TIMBUKTU CENTER FOR PEACE STUDIES - Key Persons
Accepted at HBX - Harvard Business School in Disruptive Strategy in 2018, Bilaly DICKO is a Business Development Expert trained at Dartmouth College in the United States. Project Manager at Accountability Lab, he is recognized by several organizations as one of the 20 most influential young people in Mali, he is followed by more than 100,000 people on social networks.
Bilaly DICKO is also an alum of the US State Department's Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders program initiated by President Barack Obama. And also lecturer in Orange Mali, Microcred. He is currently Executive Director of the Mandela Washington Fellowship Alumni Association of Mali and heads TIMBUKTU YOUTH EMPOWERMENT PROGRAM, a project funded by the US State Department to support 25 young entrepreneurs from the North.
Chic Dambach is an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins and American Universities, and he is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. He was President and CEO (currently President Emeritus) of the National Peace Corps Association; former President of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and former Chief of Staff for Congressman John Garamendi. Previously, he held executive positions in the arts, sports, and health, and he was an "expert" advisor to the director of the Peace Corps. He serves as Chair of the Mali Affinity Group, and he has served on dozens of nonprofit boards including the Leadership Council of Better Angels. He lectures regularly at colleges and universities and at conferences, and he was a senior consultant with BoardSource where he helped write two books on nonprofit governance.
Cynthia P. Schneider, Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, teaches, publishes, and organizes initiatives in the field of cultural diplomacy, with a focus on relations with the Muslim world. Ambassador Schneider co-directs the Los Angeles-based MOST Resource (Muslims on Screen and Television). Additionally, she co-directs the Timbuktu Renaissance, an innovative strategy and platform for countering extremism and promoting peace and development, which grew out of her work leading the Arts and Culture Dialogue Initiative within Brookings' Center for Middle East Policy.
Cynthia teaches courses in Diplomacy and Culture in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where, from 1984-2005, she was a member of the art history faculty, and published on Rembrandt and seventeenth-century Dutch art. She also organized exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Cynthia publishes and speaks frequently on a topic related to arts, culture, and media and international affairs, particularly the Muslim world. Her writings range from blogs for the Huffington Post, CNN.com, and Foreign Policy to policy papers for Brookings.
From 1998-2001 she served as U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, during which time she led initiatives in cultural diplomacy, biotechnology, cybersecurity, and education. Cynthia has a Ph. D. and BA from Harvard University and she serves on multiple Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards. http://cynthiapschneider.org/
Housseyne is an investigative journalist and a Malian researcher specialized in groups in the Sahel, the director of the newspaper « Kibaru.ml », the first Franco-Arab newspaper in Mali, covered the civil war in northern Mali during the occupation of 2012 and after the intervention in Mali in 2013.