Our Team
Board of Directors
Executive Committee
Dan Nathan, President
Dan joined the Board in 2011, after he fell in love with the program when his child was as a member of OUDC Class 15. He became Board president in August 2022. Dan retired last year from a career as an attorney with federal and industry financial regulators and in private practice, principally practicing in securities, commodities, broker-dealer and white collar law. Dan attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University School of Law, and has lived in Washington, DC for 38 years. Dan is also a member of the Board of Forge, a non-profit entity that works with veterans, law enforcement, and other gun owners on collaborative projects to save lives. A jazz pianist, he is using his retirement to increase his playing with several bands, and he can frequently be found on his bicycle around the DC metropolitan area.
Alexandra Caceres, Vice President
Alexandra joined the Board in 2022. Having dedicated most of her career to public service and volunteerism, she has contributed to the community through inspiring a love for STEM, tutoring, and professional readiness for youth. Alexandra was a founding member of the CHICA Project, an organization dedicated to uplifting and closing the opportunity gap for young women and girls of color. As a bi-cultural and native Spanish speaker, she is dedicated to uplifting communities of need to create more empowered future generations. Alexandra has a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a Master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Scott Rechler, Treasurer
Scott joined the Board in 2022. A Washington DC native, Scott is Co-Director and CEO of LearnServe International, a non-profit organization that prepares high school and middle school students as community leaders, with a focus on social entrepreneurship and global awareness. Scott graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. in social anthropology. He wrote his senior thesis on social entrepreneurship and social change in southern Chile, and co-founded Harvard’s Race, Culture, and Diversity Initiative to improve campus inter-cultural relations. Scott worked for five years at Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, strengthening Ashoka’s dynamic global community of social entrepreneurs. Scott was selected a 2009 winner of the Linowes Leadership Award of the Community Foundation of the National Capital Region. He received his M.B.A. from George Washington University’s School of Business in May 2012. He served on the Board of ScholarCHIPS, a college scholarship and mentorship program for children of incarcerated parents. A fluent Spanish speaker, Scott has lived in Chile and Bolivia. Scott is a member of OUDC Class 4 of and served as a travel leader for the summer journey for Class 10.
Joshua Levin, Secretary
Josh is the father of OUDC alum, Ethan Levin (OUDC Class 19), and has been a member of the Board of OUDC since 2016. Presently OUDC's Board Secretary, Josh previously created and chaired the Board's Innovation Committee. Josh is a staff attorney with the non-profit organization, Tzedek DC, which he joined DC in 2019 after a 28-year career with the United States Department of Justice’s Environment & Natural Resources Division. Previously, Josh was also an investigative reporter and a staff member with the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Josh is a graduate of Northwestern University School of Law. He has an M.P.A from the University of Texas at Austin, and attended Oberlin College. Josh is devoted to OUDC as an organization because of the enormous and positive influence it had in his son Ethan's life, and because its lessons of tolerance of racial healing remain at the forefront of America's critical challenges.
Other Board Members
Karim Marshall
Karim joined the Board in 2020. He is an alumnus of Class 4. Karim serves in the Biden Administration as the Senior Advisor for the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR) at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. As the inaugural Senior Advisor, he advances OEJECR’s mission to coordinate implementation of EJ priorities across the agency’s national programs, regions, the Administrator’s Office, and across partnerships with other federal agencies and coregulators in state, tribal, and local government, industry, and communities. He is also charged with implementing President Biden’s policy goals that include, implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Justice40, and other equity-driven initiatives.
Delonte Egwuatu
Delonte joined the Board in 2023. He is an alumnus of OUDC Class 17. He currently is Chief Engagement & Inclusion Officer for the Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
Jess Schwalb
Jess Schwalb is an alumna of Class 20 and currently lives in Chicago, IL. As a researcher, writer, facilitator, and storyteller, she has worked to advance fair housing laws through outreach and legal advocacy with the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, to build the child care workers' union with SEIU, and to train Jewish communities on antisemitism and white supremacy with the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.
Jack Moline
Jack was a member of the original OUDC board, then served for years on the Advisory Board. He is back on the board as of 2024. He is the father of participants in classes 5 and 13. Now retired, Jack served as a synagogue rabbi in Alexandria for 27 years and as president of Interfaith Alliance for 7 years
Pam Mahony
Pam Mahony is the mother of an OUDC alum (Class 28) and joined the Board in 2024. She is a high school teacher of government and politics in Falls Church City Public Schools. She began her career as a special education teacher and has served as a curriculum leader, Model UN sponsor, and Scholastic Bowl coach over the last several decades. As the current President of the Falls Church City Education Association, she recently led the staff union through the process of negotiating the first collective bargaining contract in fifty years. She graduated from the College of William and Mary with a B.A. in International Studies, has an M.Ed. from the University of Maryland, College Park, and has completed considerable post graduate studies in U.S History.
Alison Arnold
Alison joined the Board in 2024. She is the mother of OUDC alum, Anderson Simmons (OUDC Class 19). Alison began her career as a corporate attorney and later taught business law. She is now semi-retired and is following her passion - teaching math to middle school students. Inspired by her mother's dedication to being a contributor to her community, Alison has served on a variety of boards including the Washington Performing Arts Society, Capital City Public Charter School and the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. Alison is a graduate of Harvard University
John Mitchell, Jr. Program Staff
The John Mitchell, Jr. Program for History, Justice and Race (JMJP), part of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, is a valued operational partner to Operation Understanding DC. Learn more about JMJP here.
Dr. Charles Chavis is the Founding Director of the Mitchell Program at George Mason University, where he is also Director of African and African American Studies and an Assistant Professor of Conflict Resolution and History. He is a historian and museum educator whose work focuses on the history of racial violence and civil rights activism and Black and Jewish relations in the American South, and the ways in which the historical understandings of racial violence and civil rights activism can inform current and future approaches to peacebuilding and conflict resolution throughout the world. He is author of the newly released book, The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) and editor of For the Sake of Peace: Africana Perspectives on Racism, Justice, and Peace in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).
Dr. Linda J. Mann is a leading scholar and practitioner on racial redress initiatives at the intersection of U.S. history, international human rights, and racial repair. She currently serves as Director of Operations and Programming at the John Mitchell Justice Project at George Mason Carter School for Peace and Reconciliation and is also an Assistant Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). In 2019, Mann co-founded the African American Redress Network (AARN) at Columbia University. AARN serves as an innovative model for scholars and advocates to further groundbreaking work in activism to promote racial redress for U.S. historical racial injustices. Previously she served as the Executive Director for the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University’s School of Law and VP of Research for the Georgetown Memory Project.
Mann has a forthcoming publication in the International Journal for Transitional Justice ‘Advancing Local USA TJ Initiatives: A University Partnership Alongside Descendant Communities.’ She co-authored ‘Segregation in Evanston: An Impact Study ‘(2021), ‘To lift as we climb: A textbook analysis of the segregated school experience’ (2013) and the ‘Historical examination of the segregated school experience’ (2015). Mann's work is also included in the upcoming PBS documentary, The Cost of Inheritance. Additionally her work alongside the Georgetown University 272 (GU272) descendant community can be viewed online at American Ancestors, GU272 Memory Project. Oral histories she performed during her time at the Georgetown Memory Project will be preserved at the American Folklife Center repository at the Library of Congress.
Mann is a seasoned educator with over ten years of postgraduate teaching experience and ten years as a public-school history educator. Mann started her career as a conflict resolution specialist and has decades of experience as a political grassroots organizer.
Xochi Quetzali Cartland is a poet, Transformative Justice Practitioner, and amateur pretzel maker. She received her BA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2021, where she graduated with honors and as a Royce Fellow for her research in the field of gender justice. While at Brown she was the co-founder of the Transformative Justice Initiative, a project that seeks to create community infrastructure to minimize, interrupt, and prevent interpersonal violence. In her six years of curriculum development, she has built out a yearlong LGBTQ inclusion curriculum for high schoolers, a nine-month long curriculum to teach youth leaders how to interrupt cycles of harm in their own communities, and multiple training series on non-carceral crisis response. Her work has led her on adventures as wide and varied as being a program coordinator for nonprofits seeking to end systemic inequality, a seamstress for a professional theater company, and a brief but memorable stint as an oyster shucker in Portland, Maine. Most recently, she was selected as a Creative Community Fellow through National Art Strategies, and as a Brooklyn Poets Fellow for her writing and community art practice. Having grown up in Silver Spring, Maryland, Xochi is thrilled to have returned to the DMV, and to be supporting the phenomenal work JMJP/OUDC are doing to bring about an equitable and just world.
Interns
Kyla Goldsby is a junior at George Mason University concentrating in integrative studies, with a focus in legal studies and a minor in human rights. She has been OUDC’s intern for the past year, supporting the curriculum development and implementation of the program. After graduating, Kyla hopes to go to law school where she will work to advance Disability Rights.