SOIL Board

Sarah Brownell (Co-founder SOIL) is a live-in volunteer at St. Joseph's House of Hospitality, a Catholic Worker House in Rochester, NY where she helps provide meals, housing, discussion groups, advocacy, and spiritual support for those in need.  She received her bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and her masters in environmental engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1998 she has been working on water treatment, solar power, and ecological sanitation projects with the organization Haiti Outreach Pwoje Espwa in Borgne, Haiti. She helped found the Sant Teknoloji Brase Lide Brainstorming Technology Center in Borgne in 2003.  She has also been an active member of the Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) group at UC Berkeley, helped start an ESW class for undergraduates, and has encouraged and supported engineering students volunteering in Haiti.

Sasha Kramer (Co-founder SOIL) is an ecologist and human rights observer who has been working in northern Haiti in the town of Milot since 2004.  She received her Ph.D. in Ecology from Stanford University in 2006. Her dissertation, entitled Nitrogen, Microbes and the Human Predicament: the Ecology and Relevance of Nitrogen Recycling focused on human disturbance of the global nitrogen cycle and its impacts on the earth’s ecosystems.  In 2006 Sasha Co-founded SOIL and completed a postdoctoral research position with the Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects at Stanford where she coordinated an ecological sanitation project in Haiti in collaboration with Stanford’s Engineers for a Sustainable World and several Departments at Stanford University: Anthropological Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Biological Sciences and the School of Medicine.  Sasha is currently an Adjunct Professor of International Studies and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami, though she spends the majority of her time in Haiti. She is also the co-founder of SOL (Sosyete Oganize pou Lanati), a Haitian non-profit dedicated to promoting environmental justice and ecologically sound development.

Kevin Foos is a "human being" from Rochester, NY.  He lives in voluntary simplicity at St. Joseph's House of Hospitality, a Catholic Worker House which provides food, clothing, housing, education, and spiritual support in Rochester.  He was a cofounder of Poor People United, a poor people's human rights organization and is affiliated with the national Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign.  He recently spent 4 months in Borgne, Haiti working on a community development and personal empowerment photography project with teenagers, refurbishing the local "Poor House" to a livable condition, and helping with water and sanitation projects.

Carolyn Thompson is Jamaican political activist in Miami. She is Co Chair, Haiti Solidarity Committee, Director of the Peoples Power Vote, and past Director of the Caribbean Power Vote. Carolyn is a liaison between grassroots organizations, civil rights groups, union organizations, the Caribbean community in the United States, the Caribbean Nations, and the African American community. Her work has focused on uniting these communities into a voting bloc for economic and political power. Carolyn has been an activist in the struggle for equal justice, against war, immigrant’s rights, and voting rights for the past 20 years. Carolyn will act as a consultant for soil working to bring resources and publicity to SOIL to help create an infrastructure that will sustain the health and welfare of the Haitian People form the "roots Upward", she will educate the Caribbean Nations regarding the situation in Haiti and enlist their help on a people to people, community to community basis.

Andrew Carroll is a plant biologist in the PhD program at Stanford University. He received his Bachelor’s in Physics and Biology from the University of Virginia in 2005. He is an active member in the Stanford Chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World, and represented them while working in Haiti with SOIL during the summer of 2006. As a scientist, he recognizes that the promise of technology is empty if we lack the compassion to use them to help those in greatest need.

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.