The Noar Foundation seeks to enhance the quality of life for people in developing nations by creating a coordinated, global approach to the overall development at the community level.
The Foundation is about people. We want a chance to hear your fully developed thoughts, and get the chance to better understand, and to better respond.
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Mark Noar, MD, Executive Director
The Noar Foundation seeks to enhance the quality of life of people of developing nations and create a coordinated global approach to overall development at the local community level. By emphasizing and synchronizing improvements in healthcare delivery, economic empowerment, educational advancement, respect for the environment and the richness of cultural diversity, communities are enabled to experience sustainable socioeconomic growth allowing for the preservation of the family, social and community identity.The Foundation's unique and successful approach to global! model programming is designed to facilitate interest to duplicate and disseminate similar, although locally adapted, efforts in other communities, and serve as a learning center for the export and dispersal of ideas, equal opportunity, and sustainable growth.
Sheila Kinkade - Writer and filmmaker
A writer and filmmaker, Sheila Kinkade captures the stories of grassroots visionaries whose innovative solutions to local challenges transformed their communities. Over two decades, Sheila has completed assignments for a range of international development organizations and currently serves as Marketing Manager of the International Youth Foundation. A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, Sheila is co-author of Our Time is Now: Young People Changing the World and four nonfiction children’s books celebrating our world as a common home.
Charles Piot - Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Charles is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, where he also has a joint appointment in African and African American Studies. His primary area of specialization is the political economy and culture history of rural West Africa, especially Togo. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (University of Chicago Press, 1999) attempted to re-theorize a classic out-of-the-way place as within the modern and the global. The book was co-winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Prize for Africanist Anthropology and a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize. His recently-published Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2010) explores shifts in Togolese political culture during the 1990s and beyond, a time when the NGOs and Pentecostal churches take over the organization of social and political life, filling the gap left by the withdrawal of the post-Cold War state. His new project is on the gamesmanship of Togolese applying for the US diversity lottery. Beyond Africa, Piot has research and teaching interests in African American studies, diaspora studies, pop culture, development studies, and the history of anthropology.
Marco Ciavolino - Director of Technology