Tuesday 7:30-10:20pm - Carol Martin

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) advances America’s foreign policy interests while improving lives in developing countries. USAID's Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) Strategy supports citizens’ participation, rights, and inclusion, for example, through free and fair elections, and governance, through the transparent, accountable, and efficient delivery of such government services as justice and access to education, food, healthcare, and jobs. DRG programs are implemented in partnership with national governments, international agencies, the private sector, and local and international civil society organizations. There is ongoing debate, however, about the sustainability and effectiveness of USAID’s approach in advancing US national security and achieving broader social and economic development goals.    

The task force will analyze lessons learned and best practices to assess the impact of USAID’s DRG bilateral development assistance in select countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The task force report will be in the form of policy recommendations for strengthening USAID DRG programs. 

Carol L. Martin, PhD served as Democracy and Governance advisor for USAID at the Regional Center for Southern Africa in Botswana and USAID/Mozambique and as a Senior Policy Advisor for the US Department of State’s First Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. She has also consulted overseas for global non-governmental organizations and served as the executive director for the African Studies Association.

Wednesday 7:30-10:20pm - Martin Flaherty

The People’s Republic of China [PRC] presents the greatest and most complex challenge to the realization of international human rights.  No other society has realized so many economic and social rights so quickly and on such a vast scale.  Yet the PRC remains among the greatest and most persistent offenders of civil and political rights.  Assaults on human rights and the rule of law have increased dramatically under Xi Jinping. Domestically, the has engaged in often brutal crackdowns on ethnic and religious minorities, civil society groups, lawyers, human rights advocates, and academics, including Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong.  Beyond its own borders the PRC has also sought to stifle criticism of its actions beyond its borders.  Finally, the PRC has also sought to undermine international human rights law at the UN and in other fora.

This Task Force will study the PRC’s ongoing assault the rule of law and consider what possible steps that the US government under the Biden Administration should respond.  Specific topics include: academic freedom, legal reform, anti-discrimination, the environment, women’s rights, and LGBT issues, as well as possible responses in international forums, including the UN.  The Task Force will make recommendations to relevant organizations in New York and Washington D.C., including the Council on Foreign Relations, Congressional Staff, the State Department, and National Security Council staff at the White House, and Congress.

Martin S. Flaherty is Leitner Family Professor of International Law and Founding Co-Director of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School and Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School.  He is also a founder of the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers, and President of the American Association of the International Commission of Jurists.

Wednesday 1:30-4:00 PM - Susan Marquis

Spurred by the disruptions of COVID-19, the reality of a tight labor market, or simply the realization that minimum wage is not a living wage, recent headlines have declared a new energy in fighting for fair pay and safe working conditions in industries and professions ranging from Starbuck baristas, UPS and Amazon delivery staff, teachers, grad students, farmworkers, and autoworkers. This policy task force will examine both the history of workers’ rights and organization in the United States and exploration of new models for defining and claiming these rights including worker-driven social responsibility, grassroots organizing, and new approaches to unionization.

Susan L. Marquis is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Profession as Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, former Frank and Marie Carlucci Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and author of I Am Not A Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took on the Fast Food Giants and Won (Cornell, 2017) and Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces. She has published commentaries on topics including human rights and social justice and groundbreaking women in national security and STEM fields and spoken on new approaches to public policy and leveraging technology in the public interest at forums ranging from the USC Institute for Body Computing to the AMP Music Summit to the Aspen Institute.

Monday 7:30-10:00 PM - Minh-Thu-Pham

This Task Force aims to equip students with a better understanding of when and why global institutions work and what it takes to make global policy effective. We will examine the roles, responsibilities, and effectiveness of international institutions in helping to manage global crises, and how the Biden Administration, UN, EU, or NATO officials, or other decision-makers should respond. We will study successes and failures of multilateralism, whether the system is working the way it was designed to, and the role that governments, civil society, the private sector, and others play in its effectiveness.

With 20 years of experience at the forefront of global policymaking and innovative ventures, Minh-Thu is a political and policy entrepreneur, nonprofit leader, and activist. She is co-founder and CEO of Project Starling, is a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and teaches at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. 

As a former refugee and boat person from Vietnam, Minh-Thu knows how it feels to be powerless. And as a leader who has operated at senior levels of the policy world, she also knows what it’s like to have power. Driven by a belief that change requires connecting people, ideas, and power, Minh-Thu builds networks of policymakers, activists, and experts and helps them work together to build momentum for change. She leverages her knowledge of international relations and institutions, social change, political organizing, strategic communications, and public policy to shape politics and policy, mobilize action, and help ideas make an impact.

Previously, Minh-Thu was an advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, where she helped to steer the UN through a period of deep crisis after the Iraq War and played a key role in the 2005 World Summit to address the crisis in multilateralism at that time. As executive director of global policy at the UN Foundation for over a decade, she started and ran a global effort to help the UN create and deliver the Sustainable Development Goals, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda for Financing for Sustainable Development, and undertake institutional reforms. Minh-Thu has led dozens of track 1.5 and track 2 dialogues with government officials and civil society actors that have resulted in political breakthroughs. She built a global network of stakeholders to shape summit negotiations, which included think tanks and civil society actors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Her work helped to open up UN decision-making processes to those not usually represented. More recently, Minh-Thu has advised efforts to strengthen democracy globally and in the United States, and led an effort to mobilize immigrant voters in the 2020 U.S. presidential election and tackle misinformation targeting them.

Minh-Thu has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, NBC Nightly News, the Tavis Smiley Show, and Cheddar TV among others. She serves on the boards of several nonprofits and is a member of the Leadership Now Project, a fellow of the Truman National Security Project, and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She received her MPA in international politics and policy from Princeton University, and she has a BA in History from Duke University.

Monday 7:30-10:00 PM  - Nicky Sheats

The environmental justice (EJ) advocacy community has almost uniquely called for climate change mitigation policy to not only fight climate change but to also address the disproportionate amount of pollution often found in EJ residential communities, i.e. communities Of Color and low-income communities. In New Jersey, the EJ community has suggested polices that don’t use carbon-trading to lower mobile source GHG emissions but some questions remain regarding these strategies such as: do some policies need to be prioritized; how can it be ensured that policies will achieve reductions in EJ communities; are there legal barriers to such policies; and do additional policies need to be developed?

Dr. Nicky Sheats, Esq., is the director of the Center for the Urban Environment of the John S. Watson Institute for Urban Policy and Research at Kean University and has defined the primary mission of the Center as providing support for the environmental justice (EJ) community.  Among the issues he works on are air pollution, climate change, cumulative impacts, developing EJ legal strategies and increasing the working capacity of the EJ community. Sheats was a founding member of the NJ EJ Alliance, EJ Leadership Forum, EJ and Science Initiative, the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform and an informal NE EJ Attorneys Group. He has been appointed to the NJ Clean Air Council, EPA’s Clean Air Act Advisory Committee and National EJ Advisory Council, and was a co-author of the human health chapter of the 2014 national climate assessment. He is currently serving on the newly created White House EJ Advisory Council. Early in his career Sheats practiced law as a public interest attorney. He holds a B.A. from Princeton University and earned a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences, J.D. and M.P.P. from Harvard University. 

Wednesday 1:30-4:00 PM  - Raquelle Jeffers / Wendy McWeeney/ Jhneille Reynolds

This course will introduce students to the maternal mortality crisis facing the United States and New Jersey. This class will examine the multipronged, multi-stakeholder effort to make New Jersey the safest place in the nation to give birth and raise a baby. Students will study the conditions that led to the historically poor maternal health outcomes in the state. In conversation with movement leaders, practitioners, course facilitators, and one another, they will explore the policy and practice components of the birth equity movement, including philanthropy, community organizing and activism, clinical and non-clinical care providers (midwives, doulas, perinatal Community Health Workers) and health care policy and financing.

Raquel Mazon Jeffers is co-director of The Community Health Acceleration Partnership (CHAP), where she is  focused on creating more integrated and community-based care systems at the state and national level. Ms. Mazon Jeffers brings over 30 years of experience leading transformative public health initiatives. She’s impacted health and behavioral health systems on behalf of Government agencies, foundations and non-profits. Much of her work has focused on delivery system reform for vulnerable populations. Together with her CHAP colleagues and partners, Raquel is working to change the role of philanthropy, carving out new spaces for donors to listen, putting the decision-making power in the hands of community members, and ensuring that investments facilitate sustainable, positive community health change. Before joining CHAP, Ms. Mazon Jeffers was a Senior Program Officer at The Nicholson Foundation, where she led grantmaking on population health, telehealth, and maternal and child health. Prior to Nicholson, Ms. Mazon Jeffers served as Deputy Director of the Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services for the New Jersey Department of Human Services. In this role, she modernized New Jersey’s addition system of care increasing access and integrating behavioral health and primary care services. Ms. Mazon Jeffers holds two Master’s degrees, one in Public Health and the other in International Affairs.

Wendy McWeeny is co-director of The Community Health Acceleration Partnership, where she leads the team in building high-impact community health programs through collaboration, capacity-building and mobilization of private and public resources. Throughout her career, Wendy has worked to advance birth equity, strengthen community-based workforce programs and policies, and build philanthropic alliances to better coordinate and leverage public dollars. Wendy has worked in philanthropy for over two decades, primarily as a senior advisor at the MCJ Amelior Foundation, the family foundation of Ray Chambers, U.N. and WHO Special Envoy and founder of Wesray Capital. Wendy staffed projects in Newark, NJ prior to heading the Foundation’s global portfolio, where she helped to establish two non-profits, Millennium Promise and Malaria No More. While at the MCJ Amelior Foundation Wendy also supported the establishment of the first Office of the UN Special Envoy for Malaria, which had an instrumental role in increasing financing for malaria interventions and decreasing malaria deaths by 50%. Her work with this office expanded to supporting Community Health Worker programs in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to an interest in growing and financially sustaining community-based workforces in Africa and subsequently the U.S. Wendy received her BA from Princeton University, where she also received a Master’s in Public Administration from the School for Public and International Affairs. 

Jhenielle Reynolds (she/her) is a deeply curious, passionate advocate for reproductive justice and holistic wellness who brings a global, intersectional perspective to her work. She is currently the Program Manager of the Community Health Acceleration Partnership (CHAP), where she leverages her experience as a birth worker for systems-level change. As Program Manager, Jhenielle partners with CHAP’s directors to support the organization’s portfolio of maternal health and community health grants and serves as CHAP’s liaison to the New Jersey Birth Equity Funders Alliance.

Jhenielle is also a practicing birth doula and Integrative Lactation and Feeding Specialist who embarked on her journey in birthwork after learning from and working with a team of midwives and obstetricians in rural Argentina to learn more about the framework of parto humanizado which loosely translates as “humanized birth” and centers the needs of the birthing person during labor and childbirth. She currently works with expectant families living and birthing in northern New Jersey and some parts of Manhattan. Jhenielle’s professional experience has crossed public, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors. These experiences provided her the opportunity to toggle between engaging directly with communities and larger systems. Her experiences in higher education and philanthropy include working as an admissions officer, virtual college adviser, and overseeing program operations for a national grant-funded initiative at Bloomberg Philanthropies that provided free college advising services to over 80,000 high achieving low-income students across the country. Jhenielle received a BA in Global Studies focused on Global Health in Latin America, with minors in Medical Anthropology and Spanish for the Health Professions from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Tuesday 1:30-4:00PM - Ali Nouri

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds significant promise for societal advancement, offering the potential to enhance decision-making, streamline processes, and even revolutionize fields such as cancer treatment. However, the proliferation of AI also raises substantial concerns, including the risk of discrimination, the dissemination of disinformation, and the potential to help malicious actors misuse technologies to create bioweapons and other societal ills. To address these multifaceted challenges, the Biden Administration has issued an Executive Order (EO) on the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of AI. The EO aims to take a multi-agency approach aimed at mitigating AI-related risks. This approach may encompass the development of standards to prevent discriminatory practices, the implementation of rigorous testing and vulnerability assessments of AI systems, and support for researchers to drive innovation and uphold U.S. leadership in the global AI landscape. In a task force focused on AI security policy, students will critically examine the federal government's response to the emerging AI sector.

Dr. Ali Nouri was a Deputy Assistant to President Biden and Deputy Director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Previously he was nominated by the President and confirmed by the US Senate as an Assistant Secretary in the Department of Energy where he led the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs. Prior to joining the Biden Administration, Dr. Nouri was the President of the Federation of American Scientists, a public policy organization focused on countering WMDs, addressing emerging infectious diseases, and crafting policy solutions to science, technology, and national security challenges. Dr. Nouri previously served on US Senate staff as a science and technology fellow, an energy and environment advisor, a national security advisor, and a legislative director for nearly a decade. He has also served as an advisor to the office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan where he developed initiatives to block the applications of biotechnology toward biological weapons. He earned a B.A. in biology from Reed College and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Princeton University.