Vivek Maru Chief Executive Officer |

From 2003 to 2007, Vivek co-founded and co-directed the Sierra Leonean organization Timap for Justice, which has been recognized by the International Crisis Group, Transparency International, and President Jimmy Carter as a pioneering model for delivering justice services in the context of a weak state and a plural legal system. While in Sierra Leone he also supervised the human rights clinic at Fourah Bay College.

After that, Vivek served as senior counsel in the Justice Reform Group of the World Bank. His work focused on rule of law reform and governance, primarily in West Africa and South Asia. In 2011 Vivek launched Namati, to grow the field of legal empowerment around the world.

Vivek previously worked at Human Rights Watch and clerked for Hon. Marsha Berzon on the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 1997-1998 Vivek lived in a hut of dung and sticks in a village in Kutch, his native place, working on watershed management and girls’ education with two grassroots development organizations- Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangethan and Sahjeevan.

Vivek graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, and Yale Law School.
His publications include Between Law and Society: Paralegals and the Provision of Justice Services in Sierra Leone and Worldwide in the Yale Journal of International Law and Allies Unknown: Legal Empowerment and Social Accountability in the Harvard Journal of Health and Human Rights.

Vivek serves on the international advisory council of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the advisory board of the evaluation firm ID Insight, and the governing board of the public entrepreneurship organization Res Publica. Vivek was an affiliate expert with the UN high level Commission on Legal Empowerment, and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2008, Vivek received the Pioneer Award from the North American South Asian Bar Association.

Rachael Knight Program Director, Community Land Protection | Berkeley, CA

Rachael Knight is an attorney with expertise in the areas of land tenure security, access to justice, and legal empowerment of the poor. She previously served as Director of the International Development Law Organization’s (IDLO) Community Land Titling Initiative, working to document and protect the customary land rights of indigenous groups in Uganda, Liberia and Mozambique. Rachael also worked as a consultant for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) from 2004 until 2009. From 2002 until 2007, she founded and ran medical-legal partnership programs in Northern California that located legal services in primary care medical clinics to increase access to justice for low-income urban communities. Rachael recently completed a book for the FAO entitled Statutory Recognition of Customary Land Rights in Africa. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, and is a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall).

Sonkita Conteh Program Director, Sierra Leone | Freetown, Sierra Leone

Sonkita is a legal practitioner of the High Court of Sierra Leone and holds a master’s degree in human rights and democratization from the University of Pretoria. As a consultant for the past two years with the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions Africa Office in Accra, Ghana, he researched and reviewed law and policy on the right to water and sanitation in South Africa and Ghana; drafted amicus curiae briefs, publications and training manuals; and provided training to civil society organizations. He has over five years’ litigation experience.

Manju Menon Program Director, Environmental Justice Program | New Delhi, India

Manju has researched environmental decision making process in the regulatory and public arenas since the completion of her Masters Program at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1998. Her areas of work are the environmental law making and implementation processes related to the siting and regulation of infrastructure projects. She has investigated these processes in the context of hydropower, coal and nuclear power projects. These research projects and advocacy for improved decision making have been collaborative efforts undertaken in partnership with local community organisations, regional and thematic networks. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She was awarded the Nehru-Fulbright fellowship in 2011 and is currently based at the Anthropology Department, Yale University for the writing of her thesis. She has been a member of Kalpavriksh, an environment research group, since 2000. She has written on environment related subjects for the popular media and has several publications to her credit.

Abigail Moy Program Director, Global Operations | Washington DC

Abigail has worked with access to justice programs in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, in cooperation with the World Bank, The Asia Foundation, Fundacion Soros-Guatemala, and Timap for Justice. She previously clerked for the Hon. David H. Coar in the Northern District of Illinois, served in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State, and worked in the New York office of White & Case, LLP. Abigail was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, and holds a master’s degree in law and development from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Kate Lasso Director of Finance & Administration | Washington DC

Kate Lasso has over twenty years of experience working for international development organizations, specializing in financial management.  She previously served as the Director of Institutional Development for the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and is very interested in the nexus between international development and human rights.  Kate holds a Ph.D.…

Daniel Sesay Program Officer, Sierra Leone | Freetown, Sierra Leone

Daniel served as a lead paralegal for Timap for Justice in Sierra Leone. He consults community-based paralegal programs in program and case management and strategic oversight.…

Ellie Feinglass Health Advisor/Co-Director of Mozambique Right to Health Program | Maputo, Mozambique

Ellie has been living and working in sub-saharan Africa since 2000.  Prior to joining Namati, she worked with Partners in Health in Neno, Malawi, where she was Director of PIH’s Program on Social and Economic Rights.…

Kanchi Kohli Program Advisor (Part-time), Environmental Justice Program | New Delhi, India

Kanchi Kohli brings experience of close to 15 years in environment and forest governance related issues.  She has worked with Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group and several other organizations to carry out action research, campaigns, and advocacy outputs related to environment, biodiversity and agriculture and its essential connect with the industrial, infrastructure and energy scenario in India.…

Laura Goodwin Program Manager | Yangon, Burma

Laura has previous experience with human rights work in the US and Asia. In Cambodia, she worked in the legal reform and transitional justice fields, with a particular focus on outreach and education programs for victims of the Khmer Rouge.…

Luciana Debenedetti Program Associate | Washington DC

Luciana is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was a Banneker/Key Scholar, a member of the Gemstone Honors Program, and a core member of the Ashoka U Campus Changemakers initiative.  Luciana developed an interest in human rights issues as a Research Assistant at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management’s Minorities at Risk Database, as well as through a fellowship with Humanity in Action in Warsaw, Poland.…

Kate Richardson Program Associate, Community Land Protection | Berkeley, CA

Kate is a lawyer with experience in community lawyering, direct services, and impact litigation serving populations in North America, Central America, and Africa. She has provided legal services to asylum seekers in Boston, advocated for persons with disabilities in New York, and worked for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania.…

Gaurav Madan Community Land Protection Program Fellow-in-Residence, Sustainable Development Institute | Monrovia, Liberia

Gaurav has organized alongside democratically-elected village councils on public health issues at the foothills of the Himalayas, mobilized students on human rights and economic justice in Washington DC, and advocated for youth Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in New Delhi.…

Bremen Donovan Media Associate | Washington, DC

Bremen has worked as a media producer and educator in West Africa, Southeast Asia, Haiti, and the United States.  She works with diverse means of storytelling and her approach values field-based research and collaborative processes.  As a consultant, she has focused on human rights, displacement, peace building, and informal systems of power, often leveraging field research and media toward community and policy-level goals.…

Beth Goldberg Research Associate | Washington, DC

Beth is motivated to work in legal empowerment after her experience working to educate refugee youth from Somalia, Ethiopia, the DRC, and Sudan. She has experience in human rights research, advocacy and empowerment with populations in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and North America.…

Satnam Kaur Finance and Administration Associate | Delhi, India

Satnam Kaur has been associated with non-governmental organisations for more than a decade, including The Other Media, a broad-based platform in support of people’s movements in India, and Biblio, the literary magazine.…

Matt Brown Board of Directors | Washington DC

Matt Brown is founder of Global Zero, the international movement for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Since its launch in Paris in December 2008, Global Zero has grown to 300 leaders and more than 450,000 citizens worldwide; developed a step-by-step plan to eliminate nuclear weapons; built an international student movement with 100 campus chapters in ten countries; and produced an acclaimed documentary film, Countdown to Zero, with the team behind An Inconvenient Truth.…

Pratap Bhanu Mehta Board of Directors | New Delhi, India

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is president of the Centre for Policy Research, one of India’s most distinguished think tanks. He is also a member of NYU Law School’s Global Faculty.…

Chetan Gulati Board of Directors | London, England

Chetan Gulati is a Managing Director at Perry Capital, London. Perry is an investment firm with approximately $8 billion in assets under management that focuses on event-driven investments in both debt and equities, with a core focus on the United States and Europe. Chetan has been with Perry since 2007; prior to Perry, he was an associate for four years at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a corporate law firm based in New York, where he focused on bankruptcies, corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions.  Prior to the law firm, Chetan spent a semester as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Chetan is a graduate of the University of Rochester and earned his JD at Yale Law School in 2002.…

Chi Mgbako Board of Directors | New York, New York

Chi Adanna Mgbako is clinical associate professor of law and founding director of the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at Fordham Law School in New York City.…

Ricken Patel Board of Directors | New York, New York

Ricken Patel is co-founder and executive director of Avaaz.org, the largest global political web movement in history with over 13 million subscribers in all 193 countries. Avaaz has a simple democratic mission: to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people want.…

Tom Perriello Board of Directors | Washington DC

Tom Perriello is president and CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Counselor for Policy to the Center for American Progress. Prior to joining American Progress, he represented central and southern Virginia in the U.S.…

Zaza Namoradze Board of Directors | Budapest, Hungary

Zaza Namoradze, is Director of the Open Society Justice Initiative‘s Budapest office.  He oversees programs on legal capacity development, legal aid reform, and access to justice. Namoradze previously served as staff attorney and, later, Deputy Director of the Open Society Institute’s Constitutional and Legal Policy Institute, where he designed and oversaw projects on legal clinics, constitutional and judicial reforms, and human rights litigation capacity building throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.…