Alyssa Russo Email & Phone Number

Washington, DC, US

District Of Columbia, United States

- Acts as the Gender, Inclusion and DEIA technical lead on the Training Outreach and FSN Empowerment (TOF-EMP) Training design and delivery workstreams ensuring that the workstreams use and maintain inclusive and equitable approaches. - Provides technical guidance, oversight, and quality control to GESI, DEIA, and FSN Empowerment projects, capacity.

Washington, District Of Columbia, United States

• Manage a five track USAID project totaling $2,200,000 that impacts 300+ women and other marginalized populations in energy across 10 countries in the Europe and Eurasia Region.
• Manage a team of staff and consultants to effectively implement the Advancing Women Leaders in Energy (AWLE) project with quality and technical excellence.
• Facilitated a mid-project review using programmatic data to analyze the current state of the AWLE project from a GESI technical standpoint.
• Based on program review, adapted the program design to move it along the continuum towards a responsive level and focused on incorporating an intersectional lens in the project.
• Conducted a gender and social inclusion analysis and gender audit across all key partners and communities to ensure the barriers to women access to leadership in the energy sector are understood and all future.
• Lead, develop, and facilitate technical trainings and working groups that are contextualized to the region and focus on the use of inclusive development approaches to improve policies and procedures in the workplace to.

Washington, District Of Columbia, United States

• Manage a USAID grant that focuses on building gender equality and social inclusion skills for practitioners working in food and nutrition security
• Create and launch an agency-wide gender equality community of practice that shares program integration strategies, program learnings and encourages adaptive management for 50 team members across multiple regions
• Develop, maintain, and track adherence to organizational level gender equality and social inclusion minimum standards that must be adhered to by all Mercy Corps programs
• Lead the development, roll-out, and training components of an organization-wide gender equality and social inclusion integration toolkit
• Oversee the development of professional training opportunities for program implementors on key gender equality and social inclusion technical skills
• Provide technical assistance to country teams on how to ensure that programs are gender responsive by looking at gender equality and social inclusion throughout the program lifecycle

Washington, District Of Columbia, United States

• Co-led the development of a three-year gender equality and social inclusion organizational strategy
• Co-developed technical tools focused on gender equality and social inclusion analysis and gender responsive logic models
• Managed and facilitated remote trainings for the agency wide gender equality and social inclusion community of practice
• Supported and co-led trainings for program staff focused on key concepts and terminology of gender and inclusion and gender analysis
• Provided technical guidance and support to country and HQ-based program teams to ensure gender responsive program design and implementation
• Collaborated with country and HQ-based program quality and technical teams to strengthen GESI integration.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

• Critical member of a small team working to ensure quality management of all programs
• Served as a liaison between the program quality team and technical team responsible for gender equality
• Supported the management team with ensuring accountability to the agency level gender minimum standards
• Organized and authored quarterly program management performance reports read by senior level staff at both the regional and global level
• Led projects and managed an intern to develop new staff onboarding standards for the Program Performance and Quality team
• Managed procurement, logistics and administrative needs across a multi-location team

New York, NY/Mumbai, India

• Developed key data collection tools for gender analysis to be conducted at partner sites throughout India
• Managed a team of staff and volunteers to implement programs that would effectively empower young girls to attend secondary school
• Successfully managed programs that impacted 1000+ female students
• Coordinated regularly with field teams and five partners in India to ensure proper follow-up to programs
• Responsible for leading the identification and design phases of key programs
• Created monitoring and evaluation frameworks for all programs to be used over the program period

Kutch, Gujurat, India

• Administered and conducted a gender analysis to provide baseline data and design culturally appropriate interventions to increase the number of female students graduating from secondary school
• Led the full data collection process from start to finish including the development of data collection instruments
• Led on-site training of the full project team on gender integration methods in program design
• Designed initiative to increase enrollment of adolescent girls in secondary school
• Partnered with the public sector to build ownership of initiative to ensure sustainability

Hyderabad Area, India

• Designed an inclusion indicator to measure how girl friendly secondary schools were which was adopted by the ministry of education in 30 schools across two states in India
• Liaison with school administrators and local/regional government officials from the Ministry of Education to gain access to schools for data collection purposes
• Responsible for the development of data collection tools and enumeration training to be used for the collection of data from 1200+ female students
• Led baseline data collection process to understand safety and security factors for adolescent girls
• Effectively managed program on time, on scope, and on budget

Amata Nakorn, Thailand

• Taught English and counseled 30 female students in middle income communities on the importance of primary and secondary education
• Developed lesson plans, tests, and activities to enhance learning in the classroom

Jaipur Area, India

• Worked in low-income communities as an English teacher and informal social worker counseling female students and their families on the importance of primary and secondary education
• Conducted home visits and collected informal qualitative data on perception of girls’ education
• Created lesson plans, tests, and activities to engage students in literacy and numeracy training.

Master Of Arts (M.A.), Sustainable International Development

Activities and Societies: Gender Working GroupStudied Sustainable International Development with a focus on Gender. Focused on creating.

Bachelor Of Arts (B.A.), Sociology

Activities and Societies: Dance Theater GroupGraduated with a Sociology degree and a Dance Minor. Associated with the Womens Studies.