Professional:

I am a partner in a small consulting firm, Consultants for Community Development LLC (CCD).  In the New York region, CCD  provides interview and data analysis services for governmental and social service entities.  We are currently working with a project to collect data for research being conducted by faculty of Columbia University’s School of Social Work for the Jewish Agency for Services-Aged (JASA) in New York City.  In the past, we have worked with projects conducted by the University of Albany (SUNY) for the New York Department of Health, and worked with establishing a single point of entry system for Schenectady County’s social services units. 

CCD also provides various consulting services for organizations working in Central America.  We currently provide logistical and cultural advisory and orientation services for a team of nurse practitioners at the University of Texas Medical Branch to establish a women’s clinic for rural Mayan women.  We provide similar services for a Case Western Reserve School of Dentistry student association that has staged 5 major dental clinics in Guatemala. 

Since 1990, I have worked with various US non-profits and Central American non-governmental organizations (NGOs).  Along with my wife, Mary Pliska, I was instrumental in founding several Guatemalan NGOs that support education and public health.  We continue to work with two of these as board members and advisors: the Asociación Centro Maya para la Educación, el Bienestar, y Asistencia Rural (ACEBAR), a registered Guatemalan NGO that grew out of an out-of-pocket scholarship project Mary and I started in 2002; and the Maya Center for Rural Education and Well-Being (MayaCREW), an organization created in 2004 and granted 501(c)3 non-profit status in 2006.  I continue to facilitate tours and imersion experiences in Guatemala, and provide cultural orientation for US-based missionaries, students, and professionals seeking to participate in service learning or charity clinics in Guatemala.     

 Education:

In 2011 I finished the PhD in Latin American Studies at Tulane University, with concentrations in history, multidisciplinary linguistics, and ethnic studies.  My dissertation project was a study of public school administration in a very large rural school district (120+ schools, more than 30,000 children) in Guatemala.   

I was awarded the M.A. in Latin American Studies, also at Tulane, in 1997, with the thesis project being a study of well-educated Maya in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.  I earned the B.A. in English literature at Midwestern State University (MSU) in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1986, and went on to accumulate graduate hours in literate and creative writing at MSU and Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. 

Personal: