Leaders of Global Leaders

The World Forum Foundation is fortunate in having a handful of highly qualified and committed early childhood leaders to facilitate the Global Leaders project.

Joan Lombardi, Ph.D.

Joan Lombardi is one of the leading experts on early childhood development and child and family policy. She is the director of The Children's Project LLC. Through The Children's Project, she serves as an advisor to a number of foundations and policy initiatives and helps create innovative projects with a wide variety of national and international organizations. Joan served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for External Affairs in the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the first Director of the Child Care Bureau. She is the author of Time to Care: Redesigning Child Care to Promote Education, Support Families and Build Communities (Temple University Press, 2003) and co-editor of A Beacon of Hope: The Promise of Early Head Start for America's Youngest Children (Zero To Three Press, 2004).

In 2004, Joan launched the Global Leaders for Young Children program in partnership with The World Forum Foundation which has provided leadership support to 19 early education leaders from 8 countries. In addition, in 2004 she served as a Senior Fellow with The Global Fund for Children in Washington D.C. Joan serves on the Education Leadership Council of Save the Children, and participates in the US Chapter of the Global Campaign for Education and Global Action for Children.

Dr. Judith L. Evans

For the past 35 years Dr. Judith Evans has devoted her career to the field of international early childhood care and development. She currently has an appointment as an Adjunct Professor, at the University of Victoria, British Colombia, Canada. In that capacity she is working with the Early Childhood Development Virtual University (ECDVU) that is engaged in capacity building of early childhood professionals in Africa and the Middle East North Africa region. She also works as a consultant to UNICEF and other organizations promoting early childhood programmes internationally.

Prior to her move to Victoria, Dr. Evans was the Director of the Department of Program Documentation and Communication at the Bernard van Leer Foundation, based in The Netherlands. From 1992 – 1999 she was with the Secretariat of the Consultative Group on Early Childhood Care and Development (1992-1998). The Consultative Group (CG) is a consortium of major donor agencies that fund early childhood programs internationally. As Director, Dr. Evans managed the multi-faceted activities of the Secretariat, including research, publishing, project activities, and promotion of a global perspective on early childhood care and development.

Dr. Evans was Programme Officer for Education for the Aga Khan Foundation, from 1986-1992, with a focus on providing support to early childhood programmes, which, at the time, included initiatives in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Portugal, the UK, USA and Canada. Prior to her work with the Aga Khan Foundation, she was Vice-President of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation.

Dr. Evans has written numerous articles which have brought together research and practice on various early childhood issues, and most recently she (along with Robert Myers and Ellen Ilfeld) wrote an early childhood programming manual that is the centerpiece of a CD-ROM, Early Childhood Count. The publication was a collaborative project between the Consultative Group, the Bernard van Leer Foundation, UNICEF, the Aga Khan Foundation, Christian Children's Fund and the World Bank.

Dr. Evans has a Masters in Educational Psychology from Stanford University and an Ed.D. in Developmental Psychology/Research and Evaluation from the University of Massachusetts.

Mr. Youssef Hajjar

Mr. Hajjar is a co-founder and, until February 2007, was a senior coordinator of the Arab Resource Collective (ARC). His functions included convening ARC's workshops and seminars and contributing to the writing and editing of ARC's publications. ARC's work includes programmes on early childhood, children's rights, Child-to-Child, youth and healthy living, etc. He is still involved in the governance of ARC and represents the organisations in international fora, such as the Child Rights Information Network (CRIN) and the ECCD Consultative Group.

Mr. Hajjar was Director of the Communications Department at the British Refugee Council, based in London, from 1988 to 1994. From 1978 to 1987, he was successively the Associate General Secretary in Geneva, and the Middle East secretary in Beirut of the World Student Christian Federation. The WSCF programme included popular education work based on Paulo Freire's approach and a leadership development programme. From 1970 to 1976, Mr. Hajjar was teaching sociology at the social sciences department of the French University of Lyon, established in Beirut, and at the Lebanese college for social work, also in Beirut. He also carried out and participated in sociological research, the most prominent of which was a qualitative study of the emergence of social classes in Lebanon in the early seventies. Mr. Hajjar has an M.A. from Lyon University (1970). In 1976-78, he worked on a Ph.D. dissertation at the Sorbonne's Paris VI on "ideological mobilisation and the reading of history in contemporary Lebanon.”

Mr. Hajjar has delivered the modules on Effective Leadership and Change Management in ECD in the University of Victoria's ECDVU course for the Middle East and North Africa in 2003, the Yemen in 2005, and currently in Africa.