This week, USC Shoah Foundation welcomes Olive Mukanyamurasa to its offices. Mukanyamurasa comes to Los Angeles from Aegis Trust in Rwanda, where she is project evaluator for the Rwanda Peace Education and IWitness in Rwanda programs. She previously led Aegis Trust’s Social Program, which advocates for victims of the Rwanda Tutsi Genocide including AIDS patients and orphans, led tours of genocide memorials, and attended Kigali Institute of Education.

Iris Mandel teaches English for native speakers at Ulpanat Amana, a private girls’ high school in Kfar Saba, Israel. She taught in Cleveland, Ohio, for 10 years and is now in her 22nd year at Ulpanat Amana.

Deborah Batiste has worked for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) since 1991, after teaching high school English for 16 years, and was one of the lead authors of Echoes and Reflections, the multimedia Holocaust education guide developed by Yad Vashem, USC Shoah Foundation and ADL. She is currently the Echoes and Reflections project director, facilitating or co-facilitating over 130 Echoes and Reflections training programs in 34 states and the District of Columbia since 2005, reaching 25 percent of all participants who have attended Echoes and Reflections programs. 

Cecilia De Jesus, MFA ’13, chose one of the most unlikely filmmaking materials to tell the story of Holocaust survivor Vera Gissing. But the risk paid off in a big way when her film Where Is My Home? won the 2013 Student Voices Short Film Contest.

Surrounded by poverty, gangs, drugs and hunger, 25 teenagers from Cleveland High School in Seattle felt like it was all too much to do anything about. But the students in Jeff Taylor’s humanities class found the inspiration to change the world in a unique way: by participating in IWitness (iwitness.usc.edu), an online tool offered for free to any school by the nonprofit USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Patti Giggans has been the executive director of Peace Over Violence since 1985, but her passion for social justice began before she even got her high school diploma. “As a sophomore in high school geometry class I remember reading William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” Giggans said. “I read it on my lap... I flunked geometry.”