GLOBAL VILLAGE CONNECT - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Treasurer
- Director With Tefen USA
Adrienne Pelleg is a director with Tefen USA. She brings with her over 20 years of experience in operations management with direct profit and loss responsibilities at a major Fortune 500 company, and many years of Six Sigma, lean and Kaizen implementations. Competencies include financial strategy, business process and business transformation, organizational effectiveness and change management, operation excellence in both transactional and manufacturing environments.
Adrienne has been involved with Global Village Connect since its inception and currently serves as Treasurer.
Wat Arun or "Temple of Dawn" is a Buddhist temple (wat) in Bangkok on the Thonburi west bank of the Chao Phraya River. The temple derives its name from the Hindu god Aruna, often personified as the radiations of the rising sun.
Debbie Jacobson Glotter has followed the Abayudaya Jewish community since 2002, and always dreamed of visiting one day. That dream came true when she visited her son, Michael, who volunteered with Global Village Connect in 2016. She had the opportunity to teach Challah baking at the Sholom Women's Bakery. Debbie has had a lifelong commitment to helping others. She has a Masters Degree in Social Work, and counseled adults with Eating Disorders. Her family also mentored immigrant Russian and Somali families when they moved to Minnesota. Her trips to Uganda have been life changing and she is honored to be on the Board of Global Village Connect to continue their important work.
Job Titles:
- Project Manager
- Project Supervisor for Uganda
Esther is the country Global Village Connect Project Supervisor for Uganda. She makes sure all projects run smoothly by working hand in hand with the project teams through addressing the challenges and the successes of the projects to ensure all students are benefitting from each of our projects.
She has a degree in community development and non-profit work. She is also an expert seamstress, a skill she plans to teach to those students at our partner schools who are looking for a vocation after P7.
Heather has devoted her career to working as a non profit professional focusing on higher education, legal services, community building, international, and environmental non profits. Following completion of her degree in International Relations at the University of Minnesota, Heather began her career managing higher education programs at the University of Minnesota's College of Continuing Education. She left this position in 2003 to pursue her passion for international sustainable development work and travel, volunteering with Global Service Corp on a sustainable agriculture project in Arusha, Tanzania. Within a month of returning from Tanzania, Heather set off for Leuven, Belgium to begin a master's degree in Conflict and Sustainable Peace at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Following graduation, she started law school at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 2007 and moving to Chicago, IL. While in Chicago, Heather worked for Heartland International, a small non profit focused on promoting the development of civil society around the world by providing educational programming funded by the U.S Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development.
Upon returning to Minnesota she practiced as a criminal defense attorney for two years before returning to the non profit world as a regional development officer covering the Northeastern United States for the University of Minnesota Foundation. The opportunity to blend her criminal defense and development backgrounds appeared when she was asked to join the Great North Innocence Project as the Executive Director. Heather was then asked to join the Minneapolis Jewish Federation (MJF) as the organization's Chief Development Officer. While at MJF, Heather rebuilt the organization's development team and developed and executed a comprehensive and diversified strategic development plan encompassing all aspects of fundraising for the Minneapolis Jewish Community - including the organization's annual, planned, restricted, directed, emergency, capital and endowment, and corporate giving programs. She currently serves as the Midwest Regional Director of Philanthropy for the Trust for Public Land.
Heather enjoys traveling, reading, sailing (she's a complete novice), reading, pretending she can "craft," cooking, and visiting and relaxing "Up North." She's a life-long Golden Gopher, and lives in Robbinsdale, Minnesota - a first ring suburb to Minneapolis - with her husband, a practicing massage therapist.
Joanne Trangle founded Global Village Connect. The many wonderful friends and associations she's made throughout her 25 years of travel showed her the importance of peer relationships between people from different cultures. After adopting her youngest child from Ethiopia, she resolved that no parent should have to give up a child due to a lack of food and basic resources, as some do in developing countries in order to give their children what they need . For the last five years she's been facilitating projects that connect children with opportunities to be successful, and that help families and communities become economically self-sufficient.
Leslie graduated from Barnard College in New York City. She also has an M.S. in Technical Communications from Metropolitan University in Minnesota and a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School in New York.
Leslie has been representing juveniles and parents charged with criminal offenses for most of her career. Since 2000, she has been a full-time assistant appellate public defender and has served on the Minnesota Supreme Court's Juvenile Delinquency Advisory Committee.
She frequently presents continuing legal education trainings on issues of criminal defense.
She has also trained criminal lawyers in China and was the founder and director of the Southeast Defender Resource Center in Wuhan. In the summer of 2011 she taught legal writing in Istanbul to Palestinian lawyers, in 2012 she completed a volunteer project with the Victim Services Unit in Kingston, Jamaica, and most recently she was a volunteer legal specialist in Skopje, Macedonia, training Macedonian criminal defense lawyers in trial advocacy skills and she participated in the founding conference for the Balkans Region Rule of Law Network.
In Mae Salong, Global Village Connect volunteers will help villagers build a much-needed water storage tank and also assist in teaching English in their schools. We will learn about village life, how the elders came to live in this village, their background, religion and culture.
Mae Salong is a small village in the mountains of Chiang Rai province in Northern Thailand. This year they suffered a severe drought that destroyed many fruit plantations and rice paddies. People had no water from March to June. The new concrete water tank will help villagers combat the risks of future drought.
Job Titles:
- Agriculture Specialist
- Project Leader at the Boston Consulting Group
Michael Glotter is a Project Leader at the Boston Consulting Group's (BCG) Chicago office, where he has worked since 2017. At BCG, Michael specializes in helping upper management think through strategy, primarily in the manufacturing and agriculture sectors. Prior to joining BCG, Michael worked in the U.S. Senate as an adviser on energy, agriculture, and climate policy. Michael received his PhD in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2015, where he studied the impacts of climate change on agriculture. He received his Bachelor in Science and Engineering in Earth Systems Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2010.
Michael has been working with Global Village Connect since 2016, mostly on their farm projects. He spent 1 month in Uganda in 2016 kicking off the project at the Buyanga Primary School, planting 550 banana trees and making plans for the growth of the farm.
Sherry Rudin and her husband Jim have been educating their children through travel since they were old enough to walk. She believes there is no better way to learn than to experience life first-hand.
Sherry and daughter Jessie traveled to Uganda and spent time at Buyanga Primary School. During the week the students opened their homes to them, they cooked dinner and did chores alongside their hosts. Sherry saw the impact that Global Village Connect had on the community. She was so moved by what she saw, that she came aboard to help Global Village Connect expand its reach.