Team

Alex is currently the Chief Executive Officer at TE Enterprises, a project development and an investment holding company that sources, develops and manages Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and allied oriented projects in Iraq. Previously, Alex was a consultant for leading ICT companies at Altai Consulting, a French company specialized in Corporate Advisory and Aid and Development in emerging markets. He has split his time between Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the UAE since 2007. 

Prior to joining Altai Consulting, Alex worked as a project manager for Microsoft and for the Arab ICT Association in Iraq and Afghanistan. There he oversaw the implementation of IJMA3's ICT and business development programming including program planning and implementation. For Microsoft, he served as a direct liaison to various private and public entities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prior to working in the Middle East region, Alex was an analyst at the Shemano Group, a San Francisco-based investment banking firm.

He holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley where he was a distinguished scholar/athlete competing for the nationally ranked NCAA Division I Golden Bears. Alex is fluent in English and French.

Jennifer has 20 years professional experience in international development, working in Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and Africa. She holds an MBA and MA in International Relations from Boston University along with a degree in Communications from Boston College. She currently resides in Lincoln, Vermont with her husband and two children where she is active in public and private donor fundraising for a variety of local and international causes.

Karen Saba has extensive experience living and working in the Middle East, where she has designed and implemented refugee assistance programs for people with disabilities, conducted numerous empowerment and sensitivity awareness trainings, and led capacity building activities for civil society organizations, governments, and universities throughout the region.

As the Regional Disability Manager for the Middle East for Mercy Corps, Ms Saba has designed and implemented refugee assistance programs covering life saving services, refugee resettlement for people with disabilities. She has conducted numerous trainings to directly empower people with disabilities and has provided sensitivity (awareness) training on disability for institutional capacity building to civil society organizations, governments, and universities throughout the Middle East.

As a consultant for the World Bank, she co-drafted the first strategic report on mainstreaming the disability population throughout the Middle East and North Africa region. Ms. Saba has worked for the Presidential Taskforce on Employment of Adults and Youth with Disabilities under the Clinton administration. 

Karen Saba holds a master’s degree in International Development from American University, from Washington DC. and speaks fluent Arabic, French and English. She has published several articles on education and Disability Rights; and has completed several research studies on people with disabilities in the areas of economic development, including a field study in southern Africa examining the impact of Apartheid on the post-apartheid special education system.  She is an expert in understanding how culture, poverty, modernization, bureaucracy and foreign aid impact the identity of people with disabilities worldwide.

Paul brings 20 years of international relief and development experience, the last six dominated by operational management in Iraq of U.S. government-funded programs with local non-governmental and civil society organizations from 2005 to 2008. Prior to joining Bridging the Divide, Mr. Butler's career was spent with Catholic Relief Services and Mercy Corps International working in areas of strategic and program management, capacity building of local actors, monitoring and evaluation, and grant compliance. He has worked in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, West Bank/Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Mr. Butler finished his undergraduate studies at Georgetown University and has two Master's degrees from University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University. Mr. Butler is a scholar of Middle Eastern affairs and speaks fluent Arabic and basic Farsi. He is based in Zahle, Lebanon.

John L. Paluszek is senior counsel at Ketchum specializing in reputation management and corporate responsibility. He is also immediate past chair of The Global Alliance For Public Relations and Communication Management; liaison to The United Nations for The Global Alliance and The Public Relations Society of America; and a member of The Commission on Public Relations Education.

The PRSA 1989 national president, John has held many offices in that society and has received numerous professional awards, most recently PRSA’s 2010 Atlas Award for lifetime achievement in international public relations. In 1988, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he represented PRSA in the first US-Soviet Bilateral Information Talks in Moscow and in the first East-West Public Relations Summit in Vienna. In December 2002, he chaired the plenary session on communications at the Berlin United Nations Global Compact Forum and, in April 2004, addressed the Paris Global Compact meeting, “Sustainable Consumption”. He has lectured on corporate responsibility and public relations at twelve U.S. colleges and at business conferences on four continents.

A former journalist, John has written many commentaries for business and academic journals such as Journalism Studies, The Foreign Policy Association “Viewpoints” and the CNBC Blog. He is the author of “An American Journey”, his family’s multi-generational memoir, and seminal books on corporate social responsibility, “Organizing for Corporate Social Responsibility” (Amacom, 1973) and “Will The Corporation Survive?” (Prentice-Hall, 1977).  A graduate of Manhattan College (B.A. management), he was a trustee of the college for eighteen years and was awarded a Manhattan College honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters. He resides in Old Westbury, N.Y.                        

Steve Hansch has worked for a variety nonprofits in a field, technical and governance capacities for most of his adult life, beginning with fundraising in college and volunteer stints at Cultural Survival and Oxfam in the 1970s. He worked for the International Rescue Committee in Sudan and Ethiopia, for CARE in Rwanda, for Food Aid Management delivering food aid trainings around the world, and for the Refugee Policy Group doing evaluations of aid operations in dozens of crises. He works at the Open Society Institute on microfinance and teaches courses on food, nutrition, public health and humanitarian aid. He has done evaluations of major humanitarian operations. He is currently on the advisory board of the Leland program of the Congressional Hunger Center. He is on the boards of several nonprofits, including Relief International, Partners for Development, Heshima and the Center for Peacebuilding International. He also has taught roughly 40 professional workshops, and 40 university courses on international aid, at Stanford, Columbia, Georgetown, the Monterey Institute for International Development, and Johns Hopkins. At present he’s teaching at George Washington and American Universities.

Anton practiced law for 30 years as a trial lawyer. He co-founded one of the first law firms in Boston concentrating exclusively on government regulation and permitting of activities affecting the environment. Prior to entering private practice, he served as an Assistant Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Mr. Moehrke participated extensively in continuing education for the legal professional as a speaker and author. He also testified as an expert witness on environmental permitting issues. Mr. Moehrke has been recognized for many years by several national publications listing outstanding members of the legal profession specializing in environmental law.

Pierre is the founder and chairman of Fattouch Brothers, a Lebanon-based, multinational group, headquartered in Zahle. Fattouch Brothers is active in real estate development, construction, transportation, and telecommunications in many countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, mainly the CIS countries.

Ken Kirk is the Executive Director of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA). Mr. Kirk has served as Executive Director of the NACWA, formerly known as the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies (AMSA), since 1990. From 1978 to 1990, he worked with a Washington, DC-based private consulting firm, where he had responsibility for the management of several associations, including AMSA. From 1973 to 1975, Mr. Kirk worked in the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Legislation and from 1975 to 1977 he served as Public Affairs Manager at the organization now known as the Water Environment Federation. Mr. Kirk has degrees from New York University, the Georgetown University Law Center and the George Washington University Law Center, where his specialty was environmental law. He is a member of the District of Columbia bar. In June of 1996 Mr. Kirk was designated Certified Association Executive (CAE), the highest honor of professional achievement available from the American Society of Association Executives. Mr. Kirk also serves as chair of the Water Infrastructure Network, a broad-based coalition dedicated to preserving and protecting the health, environmental and economic gains that America's drinking water and wastewater infrastructure provide. He most recently helped found and serves as president of the Clean Water America Alliance, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established to explore the complex issue of water sustainability and plan for the future by improving public awareness that advances holistic, watershed-based approaches to water quality and quantity challenges. In 1996, Mr. Kirk was presented Vice President Al Gore’s “Hammer Award” for Reinventing Government for his work on the EPA National Combined Sewer Overflow Policy. He is a long standing member of the Water Environment Federation and the Federal Water Quality Association, serving as a Director and Officer respectively, and is the recipient of the Arthur Sidney Bedell and other service awards, including the 5S Society.

Nizar Zakka is a Lebanese national, educated at the University of Texas in Austin. After graduation, Mr. Zakka worked as a software consultant in Houston before returning to Beirut to found several ICT companies. In addition to his businesses, he serves as the Secretary General of the Union of Arab ICT Associations (IJMA3) which has 16 members in the Middle East and North Africa. Since 2003, Mr. Zakka has also served as Vice Chairman of the World IT Services Alliance (WITSA), a consortium of some 72 industry associations representing over 90% of the world information technology market.