About Jo Ann & Ed

JO ANN has a doctoral degree in the design and evaluation of education and social programs from Stanford University, and masters degrees in teaching adults ESL and basic literacy, and in sociology, from NYU and Stanford, respectively.

She grew up in New York and moved as an adult to California. She has started restaurants, non-profit organizations, taught ESL, organizational theory, basic executive skills, and how to evaluate social programs in diverse community and institutional contexts, including a primary school in Afghanistan, a business school in New York, adult schools in California, the McClaren Business School, Stanford University, and in a variety of non-profit and private consulting contexts, both in the US and abroad. As part of her work in evaluation, she has helped foster effective bilingual education programs, assisting educators and social program managers to design evaluations and make use of the results from them, as part of adult education strategic planning initiative with the California Department of Education, with AmeriCorps and program managers and state commissions, welfare to work programs, and in Afghanistan as part of a multi-year initiative to foster primary education and teaching.

Her passion is to ensure that assessment helps improve program experience, outcomes and impact.

Jo Ann Intili and Ed Kissam are co-trustees of WKF, a small family giving fund; and Jo Ann is a member of the Board of La Clinica de la Raza.

ED grew up in California, Oregon, Illinois, Tennessee, and Florida, as a pipeline migrant until his family finally settled in Mexico. After studying philosophy at Princeton University and Oxford University, and teaching literature and linguistics at San Francisco State University and Sonoma State University, he worked as a community clinic staffer for Alianza del Pueblo, a farmworker health clinic. His involvement with community-based organizations included founding an organization providing documentary television production training to low-income youth and working as part of a small core team that put the newest California public TV station, KRCB-TV, on the air in 1983.

From there, he went on to planning, evaluation and providing technical assistance to youth employment training programs, strategic planning and curriculum development in adult education, and leading studies of farmworker life for the Department of Labor and the post-IRCA Commission on Agricultural workers—in Michigan and Washington. In 1999-2000 he led a DOL-funded national study of teenagers working in farmwork. He also has led or participated in several studies of immigrant integration in rural US communities—in 2001-2006, the New Pluralism study of immigrant settlement, in 2008-2010, a study of rural Latino entrepreneurship.

Ed has worked intensely on issues of differential census undercount for three decades and published papers on farmworker undercount and coverage measurement in the 1990, 2000, and 2010 decennial censuses. He has also participated in qualitative research and operational mapping for the Census Bureau, as part of their ongoing forms improvement, development of messaging strategy, and as guidance for non-response follow-up.

Ed's international development work includes supervision of a longitudinal survey of student progress in a large USAID-funded accelerated community learning in Afghanistan, as well as technical support in designing and analyzing data from a survey of rural health care in five of the country's rural provinces.

Ed has also published three volumes of poetry–The Sham Flyers, Jerusalem, and the People, and The Arabs (Curriculum of the Soul). His translations, with Michael Schmidt, of pre-Columbian Nahuatl writing, Flower and Song, first published in 1973, won the 1988 Pushcart Prize for best small press translation, and was recently re-issued in 2009.