People

Lara Driscoe serves as Managing Director in the Office of External Affairs at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the U.S. Government’s Development Finance Institution. In this role, Driscoe is responsible for identifying emerging market investment opportunities, developing public and private sector partnerships and catalyzing private capital through innovative financial products to achieve development goals. Prior to OPIC, Driscoe was the Senior Director, Government Relations at the Managed Funds Association, an association representing the alternative investment industry. Driscoe received her J.D. from the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. and B.A. from the University of Maryland.

Carlos García de Alba has been a career diplomat in Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1987, reaching the rank of ambassador in 2006. Currently, he serves as the Consul General of Mexico in Los Angeles, transitioning into this role in 2016. In this Trump-era, García de Alba stands by the objective to bolster US-Mexico relations and underscore Mexican immigrants’ positive impact in the US. Prior to this role, he was the Mexican ambassador to Ireland. His earlier positions include serving as Executive Director of the Institute of Mexicans in the Exterior (2009-2011) Director General of International Relations of the Ministry of Public Education (2007-2009), Senior Officer of the Secretariat of Environment and Resources Naturals (2000-2003), and Head of the Policy Department in the Labor of the Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources (1979-1980).

C.D. Glin is the President and CEO of the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF) since September 2016. From 2011-2016 Glin was based in Nairobi, Kenya as the Associate Director for Africa for the Rockefeller Foundation. Prior to Rockefeller, Glin served as a White House appointee at the U.S. Peace Corps as the first Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and Global Partnerships, and was Vice President for Business Development at PYXERA Global. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and in 2011, was designated by the White House as a “Champion of Change” for his commitment and contributions to international service and civic participation.

Jae Kim is the Chief Philanthropy Officer of the Radcliffe Foundation. Prior to this, she was the Founding President of the Streetohome Foundation, Deputy Director of the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, former commercial litigator at Shearman and Sterling, and Morvillo Abramowitz, and Head of Strategic Partnerships at the Empire State Dev. Corporation. Kim studied law at the University of Oxford and Economics at Brown University.

Rahul Keshap is Head of the Investment Foundations Program at CFA Institute, where he is helping deliver investment industry literacy. He joined CFA in 2002 as an Associate General Counsel and later spent more than two years based in Hong Kong as Director of Asia Pacific Strategy & Operations. Prior to his tenure at CFA, Keshap worked as an attorney at a business law firm in Virginia and a communications law firm in Washington, DC. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Government as an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia, and he also received a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia.

Michelle McMahon is a US lawyer with 25 years of legal and corporate finance experience. She was Senior Partner of a US law firm, specializing in financial transactions, and Chief Executive of the Jersey, UK subsidiary of a global financial services firm for capital markets clients. McMahon has served as an advisor and fiduciary of non-profits and social finance initiatives, primarily focused on education and children. In 2016 McMahon joined Innovest Advisory to draw on her experience to facilitate the strategic deployment of philanthropic and social investment capital to achieve social change.

Kate Montgomery is Associate Director, Strategic Partnerships at Acumen. She leads business development and partner engagement for the Pioneer Energy Investment Initiative and Africa. Prior to joining Acumen, she was d.light’s Director of Global Partnerships for five years, developing d.light’s strategy for engaging with the public sector and other key partners globally. A key part of her work at d.light was to institutionalize strategy and to measure and communicate social impact across the enterprise. She holds a BA with honors in Political Science and East Asian Studies from Colgate University and a MS in Conflict Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Displaced from his home in the DRC at the age of six, Joseph Munyambanza grew up in the Kyangwali Refugee Camp in Uganda. At the age of 14, Munyambanza founded COBURWAS International Youth Organization to Transform Africa (CIYOTA) an NGO empowering young leaders through education, and which he continues to lead. Based on these early accomplishments, Munyambanza was selected to attend the African Leadership Academy, a pan-African leadership school based in Johannesburg, where he graduated. He also holds a degree in biochemistry from Westminster College (2015) in the U.S., where he received the school’s highest honor, the Outstanding Senior Award.

Lev Plaves is Kiva’s Senior Investment Manager for Refugees & Displaced Populations, leading Kiva’s efforts to provide economic opportunities to displaced populations around the world. In 2017, Plaves spearheaded the launch of the World Refugee Fund, an innovative effort to utilize Kiva’s crowdfunding platform to extend access to financial services to forcibly displaced populations. Kiva, the world’s largest crowdfunding platform for social good, has facilitated over $8 million in loans to refugees and IDPs in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa since 2016.

Amy Slaughter is Chief Strategy Officer of RefugePoint – an NGO with a dual mission of state- of-the-art direct services and systems change in the refugee solutions sector. Since the early 1990s, Slaughter has worked and consulted for a variety of refugee NGOs as well as UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration, working in refugee situations in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East. With a Master’s degree in human rights from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Florida, Slaughter is a frequent panelist at refugee conferences and has published several articles on refugee protection.

Justin Sykes is a social investment specialist with over 15 years of experience in the structuring and implementation of innovative and large-scale impact investments, which have positively impacted hundreds of thousands of lives across a diverse range countries in Africa and the Middle East. He serves as a board member and adviser to several international charities, and local grassroots financial institutions, that are engaged in supporting the livelihoods of low-income communities.