Amanda is a passionate and dedicated mother, wife, and student. After spending the last 16 years raising her children, she has decided to turn her love and devotion to children into a career in social work. She’s currently working toward her master’s degree in social work (MSW) at the University of Michigan. Her passion for philanthropy, community development, and dedication to her children fuels her enthusiasm to continue to influence missions committed to inspiring and empowering young women and girls.

Prior to continuing her education, Amanda spent ten years working in direct sales. Her diligence, self-discipline, and customer-first approach continuously landed her in the top 3% of a global cosmetic company. She is an avid volunteer, assisting and holding leadership positions within several nonprofit organizations for more than twenty years. Amanda has a passion for providing a safe place for ideas and expresses the importance of cultivating creativity. She is an artisan, crafter, painter, seamstress, and quilter; enjoys party planning, event organizing, interior design, and decorating.

Amanda continues her commitment to philanthropic fundraising and positive program development for children while simultaneously continuing her education and raising her young family.

Anna van Schaap is a Detroit based Fine Artist and Curator. She graduated Summa Cum Laude, with highest honors, from the University of Michigan, with a degree in Fine Arts, and supplementary concentrations in Art History & Curatorial Studies as well as Women’s Studies. For her Fine Arts degree she works predominantly in painting and photography, with additional interests in film and video. While attending the University of Michigan, she joined several activist organizations, focused on Women’s Rights, Racial Justice, and Environmental Action. While working as a photographer for a University of Michigan research team, studying network analysis research in conjunction with the microcredit industry in Honduras, she discovered an additional passion for photojournalism and photo-documentation, which still factors in her activist-based projects to this day including documenting the BLM protests in Detroit.

As a fine artist, Anna exhibits her work both Nationally and Internationally, with work in personal and public collections across the world. Her work focuses primarily on Femme-representation. Her work ovrlaps traditional portraiture with surrealism, while exploring ideas of Femme identity, expression, representation, symbolism, communication/the inability to communicate, and the psychopathology that arises from being silenced. Her fine art, photo documentation, and collaborative projects have been published in Hyperallergic, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Uproxx, The Art Newspaper, Art Tribune, Artvoice, Salon, W Magazine, Newsweek, Juxtapose Magazine, Vice Magazine, Nylon, NYMag, Broadly, Refinery 29, Detroit Free Press, and Artforum.

As a curator she has worked for several Detroit and Greater Detroit based galleries including Galleri 454 and Galleri 2987. In 2015 she founded her own curatorial organization, Things Feel Heavy, and has independently curated and guest curated exhibitions for the Scarab Club, the Charles H. Wright Museum, The Carr Center, The AAAC, MCCC, T. H. Muller Galleri, amongst many other small artist-run spaces. Additionally, she has guest lectured as a Fine Artist and Curator at Wayne State University and MCCC, and has sat on several artist panels, curatorial panel talks, and portfolio reviews.

She is deeply passionate about the arts and expanding art opportunities for artists, while working towards more gender and racial equity in the field of Art.

Michael Montgomery is the lead principal of Montgomery Consulting and has served as lead philanthropic investments Counsel to Christine Gavin & Company for more than 20 years. As a husband and father of two daughters and a new granddaughter, Mike brings intimate and professional knowledge of the unique fundraising needs of nonprofit organizations working within benevolent gynocentric missions.

Mike is part of the foundational social innovation creation team of the This Mission is Possible Foundation and brings strategic planning and thought leadership.

Mike brings a parallel career in fundraising and economic development. As a fundraising consultant, he has advised on more than $1B in fundraising and project activity, including some of this region’s most challenging efforts. Earlier in his career, he headed private sector fundraising for Focus: HOPE, was on staff at Wayne State University, and was a program consultant for the Hudson-Webber Foundation. He is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Health and Human Service at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and previously taught nonprofit management courses to MBA students at Lawrence Tech and MPA students at Oakland University.

He was a U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer at the start of his career. In 2002, Mike won the Michigan Economic Developers Association’s Mike Conboy Award for his contributions to economic development education and is a three-time winner of MEDA’s President’s Award. He is a former member of MEDA’s Board of Directors and the Board of Governors of the Cranbrook Schools. In the fall of 2009, Crain’s Detroit Business selected him as a leading local adjunct professor for bringing real-world challenges and experience to his classroom. He holds an M.A. from the University of Michigan and an A.B. from Columbia University.

Adam graduated from the University of Michigan in 2010 with a degree in Biological Anthropology where he studied primate evolution, anatomy, and behavior. His studies led to opportunities performing behavioral research on wild populations of neotropical monkeys in Costa Rica; ultimately gaining a better comprehension of human behavior. As he progressed into a graduate program at Miami University, his chosen field of study took him on research projects all over Central and South America, igniting a passion for cultural studies, human connectivity, and global interconnectedness.

These unique research experiences led Adam to Metro Detroit, working in education at the Detroit Zoological Society for eight years, helping to lead programs that included a wildly popular camp program for thousands of camp kids as well as an education-wildlife conservation program partnership in the Peruvian Amazon with citizens of the region working to protect the natural world around them.

Through his professional and graduate work abroad in zoology, he realized another passion for photo documentation, that would see him pursuing opportunities in photojournalism and investigative news research back in the U.S. documenting social movements, politics, the NFL, USFL, NCAA Basketball, boxing, and more, garnering publications in CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, Vice, USA Today, and more, ultimately leading to his role as the Social Impact Photo Storyteller for This Mission Is Possible Foundation.