An event sharing ideas worth spreading about the following topics (among many!):
Open Sourcing and Fab Labs
Acting on Vulnerability
Violence against women around the world and solutions

El Paso Community Foundation/Foundation Room
333 North Oregon Street
El Paso, Texas, 79901
United States

Arvind Singhal

Dr. Arvind Singhal is the Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor of Communication and Director of the Social Justice Initiative in UTEP’s Department of Communication. He is also appointed, since 2009-2010, as the William J. Clinton Distinguished Fellow at the Clinton School of Public Service, Little Rock, Arkansas. Dr. Singhal teaches and conducts research in the diffusion of innovations, the positive deviance approach, organizing for social change, the entertainment-education strategy, and liberating interactional structures. Dr. Singhal is co-author or editor of 13 books and three of Dr. Singhal’s books won awards for distinguished applied scholarship.

Austin Savage

Austin Savage was the recipient of the 2009 Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival Meritorious Achievement Award for Directing for his region. He has worked at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as an Assistant Director for their MFA Playwriting Workshop in which he helped develop Norway, an original work by Obie Award winning and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Samuel Hunter. After being named an Observership Fellow by the Society of Directors & Choreographers he Assistant Directed The Good Negro by Tracy Scott Wilson at Chicago's legendary Goodman Theatre under the direction of acclaimed director Chuck Smith. In 2010 he founded The Border Theatre, a performance ensemble dedicated to developing and performing original and world premier works as well as educating the El Paso community in the artistry of theatre. His body of work over the last 5 years has led to a nomination for the 2015 Texas Medal of Arts Award.

Charlie Clements

Charlie Clements is a public health physician and a human rights activist. He describes his journey of conscience from a pilot in Vietnam to a physician in a ‘free fire zone’ of El Salvador’s civil war in Witness to War (Bantam, 1984), which is also the name of an Academy Award winning documentary of the same title. From 1996 to 2003 in collaboration with the El Paso Community Foundation he worked in a corridor from Brownsville, TX to Hatch, NM assisting colonia residents with construction of urgently needed water and sewer infrastructure. He was a founding board member of Physicians for Human Rights and in 1997 represented it as President at the treaty signing ceremony (Ottawa) and the Nobel peace prize ceremony (Oslo) for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Charlie is currently the Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he also teaches human rights.

Dagoberto Gilb

Dagoberto Gilb is the author of Before the End, After the Beginning, as well as The Magic of Blood, Woodcuts of Women, and few others. His fiction and nonfiction are published widely in magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Zyzzyva, Harper’s, and Best American Essays. A high-rise construction worker for sixteen years, his current other occupation is as writer-in-residence and executive director of CentroVictoria, the center for Mexican American literature and culture at the University of Houston-Victoria, where he is also founding editor of the literary magazine Huizache.

David Garza

David Garza has been making his mark since the late '80s when he emerged from the fertile Austin, Texas music scene with his inimitable blend of glam-rock, power pop, Latin folk, blues and even musique concrete. Through a couple of major-label albums and a trove of indie releases, he's embodied the troubadour, the guitar hero, the post-punk provocateur, the falsetto-wielding overman, the effects-looping mad scientist, the griot--but always a storyteller, relentlessly seeking that human connection.

Gus Arriaga

Gustavo is a recovering Neurobiologist now exploring the wild world of digital fabrication. After receiving a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Duke University and completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Tokyo he left the bench to return home and co-found the non-profit Fab Lab El Paso. As director of the Fab Lab he’s always seeking ways to leverage the power of open source design and distributed manufacturing to accelerate scientific discovery.

Kathy Staudt

Kathleen (Kathy) Staudt (PhD, University of Wisconsin) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at El Paso and Endowed Professor of Western Hemispheric Trade Policy Studies. She founded UTEP’s Center for Civic Engagement and led it for ten years. Kathy teaches courses on public policy, democracy, border politics, and women and politics. Among her books and edited volumes, eight have focused on the U.S.-Mexico border. The latest of these, coauthored with Zulma Méndez, is titled Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez: Challenges to Militarization. She has published over a hundred academic articles and chapters in books. Kathy is active in community organizations and has served on many nonprofit boards. She has two adult children.

Paul Hotchkin

Paul Hotchkin is Assistant Professor of Biology at El Paso Community College. In 1996 he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Religion from The Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and he earned his Masters in Biology from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2002. Paul’s interests are wide-ranging, and include philosophy, human ecology, and science education.

Rebecca Ramos

Early in her career Rebecca became involved with community mobilization which has guided her educational and professional choices ever since. In the 1980’s she was the Director and Principal Investigator of the Paso Del Norte Area Health Education Training Center. Between 1990 and 2009 Rebecca was the Technical Director of the U.S. Mexico Border Health Association. Currently she leads the Alliance of Border Collaboratives (ABC). ABC works to improve outcomes for health disparities populations. She has led innovative public health efforts dealing with health (HIV, STIs (including Hepatitis C), and social issues (substance abuse, violence, and poverty mitigation). Recently she developed Pasa la Voz, a Participant Driven Intervention to increase access to and utilization of local services. A variation on the program is now actively affecting change by giving thousands of children tools and a voice to counter the effects of lawlessness and violence in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Robert Tinajero

Robert Tinajero was born and raised in El Paso, TX, and has degrees in English, Creative Writing, Religious Studies, and a doctoral degree in Rhetoric and Writing Studies. His research interests include Hip Hop culture, race, composition studies, and politics. He is currently Director of Writing Studies at Paul Quinn College in Dallas, TX.

Roger Gonzalez

Roger V. Gonzalez, Ph.D., P.E., is the Founder and President of LIMBS International (www.limbs.org), a humanitarian organization that designs, creates and deploys prosthetic devices to transform the lives of amputees in the developing world by restoring their ability to walk. He is also the Inaugural Chairman and Professor of the Dept of Engineering Education and Leadership. He has been recognized for scholarly work, education innovation and socio-entrepreneurial humanitarian efforts and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) with over 100 publications detailing his scholarly endeavors.

S. Paola Lopez

S. Paola López R. (BFA, M.Ed.) is a dancemaker and improviser with an active career involving performance, education, and activism. Her work is characterized by the exploration of relationships, gender, race, identity, awareness, kinesthetic listening and perception and it has taken her throughout the US, Colombia, Brazil, Cyprus, France, Mexico and Canada. She is co-founder and Director of in2improv an organization that empowers underserved communities through improvisation and performance and is currently faculty in the dance programs at University of Texas at El Paso and New Mexico State University.

Sally Deitch

Sally A. Hurt-Deitch, RN, FACHE, is the Market Chief Executive Officer of Sierra Providence Health Network (SPHN) in El Paso, Texas. In this capacity, Sally serves as the CEO of Providence Memorial Hospital and Providence Children’s Hospital. Sally was recently promoted to this position in March 2015, after serving as SPHN Market COO and CEO of Sierra Providence East Medical Center. In her role as Market CEO, Sally oversees the strategic, operational and clinical activities for the health network as well as the integration activities of three hospitals and the current construction of a fourth.

Tracey Jerome

Tracey Jerome is the newly appointed Director of Museums and Cultural Affairs for the City of El Paso. She and her team are responsible for the Museums of Art, History and Archeology as well as the City’s Public Art and Cultural Affairs programs. Tracey’s vision and passion are all about ensuring that the people of El Paso have museums and cultural affairs programming that are world class. The Museum of History’s Digital Wall and the City’s Public Art Program are already attracting positive global attention. Tracey attended The College of William and Mary and earned a BA in Government. She earned Master Degrees in Historic Preservation from Eastern Michigan University and in History of Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. Tracey moved to El Paso from London, England, with her husband and two sons in February 2015.

Travis Duckworth

Our planet is under stress and our education system is struggling. Travis Duckworth hopes to address both these issues by bringing global concerns into the classroom and local community. He currently designs programs for public schools which integrate the disciplines through demonstration sites that model principles and practices of sustainability. Through these projects students gain a bigger perspective and responsibility while being empowered with the real-world skills of how to build their own houses, grow their own food and start their own businesses.

Xochitl Rodriguez

Transdisciplinary artist and educator, Xochitl Rodriguez received her BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2009. Immediately following her graduation, Rodriguez accepted an invitation from Prince Jigyel Ugyen Wang- chuck to visit the Kingdom of Bhutan as the country’s first international artist in residence. It was during her residency in Bhutan that Rodriguez began to explore her own philanthropic art practices and the points of contact between art and the general public that would be the foundation for her current work. Rodriguez returned to El Paso and In 2013, co-founded ‘The Caldo Collective’, an artist-driven curatorial collective that creates professional development, micro-financing and exhibition opportunities for artists working in the border area. She is the Creative Director for the Caldo Collective.