (MPH), Peter worked for federal and local governments in health planning and been president of community and international charitable foundations. He oversaw hundreds of fundraising running events and guided the disbursement of $10+ million toward ending hunger and poverty. Peter remains dedicated to partnering donors with African communities toward practical, sustainable solutions to better lives. He has run 60 marathons and ultra-marathons for pledges, and is now an avid bicyclist.

Nick Fusso

Nicholas Fusso

Nicholas Fusso is a nonprofit leader and social entrepreneur dedicated to fighting extreme poverty.

As Co-Executive Director at Global Partners for Development, he draws on over a decade of experience launching and scaling impactful organizations. Nicholas co-founded D-Prize, which has helped over 277 new ventures deliver essential health, energy, and agriculture solutions to more than 11 million people across Africa and beyond. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Global Distributors Collective and holds an MBA from Claremont Graduate University.

Nicholas is passionate about empowering communities and advancing sustainable development

Daniel Casanova

Daniel leads Global Partners for Development as the Director and Co-Executive Director. He has been a part of the organization since 2013. With a BA and MA in Humanities and Philosophy from Dominican University of California, his educational background deeply informs his approach to community development and social justice.

Boasting over 25 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, Daniel has honed his expertise in board and community relations, resource development, program and clinical services management, and grant writing. His work has spanned diverse populations and issues, from syringe exchange programs in Los Angeles to economic empowerment projects in Tanzania.

A dedicated philanthropist, Daniel continues his family’s legacy of service and care, driven by a deep commitment to making a positive impact in the world. Outside of his professional endeavors, he enjoys playing basketball, swimming, and cherishing moments with his wife and children.

Don Harris

Board member since 1993. Don is co-founder of Elk Creamery LLC, California’s first certified organic goat dairy. Partnership was key to his successes and leadership development in the dairy, healthcare, and hi-tech industries. His educational background is in art, architecture and medicine. In 1981, Don started running marathons to fundraise for non-profit organizations focused on ending world hunger. Don has traveled to East Africa multiple times. He did his undergraduate studies at College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and California State University, Hayward.

Jeremy Walker

Jeremy Walker has strong business sector contacts and is an experienced advocate. He has been involved in the Philadelphia business and political community since arriving in 2003 and is already an emerging leader. In 2006, Jeremy started his own law firm and worked on dozens of campaigns, forging strong relationships with a wide range of elected officials and their counterparts in the business community. He has built one of the area’s best-respected minority-owned law firms in Philadelphia.

Jeremy has expanded his expertise and work in Real Estate and Development and transportation. In 2013, he launched STSC Transportation Services, Philadelphia’s first minority-owned and operated bus company, with a fleet of fives buses. In 2014, Jeremy brokered a deal and became one of three owners to take over the original Chinatown Bus Terminal. He started running a travel agency, Focus Travel, out of the location as well as his new company Yep Tour. Today, Jeremy has 93 buses that run more trips to NYC, SC, NC, FL and GA than any other bus company.

In 2017, Jeremy created National Driver Solutions a trucking company that services some of the largest companies in the region such as Shoprite, Nissan and General Motors. Jeremy brokers new contracts, renegotiates current contracts, and oversees finances with accountants. He also optimizes human resources, meets with customers and oversees various departments. Jeremy’s extensive business expertise will be a tremendous asset to Global Partners’ board.

Roshan D. Kaderali

Roshan was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her mother is Scottish and her father an Indian from Kenya. She was raised in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania where my father had a medical practice as a physician. She attended boarding school in Edinburgh and graduated in 1964. She then began my nursing training Edinburgh at the Western General Hospital followed by a graduate training as a midwife at the Elsie Ingles Hospital. 

She married her husband, who was born in Tanzania, in 1968 and came to the USA in 1970 for his graduate program at Harvard. They then headed West to California where they built their family. She continued to work as an RN, specializing in obstetrics including childbirth education, lactation specialist and parenting support. She branched out and became an entrepreneur developing natural products for children and has had her business, “Mommy’s Bliss,” for 23 years with her daughter operating as CEO. 

Her mission has always been to help those less fortunate, especially in East Africa where she spent her childhood. She joined a group and returned to Tanzania as a volunteer and taught HIV prevention to local schools, communities around the Arusha area especially the Massai. Since then, she has volunteered in a mobile health clinic in Karatu and went with GPFD in 2010.

Amy Holter

With a master’s degree in international development and experience working for local and international, large and small organizations, Amy Holter is a monitoring, evaluation, and learning consultant at Global Partners. She has extensive experience designing, analyzing, and producing reports on qualitative and quantitative impact evaluations and specializes in community-led programming. Amy is also the Director of Integrative Programs at Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa.

Sara D. Henning

Sara Henning, Director of Strategy, joined Global Partners in April 2016. She holds a B.S. in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing from the University of Missouri and J.D. from the UCLA School of Law. She has expertise in developing and managing programs and extensive experience working with international organizations.

After working as a litigator, Sara changed career paths and ended up traveling for several months in East Africa, training teens to become peer educators in Santa Monica, CA and eventually helping to plan and implement a HIV/AIDS Treatment Summit in Los Angeles. Sara next moved to South Africa to serve with the U.S. Peace Corps. As a Peace Corps volunteer, Sara conducted life skills trainings for young women, established a legal aid clinic in her rural village, taught classes at a primary school and developed training programs and monitoring and evaluation tools for a NGO supporting people living with HIV/AIDS.

Marisa Mazria Katz

Marisa Mazria Katz is a reporter and editor who has contributed to numerous publications, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Vogue, NPR, Marketplace, Time and the New York Review of Books, on subjects as wide-ranging as culture and heritage in conflict zones and the geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa. She has been awarded major grants from the Keith Haring Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Andy Warhol Foundation for her editorial work. In 2009 she received funding from the US State Department for a four-year-program that taught journalism to teenagers from a marginalized community in Casablanca, Morocco. In 2018 Mazria Katz served as one of the first Kickstarter Fellows, and later that year she founded the Craig Newmark Philanthropies–funded program the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism, an award-winning program whose central mission is to place writing by artists in major media publications like the New Yorker, the Guardian, Wired and the Atlantic. Marisa holds a dual BFA degree in film and TV and theater from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MA (magna cum laude) in Middle East history from Tel Aviv University.