About the Members of the Board

• Naava Frank is a respected educator in the area of knowledge sharing and communities of practice. Dr. Frank is the founder of Knowledge Communities; more here.
• Sarah Blumenstock Girrell is the Chair of the Board of the Family of Women, another Section 501(c)4 organization. Professionally, she has 30+ experience as an Operations Manager with advertising, publishing, financial services and human resource consulting and services companies.
• Lawrence A. Kletter has been an attorney for over 26 years. He has worked with the formation and operation of numerous Section 501(c)(3) organizations. He is active in community organizations in the Jewish community.
• Kristen W. Girrell specializes in engineering and delivering talent management initiatives on executive coaching and leadership development. He is Chairman of the Career Partners International (CPI) Executive Coaching Quality Review Board and co-authored their Executive Coaching Practices Manual.
• Rachel E. Levy is a marketing consultant who has worked for nonprofits and for profit organizations. Since 2007, she has been a Board member of Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies. Ms. Levy is also active in Chicago’s Jewish Federation.
• Debra Edelson is an experienced nonprofit professional and a professional planner for the Trust for Public Land.
• Josh Plaskoff is the Director of Learning at Emmis Communications, an international diversified media company. His work on communities has been recently published in the Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management.
• Estee Solomon Gray is the founding partner of Congruity, a Palo Alto-based technology-management consulting firm. She has received multiple awards for leadership and service within the Jewish community and currently serves on the Board of Hillel at Stanford.

Advisory Committee (Non-Board)

• John Smith is the founder of Learning Alliances, a consulting firm for communities of practice with an emphasis on stewarding technologies and designing learning events. He is also the community steward for CPsquare , the community of practice on communities of practice.
• Debra Beck recently completed her doctoral dissertation (EdD, adult and postsecondary education) at the University of Wyoming. “Dissertation title is The Practice Of Generative Governance: A Case Study Exploring Board Learning in Context.”) Debra’s commitment to nonprofit governance began with her first board assignment in 1983. Since that time, she has served on a variety of local, state, regional and national governing bodies. Debra is a facilitator, trainer and consultant to Rocky Mountain nonprofits and their boards. She also teaches online courses on nonprofit management and leadership issues for the UW Master of Public Administration Program. She is co-founder and coordinator of the Snowy Range Nonprofit Institute, an annual professional development event targeting nonprofit practitioners and board members in Wyoming and Colorado’s Front Range.