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Bikes for the World is a sponsored project of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA). WABA provides formal board supervision via the WABA executive director. As of 2008, Bikes for the World is managed by a program director, Keith Oberg. Keith is a salaried employee of WABA. His bio appears below. In addition, an informal advisory board is being created to support the BfW director and provide strategic guidance. Al members serve on a volunteer basis. Among these members are Craig Annear, Nicholas Griffin, Gerard Rogers, Ben Slade, Hellen Gelband, James Kolb, John Shettel, Antonio Bravo, and Merywen Wigley. The board is open to others. Bios for these individuals are being prepared—some appear below. Selected Biographic Summaries:Keith ObergKeith Oberg is the director of Bikes for the World. Previously he served eight years as Vice-President and Washington DC Area Coordinator of Pedals for Progress, first as a volunteer and from 1999 as a salaried employee. Prior to that, Keith worked 13 years with the Inter-American Foundation, a U.S. Government agency providing grant support to grassroots development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Between 1986 and 1998, Keith also served on an unpaid basis as a member (and president, 1993-97) of the board of directors of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Keith holds an M.A. in International Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a B.A. in Political Science and History from Middlebury College. He currently lives in Arlington VA with his wife, Jessica Mott, and their two children. Craig AnnearCraig Annear is a member of the Bikes for the World Advisory Committee. He is a life-long biker and he has been a supporter of Pedals for Progress in the DC Metro area and a member of WABA. Craig retired from the Environmental Protection Agency in January 2005. He worked in the Office of General Counsel for over 21 years as an Associate General Counsel and Senior Counsel. He retired with more than 31 years of Federal service, including attorney positions at FEMA, HUD, and the FTC. Craig has a law degree from the University of Michigan and an undergraduate degree in Government from Cornell University. He has a long-standing interest in Africa, having first visited in 1966 with Operation Crossroads Africa. Craig lives in McLean, VA, with his wife, Sara. Their three sons are currently in Zambia (Chris, on a Fulbright), Chicago (Brian, completing a Masters in Education), and Charlottesville (Alex, an undergraduate at UVA). Nicholas Griffin Nicholas Griffin is a member of the Bikes for the World Advisory Committee, with nearly 20 years of professional experience in the development and education sectors. As a development consultant, Nick provides support to technical assistance on gender for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Prior to that, he spent several years as a strategic planner in international higher education, at the American University in Cairo, as well as several years as a public information and policy analysis specialist at the United Nations in New York. He has a graduate degree in public administration and he speaks French, Spanish and basic Arabic. He has been involved in non-motorized transportation initiatives for over 15 years. Merywen Wigley Merywen Wigley became a member of the Bikes for the World Advisory Committee after volunteering on DC-area bike drives between 2002 and 2006. Since moving to Durham NC in 2006, she has continued her involvement with BfW and hosts annual bike collections in the Triangle area (Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh). The 2008 Triangle collection broke all BfW records for the most bikes collected in a single one-day collection (315 bikes.) Wenny is a bicycling enthusiast, commuting 100 miles a week to work and also spends as many weekends as possible on the local mountain biking trails. Merywen's job is to design and implement training for health care workers in Africa and Asia. Her focus is currently on HIV/AIDS prevention research, but she has also worked on Avian Influenza. Wenny has a Master of Science in International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health and attended Emory University as an undergraduate. Ben SladeBen Slade is a member of the Bikes for the World Advisory Committee and BfW's webmaster. Ben is a computer hardware and software technologist with interests in political activism. Over the past 20 years he's worked in the fields of digital logic design, real time software development, Sybase database design & operation, and large high performance database design & operation. He eventually landed in the Operations division at AOL where he held various roles including principal database administrator, manager, director, and finally system architect for email operations. He is currently a software consultant specializing in Sybase databases. He has interests in Internet technologies for creating innovative online discussion and collaboration software. Such technologies might combine MoveOn.org type grassroots political activism with self-moderating voting booth/message board type web applications. The goal of these software technologies is to automatically extract the most interesting opinions from a large group of participants with the hope of permitting the efficient exchange of ideas between large numbers of people without relying on profit-reliant news media.
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