About the Team

KELLY RAPPUCHI, Editor-in-Chief and Founder

Kelly Rappuchi is a global leadership development specialist and management consultant. She specializes in designing innovative learning experiences to expand the human, team, and organizational skills required for growth. Kelly has implemented programs in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.

Kelly’s career began in human rights where she coordinated the distribution and translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to 15 countries in their native languages. In 2014, she co-founded CIRCLE, a women’s leadership initiative focused on empowering women in Pakistan. She researches and facilitates sessions on the DNA of women’s leadership and is the Research Chair for Harvard W3D: Women in Defense, Diplomacy and Development. Kelly has taught communications workshops at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and was a teaching fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Kelly received a B.A. in European History from the University of Pennsylvania and an Ed.M. from Harvard University, where she worked as a copy-editor for two former Harvard presidents and for Leadership on the Line (Heifetz and Linsky). Kelly is an accomplished classical and East Indian classical musician who has performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and at venues around Europe.

Kelly currently serves as an Ambassador for The Op Ed Project in New York and works for Polygence as a research mentor for gifted high school students.

ZAINA ADAMU, Editor-in-Chief Emerita and Founder

Zaina Adamu is an award-winning global communications expert with over 10 years of experience working in media, international affairs and human rights. In 2018, she founded Ghana Girl Rising, a social enterprise aimed at improving education access for Ghana’s marginalized young women. Before then, she was a journalist at CNN, covering both the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

During her six-year tenure at CNN, she won a Peabody Award for her contribution to the network’s reporting of the Arab Spring and was selected as a Power 30 Under 30 honoree. As news editor for The Spokesman, she won an Excellence Award for her breaking news coverage of President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 win. In 2022, she was appointed by the European Council on Foreign Relations to the Panel of Experts for Africa where she serves as a policy consultant on foreign affairs in Ghana.

Zaina is the author of 20,000 Words: A Guide to Finding Calm in a Cluttered World. She currently serves as president of Harvard Alumni for Global Development. She served on the board of Harvard W3D: Women in Defense, Diplomacy and Development and is a member of the G-100, an influential group of 100 women leaders from across the world.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism from Morgan State University and a Master’s degree in International Education Policy from Harvard.