Mariame Kaba is currently Program Officer for education and youth development at the Steans Family Foundation. Mariame has a long history in the field of education and youth development, having taught high school and college students. Mariame has a Masters in Sociology and is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at Northwestern University where her work focuses on adolescent girls and violence related issues. She is the board co-chair of the Chicago Freedom School and a board member for the Power House High School.
Chang is program coordinator with Research Development Services (RDS) at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. He develops, coordinates, and facilitates activities to increase external funding at UIC. Activities include identifying funding opportunities from federal, state and local agencies, facilitating collaborations, and providing training in finding funding and proposal development. Previously with the UIC Neighborhoods Initiative – a university-community partnership initiative, he helped raise and administer approximately $3 million in external funding from federal, state, and foundation sources for collaborative programs in youth, community technology centers, housing, evaluation, capacity building, and literacy. Chang has been involved in fundraising and grants administration for approximately 10 years. He is part of AFP’s (Chicago Chapter) Chicago Fellows Program, holds an MA in English (DePaul University) and a Certificate in Nonprofit Management (UIC’s College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs).
In her current position, Cecilia heads a campaign to raise $100 million for dental education. She has worked in resource development and fundraising for nonprofit organizations for more than 20 years. In that time, she has worked as a consultant or employee with boards and staff of 25 organizations in the United States, Canada and Ecuador. Her experience includes providing resource development training, technical assistance and consultation in fundraising plans, program planning, proposal writing, direct mail campaigns, major individual donations, capital campaigns, board development, membership development, and donor cultivation. For two years she wrote a quarterly column on resource development for emerging organizations for Clout, a quarterly business publication. She has been training volunteers and staff on resource development for more than a decade, and most recently at the 2005 AFP Regional Conference in Chicago and the 2007 Fundraising Summit.
