Christine Ward

Executive Director

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Christine was appointed Executive Director in October 2017, having originally joined Raising A Reader MA as Operations Manager in January 2010. Her passion for reading and empowering parents is supported by her volunteer work, raising her own two boys, and now as the leader of Raising A Reader MA.

Other charitable work includes serving as a coach for Babson’s Coaching and Leadership for Teamwork Program, on Hill House Council (a community organization), the Nichols House Museum Committee, as a parent-teacher coordinator, and supporting numerous community events and fundraisers. With a background in marketing and working for entrepreneurial companies, she brings for-profit experience and insight to the non-profit world.

Previously, Christine worked as a Vice President for Progress Partners, an investment bank and corporate advisory firm. With an MBA from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, and a concentration in marketing, Christine is passionate about Raising A Reader MA’s goal to end the literacy opportunity gap and excited to share her enthusiasm and entrepreneurial ideas with donors, partners, volunteers and her dedicated team. A few of her favorite children’s books include Wild About Books and The Story of Ferdinand.

Katee Duffy

Director of Programs

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Katee joined the Raising A Reader MA team in February 2020.  She has enjoyed  her entire career learning from children and families and supporting them in a variety of pediatric settings including childcare, home visiting, and child welfare.

Katee is a National Certified Counselor with an undergraduate degree from Brandeis University and a graduate degree in Counseling and School Psychology, specializing in Early Childhood Counseling and Child Development. Her clinical interests include adoption, early childhood mental health, assessment, children’s literature, and early literacy.  Several of Katee’s favorite picture books include I Feel a Foot!, NOT A BOX, and MEAN SOUP.

Angela Haynes

DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT

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Angela Haynes, CFRE, has over 20 years of development experience in the nonprofit sector, raising funds between $650K and $4.3M for various organizations.  

She is thrilled to take on this role, as reading has always been an important value to her family, and she has been reading to her now three year old since before he was born.

Angela graduated from University of Hartford with a BA in Communications with a Minor in Sociology. She is a graduate of Boston University’s Institute for Nonprofit Leadership, and obtained her Certified Fund Raising Executive status in 2022. She enjoys running, cycling and skiing and loves to travel.

Maria Mombeleur

Associate Program Director

E-mail | Brockton Facebook group | Maria’s story on our blog

Maria joined the Raising A Reader MA team in September of 2012. She immigrated to America in 1996 from the Cape Verde Island and immediately fell in love with books, especially Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel.

Maria earned her Bachelors of Science in Communications from Regis College in May of 2010. Upon graduation, she worked to decrease underage access to alcohol in Brockton.

Most recently, Maria earned her Masters of Science in Organizational and Professional Communications also from Regis College. As a Brockton resident for over 15 years, Maria is delighted to be part of the RAR team and to bring books home to more children in the City of Champions- Brockton.

Isaí Jiménez

Associate Program Director

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Isaí joined Raising A Reader MA at the end of 2019, bringing a passion for education and connecting with people from diverse backgrounds. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Teaching English as a Second Language and is currently pursuing an MBA.

One of his personal goals is to become a polyglot; he’s bilingual in English, knows German, and is currently learning French and Russian. 

As an English and Spanish instructor, he’s had the privilege of working with learners from all over the world, which has only deepened his love for languages. 

Isaí is an avid reader and has fond memories of his grandmother sharing books with him at a young age. His favorite childhood books include Where the Wild Things Are, The Little Prince, Robinson Crusoe, and comic books. Now, as a father, he loves reading to his daughter and hopes to pass on his enthusiasm for books and languages. 

He’s deeply motivated to inspire families to embrace the power of reading in their children’s lives.

Guadalupe Panameño

Senior Program Manager

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Guadalupe was introduced to Raising A Reader MA through a playgroup her two children attended. Later, she became a facilitator at that playgroup. In 2013, Guadalupe joined Raising A Reader MA as a Parent Ambassador.

When she was a child, she had no books at home, but her father read the newspaper together with her every night. This experience has motivated her to reach parents and show them the importance of reading.

Her childhood dream was to become a teacher. She is still looking forward to start her education in Early Childhood soon. Being a Parent Ambassador opened a new path for Guadalupe to help her community, and she eventually became a staff member as Parent Liaison, helping to coordinate all of the Parent Ambassadors.

In the fall of 2018, Guadalupe was promoted once again to a full-time position as Program Coordinator, and in August 2019 to Program Manager serving Greater Boston. She feels grateful to contribute to such a wonderful organization.

Some of her favorite children’s books now include Froggy Gets Dress, Snuggle Puppy of Mine, The Very Hungry Bear and The Red Ripe Strawberry.

Nina Norfleet

Development and Communications Manager

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With some of her earliest memories being read Anne of Green Gables to her by her dad as a child, Nina Norfleet is delighted to join the Raising a Reader MA team and champion the importance of early literacy, a gift she treasures since she was young.

Nina graduated from Fordham University in 2014 with a Bachelor of Arts in Art History. For the next 9 years, Nina worked for a philanthropic jewelry brand, where she gained valuable experience in project management, marketing, and communications. Her volunteer work for nonprofits while in New York combined with her background in visual communication, greatly influenced her to pursue a career in nonprofit development.

In her free time, Nina enjoys watching Jeopardy!, crossword puzzles, attending museums, and any kind of trivia. Her favorite children’s books are One Morning in Maine by Robert McCloskey and Many Moons by James Thurber. 

Tara Ruby

Grants Manager

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Tara is proud to return to Raising A Reader MA in 2020 as the Grants Manager. She was previously the organization’s Founding Program Manager in Boston, where she worked with partners, parents, implementers, and other community agencies to deliver RAR-MA’s dual interventions. An unquenchable love of books, learning, and words was fostered through the home reading routines of her own childhood, providing Tara with an initial passion for, and personal understanding of, the role that literacy and family engagement play in a child’s development. Adding that to her own unique program team experiences allows Tara to bring new depth to grant narratives as RAR-MA continues to confront education inequities in Massachusetts.

Tara graduated from Northeastern University with a BA in International Affairs, having leveraged a scholarship into opportunities to study in the Dominican Republic, Egypt, and Cuba, as well as participate in an Arab-Western student conference on women’s issues in Abu Dhabi. She later earned a Master of Arts in Teaching from University of Notre Dame of Maryland in 2012, teaching general and special education in Baltimore City for several years. Tara’s work experiences have centered around youth programming and education, including roles at Hyde Square Task Force, Sociedad Latina, Massachusetts State House, Baltimore City Public Schools, and Boys and Girls Clubs of Lancaster.

She joins the team remotely from Pennsylvania, where Tara also continues to invest time in local community organizing efforts, empowering youth civic engagement, thinking about how the structures of our society contribute to oppression, and advocating for the role of education as a transformative power for individuals, communities, and the entire world.

Lindsay Woods

Executive Administrator and Data Analytics Manager

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Passionate about lifelong learning, Lindsay Woods graduated from George Washington University with a Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs in 2014, minoring in Spanish and Sociocultural Anthropology. Following graduation, Lindsay spent five years working in state government programming focused on creating systems of support for individuals arriving to the United States with refugee status.

In 2020, Lindsay turned her focus towards the role of libraries as community connectors, pursuing a Masters degree in Library Science from Texas Woman’s University, working as a Library Assistant with a local public library, and gaining an increased appreciation of the role of parents and caregivers as their child’s first teachers. 

Amy Dolan

Program Manager

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Amy was raised in the mountains in Southern California by two readers that gave her the gift of reading. Her favorite early memories are reading with her parents and sister and getting to go to the library where she got to pick out her own books. To her parents’ credit and to their dismay she often could be found reading instead of doing her chores and often had to get her books taken away as a result.

She graduated from Gordon College in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature and Linguistics. Here Amy was able to further expand her love of stories while also gaining a newfound appreciation for the intricacies of language, both spoken and written.

Alongside her desire to bring literacy to communities to promote academic success, Amy also wants to share in the joys of literature and the amazing places it can take a child. Some of her favorite books growing up were Harry Potter, Curious George, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Corduroy.

Claudia Chavarria

Community Ambassador Coordinator

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Claudia was born in El Salvador and lived there until the age of 25.  There she studied Modern Languages, French and English at the University of El Salvador.  In 2012 she moved to the United States.  She is the proud mom of two beautiful children and a Sunday school teacher at her church. 

Claudia loves working with kids.  She was introduced to Raising A Reader Massachusetts’ Red Bookbag Program in 2016 through a play group, when her oldest was four years old and younger daughter was one.  Story time was always their favorite part.  In 2018, she began to volunteer as a community ambassador with RARMA. 

Since then, she has been learning and sharing the importance and the impact of early literacy.  She especially loves to read books with no word to kids, where they can create their own stories.  Some of her favorite children’s books are: I Really Like Slop by Mo Willems, The Little Red Hen, and The Secret Garden.

Faten EL-Gamal

Program Manager

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TIn August 2024, Faten joined Raising a Reader MA as a Program Manager for Pioneer Valley. She holds a master’s degree in early childhood education and has experience in teaching, IT project management, and software design. Faten is certified to teach Early Childhood Education and is passionate about working with young learners, helping each child progress in all areas of development. She aims to create a community of learners that nurtures growth in a positive, fun environment by connecting with families and sharing different resources and experiences with them.

Faten first learned about Raising a Reader MA through a previous partnership and values the organization’s focus on integrating dialogical interactive reading and promoting shared home reading behavior to help families thrive. She is committed to engaging with families and emphasizing the significant impact of reading on young children.

Her favorite picture books include “Guess How Much I Love You” by Sam McBratney, “Roller Coaster” by Marla Frazee, and “The Wonky Donkey” by Craig Smith.

Tatiana Keane Forero

Program Manager

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Tatiana joined Raising a Reader MA in 2019 as Community Ambassador as a result of her searching for early literacy and literature for her toddler in the Greater Boston area. She previously worked at The Gaston Institute for the Latino Community in Massachusetts at UMass Boston, where she expanded her knowledge of the challenges that immigrant groups experience with language barriers and socioeconomic disparities, including the lack of access to books, literacy programs, and support for early childhood.

Books have been an essential element in her life. Some of the most influential authors from her childhood include Rafael Pombo, Jules Verne, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jose Saramago, and Garcia Marquez. Her passion for reading led her to earn a BA in Education & Literature in Colombia (and to use it to teach in Elementary Schools for 8 years!), and a Dual Language Certificate at UMass Boston.

From her professional experience as a teacher, she can attest to the advantages of early access to books for children in building enjoyable reading habits, Kindergarten readiness, broader use of vocabulary, and developing a longer attention span. As an immigrant herself from Colombia, and mother of a baby and a toddler, she knows first hand the daily challenges of introducing reading & literacy routines at home. Now, she has the opportunity to provide tools and instruction through dialogic reading to families and caregivers with RAR MA.

As a mom of two young children, she is always learning about new books. Some of her children’s favorite books at the moment are: Tiny T-Rex and the Impossible Hug by Jonathan Stutzman, The Wonky Donkey by Craig Smith, and The Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl.