Leadership

Advisory Board

Ron Andrade

Executive director of the Los Angeles City/County American Indian Commission and former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. Mr. Andrade serves as a key liaison with the network of American Indian national and regional consortia and economic development organizations.

Leonard Smith

Leonard Smith, executive director of the Native American Development Corporation (NADC), Billings, MT, a foundation supported economic development facilitator, supporting all of the American Indian tribes of Montana and Wyoming, as well as investing in a variety of projects supporting non-reservation based American Indians. Mr. Smith is an enrolled member of the Assiniboine & Sioux tribe of the Ft. Peck Reservation in Montana. He assistd NAC in searching for, screening, and reviewing a variety of tribal and non-tribal American Indian business projects.

Ricard Ohrstrom, Jr.,

The Ohrstrom Family Foundation. A nationally recognized philanthropist, Mr. Ohrstrom sits on the boards of several foundations and corporations. He is the chairman and founding member of the Committee on Outcome-Based Benefits (COBB) – an organization that seeks to improve the cost efficiency and cost-effectiveness of substance abuse treatment.

Dr. Susan Tave Zelman

Dr. Zelman is president of the Zelman Education Consulting Group. Previously, she served as senior VP for education and children’s programming at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and was the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Ohio for ten years, leading Ohio from 29th to fifth in the 2009 Education Week Quality Counts Report. Under her leadership, average student test scores increased, earning Ohio the Goldman Sachs Foundation Prize for Excellence in International Education. Dr. Zelman has held executive posts at the Missouri and Massachusetts Departments of Education and chaired the Department of Education at Emmanuel College in Boston. Dr. Zelman holds a PhD in education from the University of Michigan.