Our Staff

Please note: Our beloved project officially wrapped up in 2016, with the publication of Integration Nation: Immigrants, Refugees, and America at Its Best. Please continue to enjoy and share ONI’s stories, which we hope will be a source of inspiration and hope during these challenging times. Please keep in touch, as Susan and Gina both remain engaged in similar work!

Gina Chirichigno
Co-Creator and Co-Director
gina.chirichigno@gmail.com

Gina is the Outreach Coordinator for the National Coalition on School Diversity (NCSD), which is led by the Poverty and Race Research Action Council.

A native of Denver, CO, Gina graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and Howard University School of Law in Washington, DC. Prior to law school, she worked as a Residential Instructor at the SEED Public Charter School of Washington, DC. She later interned at the Office of Human Rights for the City of Alexandria, VA where she handled employment discrimination claims.

Gina led the staff of Education Action, a small (and no longer active) nonprofit spearheaded by author and activist Jonathan Kozol. Education Action assisted teachers, parents, students, and organizers in becoming actively engaged in education reform. In June of 2008, she began coordinating the school and neighborhood integration efforts of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School (CHHIRJ) and four other national civil rights organizations. From 2010-2011, Gina was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. There, she was primarily involved with the Ford Secondary Education and Racial Justice Collaborative. This project engaged social justice leaders and education practitioners in the education policy development process.

She served as a member of the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council (RIAC), one of many advisory councils that contribute to the development of education policy in Massachusetts, from 2009-2014. She also belongs to TAG Boston, a network of educators in the Boston metropolitan area who are committed to social justice and racial equity, which she helped launch.

Gina manages One Nation Indivisible’s website and database, and oversees the design of its print and video products. She is the principal organizer of One Nation Indivisible’s convenings.

Susan Eaton
Co-Creator and Co-Director
seaton@brandeis.edu

Dr. Susan Eaton is Director of the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management.

At the Sillerman Center, Susan and her colleagues engage funders and their advisors, socially concerned scholars and non-profit practitioners to increase and enhance grantmaking to social justice causes. Susan is also Professor of the Practice at the Heller School and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

She is the author of The Children In Room E4: American Education on Trial, which chronicles a landmark civil rights case and life in a classroom and neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut and The Other Boston Busing Story: What’s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line, a qualitative interview study of the adult lives of African Americans who had participated in a voluntary school desegregation effort in suburban Boston. She is co-author, with Gary Orfield, of Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education.

Prior to her appointment at Heller in 2015, Susan was research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, where she co-founded and co-directed One Nation Indivisible. Her most recent book (an outgrowth of One Nation Indivisible), Integration Nation: Immigrants, Refugees and America at Its Best, profiles myriad efforts that welcome and incorporate immigrants into their new communities across the United States.

Her writing has appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications including the New York Times, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, the Nation, Education Week, Education Next, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Law & Policy Review, Race Poverty & The Environment and many others. For the first decade of her career, Susan was a newspaper reporter for dailies in Massachusetts and Connecticut where she covered public schools, city government and housing. She has also been a frequent advisor, consultant and writer for national and regional foundations in the United States.

Susan holds a doctorate in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Susan oversees production of One Nation Indivisible’s written products, its multimedia and public presentations.