Board of Directors
Greg Robison
PRESIDENT
Chairman of the board, Gregory Robison, has served as senior manager in both new and established ventures in the financial, industrial and non-profit sectors. His work has taken him throughout the United States and various parts of the world, including Eastern Europe, where he was director general of an investment fund, and the Caribbean, where he was general manager of a manufacturing company. He has undertaken consulting assignments on economic development issues for the World Bank, the United Nations and other organizations in the Middle East, as well as for the Inter-American Foundation in various countries of Latin America.
Rawan Odeh
FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BOARD MEMBER
Rawan Odeh is Partnerships Manager for social impact at monday.com. Prior to joining monday.com, she was the Executive Director of New Story Leadership. She often found herself as the only Palestinian, woman and under 30 in political halls of power in Congress, the White House, and Diplomatic channels. She understands that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution and yet they don't have access, and she saw the same story working for Women's World Banking in micro-finance for low-income women across the world. Over one billion women remain outside formal financial systems, and that is why she joined monday.com, where she leads partnerships with different social and tech organizations to close the digital divide for nonprofits around the world.
Joyce Schwartz
VICE PRESIDENT AND TREASURER
Vice President and Treasurer, Joyce Schwartz, has been an active host mother for the Washington Ireland Program and the South Africa International Program as well as the NSL program. A teacher by profession, she has taught science, art history and cooking to children for the past 40 years, and has also co-authored several published biographies and science articles for kids. Since 1976, she’s been a school-tour docent, first at the National Museum of Natural History and presently at the National Gallery of Art. An active member of the Vassar Club of Washington, DC since 1973, Joyce was elected to several officer positions including a term as president. Joyce is also active in politics, serving for over 20 years as the Vice-Chair for the Democratic Party in her precinct.
Ira Weiss
Ira is a neurophysiologist by profession now retired after 30+ years at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC. He grew up on the lower east side of New York City where he attended an Orthodox yeshiva. He then attended MIT and The City College of New York where he received his B.A. He received his Ph.D. in Physiological Psychology from Syracuse University after which he served a three-year post-doctoral fellowship in Sensory Neurophysiology at the Callier Center in Dallas, TX.
Ira helped found and run an NGO called Projects Encounter which, for four years, brought Palestinian and Israeli high school students to Spain for summer coexistence workshops. After that, he spent about a year developing a 16-hour adult education course called History of the Arab-Jewish Conflict: Parallel Narratives Never Meet, which he has taught in several venues in the Washington DC area
Liane Dorsey
SECRETARY
As a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, Liane Dorsey worked in places as diverse as Uganda, Scotland, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Turkey, Jerusalem and the West Bank. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, she taught high school students in what-was-then Zaire, and she has also worked for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Washington, D.C.. Much of Liane’s work has focused on international humanitarian relief and has included responsibility for U.S. government assistance programs aiding refugees and displaced persons in Pakistan, East and Central Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Turkey. Liane spearheaded the U.S. government’s humanitarian response to Syrian refugees in Turkey and was Senior Humanitarian Advisor in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. She has a BA in Political Science from Yale and did her graduate work at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In 2017, Liane launched an NSL sister program, RefAmerica, a leadership program which brings together recently resettled refugee teens with local American counterpart volunteers and American host families in the national capital area. The goal of the program is to help promote a warm welcome for (and full inclusion of) refugees in America and to provide participant refugees with the tools to tell their stories and to help forge for themselves, their families and their fellow refugees – like generations of Americans before them – a new American story.
Margreta Silverstone
Margreta Silverstone currently has an independent business providing consulting services to IT firms and State & local governments. The firm provides business development, proposal development, training and business analysis on social service delivery, particularly focused on child protective services and case management. She held similar roles with two information technology firms.
Margreta spent 15 years in the federal government, serving as a senior analyst within the Administration for Children and Families within the US Department of Health and Human Services. She supported public affairs, wrote child welfare policy materials and managed the technical assistance and training contracts for child care and child welfare information technology.
Margreta also loves to create custom handbags, wallets and reusable straw holders. This work evolved from her interest in creating quilts. She has had work juried into international quilt shows.
Margreta holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from The George Washington University. She is also a credentialed Project Management Professional.
Margreta is an active member of Seekers Church. She, her husband and their 14 year old adopted son live in Takoma Park, MD.
Joy Markowitz
Joy and her husband, Rick Eisen, were NSL host parents in 2018 and 2019. She attended most NSL events those summers, and engaged regularly with the delegates and staff. Joy lived in Israel for two non-consecutive years—one year on a kibbutz (1970-71) and one year in Jerusalem while attending The Hebrew University (1973-74). Prior to her retirement, Joy managed federally-funded special education projects for more than two decades, after having provided services directly to children and their families in the early part of her career. Joy has a doctorate in education. Since her retirement in January 2017, Joy has been tutoring adults, serving as a court-appointed advocate for children in foster care, coordinating volunteers for a local music festival, leading tours on the Underground Railroad experience trail (regional park in Montgomery County, MD), and serving on the board of her Jewish humanistic congregation (2 years as president).
Mark Nadel
Mark joined the board in 2019. He is an attorney advisor at the Federal Communications Commission, where he was in charge of writing the original rules for the FCC’s schools and libraries program (E-rate), which provides more than $3 billion/year in discounts for the purchase of Internet access and the like. He was also on the board and treasurer of challengingracism.org from 2019-2022, and co-chaired Temple Rodef Shalom’s Lens on Race program from 2016-19. He has organized annual trips for both groups to plays dealing with race and white privilege since 2017.
He has also written law review articles proposing public policies for improving affirmative action, organ donations, real estate broker commissions, copyright, and analyzing different aspects of the First Amendment. He majored in economics and political science at Amherst College and has a JD from Harvard Law School.
Nancy Adams
Nancy served for 30 years as an international trade negotiator with the Office of the United States Trade Representatives (USTR). During her tenure at USTR she was responsible for numerous international trade negotiations with countries around the globe. She served as USTR’s Middle East negotiator and senior staff negotiator of the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement (1982-1984), negotiating the first free trade area agreement ever undertaken by the United States.
Following her retirement from USTR in 2007, Nancy continues to work on a voluntary basis with several organizations focused upon refugee and asylee resettlement, inter-faith communication and activities, Middle East peace, teaching negotiating skills, and health and wellness.
Nancy’s interest in the Middle East started as a child, when her family lived in Beirut, Lebanon while her father was teaching at the American University of Beirut and serving as an American Specialist for the USIS. During that time her family visited many Palestinian refugee camps and drove from Beirut to Jerusalem, staying at a Palestinian college in the West Bank for several weeks. Later, during the negotiation of the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Area Agreement, Ms. Adams visited Israel many times, including multiple weeks of speaking engagements throughout the country about the benefits of the agreement to provide economic stability for the Camp David Peace Accords. She returned to Israel on pilgrimage in 2017 for the first time in 30 years.
She has been active in supporting NSL for over 5 years and has served as a host family for the last two years.