After finishing their course work at CIE in 1990 Grant and Marisa Suhm spent six years in Micronesia, working as faculty members at the College of Micronesia where Grant was the Founder and Director of the Department of Agriculture. Grant also worked as the Training Director for Peace Corps in Micronesia and later in Ecuador and Sri Lanka.

Since leaving CIE, I have had an eclectic and fulfilling professional life and worn many hats. CIE gave me the confidence and the tools to be creative, to contribute, and to thrive anywhere.

After graduating from UMass in 1992, I resettled in Canada and volunteered with the Somali Canadian Youth Association of Ottawa, Ontario. I assisted the with after school programming and fundraising for the youth.

After leaving CIE, Eligia worked for World Education in Kenya.

I currently serve as director or the Language and Culture Institute (LCI) at Virginia Tech, where I have been employed for the last 15 years.  In my role as a leader in international affairs, I represent the university with EducationUSA offices, foreign universities, international aid organizations, scholarship offices and globally minded businesses. Over the last several years, I have visited nearly 20 countries and given presentations on Virginia Tech to over a dozen leading universities.

My Family and I live in West Hartford, Connecticut where I have worked for over 28 years at the Performance Office of the Connecticut Department of Education as a senior psychometrician. My role has been to conduct or supervise all psychometric work for the Department, such as test construction, equating, scaling, and validation. I also coordinate test data management, auditing, and analyses. My team and I check yearly test results, and ensure the accuracy of scores for all students.

Dear long lost but not forgotten CIE friends, 

Since the last update in 2008, I retired from the UN as Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretariat General for UNDP’s partnerships and resource mobilization division.  I continue to consult for the UN, coaching country and agency teams as well as co-teaching leadership and management courses for the UN Staff College. I have been facilitating a host of virtual teams throughout the pandemic, mostly regarding psychological safety, communication, strategic planning, and imagining a future office.

I have been involved in education, primarily in middle schools, high schools and colleges, since the early 1980s: in Africa, Canada and here in the United States. I was one of the founding teachers of the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, Massachusetts. I served as a member of the instructional team and a teacher for multilingual classes.

In the early 80s I began my journey in the field of education and community development by joining a team at the Ministry of Education in Nepal as a curriculum specialist, where I was exposed to the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. It led me to become interested in CIE’s work, after which I enrolled in its M.Ed program in 1987, and the Ed.D in 1990.

Charles’ career continues to focus largely on government capacity building in the many areas related to migration and governance.  Building on earlier work with migrant and refuge communities in New England during his years at CIE, and subsequently as a member of the senior management team at the Philippines Refugee Processing Center in Bataan until its closure in 1994, Charles then joined the International Organization for Migration (IOM), now the UN’s migration agency.  He served in programmatic and senior management positions in Georgia (Tbilisi), Italy, Geneva, again the Philippines and