Berkley Center

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries; one way she shares her expertise is through her blog Faith in Action. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Sulak Sivaraksa is a Buddhist spiritual leader and humanitarian best known for his social criticism and grassroots organizing that uses spiritual models to advocate for sustainable change to better the lives of poor, rural Thais. For his activism and writings, he has been exiled from Thailand (1976-77 and 1991-94), jailed four times, and been accused of defaming the Thai monarchy. Born in Thailand in 1933, he studied law in the United Kingdom. Returning to Thailand in 1961, he taught at Chulalongkorn University, founded the Social Science Review (Sangkhomsaat Paritat), and initiated social and ecological organizations such as the Spirit in Education Movement (SEM), and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB). Sivaraksa has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, the University of Hawaii, and Cornell, and he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (1995), the UNPO Human Rights Award (1998), the Millennium Gandhi Award (2001), and the Niwano Peace Prize (2011).