Staff

Michael Doyle Cluett is the recipient for the 2009 Canadian Red Cross Young Humanitarian Award. Currently, Michael is the coordinating Youth Facilitator for the GPI Youth Stories of Resilience: Youth Leaders for Community Wellbeing program. Michael recently returned from Bhutan where he worked with GPI Atlantic and partner organizations to facilitate a number of youth media projects and also attended the Educating for Gross National Happiness workshop. He has been an active member and frequent facilitator for the GPIAtlantic Youth Program since 2007 when he joined the Youth Engage! Project, during which he facilitated programs such as Move Your World, a 4-day conference for Atlantic Canadian youth on global issues. Michael was one of 26 GPI Atlantic Youth who attended a 2-week program with the 2007 Third International Conference on Gross National Happiness (GNH): World Views Make a Difference. Michael frequently volunteers in addition to his paid facilitation duties and also works with the Atlantic Council for International Cooperation First Voices: Connecting Aboriginal Youth in the North and South program as well as other youth organizations. Michael was also the 2006 President of the Mi’kmaq Students Association at Dalhousie University and worked in his home community of Chapel Island, Nova Scotia at the Potlotek Youth Centre. Michael uses creative expression, film and music to help other youth address issues as diverse as environmental sustainability or sharing and preserving aboriginal heritage, cultures and history around the world.

A Cofounder of the GPIAtlantic Youth Program, Dahlia Colman has been immersed in the principles of genuine progress and gross national happiness since early childhood. Currently, Dahlia is coordinating research for an education partnership in Bhutan and will be facilitating a youth program on genuine progress in France this summer. She served as Director of Media Relations, Bhutan for the Educating for Gross National Happiness international workshop in Thimphu held in December 2009. Dahlia is a contributor to Solutions Journal, an online magazine addressing environmental and social issues. She authored the GPIAtlantic publication (originally written for the Atlantic Council for International Cooperation). Dahlia has volunteered and worked as a paid facilitator with innumerable youth programs for GPIAtlantic and other organizations, including the Bhutan Youth Development Fund, the Sierra Club, and GNH USA. Dahlia attended the Foundation Year program at the University of King’s College and is now a student at Sarah Lawrence College where she is studying economics and art.

Gwendolyn Colman is Executive Director at Genuine Progress Index Atlantic. Prior to her role as Executive Director, she started the GPI Atlantic Youth Program, which became the inspiration for a world-wide youth movement toward creating genuine progress based on the four pillars of Gross National Happiness: environmental conservation; cultural preservation and promotion; sustainable economics; and good governance. This coordinated network of young volunteers spans 18 countries and is a force for youth led positive change. The GPIAtlantic youth program organizes: participative youth research projects; educational workshops and camps; and media projects. Previous to her work with GPI Atlantic, Gwen worked as an editor and project manager on several large environmental impact statement and database projects. She has also worked as a small magazine editor and journalist and created workshops for young writers, as well as many other youth programs. She attended the University of Colorado with majors in Journalism and Chinese Languages.

Dr. Ronald Colman is founder and previous Executive Director of GPI Atlantic. Prior to that, Dr. Colman taught for 20 years at the university level and was a researcher and speech-writer at the United Nations. He has researched and written many reports on indicators of population health, community wellbeing, natural resource health, and environmental quality. Ron advises governments and communities both in Canada and internationally on indicator work, and regularly speaks on the subject to interested groups.

View video clips of Ron speaking at the Rethinking Development Conference in June 2005.

Dr. Nora Didkowsky is the Director of Youth and Community Resilience/Resilience Research at GPI Atlantic. Her work at GPI Atlantic involves managing and implementing international research-training and capacity building programs; facilitating collaborative, interdisciplinary methodological development; and supporting multi-level partnerships emphasizing youth-elder cooperation and participatory-action research. Nora has also worked with the GPI Atlantic Youth Program since 2007. Prior to her work with GPI Atlantic, Nora was coordinator of the Negotiating Resilience Project at the Resilience Research Centre (Dalhousie University), a 3-year international study that sought to understand resilience from the perspectives of youth aged 12 to 15 in transition in India, South Africa, Canada, China, and Thailand. Nora spent three years as an international researcher and youth internship programs coordinator at the Center for Research on Culture and Human Development, (St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada), which involved coordinating and conducting research on healthy child development with diverse populations in contexts around the world. She also taught a third and fourth year migration and development class through the International Development Studies Department at Dalhousie University. Previous research contracts at universities and elsewhere have focussed on: understanding and building resilience in contexts facing socioeconomic, political and environmental transformations; youth and community development; child emotional development; mother-infant interaction; child symbolic development; immigration and forced displacement; and gender differences in stress and coping. Nora volunteers extensively, including with the Atlantic Council for International Cooperation's Board of Directors Personnel Committee.

Nora has a BSc Honours Psychology degree from Acadia University, a Masters of Arts in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies from Dalhousie University. Her mixed-model Master of Arts research used surveys and qualitative interviews with young people, and focus groups with adults, in Moscow to explore youth resilience within the framework of shifting economic, political, and social realities in post-Soviet Russia. Her doctoral research, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Foundation through the Atlantic RURAL Centre, investigated pathways to resilience for youth coping with the effects of community restructuring in rural Atlantic Canada.

A list of her peer-reviewed publications and presentations can be found here.

Karen Hayward has been a researcher with GPIAtlantic since 2000. She has worked on a number of research reports on in the area of population health, and in 2004 was the lead author of GPIAtlantic's The Costs and Benefits of Gaming report. Karen has a background in health and social work, and as a writer and editor of a number of publications.