Lydia Stazen

Director | Institute of Global Homelessness

lstazen@ighomelessness.org

Lydia has dedicated her career to building a world where all people have a place to call home and a strong foundation upon which they can build the lives they envision for themselves. Lydia has held executive leadership roles in anti-poverty organizations across the Midwest, focusing on housing, employment, education, and policy advocacy.

Immediately prior to joining the Institute for Global Homelessness, she served as Vice Chancellor of Advancement and President of the City Colleges of Chicago Foundation, where key achievements included establishing a $500,000 fund for student basic needs emergencies and securing funding for a full-time staff position to drive a college-wide response for students experiencing homelessness. She also served for several years as Vice President of All Chicago Making Homelessness History, where she was instrumental in integrating homeless data with medical data to help patients experiencing homelessness access housing services.

Molly Seeley

Special Projects Manager | Institute of Global Homelessness

mseeley@ighomelessness.org

Molly graduated from New York University with a BA in Anthropology and Comparative Literature. She has worked as an editor, content coordinator, tutor, researcher, and sports reporter. Before coming to Chicago, Molly worked for Variety the Children’s Charity of New York, seeking to fund and support arts education in New York City and the Tri-State area. Along similar lines, she worked for the Shakespeare Society to help make Shakespeare education accessible and available to students in all five boroughs. She is on the board of NYU’s College Alumni Association.

Molly has worked researching the role of politics in the comedores of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and performed an ethnographic field study of the role of insider language within Live Action Role Players in the New York Tri-State area. She wrote her thesis on translations of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as a method of political discourse in Spain. She is currently pursuing her MSc in Public Administration and Policy at the London School of Economics.

Molly is an avid hockey fan and hockey history buff. It’s best not to get her started talking about it unless you have at least an hour to spare.

Tiffany Connolly

Administrative Assistant | Institute of Global Homelessness

tconnolly@ighomelessness.org

Tiffany graduated from DePaul University with a BA in Psychology. She began her work at IGH as a student intern during her senior year at DePaul and now provides clerical support to the team. She is passionate about social sciences, especially human behavior, and helping others.

Julia Wagner

Program Manager | Institute of Global Homelessness

jwagner@ighomelessness.org

Julia’s experiences volunteering with Amnesty International and homeless organizations in Chicago grew her awareness of injustice and privilege, and spurred her passion for homeless issues and building a world based on equity and inclusion.

Prior to joining IGH, Julia served as a Monitoring and Evaluation Technical Advisor for the AIDSFree Project, where she worked with teams from 13 countries to track and improve performance. She has also worked in Namibia and South Africa on projects focused on empowering youth, forming continuum of care networks, and engaging civil society organizations. Her experience includes creating data management systems, building dashboards and tools to make data more accessible for decision making, and providing capacity building and technical assistance to field-based partners.

Julia holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Joanna Padgett Herz

Project Coordinator, United Nations Advocacy | Institute of Global Homelessness

jherz@ighomelessness.org

Joanna Padgett Herz is a Sociology student at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, just a borough from where she grew up in Brooklyn. She has been doing service work since she was 14, most recently being part of the Ozanam Scholars Program. Joanna is a Project ID caseworker at St. John’s Bread and Life, where she helps clients acquire vital documents such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, social security cards, and state identification. In Fall of 2017 she was the Rome program coordinator for the Little Friends for Peace Club, where she helped teach young students about non-violent problem solving, social justice, and other peaceful life skills. She has also worked on poverty alleviating programs and service trips in Puerto Rico, Ecuador, South Dakota, and Ghana. She previously was an intern representative for the Congregation of the Mission focusing on advocating for the end of human trafficking and homelessness.