board of directors
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Nelson started Minerva in 2011 with the goal of nurturing critical wisdom for the sake of the world through a systematic and evidence-based approach to learning. Over the past decade, Nelson has built Minerva University into the most selective and effective university in the US, and has developed a business -Minerva Project- to share Minerva's unique approach with other like-minded institutions.
Prior to Minerva, Nelson spent more than 10 years at Snapfish, where he helped build the company from startup to the world’s largest personal publishing service. With over 42 million transactions across 22 countries, nearly five times greater than its closest competitor, Snapfish is among the top e-commerce services in the world. Serving as CEO from 2005 through 2010, Nelson led the company's sale to Hewlett Packard for $300 million.
Nelson’s passion for reforming education was first sparked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he received a B.S. in Economics. After creating a blueprint for curricular reform in his first year, the principles from which he drew to frame Minerva, Nelson went on to become the chair of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE), a pedagogical think tank that is the oldest and only non-elected student government body at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Daryel R. Dunston is the Senior Director of the Place Pathway at the San Francisco Foundation, leading a dynamic team that focuses on ensuring all residents, especially residents of color, can live, work, thrive, and create in the Bay Area. This is accomplished through policy development, advocacy, and grantmaking that supports narrative shift through artistic expression, and affordable housing production, preservation, and protection throughout the five-county Bay Area region. Previously, Daryel served as a Deputy City Administrator for the City of Oakland, overseeing the city's interdepartmental response to the growing housing and homelessness crisis.
Daryel’s vast professional experiences are rooted in public service. Prior to transitioning to philanthropy, Daryel served in various roles within local government that include Senior Policy Advisor to the Vice Mayor of Oakland, Emergency Operations Section Chief, and Human Services Program Manager. Prior to relocating to the Bay Area from Washington, D.C., Daryel served as a sworn Fire Official, Community Organizer, and Contributing Writer with the Huffington Post.
Daryel completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia, and he earned his MPA from UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. Daryel and his wife, along with their two children, affectionately call the East Bay home.
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Dr. Cárdenas is a Continuing Lecturer at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley, a Visiting Professor at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in México City, and the CEO of The Ergo Group, Inc. a consulting group that specializes in public policy and information technology strategy, including process improvement, service delivery improvement, process management and technology implementation in government. He is a teacher, executive and consultant with 20 years’ experience in public policy, international affairs, technology strategy, technology implementation and management consulting. He has served clients in both the private and public sectors in the areas of regulation, citizen service delivery, international affairs, criminal justice reform, and planning. In this capacity, he has advised public sector agencies at all three levels of government on public policy issues in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Singapore as well as the World Bank Group and the Interamerican Development Bank. He has conducted consulting engagements with the World Bank, the Interamerican Development Bank, USAID, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the French Development Agency, as well as various agencies of the Government of Mexico, Canada, and California.
Dr. Cárdenas has extensive experience making presentations to a wide variety of decision makers, from cabinet level officers to local government officials.
Prior to founding The Ergo Group, Inc., Dr. Cárdenas served in the Mexican Federal Government as Senior Policy Adviser to the Deputy Foreign Minister.
Dr. Cárdenas holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and an MPP degree from the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California Berkeley, an MPA degree from the École Nationale d’Administration in France, and a BA from El Colegio de México in International Relations.
At GSPP Dr. Cárdenas has taught the Advanced Policy Analysis course since 2014, the Capstone Analytic Project for the MPA degree since its inception since 2017, a course on data visualization for public policy, a course on public policy implementation “Make It So!”, a course on U.S-Mexico Policy Relations, he co-teaches the Policy Frameworks and Challenges MPA course with Professor Jane Mauldon, and will co-teach the Risk and Optimization in Public Policy course with Professor Michael O’Hare.
He is particularly active in regulatory reform, government services delivery, data analytics and visualization, and U.S. – Mexico binational policy issues. He has been a member of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Working Group on Migration, serves on the board of Mexico’s Council on Foreign Relations (Comexi) and served on the Business Advisory Board in California of Nacional Financiera, México’s development bank. He has worked with the Canadian federal government as well as the provinces of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan on their regulatory reform initiatives since 2009.
He has been working with the Government of Singapore on the redesign of one of their border checkpoints with Malaysia since 2017. He has been a consultant for the World Bank Group in Bolivia and Iraq, and for the Interamerican Development Bank in Mexico. He currently leads USAIDs Competitive Municipalities three year, three-million-dollar project in Mexico to improve regulatory governance and reduce corruption in 15 key municipalities. He has advised several Mexican Federal Government agencies, including the Mexican Foreign Ministry on its consular policy and operations since 2009, the Ministry of the Economy since 2001, and has been active in the field of justice system reform in Mexico since 2008, having worked on implementation of the reforms for the Federal Council of the Judiciary, the Supreme Court, the Federal Electoral Tribunal, the Ministry of the Interior, USAID and several state governments.
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Kris Stanec’s leadership focuses on co-creation, critical pedagogies, and on-going assessment. She intuitively sees the threads that wind through a course or organization, brings them together in a coherent whole, and helps others extend their thinking. She revels in the process of discovery, research, and experimentation to arrive at unique solutions. Kris is known for her ability to develop impactful relationships and generate powerful teams.
Currently a senior lecturer in the Education Department at Colorado College (CC), she has served in a multitude of positions. As the first Director of Museum Education at The Fine Arts Center at CC, she built and iterated a ground-up community education program meeting needs of multiple constituents across education, non-profits, and public service. Her work centered critical pedagogies that develop brave spaces through arts-integration and objects-based learning. Awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship in 2017, she created an inclusive approach to arts education titled Multiple Narratives, which prioritizes students’ voice and lived experience. Now as a Faculty Fellow in Creativity & Innovation at CC, she develops courses and programs that inspire people to embrace the creative process for deeper reflection and learning. She generates over 35 workshops each semester by constructing new pedagogies to enhance faculty and student understanding of innovative trans-disciplinary thinking. Her recent project, Visual Notebooks deconstructs traditional methods of education by introducing modes of learning that have been excluded from colonial-based academic inquiry and provides space that centers various identity perspectives as assets.
Kris’ 25+ years at Colorado College include roles as: chair, professor, director, grant-writer/PI, program creator, and curriculum developer. Her courses include: ED370/529 Teaching the Expressive Arts, ED210 Power of the Arts, Theory and Practice, and ED478 Advanced Methods: Critical Pedagogies in Literacy, Curriculum, and Instruction. She developed the Specialized Internship Program required for all Master of Arts in Teaching candidates and taught the associated CBL course which combined field placements with system-analysis, enabling students to design and implement a curriculum tailored to the partner’s needs. Skilled at data-driven assessment, Kris applies best practices to transform learning and cultivate communities. Many of her conference presentations have led to additional consulting work, both remote and in-person, including specific sessions on diversity, equity, and inclusion that are tailored to the constituent’s needs.
Kris holds a Master of Arts in Teaching, earned her BA in Psychology cum laude along with a minor in Theory and Practice of the Arts from Colorado College. She has also taught in Zermatt, Switzerland and Los Angeles. An artist and writer, Kris believes in the power of visuals combined with story to speak to us as individuals connected to others, using metaphor & imagination to create better spaces for our collective humanity.
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Rei Chou’s purpose is to create experiences that help people realize they’re part of something greater. A leader, facilitator, and healer, she draws on 15+ years of experience in convening, experience design, and purpose-based innovation with organizations ranging from NASA to Intel. One of Fast Company's 100 most creative people, Chou founded The Feast, which brings together a global community of innovators and creatives to support each other in living their fullest lives, purpose, and potential with over 600 dinners hosted around the world to date. The Feast has inspired and facilitated collaborations among leaders and organizations from the White House to MTV and the Rockefeller Foundation. Attendees and participants included CEOs, heads of foundations, catalytic innovators and artists from across disciplines.
Chou works with leaders to understand their true selves, create clarity of action and vision that are aligned accordingly, and uses her community skills to build teams that operate at their peak. She is a master Usui Reiki practitioner, teacher, and KAP practitioner. Above all, she is passionate about helping each person realize the fulfillment of their true heart's desire, thereby creating the kind of world we want to see.
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Rick Darnell was born and raised in North Carolina, and has always had a deep curiosity about creative processes. He grew up in a family where this curiosity was welcomed and encouraged, if not quite nurtured. Darnell’s love of dance, movement, choreography, placemaking, community building, theater, and identity, grew out of a childhood that was full of trips to the library, working backstage in community theater, high school art, and chorus classes, and singing in the church choir.
He eventually found his way into the Theater Program at UNC-Greensboro, where he earned a BFA in Design for Theater. Darnell’s college electives were modern dance studies (technique, improvisation, dance, and theater history) After two summers at the American Dance Festival, he moved to Vermont and eventually began MFA studies at Bennington College.
Darnell was lucky in that all of these learning experiences were with great teachers, good schools, and wonderful like-minded peers: “ In my 60’s now, I realize much of my fortune was due to being a white man. It’s important for me to acknowledge this.”
Darnell moved to San Francisco in the early 1980s, and through agitprop strategies, his dance-making became a platform for AIDS activism. For several years his dance practice revolved around The High-Risk Group, a critically acclaimed men’s dance and performance ensemble, that broke a lot of taboos and was the source of many fine dances (provocative and healing) and wonderful experiences working with all kinds of people.
Today, Darnell’s art practice is deeply rooted in social practice art. He works in collaboration and in coalition with all kinds of people, in the Tenderloin neighborhood, where they live, work, and play. For over 40 years he has been working collectively with local, regional, and national communities, to identify projects that emphasize making and doing, through a shared arts experience that fosters a sense of community, inclusion, contribution trust, and sharing. This has been through dance, visual art, and place-making projects that explore agitprop, activism, queerness, identity, site-specificity, and healing.
In 2016 Darnell joined the CounterPulse Fellowship Program as the engagement fellow and over a five-year period become the Director of Neighborhood Arts, a position he is currently delighted to hold.
