EPIIC Weekend Immersion

EPIIC WEEKEND IMMERSION
October 4-5, 2019
Warren Conference Center, Ashland, MA

This is a weekend of teambuilding and lectures with a guest scholar/practitioner. This year’s Guest Scholars are NICK BIRNBACK (A’92, EPIIC’91) and RACHEL BROWN (A’10, EPIIC’08 and Poverty and Power Initiative).

Nick Birnback is Chief of Strategic Communications for the United Nations Peacekeeping. Prior to this assignment, he served as the Chief of Public information and acting Chief of Staff for the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS). He has worked with the UN for over two decades in a number of capacities both in the field and at Headquarters, including as Special Assistant to the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General at the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea, an Information Officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone, a Civil Affairs Officer and Special Assistant to the Deputy Commissioner of the UN Mission’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and an information Officer and Acting Spokesman for the United Nations Mission in East Timor. He has also worked as an External Relations Officer for the UN Department of Political Affairs’ Electoral Assistance Division. His areas of expertise are peacekeeping and military affairs.

Rachel Brown is the Executive Director of Over Zero. Over Zero supports societies to resist division and create long-term resilience to identity-based conflict through trainings, strategy advising, piloting and testing new approaches, and supporting interdisciplinary research. She is the author of Defusing Hate: A Strategic Communication Guide to Counteract Dangerous Speech. She was a 2014 Genocide Prevention Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide (where she developed Defusing Hate) and has led trainings and project design workshops on counteracting dangerous speech for a variety of organizations globally. Rachel also founded and is the former CEO of Sisi ni Amani-Kenya (SNA-K), a Kenyan NGO that pioneered new strategies to build local capacity for peacebuilding and civic engagement, most notably through the creation of a text-messaging model and platform to support community-based efforts. While at Tufts, she conducted research on the relationship between poverty and power structures in Guatemala through the Institute for Global Leadership. Inspired by this research, she and her colleagues founded the Poverty and Power Research Initiative at the IGL.