Board of Trustees

Chris works at The Motley Fool Holdings, a financial advice and money management company with offices in DC, Denver, and Pittsburgh. He has held various roles over the course of his Foolish career, starting in 2005 as an Executive Assistant before working as a business analyst,and  later attending law school and joining the legal team as Associate General Counsel in 2010. Starting in 2014, Chris put his legal and technology talents to work for Motley Fool Wealth Management as Director of Product where he works with a tech team to prioritize their work and set the direction for new client features. He also works with the legal team on storing client information, and security and retention policies.

Chris graduated from St. John’s College with a degree in Philosophy, and received his JD from Georgetown University Law Center. He moved to Denver, CO, in 2017 from Washington, DC, where he favored the Portrait Gallery out of all seventeen Smithsonian museums located the district.

Chris is a longtime friend of Headmaster Acemah, and joined the board in 2019.

Dottie (Stratton) Churchwell ’59 lives in Madison, WI. She graduated from Earlham College and has a master’s degree in mathematics from Indiana University. Dottie began her teaching career at Olney and that was followed by teaching at Friendsville Academy in Tennessee. She is now retired from a career in the Math Tutorial Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Twelve years ago she became involved in helping to run a small children’s summer camp in southern Wisconsin and this project continues. Dottie grew up in an Olney connected family with multiple generations of connections to the school and local area. Life at Olney was a good fit for her. She loved sharing a dorm room with two or three roommates, loved her classes and especially remembers learning about spring wildflowers in the Belmont County woods. Traveling with her astronomer husband to international astronomy conferences and telescope sites, having friends all over the world, visiting children and grandchildren in California, New Zealand and England, plus working in the garden at home are all important parts of Dottie’s life.

An independent Manufacturers’ Representative in the Water, Sewer & Irrigation industries, covering South Texas and Latin America, Eduardo has achieved outstanding business results with the development of distribution networks through the building and consolidation of customer-manufacturer relationships and effective communications.

After graduating from Olney Friends School in 1977, Eduardo  earned a BA in Business Administration from the Instituto Tecnológico y Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Nuevo Leon, MX) followed by a BS in Business Administration for Hospitality Management from the University of Denver (CO). A few years’ work in Hospitality Management gave him the experience and motivation to branch out into sales, where he found his niche.

Elizabeth Sikkenga, x80, teaches Entrepreneurship at the Eastern Michigan University College of Business and is a strategy and marketing consultant for small businesses. Her work experience is varied: she was the chief editor of SMID, the annual annotated bibliography of early Aegean script studies; taught English as a foreign language in Greece and Turkey; and developed the University of Michigan undergraduate application following the landmark Supreme Court decision Gratz v. Bollinger. She has an MBA from the University of Michigan and a BA in classics from Earlham College, and also spent many long years as a graduate student in linguistics at UT-Austin.

Most importantly, she is the parent of Joe Velick, ’18.

Frank has a long history with Quaker education. He has taught at five Friends’ schools, including Olney in the mid-80’s. Currently he is teaching History at the Friends Central School in Wynnewood, PA and serves as an Advisor and Grade Dean. He earned a BA in History from Earlham College and received his MA in History from Ohio University. Frank is a member of the Germantown Friends Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia, PA, and his meeting duties include Hospitality, Worship and Ministry.

Gwen graduated from Olney in 1978 and earned a BA in Theater at Otterbein University and an MFA in Acting at Ohio University.  She spent several years in Cleveland, working in the Shakespeare in the Schools program at the Great Lakes Theater Festival. She has taught acting, improvisation, voice, scene study and Shakespeare.

Most recently she has worked as a writer and editor in financial services and risk management, managing newsletters, websites and communications planning and execution. She is on the leadership committee of her firm’s Racial & Ethnic Diversity employee resource group, and has also been a diversity & inclusion trainer and consultant, and done pro bono and freelance grant writing.  She has volunteered for the Posse Foundation, City Harvest and Streetwise Partners. She lives in central New Jersey.

Hartwig has extensive experience in the non-profit sector, currently consulting in an advisory capacity on strategy formulation and external affairs with the Executive Director of Braven -New Jersey. Prior to
joining Braven, Hartwig was the Alumni Director of America Needs You and the Executive Director of the Global Business Coalition against Human Trafficking. Previously, Hartwig held management positions
with two social enterprises (Cleanslate Chicago and 180° Properties) under the auspices of the Cara Program, one of Chicago’s leading workforce development agencies. He also served as Board President of Refugee One, a Chicago based refugee resettlement agency.

A native of Germany, Hartwig holds a Master of Science degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown
University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations and French from the University of
Southern California. Hartwig is passionate about history, international travel, soccer, and long-distance
races.

Jeanne Kingery lives in downtown Columbus, OH. She graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton and, following that, from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Jeanne has practiced law in a private firm and in state government, but is now a utility regulatory attorney with Duke Energy Corporation, licensed to practice in both Ohio and Kentucky. Jeanne and her husband, Nate, sent their son, Joe, to Olney. Joe graduated in 2015 and is now studying music performance at Earlham College. It was watching Joe grow and learn at Olney that fuels Jeanne’s love for the school.

Judy Stanfield graduated from Olney in 1965, attended Earlham College, and later earned her bachelor’s degree in accounting from Indiana University Southeast in 1975.  She worked in public accounting for most of her career, starting with the very large Deloitte and finishing with her own smaller practice, specializing in non-profit audits in Washington, DC.

She is an eighth generation Quaker, and proud to have her tenth generation represented at Olney by her grandson, Will Quinn, Class of 2021.  Judy and her spouse Donna Zerbato live in Ponte Vedra, FL and enjoy golf, pickleball, and travelling the world.

Lisa attended Olney for three years and graduated in 1972.  She attended Wilmington College for two years, and then received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from Miami University in 1976.  She later earned a Masters’ in Child Care Administration from Nova Southwestern University in 1992. Lisa’s calling in life is to make a difference in the lives of the most vulnerable children.  She is currently the Director of the Head Start program in Warren County, Ohio, where she has worked for over 35 years.

Lisa is married to Markus Roberts, whom she met at Olney.  They have two grown children, Aaron and Rachel, and they dote on three wonderful grandchildren who live nearby!  Lisa is an active member of Community Friends Meeting in Cincinnati, where she currently serves as clerk of the Ministry and Counsel Committee and teaches First Day School.

After graduating from Olney, Mimi earned a B.A. from Earlham College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Purdue University. Friends Boarding School, as it was then known, has played a key role in her life, not only through its Quaker values but also as a shaper of her beliefs and practices as an educator. She believes that it is important to meet students where they are, but even more important to challenge them to exceed what they believe they can do. Once, after a difficult descent on a steep ski run, the instructor gathered the class and said, “Don’t rush to the chair lift in a hurry to get out of here. Stop, and look back up the hill. Appreciate what you have accomplished, knowing now that you can do it again.” That’s the kind of spirit Olney fosters.

During her career as a professor of English, she has taught writing and business communication to undergraduates at Prince George’s Community College (Maryland) and to graduate MBA students at Purdue University (Indiana) and Georgetown University (Washington, DC). She also authored college-level writing and business communication textbooks and built a consulting practice that took her organizations across the country. During 12 years as chair of the English Department at Prince George’s, Mimi managed a faculty of 75 and led statewide curriculum development and assessment committees. In 2013 she received the President’s Medal, the highest honor awarded by her college. These experiences as a faculty member, administrator, and educational consultant have informed her service on Olney’s board of trustees.

Mimi and her husband, Gary, enjoy international travel. Their first date was to the American Embassy library in Copenhagen as Earlham students on Scandinavia study abroad. Gary is a chemist, retired from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. His current project is restoring a 1946 Harley-Davidson motorcycle. For fun Mimi reads mystery and detective fiction, a hobby that has evolved into a course she teaches at the Johns Hopkins University-Osher Institute. She is a member of Sandy Spring Friends Meeting. The Kramer home in Gaithersburg, MD, is ruled by two Siamese cats.

Pete works for the City of Lancaster, Ohio, as a building department administrator overseeing many facets of the department including residential building inspections, zoning, Board of Zoning Appeals, Historic Lancaster Commission and manages the tax abatement program. Pete uses that knowledge to help Olney manage and maintain their buildings & grounds.

Pete is a 1974 graduate of Olney and a 1984 graduate of Wilmington College where he earned a degree in secondary industrial education and a secondary emphasis in ceramics. Pete has taught and coached for several years in the local schools. He also maintains a once bustling woodworking shop with plans to return to a daily routine as an active woodworker when retirement calls. Pete and his wife Madge have lived and worked in the Lancaster area for over thirty years where they raised their three children.

Pete rejoined the board in 2019 after serving for six years from 2010 to 2016.

Sam Leath, ’06 is a Columbus native. He attended Olney from 2002 – 2006 and has served as a trustee since January 2013.  

Sam, a first-generation college student, earned his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, from Haverford College in 2010. During his undergraduate career, he studied and volunteered abroad in Costa Rica, and gained leadership roles in several multiculturalism-focused campus programs. Sam became a nationally certified sign language interpreter in 2013 and relocated to Northern California, interpreting at San Francisco State University. 

In 2016, Sam moved to Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain to pursue a Master of Science in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at ESADE Business School. In addition to earning the Unity in Diversity scholarship, he collaborated on a consulting project with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Comitè Català and was a finalist in his school’s 2017 Hult Prize @ ESADE competition—an international business model competition that encouraged small teams of entrepreneurs to build sustainable, scalable social enterprises that restore the rights and dignity of 10 million refugees by 2022. 

During his time in graduate school, Sam was grateful for opportunities to travel to Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Seoul, and Windhoek, Namibia. The highlight of his travels, however, was participating in a week-long intensive course focused on entrepreneurship and social enterprise in Africa, hosted by the Graduate School of Business – University of Cape Town. 

After graduate school, Sam returned to Columbus, where he currently employs his knowledge of American Sign Language, Spanish, and English in his work as a trilingual interpreter. Sam is deeply committed to multiculturalism, racial justice, LGBTQ equality, disability rights, and the rights of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers — core values he began to develop during his time at Olney.

After earning a BS in Biology from Heidelberg University and an MS in Invertebrate Zoology from The Ohio State University, Sandy has had a varied career as a community organizer, mother, Medicaid bureau chief, and organic farmer. She has previously served Olney Friends School in various roles under four different administrations: as Director of Admissions (1999-2004), temporary Cook, Health teacher, and Assistant Farmer (2010-2016). Sandy is delighted to return by joining the Board of Trustees, as she is particularly passionate about healthy food and farming, hands-on interdisciplinary learning, and supportive living in a strong Quaker community.