Maria Diarra Keita is the Director and co-founder, with Cheick Oumar Coulibaly and  Debbie Fredo, of the Institute for Popular Education (IEP) in Mali, West Africa.

After graduating, Barbara worked in Washington, D.C. for six years. She then took a position as the Caribbean Regional Trainer with Habitat for Humanity.  The position was based in Guyana and involved travel throughout the Caribbean training National Directors and local staff. 

Many things in my life have changed since I left Amherst in 1994, but some things remain constant: I am still working on a UMass campus, still doing union and community organizing, still in a socialist group, and still being nagged by DRE to submit past-due writing.

I am currently the Vice President of Equity and Inclusion at Madison College, one of the sixteen technical colleges in Wisconsin. Previous to this position, I served as the Director of the City of Madison Department of Civil Rights for ten years and prior to that, I was the Equal Rights Division Administrator for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. I also served as the Deputy Secretary for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.

After graduating from UMASS with a M.Ed. from CIE, my partner (now wife) Peg Giffels (UMass M.Ed. 1993) and I moved to Seattle and have grown roots here.  I taught ESL in the Seattle area Community College system for a couple of years.  Then I joined Starbucks Coffee Company to assist in the development of the Starbucks Foundation’s literacy and young entrepreneurs’ grant program.  I enjoyed a ten year career at Starbucks and was part of the creation of the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility Department.

Carl retired from the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) at the end of 2020 after almost 20 years as a Senior Technical Advisor specializing in HIV programs.  He currently continues to work part time to complete two pediatric HIV research projects in Uganda and Zambia, and a third neonatal HIV study in Zimbabwe. 

Phyllis founded an organizational development and consulting firm called Courageous Crossings which provides training, coaching, leadership retreats, and teaches contemplative practices to aid development workers during their R&R from refugee hot spots to help reduce stress/burnout.

She has been living on the island of Maui since 2005 where she served on the Maui County Board of Water Supply for five years and served as Chair in her final year.

Since graduating from CIE, Judy Hofer has spent her entire professional career immersed in literacy education. As a fresh graduate, she ran the Ware Adult Education Center, a site of The Literacy Project, where she started a lifelong journey of addressing the impacts of violence and trauma on learning, especially on women. To this day these first students remain her inspiration for having taken such personal risk in naming the violence they experienced and creating a video to encourage others to get support and speak out.

Yuri had the following to say about “Life after CIE?”

Elias Moning is currently Director of Gaharu Kencana Estate Villa or “Ghrookeville” in West Java, Indonesia, an agro-eco-property development that emphasizes economic and environmental values by using traditional architecture for building, conserving the endangered Gaharu species by planting Gaharu trees, and facilitating the cultivation of durian and mangosteen fruit trees over their 6 hectares of land.