Our Staff

For more than thirty years, Polly Byers has worked to support peacebuilding practices and improve international development and humanitarian aid policy. Working from within and outside of government channels, she has driven efforts to make aid more responsive to communities impacted by violent conflict. As Executive Director of Karuna Center, Polly is looking forward to focusing intensively on her commitment to supporting the capacity and resilience of conflict-affected societies in order to foster peace and reconciliation.

Polly’s career has focused on developing collaborative approaches to increase local ownership of aid and peacebuilding efforts. She worked within the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to develop the agency’s first integrated strategy for Sudan, combining relief with development assistance to support local Sudanese capacity and resilience despite intense conflict and political turmoil. Polly also led successful U.S. efforts to stop the sale of “blood diamonds” traded to fund violent conflict, helping to establish the first international diamond certification system. Later, Polly helped draft USAID’s first policy on fragile states, calling for better analysis of the sources of fragility and more strategic program responses, and played a lead role in increasing and improving the agency’s support to conflict-affected areas.

Polly also served as the Executive Director of CDA Collaborative Learning, an NGO focused on improving the effectiveness of organizations working in conflict-affected areas, and integrating the concept of Do No Harm into aid programs. Do No Harm practices seek to analyze and avoid the potential for international aid to unintentionally have negative consequences on local communities.

Ms. Byers holds an MA from Yale University in International Relations, a BA from Wesleyan University, and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco.

Laura Anderson joined Karuna Center in 2010 with experience in not-for-profit communications and fundraising. She has been in the position of both grant-maker and grant-writer for grassroots organizations, worked in video and other visual media, and been involved in various community-based organizing projects. She has a BA in Social Justice and Media of Communication from University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Olivia Stokes Dreier is a former Executive Director and lead trainer at Karuna Center. She has extensive international experience in conflict transformation, including the development, design, and delivery of multi-year programs in peacebuilding, inter-communal dialogue, reconciliation, and conflict-sensitive development for diverse stakeholders.

Since 2002, Ms. Dreier has designed and led programs in over fifteen countries, including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Central African Republic, Kosovo, Macedonia, Georgia, Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Rwanda, and Senegal. She frequently conducts conflict assessments, and has consulted with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank on conflict-sensitive development. From 2002-2012, Ms. Dreier also directed the Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (CONTACT) Graduate Certificate Program at the School for International Training (SIT) in Brattleboro VT.

Earlier in her career, Ms. Dreier worked with the Gandhian movement in India on rural development and non-formal education for two years. After returning to the United States, she served as a community mental health practitioner for over 20 years, working with individuals, families, and groups from both narrative and systems orientations. Ms. Dreier holds a B.A. in Psychology from Yale University, a Masters in Social Work from Smith College, and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.  She has professional proficiency in French, and speaks conversational Hindi and Urdu.

Maria Jessop is a Senior Peacebuilding Advisor with Karuna Center in Washington, DC. and also consults independently. She has nine years of international experience and ten years in the U.S. using mediation, facilitated dialogue, and capacity-building programs to bridge divides, find solutions, and catalyze groups for peaceful change from the grassroots to the national level.  She has conducted programs in over fifteen countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, Haiti, Iraq, the Central African Republic and many other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.