SOIL Board

Sasha Kramer (Executive Director & Co-founder) Sasha has been living and working in Haiti since 2004. She first came to Haiti as a human rights advocate, and in 2006 co-founded SOIL with Sarah Brownell. During that year she also received her Ph.D. in Ecology from Stanford University and completed a postdoctoral research position coordinating an ecological sanitation project in Haiti. Sasha has continued her ties with academia as an Adjunct Professor of International Studies and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Miami. Each January she hosts students in Cap-Haitien where she teaches an intersession course called Sustainable Development Challenges in Haiti: from Theory to Practice.

While SOIL has primarily worked in the North, following the January 12 earthquake, Sasha relocated to Port-au-Prince to assist in relief efforts there. After weeks of distributing emergency aid and attending WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) cluster meetings, SOIL began to set up an office in Port-au-Prince in response to the sanitation crisis. As the Executive Director, Sasha has assembled a small staff in Port-au-Prince and partnered with OXFAM GB to build toilets in small IDP (internally displaced persons) camps.

SOIL has continued its work in Cap-Haitien during this transition, thanks to the help of its Haitian sister organization, SOL. Sasha is also a co-founder of SOL, a Haitian non-profit dedicated to promoting environmental justice and ecologically sound development.

Moira Feeney is a staff attorney at the Center for Justice & Accountability (CJA) in San Francisco, a non-profit international human rights organization that provides legal services to survivors of international human rights abuses to help them hold their persecutors accountable. She has been involved in human rights work related to Haiti since 1998.  She has worked under the supervision of Haiti's leading human rights attorneys to prepare criminal and civil litigation against perpetrators of politically motivated rape.  Previously, she coordinated election observation delegations to Haiti for the international human rights organization, Global Exchange. She also led and organized educational travel focused on issues of global justice to Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Chiapas, Mexico. She has a law degree from University of California Hastings College of the Law and a B.A. in international relations from Brown University.  While at Hastings, she created a sister-school relationship with the Catholic Law School of Jeremie, Haiti.  The program encourages educational exchange to further principles of international human rights law. She is fluent in Haitian Creole, French, and Spanish.

Jenny Benorden (Producer/Director) made her first film about Haiti in 2004, after the coup d’etat of Jean Bertrand Aristide, and the second in 2005, focusing on the UN killings in Cite Soleil, a small neighborhood in Port-au-Prince.  In 2007 she finally traveled to Haiti for the first time, to develop a 30-minute film about SOIL, a visionary green organization working with Haitian groups to address multiple layers of human health conditions with simple, easy-to-implement technologies. 

Additionally, Jenny has pursued many different outlets in the field of communication: columnist, musician and recording artist, improvisational live theatre, poetry, and spoken word.  She has produced a one-woman show made for television, as well as the award-winning 4 Directions television show, where she is bringing her unique perspective about different social justice issues to the airwaves.