Professor Alejandro Baer, now from the University of Minnesota, was first attracted to USC Shoah Foundation in 2000, when it was titled Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and was deep into its project to collect 50,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors around the world.

When Tiffany Taylor, director of Teach for America – Detroit, first received an email inviting her to join the advisory board for USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Detroit program, she admits it was the first time she had heard of IWitness.But one line in the email caught her eye: “testimony-based education.” Taylor said she was intrigued by this idea and thought immediately about its potential for strengthening the educational movement in Detroit by uplifting student voices in a way that only firsthand experiences can.

A team of eight staff members from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education is responsible for bringing the Some Were Neighbors IWitness activity to life.

Attendees of the 2015 Ambassadors for Humanity gala in Detroit on Thursday will get to hear remarks from a Michigan educator who is one of USC Shoah Foundation’s most passionate colleagues.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s newest staff member may have just graduated from USC, but she is already a very familiar face around USC Shoah Foundation.Shefali Deshpande has just completed her second week at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research, where she is assisting director Wolf Gruner with the Center’s upcoming events and administration. She graduated with a bachelor’s in political science and musical theater in May 2015.

One of the members of the 2014 Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century cohort in Hungary didn’t have any need for new lesson plans for his students, and in fact he didn’t even have a first day of school to prepare for: he’s retired. But he didn’t let that stop him from learning about how testimony can be used to teach students about genocide and tolerance.

Katarzyna Łaziuk is a graduate of USC Shoah Foundation’s Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century professional development program and is committed to educating her students about the Holocaust – almost entirely outside her own classroom.