World Trust’s Team of Visionaries

Director of Development

Jersey Harte is a queer, sober, soup-maker, swimmer, feral-cat-carer who founded and directs Harte Grants, a grant-writing firm that has raised over $20 million. Harte Grants prioritizes championing the stories, voices, and vision of female-identifying leaders. Jersey is the co-founder of The Dear Rosa Project, an oral history project dedicated to amplifying the voices of women living with HIV/AIDS.

Director of Operations

Marilyn majored in business marketing at San Francisco State University. She enjoys time with her husband and two kids. She loves being outdoors, being active, and enjoying nature. Marilyn has been with World Trust for over 6 years. She loves to know that she’s part of a big cause. Marilyn makes sure she takes care of all the backend operations for the organization.

Board President

Amikaeyla Gaston is a force for change. She creates environments that support people in exploring themselves and uses creativity and strategic questioning to support people in addressing their fears, developing a place where everyone has an equal voice. She has led corporations, universities, government, and nonprofit organizations through cultural competency & racial equity training. She has done extensive work in the health arena for over the past 20 years and travels the world extensively as a cultural arts ambassador for the State Department bringing together artists and healers of all forms and from all specialties to promote healing and wellness through the arts & activism. Her programming and work with refugees and at-risk children, youth, and families has been utilized and implemented by the Department of Health & Human Services, The American Psychological Association, and the US Consulate General’s Cultural Affairs office, taking her around the world to Israel, Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Palestine, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Nigeria & Sierra Leone just to name a few.

In addition to supporting World Trust, she currently serves as Co-Director at AYPAL, a community organizing and movement-building organization that supports Asian Pacific Islander youth leadership in Oakland. Rhummanee is also an Aquarian dragon, earring maker, and Mommy to the most awesome, Noreak!

Treasurer

Shakti Butler, PhD, is a visionary, transformative, and collaborative educator. For three decades, she has been developing film, sharing curricula, keynotes, and learning labs geared toward building racial equity through healing and structural change. As Founder and President Emeritus of World Trust Educational Services Inc., she has produced five documentaries that have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (one clip alone has been viewed over 30 million times) around the world. They are The Way Home: Women Talk about Race in America; Light in the Shadows: Staying at the Table when the Conversation Gets Hard; Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible; Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity; and most recently Healing Justice, Interrupting the Youth-to-Prison Pipeline. These films are designed for dialogue. She served as diversity consultant and adviser on the Disney animated film, Zootopia, which focuses on challenging bias and systemic inequity. World Trust’s clients span education, health, government, technology and faith-based organizations. Dr. Butler’s vision is of a world coming into wholeness, where transformative love and wisdom heal the human family from racism and separation.

Board Member

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were once considered obligations by many firms, given no more than lip service, with doubtful or non-existent impact on the bottom line. Susan Callender not only makes it her mission to demonstrate the dynamic value of DEI but has the real-world experience to prove it. As a respected business leader and consultant, she can claim what few business coaches can—clear results. She’s enabled multiple companies to achieve over $1 million in revenue since initiating her consultancy over ten years ago, but her most impactful decision came in 2019 when she accepted the role of Chief Operating Officer at Epoch Education, Inc. With Callender’s guidance, one of the foremost DE&B consultancies in the country achieved profitable growth despite the challenges of COVID-19. Callender has built a career leveraging her experience as a corporate litigator and consistent success as an entrepreneurial investor and executive to serve as a mentor and guide to start-ups and emerging businesses. Her background provides the perspective and knowledge that it’s possible to embrace DE&B and use it as a clear competitive advantage. Susan Callender believes that instituting a responsible culture of belonging is both motivational to employees and impactful to a company’s growth.

Board Member

Yolanda Ronquillo, PhD, is an expert in adult transformative learning and change. Dr. Ronquillo is nationally known for fostering and developing learning communities and Arts in Education models. She has created the instructional framework known as Cultural Paths to Knowledge (CPK) which has been used effectively to help English Language Learners.

Board Member

Rick Butler is a four-time Emmy award-winning cameraman and director with over 25 years of experience in broadcast, corporate, and narrative film and video production. His background includes extensive documentary work, much of which has aired nationally on PBS, as well as on commercial networks. Rick’s documentary on San Francisco’s Fillmore district, documented the tragic mistakes made during the city’s “urban renewal” era (1954-1977) serves as an object lesson on how policy can destroy a community of people.

President of London Audio Engineering Society

Leslie Gaston-Bird CAS, MPSE began her term as President-Elect of the Audio Engineering Society in 2023 (alongside AES President Bruce Olson). She is founder and director of Immersive and Inclusive Audio, CIC, which provides training in Avid Pro Tools and Dolby Atmos certification for underrepresented groups, an initiative which she created as part of her PhD at the University of Surrey. Leslie is author of the books Women in Audio (Routledge) and Math Fundamentals for Audio (A-R Editions). She is a Pro Tools Dolby Professional Avid Certified Instructor and Dante Level 3 Certified audio engineer specializing in re-recording mixing and sound editing. She is a member of the Recording Academy (The Grammys®), Cinema Audio Society, and Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE). She has worked for National Public Radio (Washington, D.C.), Colorado Public Radio, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Post Modern Company, and was a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver. In 2023, Leslie began an appointment as Lecturer in Sound Recording & Music Production at City, University of London.

President of Moving Joy

Sarah Crowell is a dancer and choreographer who has taught dance, theater, mindfulness, and violence prevention for over 35 years. At the end of 2020, she left her position as the Artistic Director at Destiny Arts Center in Oakland where she served in different capacities including Executive Director for 30 years. She founded and co-directed the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company, which was the subject of two documentary films, and won the National Arts & Humanities Youth Program Award. Sarah has facilitated arts integration, violence prevention, cultural humility, and team-building professional development sessions with artists and educators since 2000, both locally and nationally. She is the recipient of many awards including the KPFA Peace Award, the KQED Women’s History Local Hero Award, and the National Guild for Community Arts Education Milestone Award. She is a four-time finalist for a Tony Award for Excellence in Theater Education. Sarah believes that movement must be part of all movements for social change.