Our Board of Directors

Sydney Cannice

A development professional with over eight years of fundraising experience, Sydney focuses on donor stewardship, event planning, and major giving to promote a culture of philanthropy and support those in need. Her experience spans from developing peer to peer fundraising programs for metastatic breast cancer research to creating donor communications for camps in South Africa to supporting the fundraising needs of elementary and middle school aged students.  She is uniquely passionate about global health and previously served in the Peace Corps in Malawi, Africa as a Community Health Advisor. During this time, she partnered with local leaders to address the needs of the community and promote healthy behaviors. Currently, she serves as the Director of Development at an independent school in Boyce, VA where she manages all fundraising efforts.

Steve Cohen

An advocacy communications consultant, Steve focuses on writing, editing and visibility building to advance public interest organizations and causes. Prior to that, he spent 15 years in senior communications roles at UC Office of the President and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. A San Francisco native, Steve has led the Bay Area Democracy Funders since its inception in 2011 and is active politically. He holds an M.A. from San Francisco State’s Department of Broadcast & Electronic Communication Arts.

Allen Grogan

Grogan has an eclectic background as a technology company attorney, executive and investor. He has served in senior executive and legal roles at public, non-profit and emerging technology businesses, in industries including SaaS, semiconductors, domain names and biomedicine, with funding sources ranging from angel investors to venture capital to private equity to public markets. He has shepherded enterprises through mergers with public companies, including Oracle and IBM, as well as acquisitions by businesses headquartered in Israel, India and Canada. Allen co-founded a biomedical startup and guided it through regulatory approval and the successful sale of its assets. Earlier, while engaged in the private practice of law, his clients included AOL, Netscape and numerous pioneering software and online ventures, as well as venture capital firms and individuals and companies in the media and entertainment industries. He co-founded and served as an editor-in-chief of the monthly legal publication The Computer and Internet Lawyer. He has been a speaker at conferences and events sponsored by UCLA Law School, USC Law School, the Practicing Law Institute and the Computer Law Association. For decades he has worked with and advised venture capital and private equity firms regarding investments in technology firms.

Amanda Kim

Amanda Kim has worked for The Walt Disney Company for more than 7 years in operations and planning management. Over the past 5 years, she has helped lead more than 15 different AAPI employee groups across the company and organized internal virtual and in-person events for employees, celebrating and discussing Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. With a goal of furthering conversations around topics of identity, marginalized communities, AAPI and LGBTQIA+ issues, and more, she is always looking to both organize and attend programming centered around these topics. She has led the planning and programming for the company-wide AAPI Heritage Month celebration for the last 2 years.
With an educational background in International Relations specializing in Northeast Asia and experience working abroad, she has a passion for travel and lifelong education. Starting her schooling experience being homeschooled with her two younger sisters, she knows the power of specialized, alternative teaching to empower individuals and communities alike.

Prabhu Raman

Prabhu is a real estate private equity professional with global experience investing in and growing early-stage companies that build and manage real estate.  Prabhu has spent over 6 years at Macquarie Group (an Australian investment bank) helping grow and manage $8B in entity-level and joint venture investments.  Prior to Macquarie Group, Prabhu spent 6 years with Merrill Lynch’s Real Estate Investment group helping manage $6B of real estate joint ventures and operating companies with a specific focus on emerging markets such as Brazil, Argentina, India and Turkey as well as U.S, U.K, Germany and Japan.  He focuses on investment structuring and management and in particular mentoring management teams on efficient and effective business scaling.
He is widely traveled and beyond investment outcomes he values the contact and cultural enrichment he has gained from people on the ground in various countries.
Between the late 1990s and mid-2000s Prabhu was an attorney at large global law firms in New York and Sydney, Australia with experience ranging from litigation and real estate to project finance.  Prabhu is an admitted attorney in New York, California and Australia.  He is a graduate of the University of New South Wales, Australia with a Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) with merit and a Bachelor of Laws.

Neepa P. Ranavat

Neepa is currently the corporate senior counsel at Hanson Bridgett, a full-service law firm with over 200 attorneys with offices in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
 Neepa is a self-directed and passionately motivated corporate senior counsel leading general corporate transactions, mergers, and acquisitions. Her background and training also includes executing multi-million dollar senior debt financings. She is highly organized and is a creative problem solver who excels at guiding in-house and external teams through complex projects by identifying goals and advising on implications. Her expertise also includes all aspects of risk assessment/insulation, contract negotiations, and corporate governance.

Marcel Roche

Marcel Roche has over 15 years of experience as finance executive in life science and technology companies, both private and public. At Illumina, Marcel deployed the global FP&A practice and systems, led the DNA sequencing cost accounting team, and supported revenue growth from $70M to over $1B. At Guardant, he built the finance & accounting function, implemented NetSuite ERP and Big 4 audit, leading up to an IPO. Through his career, Marcel was instrumental in $500M+ of debt and equity financing. He is a California CPA and holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley

Bob Scaglione

As the SVP of Strategic Channel, Bob is responsible for driving adoption of OwnerIQ’s advertising solutions among key industry leaders at leading manufacturers, retailers and buying groups.
Prior to OwnerIQ, Bob Scaglione served as the CMO at Sharp Electronics Marketing Company of America where he was responsible for the management and communications of the Sharp brand across all of its consumer and business-to-business product lines. Prior to that he served as SVP of Marketing for Sharp’s lineup of consumer display, audio, video and appliance products.
Scaglione was ranked #14 in the 2012 ExecRank listing of worldwide marketing executives and he earned Advertising Age’s Top 50 Marketers award in 2004 based on his work on the AQUOS brand of LCD TV’s. He serves on the board for the non-profit Clean the World foundation. Additionally, he was a member of the Academy of Digital Television Pioneers and was on the Board of Industry Leaders for the Consumer Electronics Association.
Prior to joining Sharp, Bob was a Buyer for Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn, NY. Scaglione holds a B.S. in Marketing from the University of Scranton.

Joel Zimbelman 

Joel has thirty-five years experience in higher education as a teacher, administrator, and researcher. He also has experience as a program-builder both domestically and internationally. Strengths in institutional reorganization and administrative oversight, developing and managing multi-million dollar budgets, establishing faculty mentoring and development programs, and improving classroom environments with the selective use of new technologies. Significant collaboration in program development with arts communities (museums, summer arts programs, symphonies), public schools, health care professionals, international and domestic NGOs, regional social service agencies, and religious organizations. Expertise at applied and professional ethics in medicine, nursing, and public health and its relation to religious communities, law, and public policy.

Matt York

Founder & Executive Director of illuminAid

Matt graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in Communications (TV and Film) and English in 1978.  In 1986, he founded Videomaker Inc., a leading publisher on video production. It is Videomaker Inc.’s mission is to empower individuals to make video through its monthly magazine, website and hands-on workshops and conferences.
Branching out of Videomaker Inc. in 2008, Matt founded illuminAid because of his genuine passion to make a difference in the developing world by bringing change through video.  Since then, Matt has been able to harness over two decades of expertise in the video consumer electronics industry to grow illuminAid from an idea to a thriving nonprofit organization.
Through the development of his own patent for a consumer electronics device as well as his travels to research and development labs in Japan, he is experienced in the details of electronics equipment development. Matt's inside knowledge about consumer electronics gear, his tracking of up and coming technologies and his seasoned relationships with many top decision makers from major consumer electronics manufacturing firms contribute to his ability to fulfill the mission of illuminAid.  His professional contacts will vouch for his honesty and integrity as he is a well-respected colleague in both the publishing and consumer electronics industry.