Meet Our Team
With a social justice framework at our core, our small but mighty team
supports our clients with a variety of services.
Dr. Anh Thang Dao-Shah
Founder & Principal Researcher
Anh Thang Dao-Shah was born in Vietnam, grew up in Germany and Poland and earned her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
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Dr. Dao-Shah has 10 years of experience in research, teaching, and consulting in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging with a special focus on the cultural and healthcare sector. Her consulting clients include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Akonadi Foundation, Grantmakers for the Arts, the Federation of States Humanities Council, California Council for the Arts, DataArts/SMU, the City of Berkeley, the National Folklife Network, and National Farm to School Network.
She served as the Senior Racial Equity and Policy Analyst at the San Francisco Arts Commission, where she led the agency to pass the first racial equity action plan in the City and County of San Francisco. She was also the first Director of Health Equity at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Dao-Shah currently served on the Board of Directors of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, a non-profit organization in San Francisco that aims to connect artists of the Vietnamese diaspora with the diverse audience of the Bay Area.
Dr. Dao-Shah is a published writer with academic essays, poetry, and prose featured in Positions, the Vietnamese Studies Journal and multiple anthologies and textbooks.
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Listen to her podcast discussing diversity, equity, belonging, and justice leadership HERE.
Kate Faust, MPP
Founder & Principal Analyst
Kate Faust wants to live in a world where everyone can afford to live in beautiful cities, neighbors plan block parties at least once a year, and she gets to walk to work.
Ms. Faust earned her Master’s of Public Policy from the Goldman School at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focuses on urban arts policy and community economic development, housing equity, and finance structures in the creative economy.
Ms. Faust has been the lead analyst for a range of clients including the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Akonadi Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and Grantmakers in the Arts. Prior to her work as a policy and evaluation consultant, Ms. Faust managed programs for the City University of New York, managed communications for the Social Science Research Center, and supported community engagement projects for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has over a decade of experience in government and nonprofit sectors and has worked in a broad range of policy areas including public finance, housing, public arts, and workforce development.
OUR FOUNDERS
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Asif Majid, Ph.D.
Partner Consultant
Asif Majid is a scholar-artist-educator working at the intersection of racialized sociopolitical identities, multimedia, marginality, and new performance, particularly through devising community-based participatory theatre, making improvisational music, and addressing the nexus of Islam and performance. He has published in a range of academic and popular media outlets, and his performance credits include work with the Kennedy Center in the US and the Royal Exchange Theatre in the UK, among others. He earned his PhD in Anthropology, Media, and Performance from The University of Manchester.
Most recently, Asif was a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow with the San Francisco Arts Commission and a Lab Fellow with The Laboratory for Global Performance and Performance. He is currently Assistant Professor of Theatre and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, where he is at work on a book project titled Making Muslimness: Race, Religion, and Performance in Contemporary Manchester.
Asif can be found online at www.asifmajid.com.
Sandra Panopio
Partner Consultant
Sandra Panopio is an experienced community development and racial equity practitioner. She has over 15 years of experience working with local and international communities on the analysis and implementation of equitable policies. In the past ten years, Sandra has focused on racial, gender and linguistic equity and accessibility for communities in San Francisco and the Bay Area. She specializes in community engagement and culturally competent facilitation that is multilingual and people-centered.
Sandra was born and raised in California and lived in New York City, London, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines prior to returning to the Bay area. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the London School of Economics.
Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar, Ph.D.
Partner Consultant
Mytoan has over two decades of experience doing research for policy making, advocacy, community-based outreach, higher education, and personal intellectual pursuits with a heavy emphasis on centering communities of color and building community. Mytoan entered City government by way of a Mellon /American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellows position at the Office of Arts & Culture, where she led research-based initiatives and developed a set of impact and assessment tools in the arts sector for better results-based accountability and race and social justice impact.
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Mytoan earned her Sociology PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA in Australian Studies from The University of Melbourne, Australia, and a BA in Political Economies of Industrial Societies from UC Berkeley. She has published many articles on race, migration, and social change. She is a Regional Affiliate with the University of Washington Center for Studies of Demography and Ecology.
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Mytoan volunteers as a Board Member of Friends of Little Saigon, as Chapter Founder of the Pacific Northwest Public Policy and International Affairs Alumni Association, and formally mentors two different cohorts of PPIA UW Evans rising seniors in college and Leading Edge post-doctoral fellows.