Our Team

Darren Blankenship is glad join Fistula Foundation as Database Administrator. Darren brings over twenty years of experience working with various Bay Area non-profits and educational institutions. His passion is for systems integration and data integrity, and he is excited to bring this to Fistula Foundation. He holds a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University. When he’s not working, he enjoys spending time with his family, reading science fiction, and catching up on recent developments in science and technology.

Katherine Weller joined Fistula Foundation as Marketing Communications Writer in 2017. She brings a background in nonprofit program support and journalistic writing, as well as a B.A. in cross-cultural sociology. Katherine formerly served as co-chair of the Young Professionals Council at the St. Anthony Foundation, an organization serving homeless and low-income San Franciscans.  She is honored to be a part of Team Fistula’s mission to create a world where no woman is ostracized for trying to bring a child into the world.

Kimberly joined Fistula Foundation in 2016, and is focused on growing the Love a Sister and monthly giving programs. She is an experienced nonprofit fundraising professional with over 10 years’ experience working for some of the top nonprofits in the Bay Area, including Hope Services, EMQ Children & Family Service, Family Giving Tree and most recently, Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. She continues to grow professionally through involvement with the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), serving as a part of the Mentorship Program Committee and as a Mentor in the program. Kimberly is active in the local community and spent several years volunteering with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training Program, helping participants become successful fundraisers and train for half marathons while fundraising and completing the events herself. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Morgan Walter joined as the Video Production Specialist for Fistula Foundation in 2018. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Cinema from San Francisco State University, with an emphasis in Documentary. In 2012, her first film “I Agree With Jennifer”, won an award at SiDocFest. This sparked her commitment to documentary filmmaking as a way to provoke change and advocate for a cause.  Since 2016, Morgan has worked as video editor and cinematographer for documentaries, wedding and branded content in the Bay Area. She is honored to bring Fistula Foundation’s stories to life in videos, and tie our supporters closer to the life-transforming work on the ground.

Sajira Mae The is excited to join Fistula Foundation as Development Associate. Sajira is a graduate of Azusa Pacific University (MA, Transformational Urban Leadership) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA, Community Studies). She first learned about obstetric fistula in a global health class for her masters, when she was assigned Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In joining Fistula Foundation, Sajira continues a career path in the nonprofit sector, supplemented by an impressive personal tradition of volunteer service.

Dr. Andrew Browning AM is an Australian trained obstetrician and gynecologist who has worked in Ethiopia and Tanzania for more than 17 years as a senior fistula surgeon.

Dr. Browning’s life mission has been to help women suffering with obstetric fistula in Africa.

As a young doctor, he was inspired to become a fistula surgeon after visiting his aunt, Valerie Browning, in rural Ethiopia as she assisted women with terrible childbirth injuries. Deeply moved, Andr ew decided to train under the legendary Dr. Catherine Hamlin at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. In the 17 years that have passed, Dr. Browning has provided life-changing surgery to women across Africa and Asia.

With the help of his obstetrician father, Dr. David Browning, he founded the Barbara May Foundation in Australia in 2009, providing volunteer midwives and obstetricians for emergency maternity services in district hospitals, and training for local staff.

Dr. Browning has led a team that have gone on to transform several rundown health centers into safe and functional maternal health centers for poor women, and those living in remote regions.

In an effort to help the more than one million women estimated to be suffering with existing obstetric fistula injuries throughout Africa, Dr. Browning continues to provide fistula camps in Malawi, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Chad, Uganda, Congo, South Sudan and Togo.

Dr. Browning also consults on global maternal healthcare issues to United Nations Fund for Population Activities and the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (FIGO).  Andrew recently was appointed chair of the Fistula Expert Advisory Group at FIGO.  Recently, he was named as a Member (AM) of the Order of Australia in recognition of his “outstanding contributions” to improving maternal healthcare for women in poverty.

Fistula Foundation is thrilled to have Dr. Andrew Browning on our team!

Habiba Corodhia Mohamed is Country Director for Fistula Foundation’s Action on Fistula program in Kenya. In this role, Ms. Mohamed works at the local level to educate communities about fistula and help identify and refer women for treatment. She also trains other community health workers in western Kenya to do the same. Ms. Mohamed began her career as a community veterinarian, assisting livestock farmers by treating their sick animals. Though this close contact with the community she began to see the myriad social challenges face by rural communities and became passionate about working with women facing reproductive health challenges. She is the founder of Women and Development Against Distress in Africa (WADADIA), a community based organization working in the western region of Kenya that provides psycho-social support, economic empowerment and reproductive health to women in need. Prior to joining Fistula Foundation, she worked on fistula for nearly a decade. In this time, she was able to publish a research paper on the psychosocial consequences of fistula to young mothers in western Kenya, and developed Habibathananga, a fistula reintegration model currently under pilot in western Kenya.

In merely the first five months of her work on Action on Fistula, Ms. Mohamed oversaw the training of more than 70 community resource workers, who have conducted outreach visits and community rallies that resulted in reaching more than 4,500 community members, and the treatment of 80 women who were successfully referred to treatment Action on Fistula sites.

Ms. Mohammed holds an undergraduate and Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from Mt. Kenya University.

Bwalya Magawa Chomba is the Program Director for the Fistula Foundation Zambia office. Bwalya is responsible for supporting referrals for fistula patients to partner hospitals, serves as key liaison between the hospitals and the community, and strengthens partnerships with government ministries and community and faith-based organizations.

Bwalya has been working as a Social Worker and Community Development Officer for 13 years, most recently based with the Ministry of Community Development and Social Welfare in Nakonde District. Bwalya has also worked with Caritas / Catholic Relief Services (CRS) Mpika Diocese, where she worked as a Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, coordinating revisions of project strategies with key stakeholders and ensuring a shared understanding of strategic and informational needs. During her tenure as District Development Facilitator with the NGO Africare Zambia, she learned about obstetric fistula and took up an active role in mobilizing suffering women, successfully referring 200 women for life-transforming surgery.

She has always believed that local community participation is an important way to achieve sustainable development, particularly in the fight against obstetric fistula. Bwalya holds a bachelor’s degree in social work from Mulungushi University in Kabwe, Zambia.

Kalumba Kaputa is a Program Officer at Fistula Foundation’s Zambia office. He collaborates with the Ministry of Health and local grassroots organizations, screening potential fistula patients and referring them to treatment centers for care in Zambia’s Luapula Province.

Prior to joining Fistula Foundation, Kalumba worked for 8 years as a Clinical Officer for the Zambian Ministry of Health, serving as a frontline health provider at Chilonga Mission General Hospital. He has also served in roles at the Mpepo Rural Health Centre and the Mpika District Health Office. Kalumba holds a diploma in Basic Clinical Medical Sciences in Mental Health and Psychiatry from the University of Zambia School of Medicine in Association with Chainama College of Health Sciences.

Kalumba strongly feels that unity and team work are essential for any organization to achieve its key objectives, especially in the fight against obstetric fistula.

Kelly Brennan is a Managing Director at Citadel Securities. She runs the global ETF business and specializes in helping clients to execute large trades in US and global exchange traded funds and equities. Prior to joining Citadel, Kelly managed several teams within Goldman Sach’s Securities Division in New York for nearly thirteen years. She joined Goldman Sachs in 2005 as an associate and was named managing director in 2010. Kelly started her career at Susquehanna International Group as an equity and equity derivatives trader. Kelly is an active member of Women in ETFs and served on Goldman Sachs’ Women’s Network. She was on the advisory council for Goldman Sachs Hispanic/Latino Network. She has served as member of Two Together, a mentoring program for disadvantaged youth in Manhattan and volunteer for Puppies Behind Bars.Kelly earned a BA in Political Economies with a concentration in Molecular Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000.

William ‘Bill’ Mann is Director of Small Cap Research for Motley Fool Asset Management and specializes in identifying companies with underappreciated competitive advantages and assets. He has experience analyzing a wide range of industries, and it was his expertise in corporate governance that led the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to ask him to be an expert witness at a 2001 hearing regarding the collapse of Enron.

A sought-after public speaker, Bill has frequently appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, CBS, and numerous business radio programs. Before joining The Motley Fool in 1999, Bill was a co-founder of a specialty international telecommunications carrier, and he previously worked in the energy and telecommunications industries. Bill holds a degree in international service from American University. He was named a 2011 Rising Star in the Mutual Fund Industry by Institutional Investor. Bill became passionate about obstetric fistula after a visit to Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Mr. Robson enjoyed a lengthy career at Johnson & Johnson, from which he recently retired in 2014. While at J&J, he held several senior positions in International business management such as Director for African Affairs and General Manager of the Medical Device business in Africa and the Middle East.

In these capacities, he collaborated regularly with Fistula Foundation on projects such as a small grants program, distribution of affordable fistula repair kits and sponsorship of a fistula forum in Scotland.

Mr. Robson is now enjoying retirement and, in his spare time, pursues volunteering opportunities and acts as a healthcare advisor to NGOs on women’s health issues and surgery in Africa. He is an active Rotarian and past President of his local club (twice) with a particular interest in the work of their International Committee. His geographical focus is currently on projects in Malawi where he serves on the Board of the Scotland Malawi Partnership, a national network that supports people to people links between the two nations.

Mr. Robson is an Honorary Fellow of the West African College of Surgeons (WACS) and the College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa (COSECSA) and graduated in Business Studies from the Scottish College of Textiles.

Mal is the founder and chairman of Mal Warwick | Donordigital (www.malwarwick.com, Berkeley, CA, and Washington, DC), a fundraising agency specializing in integrated, multi-channel fundraising and marketing that has served nonprofit organizations nationwide since 1979. The agency has helped raise more than a billion dollars for many of America’s biggest and most-loved causes and institutions.

For decades, Mal played a leadership role in the fundraising and direct marketing fields both nationally and internationally. He lectured or led workshops on fundraising and marketing on six continents for NGO executives from more than 100 countries. He is a former Peace Corps Volunteer.

Mal has written or edited a total of twenty books, including the best-selling fundraising text, How to Write Successful Fundraising Appeals, now in its third edition. Among the books he has written about the role of business in society today is The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers, winner of a 2014 Axiom Business Book Award, which he co-authored with the late Dr. Paul Polak.

For more information, go to www.linkedin.com/in/malwarwick.