Staff & Volunteers

Executive Administrative Assistant

Halima Kilgore

Halima is a passionate advocate for human and animal rights and global warming. An avid reader, she dedicates her time to informing people about the controversies surrounding Syria, Iraq, Libya, Congo, crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs in China, and US foreign policy in Palestine. A proud French-Algerian, she enjoys traveling to her native Algeria, where she plans to retire one day. Halima volunteers as an Executive Administrative Assistant for UBFSF.

Program & Policy Director

Taos Washington

Taos Washington serves as the Program and Policy Director for the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation. Taos started as the Survey & Research Coordinator before switching to the Program and Policy Coordinator. Taos then moved up the ranks and was promoted to the Program and Policy Director position for the United Black Family Scholarship Foundations. Taos recently graduated from the University of Colorado Denver in the Spring of 2024 earning his Master’s in Public Administration with a specialization in Public Policy Analysis/Program Evaluation. Taos is excited to continue his Journey in his new role with the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation.

Development Officer

Benjamin O'Brien

Ben is a current senior at the University of Michigan, where he is a History and Spanish major and an Earth Sciences minor. An aspiring lawyer, Ben served as an intern for Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut last summer, and previously interned at a small litigation boutique in New York. Ben lived and studied in Madrid, Spain last spring. There, in addition to his studies, he taught English at a preschool serving children from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds. He is passionate about policy, service, and empowering the victims of our flawed justice system to affect change, which is what ultimately led him to volunteer at UBFSF.

Operations Manager

Cheyenne Hughes

Cheyenne recently graduated from California State University Los Angeles with a Bachelors degree in Political Science. She has plans to go to graduate school and get her Masters degree in Political Science and then go to Law School. Cheyenne aims to focus on improving education in disadvantaged communities to transform the norm of school to prison pipeline. Her goal is to encourage lawmakers to implement stronger school systems inside marginalized and socially excluded communities that incorporate work-based programs that encourage students to stay in school as well as promote increased skill sets to prepare students for life after school. Cheyenne previously served as our R.E.B.U.I.L.D. Volunteer and Services Coordinator.

Media & Marketing

Isabella Cain | Program Coordinator

Isabella is a graduate student at University College London (UCL) in the UK. In 2024 she graduated from Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York with a BA in Cultural Anthropology. Isabella sits on the Board of Trustees at the Kings Park Heritage Museum. She hopes to pursue a career in the museum sector because it is time for history and history makers to be held accountable for the wrongdoings of the past. For over six years, Isabella has been volunteering for organizations within her community. Isabella joined the UBFSF media and marketing team in October 2023 and helps to facilitate the creation and administration of our organizational newsletter and media campaigns. She currently serves as our Media & Marketing Program Coordinator.

Gianna Clarke | Social Media Volunteer

Gianna is a Senior at Stony Brook University on Long Island, NY, double majoring in Sociology and Environmental Science. She has previous experience working with nonprofits focused on environmental racism and food justice. In September 2024, she joined the UBFSF team as a Media and Marketing Volunteer, where she manages social media and is leading the new organizational video series, “Conversations with Ivan.”

Web Development

James Ewing | Web Development Director

James Ewing is a project management director with proven technical abilities and an eye for design. He realized his passion for art late in life when he picked up a charcoal pencil and started drawing his first piece. He eventually produced a gallery exhibit under the pseudonym ShadedHues. This love of art guided his professional life by igniting a talent for web development.

Using his knowledge of frontend and backend development skills, James implements the latest coding languages and frameworks to translate beauty into code and create unique websites for organizations like the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation. He continues web development on a freelance basis and joined UBFSF to assist in delivering its invaluable services and opportunities on the web.

James currently works in the fintech industry as a project management director, translating business needs to technical solutions and driving those projects through to fruition.

Shrimann Myneni

Shri is a junior at the University of Michigan, majoring in Computer Science. Growing up in the Detroit suburbs, he has had a strong commitment to supporting underprivileged communities, often spending weekends volunteering at places such as Gleaners Community Food Bank and Grace Centers of Hope. These experiences have made him passionate about advancing community-focused initiatives. Shri serves as a Web Developer Volunteer and works to boost the online presence of UBFSF by improving SEO, optimizing navigation, and designing modern wireframes. After graduation, he aims to become a Software Engineer.

Accounting

Kohley McCargo

Kohley McCargo is a Contract Specialist with Indian Health Services in Oklahoma City. She has a Masters in Business Administration. One of her passions evolves from her volunteer service with the UBFSF and Sister Love Community Outreach in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

Sister Love is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering, improving, promoting, inspiring, and advancing the Okmulgee Community, young and old alike.

Kohley loves spending time with her son and supporting him in anyway possible. She enjoys family, friends, and relaxing and living a peaceful life.

She manages the UBFSF financials.

Our Partners At Stony Brook University

Robert Chase

Robert T. Chase is an associate professor of history. He is the author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners Rights in Postwar America; a national book award winner for Best Book for the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology. He is the co-director of the national organization Historians Against Slavery and editor of Caging Borders and the Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance.

His work has been published in numerous scholarly journals and anthologies. A renowned intellectual on the history of prison and policing reform and state violence, his work has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, Newsweek, Washington Post, and a number of other media outlets.

Zebulon Vance Miletsky

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and History. His articles have appeared in the Trotter Review, the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, and the Journal of Urban History. He is an Executive Board member of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. He is a regular contributor to the award-winning blog Black Perspectives, hosted by the African-American Intellectual Historical Society. He has written op-eds for Diverse Issues in Higher Education and is a columnist for the BK Reader. His new book Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle was published in December 2022 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Miletsky was the recipient of a 2020 “Game Changer” Award by the Long Island Area NAACP branch. In 2021 he was honored by the Town of Brookhaven Black History Commission “for leadership and service to the community as a role model to the next generation.” He lives in Brooklyn and works with the UBFSF as an editor for the 100 Prisoner Book Publishing Literacy Program.

Willie Mack

Willie Mack is a Ph. D. candidate at Stony Brook University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Black Studies Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research interests focus on race, capitalism and the carceral state in twentieth-century United States. His dissertation takes a transnational approach to the development of the carceral state in Haiti and the U.S. during the 1970 through the 1990s. Will has had articles published with “Black Perspectives” the blog for the African Americans Intellectual History Society, the Society for U.S. Intellectual Society, and “Next Chapter,” the digital forum for the University of Chicago’s Race and Capitalism Project. He has also won the Organization of American Historians’ 2022 John Higham Research Fellowship Award for graduate students writing doctoral dissertation in American History.

Susan Scheckel

Susan Scheckel is an Associate Professor of English. Scheckel earned her Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. After teaching at the University of Memphis and, briefly, at the University of Southern California, she came to Stony Brook University in 2000. She’s committed to showing that education in the humanities provides invaluable training in the acquisition of real-world skills. She is the editor of The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton University Press, 1998), which was the recipient of 1999 South Central Modern Language Association Book Award. She also co-edited Boundaries of Affect: Ethnicity and Emotion (Humanities Institute of Stony Brook Occasional Papers Series, 2007) with E. Ann Kaplan.

Julie Y Huang

Julie Y. Huang is an associate professor of marketing at the College of Business. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the marketing department at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Dr. Huang studies consumers’ attitudes towards to products made by disadvantaged producers, including incarcerated laborers. Her theoretical and empirical work has been published in top-tier behavioral science journals, including Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Psychological Science, The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Social Psychological and Personality Science.

SBU Project Assistants

R.E.B.U.I.L.D. Program & Public Policy Cohort

R.E.B.U.I.L.D. – Reinvesting in Every Black and Underserved Institution to Liberate and Diversify
Our Program & Public Policy Internship Program is an innovative program that allows student volunteers the opportunity to gain invaluable experience utilizing their education in political science, public administration, and other related fields to develop, direct and implement comprehensive program and policy development measures that have the potential to transform the dynamic in underrepresented communities.

Tom Gambaro

Tom Gambaro is a fourth-year student at the University of Michigan studying History and Psychology. He possesses a proven track record of working within the nonprofit space, having volunteered with several organizations dedicated to tackling Wicked problems such as gentrification, food deserts, redlining, and homelessness. He recently completed an independent research project investigating the root causes of and potential solutions for gentrification in East Palo Alto, California, which involved interviewing EPA community members. After completing his undergraduate degrees, Tom aspires to attend law school, where he hopes to continue learning about systemic injustices in the legal system and doing his part to contribute to meaningful change. Tom joined the UBFSF Program and Public Policy Cohort to write and advocate for programs and policy that grows communities and empowers them to become successful.

Laurie Tang

Laurie Tang is a fourth year student at the University of Michigan studying political science and history. She has received scholarships and accolades while at school, consistently maintaining her spot on the Dean’s List. She previously interned at ALPHA Education, a nonprofit organization that aims to educate the world on Asian history, where she worked on a historical research project about Hong Kong that will be featured in the Avery Wong Museum in Toronto. Just as she was able to impactfully educate herself on the hidden history of oppression in Asia, she wants to be a part of creating educational opportunities for communities who systematically are not afforded them, which is why she joined UBFSF. She hopes to attend law school in order to continue pursuing that goal. Laurie volunteers as our Program & Policy Coordinator.

Get in Touch

United Black Family Scholarship Foundation

P.O. BOX 862
BRISTOW OK 74010
Phone: 1-918-924-5872
Email: news@ubfsf.org