Senior Vice President and General Counsel at the International Rescue Committee Angela Mariana Freyre and Senior Humanitarian Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to UN (2019-2025) Sam Vigersky will focus on the state of humanitarian affairs generally as well as current U.S. government policy and its effect on the humanitarian sector domestically and internationally. They will also address the growing role new actors in the humanitarian space, including the private sector. Students and faculty from the Gwen Ifill School and the Schools of Social Work, Nursing, Management, and Sciences and Health Professions are particularly encouraged to attend.
Angela Mariana (Manana) Freyre is Senior Vice President and General Counsel at the International Rescue Committee, she brings to the IRC over forty years of extensive and sophisticated global experience across public, private and government sectors. As a refugee from Cuba, Manana also brings personal experience of displacement and deep commitment to the organization's cause. Manana is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, the Université de Droit, d’Economie et des Sciences Sociales de Paris and Wellesley College. She is fluent in Spanish and French and resides in New York City.
Sam Vigersky is a humanitarian practitioner and policy expert with two decades of experience in international and domestic settings. Throughout his career, he has led numerous disaster relief initiatives including the U.S. Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DARTs) in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the Ebola West Africa outbreak (2014-15), the Ethiopia Four Famines response (2016), and the Boko Haram complex emergency in Northeast Nigeria (2016). He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Reed College in Oregon, and a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan.
Presented by the Warburg Program.