Our Board
Most boards are accumulated. Ours is assembled.
We start with what the Foundation needs to do, then look for the person who makes it possible. We look for proximity to the work, independence of judgement, genuine reach into a community, and the willingness to put in the hours.
We compose across disciplines, regions, generations, and kinds of knowledge, so the researcher and the cultural custodian sit at the same table with the same vote.
Two rules hold us honest. Nobody is appointed to represent a category; every member holds a portfolio of work. And no seat is available in exchange for funding.
We would rather leave a chair empty than fill it with a name.
Dr. Gale Rigobert completed her Masters at Cambridge and holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and has spent her career moving between the lecture hall and the cabinet room, most recently as Saint Lucia's Minister of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development, and in 2014 as the youngest and first woman to lead the parliamentary opposition in her country. Her scholarship, including Bridging the Digital Divide? Prospects for Caribbean Development in the New Techno-economic Paradigm, asked two decades ago what small island states stand to gain or lose when a new technological order arrives without them, which is the question this Foundation now asks of AI. A founding member of this summit, she is seated for the work of turning our research into standing in the rooms where international policy is actually decided.
Founding Co-Chair, & Special Advisor for, International Relations & Global Policy
Dr. Gale T. C. Rigobert
Kay Valley is founder and director of HomeBanx, a Canadian venture applying 3D construction printing to the housing gap.
HomeBanx is built as a cooperative that puts homes into the hands of people the mortgage market has never served: the under-housed, people without shelter, and Black Canadians shut out of generational wealth. Her own description is the clearest one: a food bank for homes. he arrived there by way of an eco renovation showroom she founded in Toronto, and a decision that consulting on equity is not the same thing as changing who owns anything. HomeBanx was named a winner in the social enterprise stream of Rhyze Ventures, Innovation Guelph's programme for women founders, in 2022.
She also writes. Your Black Friend takes on inequity, race, poverty, and the pull of status among the powerful.She joins the Foundation's advisory board with a finance practice that begins from distribution rather than from credit, and a working interest in who gets counted as fundable and who never enters the calculation at all.
Alexander (Alec) Martin is a doctoral researcher in Science and Technology Studies at York University, where his work on decentralized social platforms asks whether democratic discourse can survive infrastructures owned elsewhere. He teaches communication at Conestoga College and writes on AI, digital sovereignty, and emerging threats as an editor at Open Canada and a fellow of both the Canadian International Council and the NATO Association of Canada.
A member of the inaugural summit since its first year, he is seated for the question of who owns the pipes: because a global South that shapes AI policy while running entirely on other people's platforms has authorship without infrastructure.
Advisor, Capital & Community Wealth (global South)
Kay Valley
Secretary & Project Lead
Ajibola (Jibs) Adigun
Join our board
Treasurer
Open
Advisor, Business & Industry
Rahwa Haile
Rahwa Haile is a senior manager in business development with a Schulich School of Business background and a career spent across start-ups, financial services, government, and technology firms, where her work has centred on financial analysis, strategic planning, and market entry. She is, by her own description, someone who bridges the gap between strategy and day-to-day operations, which is precisely the distance most foundations fall into: the space between what an organization says it will do and what its resources will actually allow. As treasurer she holds that ground for us, because a board that commits to refusing seats in exchange for funding needs someone whose job is to make the arithmetic work anyway.
Ajibola (Jibs) Adigun is a governance specialist and doctoral researcher at the University of Alberta who studies why organizations and policies get stuck, and builds the strategies that unstick them. He has spent his career inside the rooms where good intentions stall, in nonprofits, political campaigns, and government offices, and his work now sits at the intersection of policy analysis, strategic communications, and change management. As project lead he holds the part of this Foundation that is least visible and most decisive, on a conviction he states plainly: transformation does not come from better ideas, it comes from better processes for turning ideas into action.
Member at Large
Alexander (Alec) Martin
Rotating Board Members
Permanent Board Members
Dr. Trevor Charles is a professor of biology at the University of Waterloo, where he has spent nearly three decades on bacterial molecular genetics, functional metagenomics, and the machine learning methods now used to read microbial communities. Alongside the lab he founded and leads Lanterna Black Innovation Hub and serves as CEO of Metagenom Bio Life Science, work that has supported roughly 150 Black entrepreneurs and earned him the inaugural Wiley Research Heroes Prize in 2025, chosen from more than 1,700 nominations worldwide. He holds our education and scholarships portfolio because he has spent a career proving the thing this Foundation argues: that the talent was never the missing variable, only the access.
Lead Independent Director, Education and Scholarships
Dr. Trevor Charles
Dr. Kem-Laurin Lubin works at the convergence of computational rhetoric, AI governance, and equity-centred design. She holds a PhD from the University of Waterloo, where her dissertation developed ethotic heuristics for responsible AI design, and she is a 2026/2027 Post-doctoral Fellow with the Digital Policy Hub at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. She teaches at the University of Waterloo and is the author of Design Heuristics for Emerging Technologies: AI, Data, and Human-Centered Futures. Considerations for the Rights of Women.
She founded the AI Global South Summit in 2023, after noticing that conversations about AI were being shaped by extractive Global North logics that still described the Global South in colonial terms.
She chairs this board around a single question: when a system makes a decision about you, what kind of person does it think you are? She holds that question through Global South epistemologies, and writes on power, algorithmic harm, and the making of the digital subaltern.
Founding Co-chair & Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Kem-Laurin Lubin
Fabien Anthony is chairman and co-founder of the Pan-African Council, a global leadership body working across Africa and its diaspora on three fronts: diplomacy, economic development, and community. The Council's network runs through Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Ghana, Washington, Brazil, Colombia and the Caribbean, and it reports brokering more than $212 million in intra-African and diaspora trade and investment across technology, manufacturing, agribusiness and the creative economy, alongside advisory work with political leadership in over twenty countries.
A technology entrepreneur by background, he was named to MIPAD's Global Top 100 Most Influential People of African Descent Under 40. He writes for Al Jazeera and Face2Face Africa, where the argument is consistent and blunt: the Western neoliberal model will not deliver Black economic security, and what is required instead is a pan-African collaborative economy built on ubuntu rather than extraction.
He brings the Foundation continental reach, standing relationships with African Union structures, and a diaspora network that already runs through Latin America and the Caribbean.
Lead Independent Advisor,
Pan African Affairs
Fabien Anthony
Advisor: Social Change & Community Advisor
Samantha Blostein
Samantha Blostein is the director of Research for Change, a practice that carries out community-based research for the organizations least able to fund it: women's shelters, newcomer and settlement services, justice collaboratives, and community health teams across Ontario and beyond. She also teaches international development at the University of Guelph and serves as a global engagement specialist at its Community Engaged Scholarship Institute, where she builds the partnerships that let students and faculty work on research priorities communities set for themselves. She is seated for the discipline this board cannot do without: making sure that when we speak about communities, we have first done the harder work of asking them.
Karlyn Percil-Mercieca is founder and chief executive of KDPM Consulting Group and its Equity Institute, a Toronto practice working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, neuroscience and systemic transformation. She calls the role Cultural Architect. It rests on twenty three years across international banking, corporate equity and community-based research on three continents, with clients including TD Bank, KPMG and Pinterest.
Her work focused on cultural intelligence memory which is included in her KOFA AI, coaching platform for inclusive leadership and psychological safety.. Her position this table is unambiguous: responsible AI must advance human dignity, not merely efficiency.
A certified Emotional Intelligence and Neuro-Life Coach, she also founded the SisterTalk Group Leadership and Wellness Academy, chaired the BBPA Harry Jerome Awards, partnered with UNICEF and Toronto Police Service on Break The Stigma, and was named among Saint Lucia's women leaders in the 2021 She Is Saint Lucia campaign. She has appeared on Oprah's LifeClass and Cityline, and in Forbes, Essence and The Globe and Mail.
Advisor, Cultural Intelligence & Memory
Karlyn Percil-Mercieca
Dr. Helen Beny is a researcher and policy consultant working at the intersection of technology and politics, with a PhD in Comparative Public Policy from McMaster University, where her dissertation traced digital discrimination against historically marginalized communities in Ethiopia and India. Her work on internet shutdowns and digital repression found that regional blackouts are not short-term authoritarian reflexes but the continuation of long histories of discrimination, present in democracies and autocracies alike, and borne most heavily by women. She holds this board to the question she puts at the centre of her own writing: who gets left out of the room when digital policy gets made?
Vice Chair & Co-Executive Director