Cohort 6 (2022-2023)

Daisha Versaw is a storytelling and strategy consultant, creative writer, community cultivator, and bridge builder. She has worked in economic development in the public sector, been an investor and entrepreneur in the private sector, directed philanthropic programs in the nonprofit sector, and spent over a decade and a half learning from and contributing to a number of community-based organizations in various roles—staff, board member, consultant, donor, mentor, and volunteer.

Originally from the San Luis Valley, a high desert farming community in southern Colorado, Daisha has early lived experience in poverty and rural life. From there, she went on to live in various places around the Western United States and globally as her family migrated for work. She returned to Colorado to take part in her own love story—a move that yielded a partner, three sons, and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Colorado over a few whirlwind years. 

Daisha is also Jesuit educated, holding a graduate degree in management from Regis University where she first began thinking seriously about her role in building a more just and humane world. Over time, this has become her life’s work, growing her into a firm advocate for social and economic justice and building community trust and relationships. Now living in Olympia, WA with her family, she works to support her community through strategy and systems work, capacity building, and storytelling as the founder and principal consultant at Salmonberry Community Strategies.

When she is not fiddling with a system map, investing in local sauerkraut companies, or plotting a mutiny, you’ll find her teaching her three teen boys how to cook; wandering a rainforest, mountain, or beach on the lands of the Coast Salish people with her husband; writing science fiction; or around the fire with friends.

Rakiba Kibria is a lifelong learner, a mom, a partner, a daughter, and a plant lover. She comes from a lineage of refugees, liberation fighters, community organizers, educators, and farmers.   

Rakiba has tough love for the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, which have been her professional home for over 13 years. The majority of her career has been as a fundraiser for human services nonprofits in NYC focused on young people.   

Through her work, she intimately understands the challenges small and large social sector organizations face and are often ill-equipped to solve due to a lack of diverse leadership, informed programming from communities most impacted, and approaching problems from a dominant worldview and scarcity mindset. At Common Future, she leads the Revenue team to fundraise for community-led economic solutions created by/for/with BIPOC leaders on the ground.   

Rakiba is a big believer in the quadruple bottom line: people, planet, equity, and profit. She believes philanthropy and impact investing have the power and responsibility to remedy centuries of extraction, exploitation, and harm suffered by marginalized communities and our planet. It is through trusted relationships in the social sector we can begin to radically reimagine solutions to the problems plaguing our communities by taking risks, catalyzing change, and accelerating and incentivizing impact over profit.   

She is a first-gen Bangladeshi American with strong Queens, NYC pride. Rakiba holds a B.A. from American University in International Development and Economics and an M.S. from Columbia University in Nonprofit Management — where she was also an Associate Instructor for the program.    

Samir L. Doshi, Ph.D. (he/him) is a Director at the CS Fund working on a Just Transition for communities through an intersectional approach to justice, joy, belonging, and liberation. He is also a Race and Technology Fellow at Stanford University’s Digital Civil Society Lab. Previously, Samir has worked as an organizer and facilitator for movement organizations and communities in food and land sovereignty, farmworker justice, and climate justice in pushing for systems transformations through a foundation of racial, gender, and intersectional justice. He worked for the Obama Administration as a Senior Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and on the White House Task Force for the Ebola Response in West Africa, as well as a Senior Scientist and Deputy Division Chief for the US Agency for International Development. At USAID, Samir led the Agency’s programming on agile development, responsible data, and disaster/emergency feedback systems so programming could be more responsive and adaptive to emerging community needs on the ground.   

Samir has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Cambridge, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Santa Fe Institute, and as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Before his academic career, Samir worked for years as an environmental engineer and emergency humanitarian responder for local organizations and indigenous communities in dozens of countries on six continents. Samir’s Ph.D. specialization was in Systems Ecology, focusing on how communities can develop a regenerative economy by regenerating degraded soil ecosystems. His doctoral work on regenerating coalfield communities in Appalachia helped win the first Buckminster Fuller Design Challenge and the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Award. He has a M.Sc. in Community Development Economics and a B.Sc. in Computer Systems Engineering. Samir has also worked in kitchens and farms for many years, loves to cook, cultivate plants, play in the wilds, and along with his wife Marit, is enraptured by their baby, Edhas Drømmer.   

     

Stephanie Green is the Chief Strategist of Partnerships at Women’s Foundation California, where she leads efforts to engage communities of support to fund and advance a gender-just future for California. Stephanie was previously the Development Manager for Advancement and Planned Giving with Mother Jones. During the 2004 Presidential campaign, Stephanie was the Canvass Director for Grassroots Campaigns in San Francisco and led MoveOn’s final get-out-the-vote work in Albuquerque, NM. She holds a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Texas where she was the teaching assistant for Governor Ann Richards.  

She received her undergraduate degree from St. Mary’s College of California, where she helped found the college’s Women’s Resource and Research Center. She currently serves as the School Site Council Chair at her children’s elementary school. Stephanie and her husband Adam have two children and reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Christopher Williams is a family historian, agile coach, and strategist based in Atlanta, GA. With nearly ten years of experience in research, marketing, consulting, and agile project management, Christopher’s work focuses on strategically aligning talents, resources, ideas, and people’s lived experiences with the categorical needs of various projects and programs, ranging from social good to technology, while placing Black-queer people at the forefront of these efforts.

Christopher’s genealogical research focuses on their ancestral homes of New Orleans and Bayou Teche, Louisiana, as well as Hermitage, Tennessee. This research has revealed a long-set culture of innate African-inspired family structures that prioritize community, communal building, and shared resources.

This deep research and love of community led Christopher to co-found The COWRIE Initiative 501(c)3, an organization dedicated to cooperative economics and reinvestment within the Black community in the United States. Along with their co-founders in 2015, Christopher launched BankBlackUSA, the most comprehensive resource within the #BankBlack movement.

Currently, Christopher serves on the Board of Advisors for the Black Inmate Commissary Fund (BICF), a Black women and queer-led mutual-aid organization focused on providing resources to those most affected by the American carceral system in the American south. They have provided historical context, political literature, social strategy, and an overall dedication to the BICF cause, truly understanding the importance of marginalized group cooperation within anti-Black systems.

*Christopher responds to all pronouns and does not use honorifics.