A diverse national team, growing every year.

Damali is a native of Oakland, California. Prior to joining FUSE, she’s held roles in the non-profit sector focusing on K-16 education, civic engagement, and leadership development at City Year, Making Waves Foundation, Leadership for Educational Equity and in higher education at Saint Mary’s College of California and UC Berkeley. She holds two Master’s Degrees: one from the University of Utah and the other from Saint Mary’s College of California.

On her downtime, she enjoys hiking, vinyasa yoga, rejuvenating trips to the California mountains and coasts and watching scary movies.

Dan Houston leads FUSE’s efforts to build and maintain systems and programs to assess and increase the impact of FUSE Executive Fellows and Alumni in their work with government partners through the country. Dan oversees the continued enhancement, design, and ongoing maintenance of evaluation tools and strategies to collect, track, and analyze timely and relevant data about the fellowship program and its projects.

He previously served as Co-CEO of In-Powered by One Significant Act, wherein he designed and evaluated mindfulness-based programs in schools, juvenile justice centers, and minimum-security corrections facilities in the Greater Houston Area. Dan has also conducted research aimed at evaluating stress markers that account for resilience – specifically, Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and cortisol production – through a specialized breath work protocol. Dan also founded a mindfulness-based consulting company that supported health providers with training, certification, and coaching related to resilience-based services for their employees and clientele. Prior to joining FUSE, he passionately served as a Careers Manager for One Refugee, an organization focused on serving students of refugee background with college matriculation, academic success, graduation, and workforce development.

Loren Nadres is a mission-driven professional with over 15 years of experience in public policy, urban development, and inclusive economic development, of which over ten years are at leading global institutions such as the World Bank, International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the United Nations. She has traveled to nearly 80 countries, survived triathlons, and climbed Mt. Everest Base Camp.

Loren has served at senior levels of government, including at the NYC Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, major city agencies such as the NYC Economic Development Corporation, and as a Cabinet Member leading economic development for the Mayor of Stamford, CT.  In addition, she also serves as an Advisor and Contributor to the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative’s “City Leader Guide on Equitable Economic Development: Navigating Inclusive Growth, Racial Justice & Economic Resilience,” which helps city leaders across the United States translate commitment into action. Previously, she has worked at a startup tech company and an international development consulting firm. 

Loren also has an entrepreneurial streak. She is the co-creator of HerVenture.org, an award-winning interactive mobile app for women entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses on the go. She was also part of the scale-up team at World Bank Group IFC’s Small Business Toolkit program. This interactive online training platform reached and built the capacity of over 30 million small businesses across 18 languages in 30 emerging markets. 

Loren is a Senior Advisor for the Mandela Institute for Humanity and a Fellow at the Disruptor Foundation. She is also a member of the Global Entrepreneurship Network’s Startup Nation Policy Group, a forum of community leaders worldwide working on advancing inclusive economic development. 

Loren completed a Harvard University Kennedy School of Government’s Executive Education for Emerging Leaders. She holds a Master of Arts from Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Arts from George Mason University. She participated in Georgetown’s Graduate Business Summer Program in International Management at Oxford University. In addition, she was a Fellow in the Asia Pacific Leadership Program at the East-West Center based in Hawai’i. Loren immigrated from the Philippines, and she speaks Tagalog.

Hyma Menath has over 25 + years of experience in institutional systems change work in Educational Publishing (Macmillan, Pearson) Tech (SAP, VISA,) and more recently in local government (San Jose, San Bernardino).

Hyma was part of the 2019 FUSE Fellowship cohort. As a FUSE Executive Fellow and subsequently, as a consultant, she has combined results-based systems change work with explicit racial equity and community organizing principles to advance equitable outcomes in public agencies. That means moving organizations from thinking and feeling that racial equity is critical to their work to behavior and institutional change that shows impact and also recognizes our shared humanity.

She is based in the SF Bay Area with her husband and her daughter. She enjoys reading, yoga, traveling around the world marveling at the human spirit, and experiments with diverse cuisine – in pursuit of happiness!

Brandon Starling comes to FUSE from Out Teach, a national teacher-development nonprofit, where he served as the Director of Education Partnerships. At Out Teach, Brandon focused on developing and building partnerships with districts and schools to create unforgettable learning experiences to unlock student performance. Brandon graduated Cum Laude from Howard University with a Bachelors of Science Degree in Psychology, and immediately went into teaching. Brandon has over 15 years of experience serving in education, nonprofits, and workforce development programs. His passion is to serve people, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds, by giving them the opportunity to lead successful and accomplished lives. Brandon is an activator, achiever, and an agent of change who thrives in diverse and challenging environments that allow him to strategically communicate and develop simple solutions to complex and/or multi-tiered problems.

In his free time, Brandon enjoys working on a good jigsaw puzzle, sports, and spending time visiting family and friends. Brandon’s young Daughter is the absolute apple of his eye and he enjoys spending every minute that he can with her.

For nearly a decade, Jeff served Mayor Mitch Landrieu and the City of New Orleans in many capacities, including as the First Deputy Mayor & Chief Administrative Officer, Chief Resilience Officer, Executive Director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, and as the Mayor’s “blight czar.” In these roles, he managed the day-to-day operations of City Hall, tackled the crippling blight issues plaguing New Orleans, refocused more than $250 million in place-based investments, and oversaw the city’s development portfolio and the Office of Resilience and Sustainability.

Some of Jeff’s most notable accomplishments include the redevelopment of the former World Trade Center, the new terminal at Louis Armstrong New Orleans Airport, Lafitte Greenway linear park, the award-winning Resilient NOLA comprehensive resilience strategy, and the $141 million National Disaster Resilience Competition award, as well as the city’s historic riverfront revitalization projects, Bike Share program, green infrastructure program, and its first climate action plan.

Jeff is also an adjunct faculty member at the Tulane University School of Architecture and a trustee of the Louisiana Children’s Museum in New Orleans. He holds a bachelor’s degree from New York University, a master’s degree in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a graduate of the Achieving Excellence in Community Development program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he was a Ford Foundation Fellow.

Since 2009, Miguel Solis has served the residents of Dallas in the areas of education, housing, and transportation. Miguel began his career as a member of President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, and soon after he was selected to be part of Teach For America in Dallas, where he taught eighth grade social studies in the public schools. He later served as special assistant to the superintendent of the school system, co-founded the nonprofit Latino Center for Leadership Development, and ran the urban policy think tank Coalition for a New Dallas. In 2013, Miguel was elected to the Dallas Independent School District board of trustees at the age of 27; he has also been elected as the board president and vice president, making him the youngest person to hold these roles. During his decade of service to the district, Dallas ISD underwent a monumental transformation: The number of schools requiring improvement dropped from 43 to 3, two multi-billion-dollar school bonds passed, and its innovative concepts were used as models for other districts across Texas and the nation.

Miguel is also involved in numerous nonprofit activities, including serving on the Children’s Medical Center Foundation board, the UT Southwestern presidential advisory board, and the Teach For America national board of directors. In addition, he was a member of the U.S.-Mexico Foundation board, the American Council on Germany, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s Southwest Leaders Program, and the American Council of Young Political Leaders. He is an alumnus of the Aspen Institute’s Rodel Fellowship, having been selected as an elected official who has demonstrated an outstanding ability to work responsibly across partisan divisions and bring greater civility to public discourse. Miguel graduated from Lamar University with a B.A. in history and Harvard University with a M.Ed. in policy and management.