Board of Directors
Patrice Jean
Board President
​
Patrice Jean began his career in healthcare as a volunteer responding to the 2010 earthquake that devastated his home country, Haiti. A lifelong member of the Catholic Church's Congregation of the Holy Family, he has devoted his life to caring for those in crisis.
He is now an acute care nurse at Providence Milwaukie Hospital in Oregon, where he works with a diverse patient population dealing with both physical and mental trauma. His responsibilities in hospital resourcing involve him in the daily workings of intensive care, internal medicine, emergency, surgery, and recovery units.
As a musician and producer, he managed a studio in Port-au-Prince that produced tracks for some of Haiti’s most well known artists, including Lakou Mizik, Boulo Valcourt, Bélo, and Tifane. He now lives in Portland with his wife and two young sons.
.jpg)
Anne Rygiel is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and Executive Director of the Mid-Alabama chapter of the Red Cross. Prior to this she worked for 11 years as Executive Director of Firehouse Ministries, a nonprofit that served chronically homeless men through emergency sheltering, direct services, and housing. She holds a Master's in Social Work from the University of Alabama.
Anne has served on many boards and advisory committees addressing mental health issues, veteran’s issues, and homelessness, and is very involved in raising public awareness about topics surrounding systemic poverty in the Deep South.
Anne has received numerous awards for her service and leadership, including the White Wolf award for homeless advocacy, Hoover Citizen of the Year, BBJ Top 40 Under 40, Nonprofit of the Year award, and was a finalist for CEO of the Year. She is a member of the 2019 class of Leadership Birmingham, the 2025 class of Leadership Hoover, and Harvard’s Young American Leaders Program class of 2024.
Board Member
Board Secretary and Treasurer
D
Dr. Michael Dylan Rogers is a historian and author who teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art / Willamette University in Portland, Oregon. His research explores the intersection of ideas about science and politics in 20th-century German-language philosophy.
His book Epistemology and Political Thought in Interwar Germany and Austria: 1914–1945 is forthcoming in 2025 from Springer Nature. His work has appeared in the journal Modern Intellectual History and in the SAGE Encyclopedia of War, and has been presented by invitation at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. He holds a PhD in History from Cambridge University.
​
Michael first traveled to Haiti in 2002 and has spent over five years living and working there. As Co-Founder and Program Coordinator of the Haitian Machete Fencing Project, he is the only non-Haitian known to have mastered the traditional martial art of Tire Machèt, and is featured in the award-winning documentary film Papa Machete.
​​
​
.jpg)
Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is a filmmaker (and occasional journalist) from Barbados whose work focuses on giving voice to the often-marginalized stories of the tropics.
​
As a journalist, his work has appeared in The Miami Herald and American Way and on The Intercept. As a filmmaker, he has produced award-winning shorts such as Papa Machete and Swimming in Your Skin Again that have screened at film festivals such as Sundance, BlackStar, TIFF, Sheffield and more. The most recent, T, was the 2020 winner of the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale.
​
He is also Co-Founder of the Miami-based filmmaking and creative collective Third Horizon, which stages the annual Third Horizon Film Festival, a showcase of cinema from the Caribbean, its diaspora, and other underrepresented spaces in the Global South. It was named one of the “25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World” in 2019 by MovieMaker Magazine.
Board Member (on sabbatical)
Reginald Turnier
Executive Director
Reginald Turnier is a writer, musician, peace activist, and the steward of his family's ancestral lands in southeastern Haiti. For the past 20 years he has lived in Haiti full-time, leading an effort to restore these lands through sustainable development practices, working in close collaboration with local stakeholders.
​
He has served on the Boards of various nonprofit organizations, including Kay Angel, an orphanage for children with HIV and other serious medical conditions. In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, he served as Administrative Director for an emergency birthing clinic run by the international midwifery organization Bumi Sehat.
​
Reginald is also Co-Founder and Logistics Coordinator of the Haitian Machete Fencing Project, and worked as a consultant on the award-winning documentary film Papa Machete. He is co-author of the book Haitian Machete Fencing: The Avril Family Method.
