Giving Tuesday

802 Diplomat Speakers

Our 802 Diplomat Speakers are exemplary leaders with strong ties to the VCWA community who embody the VCWA mission.

Sylvia Ssenkaali is a high school teacher from Uganda with a masters degree in Business Administration. She works as a senior teacher at Sekisinde vocational High School in Kayunga, Uganda, East Africa. Sylvia is the founder and president of Motivate the Youth Mission, an organization that work to bring back hope to the girls who had dropped out of school and help keep others in school until academic completion.

Sylvia served as a PALYP mentor with the VCWA.

Claudia Lovell Tetreault is a past Board member of the Vermont Council on World Affairs who has worked and lived internationally for more than 30 years. She holds an M.A. from the University of Geneva where she studied European and International Law and a B.A. from McGill University in Modern Languages. She speaks French, Italian, Spanish, and German. Claudia and her husband are frequent international travelers and were married in Venice, Italy. They currently live in Brookfield, Vermont where they enjoy snowshoeing, e-biking and gardening.

Claudia serves as a VCWA Host for International Visitors.

Ellen Yount is a member of MSI’s (a Tetra Tech company) executive management team. Throughout her career, she has worked at the intersection of democracy/governance and strategic communications – helping to convey the important of communications and transparency to donors, governments and political party candidates.  From 1997-2002, she lived in post-war former Yugoslavia, helping the country usher in historic, democratic changes while leading a democracy-oriented non-governmental organization that worked with youth and burgeoning political parties and candidates. Ellen returned to the U.S. and served at the State Department, seconded to USAID as its chief spokesperson and director of media relations. She was the Agency’s press director in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the intervention in Afghanistan and the Iraq war. For 13 years, she helped to guide the Agency’s overseas communications efforts as a senior advisor, working hand in hand with dozens of global field offices. She has traveled extensively and served as a trainer and advisor in more than 20 countries.

Previously, Ellen served as former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge’s Press Secretary in the U.S. House of Representatives and later as his director of communications. She is a former board member of the Society for International Development’s Washington, D.C. chapter, founded and serves as President of the One Connected Village Foundation, is a global ambassador for Kenya-based RefuSHE and volunteers extensively in her community. She holds a master’s degree in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.