Who We Are
Board of Directors
Susan Barnes is the Founder and Director of Classes for Causes, Inc. The idea came to her after watching "An Inconvenient Truth" and feeling compelled to do something to continue educating people about the effects of global warming and what it will mean to them and their children and grandchildren. Susan enjoys teaching and encourages people of all walks of life to share their knowledge and passion with others in a teaching and learning environment. "You'll learn more through teaching than you will by being a student." Susan believes anyone can teach if they have enough passion, because passion inspires learning.
While Susan has a lot of experience teaching classes online, she believes that live classes are better for connecting with people, building relationships and sharing common interests. The community aspect of Classes for Causes is very important to Susan and her dream for the organization is that it is a place for people to connect and learn around good causes.
Susan teaches online marketing classes at the San Francisco State University College of Extended Learning in the Integrated Marketing Program and the Multimedia Studies Program. Her current classes are Maximizing Search Engine Marketing and Internet Marketing Now: New Tools and Trends.
Pablo Chamorro is a massage therapist and teaching assistant at the San Francisco School of Massage for the ongoing Swedish program. Prior to becoming a bodyworker, he earned a Masters Degree and PhD candidacy in bioengineering. He was brought over to California from Spain by the technology industry where he worked as an engineer for 12 years. Now he has decided to go back to study the human body and of a whole new career.
Kate Dahl Folan is the marketing director at a fast growing structural engineering firm based in downtown San Francisco, where she is responsible for business development initiatives and client relationship management. Kate has been the lead on a brand strengthening campaign that hopes to illustrate the accomplishments of the firm and create opportunities in new markets. Prior to moving to San Francisco two years ago, Kate taught English and reading skills at a high school in Burlington, NC. Kate earned a Masters in Education with a focus in Curriculum Development from the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The mission of Classes for Causes especially resonates with Kate's former career, and she hopes to teach some CfC courses. In her free time Kate enjoys exercising, traveling and discovering new places in and around San Francisco.
Jose Mateos is a software engineer with experience in the mobile technology industry and high tech startups. He makes it his business to always know everything about all people. He is a real people person. Jose is involved in several non profit organizations in his home country of Spain (Social Computer Grouo, Gesto por la Paz, to name a couple.) From the very beginning he fell in love with the idea of Classes of Causes because of the concept: giving back to the community through teaching.
Jose moved to San Francisco to enjoy the Silicon Valley high tech scene. Currently he works with Silicon Valley startups facilitating their business development in Europe and recently founded his company to help his fellow Spaniards establish business and operations in the US market. Jose is a workaholic who is constantly sleep-deprived and under caffeinated. His professional goal is to never stop thinking of new ways to combine standalone/individual ideas to produce a market moving combined powerful idea.
Advisory Council
Lisa Haut-Mikkelsen
Whether cooking in a soup kitchen for the homeless, working with SF Connect, contributing time to Next Door Solutions to Domestic Violence, an advocacy group devoted to healing lives shattered by abusive relationships, "adopting" and teaching a young boy challenged with learning disabilities from fetal alcohol syndrome, or taking time off from her job to teach mathematics to disadvantaged middle school children, Lisa has always tried to find time to make that difference in the lives of people less fortunate.
Lisa received a B.A. in Sociology from Wellesley College and an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University. She can be found running along the Embarcadero in SF or swimming laps in her condo pool at 5am before work, and then after hours, hanging out in cool SF coffee shops with her laptop and books or enjoying the company of her 3 grown children and husband. One of these days, assuming the economy decides to cooperate, she will retire from high tech so she can pursue her lifelong passion: to make a difference in the world full-time.
Michaela Hayes is Principal of Hayes Marketing & Communications, a consultancy focused on market research, marketing strategy and planning, branding, and communications.
Her professional work spans the business, nonprofit, and government sectors. She has held manager and director of marketing positions for major health care organizations headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Blue Shield of California and Healthtrac, Inc. A seasoned management consultant, she has held senior-level consulting positions with national firms including The MEDSTAT Group and KPMG. In addition to health care, Michaela has expertise in a variety of fields including the environment, mental health, social services, children and youth, seniors, and education.
Michaela helps her clients better understand their markets and market trends, market position, and customer/client needs and concerns. Working in partnership with her clients, she supports them in using this information to make better decisions, create or enhance their branding and messaging, and develop more effective business, marketing, and communications strategies and plans to achieve their missions and strategic goals.
Michaela has published many journal articles on strategy, marketing, and market research. She is co-author of Play to Win: the Nonprofit Guide to Competitive Strategy, which won a Terry McAdam Nonprofit Book of the Year award, and is co-author of The Nonprofit Mergers Workbook, Part II: Unifying the Organization after a Merger (2004). She is a major contributor to the recently-published book, The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution. Her workbook, Focus Group Essentials, was published by the International Association of Business Communicators.
Michaela has served as a board member and volunteer for several nonprofit organizations. She is active in professional organizations including the International Association of Business Communicators where she serves as President on the Board of the San Francisco Chapter and on the international organization's Social Responsibility Committee. Additionally, Michaela is instructor of the Market Research course for San Francisco State University's Integrated Marketing Program.
She received a Master's degree from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, with a focus on policy and planning, and a BA in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and has a Certificate in Gerontology from the University of Michigan.
Michaela spends her spare time with her family and friends, reading, and exercising at her local community health club where she enjoys a variety of classes, including her current favorites zumba and Latin dance.
Kim Mason is a visual artist, arts advocate, educator and mentor. Her award-winning career in graphic design has been a core focus in concept, branding and new media art production. Kim has held key roles as art director and senior designer on multiple creative teams in the combined areas of identity design, digital media, web, and print collateral. While working under the auspices of marketing divisions and ad agencies, cross-media visual design has been a recurring catalyst in her career track, crossing lanes in sports marketing, live entertainment, consumer products, corporate communications, and media-arts education. And she drives it all with a tenacious appetite for integrating art, message and technology.
Kim's pattern of attracting history-making creative work opportunities, resulted in a unique breadth of accomplishments including her integral role in the creation of the NBA's first in-house creative services division. As Group Design Manager at Etrade, Kim was honored at the 5th Annual Women of Color in Technology Awards Conference 2000 as one of the "50 Women Who Make a Difference in Technology." As founding faculty member and visual arts department chair, she contributed to the creation of Oakland School for the Arts, and as current Art Director & Apprentice Program Manager, Kim is on the core team developing the world class, "Remember Them" monument project in downtown Oakland, spearheading an engaging internship program offered to Oakland youth.
Kim's west coast client list is selectively cultivated to rival her east coast list with the likes of: Zoom Technologies, Rotary Club of Oakland, Emeryville Unified School District, Women's Cancer Resource Center, Jansport, Port of Oakland, and NY Times Bestselling author-Mary B. Morrison. Kim attended Pratt Institute, NY when computer graphic degree programs were initiated, and she spends her coveted spare time working on her first graphic novel, a memoir novel, sharing art and culture with friends, mix-media painting, collaborative photography, dabbling in independent filmmaking, and reading.
Jennifer Perkins McVicker is a self-taught Internet developer and has been programming professionally since 1996. She has built complex content management systems, shopping carts, and other online and mobile applications for a wide variety of clients across business, health, entertainment, and non-profit sectors, including Bank of America, Planned Parenthood, and Pier 39. She has been a certified ColdFusion developer since June 2000, and is proficient in HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL. Jennifer enjoys keeping up with technological advances in the Internet world, and keeps things interesting by playing with new programming languages and frameworks.
Jennifer expresses her creative side by knitting, blogging, and experimenting with new recipes. Her favorite things include her iPhone, spending time with family, and cheese. Pretty much any kind of cheese.
As a young girl growing up in NY, Lisa always dreamed of making a difference in the world. Although she received her B.A. in Sociology from Wellesley College and planned to work with disadvantaged children, the exciting potential of using technology to solve social problems lured her away from her original goal. Once receiving her M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University, she landed a job with IBM that started her long career in the high tech world of Silicon Valley.
Jennifer was the first person Susan confided in about the idea for Classes for Causes and she really liked it. Without Jennifer's encouragement and extensive effort in programming the website, the organization would not have started. Jennifer is teaching "Custom Custom Ringtones." Haven't you always wondered how to add your own special ringtone to your cellphone?