The AIDS-Free World team is made up of international experts whose experience, expertise and strengths span the field of advocacy, from speaking and writing to opinion-making, research, critical analysis, political analysis, program development, policy formulation, innovation, problem-solving, education, persuasion, mobilizing and networking.

Co-Directors:

Stephen Lewis began his career in Canadian politics with his election to the Ontario Legislative Assembly at the age of 25, and went on to become leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party from 1970 to 1978. In 1984 he was appointed Canadian Ambassador to the UN, the first of his several senior United Nations roles spanning two decades. Among those, he chaired the Committee that drafted the first UN Programme on African Economic Recovery and the first International Conference on Climate Change, coordinated an international study on the "Consequences of Armed Conflict on Children" and was appointed by the Organization of African Unity to its “Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the Genocide in Rwanda”. From 1995 to 1999, Stephen was Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and in 2001, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan named him the first Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, a position he held through 2006.
 
Along with co-directing AIDS-Free World, Stephen is also currently a Professor in Global Health at McMaster University and the chair of the board of the Stephen Lewis Foundation in Canada. He serves on the Board of Directors for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. His best-selling book, Race Against Time won the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Libris Award for non-fiction book of the year and he was named CBA’s Author of the Year for 2005.

Among many honours and distinguished awards, Stephen has been named a Companion of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honour for lifetime achievement, and awarded 30 honorary degrees from Canadian universities. In 2005, TIME Magazine listed him among the World’s 100 Most Influential People, and in 2007, the Kingdom of Lesotho invested Stephen with that southern African country’s highest honour, Knight Commander of the Most Dignified Order of Moshoeshoe.

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Paula Donovan began working in international relations 20 years ago at the US Fund for UNICEF, where she was Director of Communications. She subsequently joined UNICEF's international headquarters as manager of communications and advocacy for a joint UNICEF/World Health Organization global campaign to end the illegal promotion of infant formula and protect women’s rights to breastfeed.  Paula's next position was as Executive Aide to the Deputy Executive Director responsible for UNICEF’s worldwide programmes and external relations. In 2000, she was posted to Nairobi, first to create the post of UNICEF Regional Advisor on HIV/AIDS for the 23 countries of east and southern Africa, and then as UNIFEM's Africa-wide Gender and AIDS Advisor. In 2003, Paula conceived of and independently organized the "International Women's AIDS Run" in Kenya, Africa 's first all-women's long-distance road race – now an annual event — designed to raise awareness of the millions of women who care for those sick or orphaned by AIDS. Prior to co-founding AIDS-Free World, she was Senior Advisor in the Office of the UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa through December 2006. Paula holds an MA in Corporate and Political Communication from Fairfield University.

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Associate Director

Julia Greenberg has been working on HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Community Development for over a decade. As the Director of the Grants Department at American Jewish World Service, she advocated for increased direct financial support for activists making change at the grassroots level, and developed a program that provided over 13 million dollars in small grants to 350 community organizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In her role as Senior Program Officer for Africa, Julia spent five years traveling extensively in the region working with women’s and PWLHA groups to develop AJWS’ HIV/AIDS program. Under her direction, AJWS provided seed funding to organizations that went on to become key players in the global HIV/AIDS treatment access movement.

Julia served on the steering committee of the International Human Rights Funders Group, and has spoken extensively about community responses to HIV at international conferences including the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto and the Time Global Health Summit. She studied Russian Literature and History at Wesleyan University and the Institute of Steel and Alloys in Moscow.

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legal director and general counsel   

Betsy Apple has extensive experience as an international human rights lawyer, focusing on issues at the intersection of human rights, gender justice, and environmental abuse.  Before joining AIDS-Free World, Betsy was the director of the Crimes Against Humanity program at Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights). She also served as deputy director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), based in New York.  Prior to that, she was the managing and legal director of EarthRights International, in Thailand and the US, where she focused on government and corporate accountability for human rights violations and environmental abuse.

Betsy has served as legal consultant to various institutions including Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Clinic, Refugees International, and the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma. She is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she teaches International Human Rights Law and Human Rights Advocacy.

Earlier in her career, Betsy worked with the Volunteer Legal Services Program in San Francisco, focusing primarily upon family law and civil rights.  She also practiced employment and commercial litigation at the San Francisco law firm of Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon. Betsy graduated from Brown University and Boston College Law School.

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Director of Communications

Sohaila Abdulali has lived in both India and the US for most of her life. She has published a novel, and her second novel will be published in February 2010. She has also published several children’s books, short stories, essays, journalism pieces, scientific papers, development reports, and other writing. With Ford Foundation support, she has written a memoir about an aboriginal Indian woman.

Her first job was as Director of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, and she has written about and worked on women’s issues throughout her career. For Oxfam India, she was in charge of communications and fundraising for India and she ran a nationwide campaign involving major events, outreach of every type, and producing materials from T-shirts to movies. She has done hundreds of public speaking engagements, from being a guest speaker on a TV show pitted against a pornographer to giving workshops for law enforcement officers on how to deal with rape. She has written reports for the UN, Oxfam, Ford and other similar organizations. She has edited computer manuals, health care manuals, a book on hedge funds, a book on women’s activism and human rights, and other materials. She has ghostwritten for Wall Street risk managers. She taught South Asian Culture at NYU. She is on the board of Point of View, a women’s media group in Mumbai. She has also, among other things, worked as a bookseller, an ice-cream scooper, a sleep technician and an industrial spy.

Sohaila got her undergraduate degree in Economics and Sociology at Brandeis University, and a Master’s in Communication from Stanford University.

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Executive Assistant to Stephen Lewis

Christina Magill began as Executive Assistant to Stephen Lewis in 2000.   For the next four years, Christina worked both for Stephen and for Naomi Klein.  Among other duties, she helped to orchestrate Ms. Klein's European book tour for her bestselling first book, No Logo, handled the distribution of her popular newspaper column, and coordinated her travel to Baghdad during the early days of the US invasion.  Following former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's appointment of his first Special Envoy on AIDS, Christina turned full-time to assisting Stephen in that role, and coordinating the UN work with his other roles and responsibilities.  She now manages all aspects of Stephen's work – his primary position, as Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, as well as his speaking engagements and public appearances, his professorship and his volunteer position as Chair of the Board of the Stephen Lewis Foundation. Christina is Stephen's chief liaison, managing his correspondence, all interactions with the media, scheduling, and travel.  That central position, and her expertise as a communicator, negotiator and fundraiser, have taken Christina across the US and Canada and as far as southern Africa, putting her directly in touch with Presidents, Prime Ministers and top UN and government officials from around the world, with countless acclaimed journalists and hundreds — perhaps thousands — of the AIDS pandemic's most devoted and respected leaders and activists. Christina has a BA in Art History from the University of British Columbia and a Culinary Arts diploma from the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts.

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legal and gender advisor

Shonali Shome, received her JD from Georgetown University, where she was selected to be a Public Interest Law Scholar.  She provided legal services to women fleeing gender-based crimes through her volunteer work with the Tahirih Justice Center, Georgetown's Center for Applied Legal Studies-Asylum Clinic, and the Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons at Global Rights.  Prior to law school, Shonali worked for the Global Fund for Women, Medical Students for Choice, and the Feminist Majority Foundation, in addition to holding various voluntary board memberships and national advisory committee positions for women's rights organizations.  She currently serves on the board of Women Organized to Respond to Life-threatening Disease (WORLD), an HIV/AIDS organization based in Oakland, California.  In 2006, she was named the Judith Stronach Woman's Rights Fellow at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, and in 2007 she was awarded the Kroll Foundation's Human Rights Fellowship to work on gender and HIV/AIDS issues.  Shonali has a BA in Foreign Affairs and English from the University of Virginia and a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies from Georgetown University.

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Advisor on Marginalized Populations

Myroslava Tataryn’s social justice activism at local, national and international levels began at an early age and has included work with Environment Canada, the Sierra Club and Disabled People’s International. The recipient of a BA in Development Studies and Environment Studies from Queen’s University in 2004, Myroslava has since been active in promoting the inclusion of people with disabilities in worldwide AIDS advocacy efforts — an issue to which she was drawn through her personal experience with disability and her work with disabled peoples’ organizations in Canada, Ghana, Ukraine, South Africa and Uganda. Myroslava speaks publicly about building alliances between the AIDS and disability rights movements as well as integrating a disability rights perspective into international development work. Her current work examines rights issues faced by marginalized populations in the context of HIV/AIDS with a particular focus on people with disabilities, refugees and internally displaced peoples and injection drug users. Her personal research interests include attitude and access issues pertaining to women with disabilities, sexuality and access to reproductive and sexual health care services. In 2008 Myroslava was named a 2008-09 Gordon Global Fellow by the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation in Canada.

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COUNTRY CONSULTANT, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Elisabet Fadul has more than five years experience contributing in the area of sexual and reproductive rights and HIV and AIDS. At national and international levels, she has been at the table with diverse actors and decision-makers, speaking out for youth rights and accountability to commitments. She has represented young people in many networks and events around the world, such as in the Leadership Programme Committee of the XVII International AIDS Conference and as co-chair of the conference’s Youth Programme. In addition, she represented young people as a plenary speaker at the first plenary session of the XVII International AIDS Conference, the State of the Epidemic. Elisabet is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils, a network of experts from diverse areas who brainstorm on solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. In the Dominican Republic, Elisabet is co-founder and President of the Dominican Network for Youth Rights (RD-Jóvenes), an organization which advocates for improved public policies and participation in decision-making spaces for young people on urgent issues such as SRH, human rights, constructive civil engagement, and HIV and AIDS; mainly through the use of ICT (information communication technologies).  Elisabet is technical coordinator and web manager of a project for these purposes. She also consults with UN agencies, such as the World Food Programme (WFP), and previously, in the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

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AdMinIstrator

Nionne James-Pineda has spent most of her career administering HIV/AIDS projects. She began as the receptionist for a National Institutes of Mental Health study examining a cognitive-behavioral intervention for adolescents with HIV-infected parents. She worked as Director of Operations at the AIDS Service Center NYC (ASCNYC), a community-based nonprofit that provides services to people affected by HIV/AIDS. While at ASCNYC, Nionne's responsibilities included data entry, executive assistance, human resources, database administration, data quality assurance and integrity monitoring, outcome evaluation, network administration, and facilities management. Before joining AIDS-Free World, Nionne was the Administrative Research Director at the Vera Institute of Justice. Nionne earned a BA in Sociology from Marymount Manhattan College.

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