Who We Are

Faisal Lalani is a global community organizer born in Hyderabad, India and residing in New York City. He spent the past decade living and working in over a dozen countries to understand how emerging technologies were affecting the world's most vulnerable populations. Whether it's studying progressive curricula in rural Nepal or building community wireless networks in South African townships, he has worked to reconcile people and power to shape an inclusive and expansive future.

Faisal is now the Head of Global Partnerships at the Collective Intelligence Project, where he actively coordinates with AI labs, governments, and civil society. He is also the Executive Director of We Are One Humanity, a global human rights foundation founded by Rajmohan Gandhi.

Che de los Reyes-Ferrer (she/her) is an investigative and community-focused journalist from Manila now based in New York where she is specializing in engagement journalism at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She helps newsrooms build and expand communities through data-informed products and deep listening. Dogs and coffee make her happy.

Rund has a Bachelor's in Global Public Health and Global Liberal Studies with a concentration in Critical Creative Production from New York University. Growing up in different countries—such as the United States, Nepal, and Thailand—has brought a multifaceted and diverse perspective to her work as a third-culture individual, driving her to discover her passion for disseminating cultural narratives through artistic expression. Rund's past work explores the intersections of art, research, and advocacy through digital zines, self-designed graphics, critical essays, and most recently, a multimedia thesis produced in the forms of a self-published book, handmade garments, and a fashion show fundraiser.

Born in 1935, Rajmohan Gandhi has been writing on democracy and human rights from 1964, when with a few friends he started a weekly called HIMMAT in Mumbai. Over the years Rajmohan has been a journalist, a professor teaching history and politics in the U.S. and in India, an author of biographies and histories, and a member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of India’s parliament).

Margaret Eastman Smith has devoted her life to exploring the nexus between personal growth and social change. Her doctoral research, at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, focused on new ways dissemination of historical ideas can be used to mitigate conflict. Between 1999 and 2017 she was on the faculty of the Program on International Peace and Conflict Resolution at American University. Her areas of specialization include nationalist and ethnic conflict, uses of memory in politics, and post-conflict reconstruction in deeply divided societies. Before becoming an academic, she worked with the international program of Initiatives of Change, spending four years in Papua New Guinea and a further four years in Richmond, Virginia working on projects to improve community relations.

Born in independent India in 1947, Mridu Sekjar was inspired by the leadership of Gandhi and Nehru and educated in the Rishi Valley School’s humanist philosophies of J Krishnamurthi. She worked in Information technology & healthcare at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She spent two critical decades during the breakup and restructuring of the Soviet Union (1985- 2008) building relationships in the countries of this region. Since 2015 she has lead Kalapriya Center for Indian Performing Arts, a small organization that uses the performing arts to provide accessible avenues for people of all backgrounds to engage meaningfully with issues and becoming powerful catalysts for change.

Edward Peters worked with Moral Re-Armament/Initiatives of Change since leaving school in 1970, in over 50 countries. He was responsible for formal training programmes for young people and a commissioning editor & monthly columnist of 'For A Change magazine' from 1990-96. From 1993-98 he served as international co-ordinator of 'Foundations for Freedom,' a programme of courses aimed at strengthening democracy in Eastern Europe. From 2002-2008 he managed the global internet work of Intiatives of Change. From 2009-2010 he assisted Rajmohan Gandhi during his Presidency of IofC International. He was Executive Vice President of Initiatives of Change International from October 2010 to December 2014. Edward’s wife is Swedish, they have two children, and live on the west coast of Sweden where Edward works in web development.

Belonging to Malta and the United States, Charles Aquilina worked in his youth at a bank in Malta, where, in his late teens, he also presented music programs on radio and television. An overcoming of prejudice towards Arabs, which had stemmed from centuries of conflict in the Mediterranean, set Charles on a course of attempting to build bridges across this and other divides, rather than remaining a slave to what history may have bequeathed. Towards this aim, Charles has worked with others to initiate inclusive dialogues in Malta and in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the USA. Long a resident in the U.S., Charles has also lived in India, Australia, and Britain, and made numerous visits to Middle Eastern countries, always as a guest of friends there.