GET TO KNOW OUR TEAM
Meet our curriculum developers and our board members.
Furahi Achebe
President and Curriculum Developer
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Achebe is in her seventh year of teaching in a high poverty, urban district. She has volunteered with urban youth for thirty-nine years, teaching self-empowerment strategies and promoting academic engagement and science literacy among disadvantaged groups.
Prior to working as an educator, Achebe was a medicinal chemist for more than twenty years and is listed as co-Inventor on five patents or patent applications. Achebe holds a master’s degree from Cornell University and a Certificate in Film Making from New York University.
Achebe is a recipient of numerous teaching fellowships and awards including, a Grosvenor Fellowship awarded by National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions. She was a 2017 PBS Digital Innovator, a Fund for Teachers Fellow for 2017, a Joules Fellow at UCONN School of Engineering, and a Yale Teachers’ Institute Fellow for 2019.
Karen Corell
Vice President
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Corell retired from a successful career on the management team of a 75-person New York City design firm specializing in consumer-product branding and packaging design. Responsible for the creative excellence of the design staff, she also led major redesign programs for brands such as Haagen Dazs, Stouffer’s, Shop-Rite supermarkets, Goya Foods, Exxon-Mobil, Tropicana, and many others. She has won Clios and other design awards for her own creative work. She holds a master of science degree in Communications Design from Pratt Institute.
Corell’s work involved branding and marketing strategy, market research, and verbal and visual communication, skills that she uses to guide the development of the Determine Your Destiny organization.
Myrna Watanabe
Treasurer
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Watanabe has been in her current position for the past eighteen years. In a long career, she has mostly taught at inner-city community colleges where her students, increasingly from minority populations, range from the highly motivated to the economically and socially struggling. Myrna also taught at several four-year colleges, graduate schools, and a podiatric medical college.
Simultaneously, Watanabe was a freelance science writer for thirty-eight years, writing mostly for publications aimed at scientists and medical professionals. Her clients included many of the major scientific journals. She ran a science and grant writing business for thirty years winning more than $220 million for science, engineering, veteran, and community organizations.
Watanabe majored in Biology and minored in East Asian Studies at Barnard College. She received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Animal Behavior from New York University, followed by a post-doc study of Chinese alligators in Anhui, China, with the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, under a grant from the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. She was the first woman to study American alligators in the field and the first Westerner in forty years to do field research in Anhui, China.
Rachel McCullough-Smith
Secretary and Curriculum Developer
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McCullough-Smith has had a twenty-five-year career as a full-time specialist in youth development and community service.
As Youth Service Director at the Hall Neighborhood House in Bridgeport, McCullough-Smith coordinated outreach services among community based programs; supervised program staff, students and volunteers; developed and maintained the program's budget. She organized a one-on-one mentoring program in Fairfield County; conducted after-school and summer programs for youth; and established a nontraditional sports, nutrition, and physical fitness program.
Her background also includes working with foster care adolescents; organizing workshops and fundraisers; and providing education and life skills counseling to parents.
At the Women and Families Center she again provides mentoring, training in life skills, and college prep counseling to high schoolers; promotes literacy and math skills; and is building relationships with community resource providers.
McCullough-Smith attended Asbury University in Kentucky and the University of Bridgeport and is currently completing a degree in Psychology and Spanish at Charter Oak State College. In addition, she has earned numerous certificates such as Battered Women/Sexual Assault Crisis Counseling, Supervising and Managing in Youth-Serving Organizations, Governor’s Prevention Mentor Training, Daniel Memorial Life Skills Curriculum, Training for Parenting for Families, among many others.
Janet McCray
Board Member and Curriculum Developer
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McCray has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Baruch College of the City University of New York and a Juris Doctorate from Quinnipiac University School of Law.
Attorney McCray has been an advocate for youth and families throughout her career, spanning more than thirty years. Devoted to the empowerment of youth in her church and the community, McCray has served as a youth ministry leader, teacher, counselor, mentor, and youth choir director. Throughout her career she has served on several youth councils and advisory boards within the Hamden and New Haven areas. Attorney McCray joined Determine Your Destiny in 2009 to assist in the endeavor to broaden the knowledge of career options, and pathways to those career choices, among disadvantaged youth.
Alix Mathieu
Board Member and Curriculum Developer
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Mathieu has a bachelor’s degree in Human Services with a minor in Psychology from the University of Bridgeport and a master’s degree in Clinical-Community Psychology from the University of New Haven.
Mathieu, originally from Haiti at a young age, experienced the vulnerability of this immigrant population because he was a part of it. This led to his commitment to a career of improving the lives of members of vulnerable populations. This passion led him to work with the homeless population at the Thomas Merton Center, in Bridgeport, Conn., where he assisted with preparing meals and had dialogs that inspired hope within the members of that group. Wanting to diversify, he worked with the elderly population to promote interaction and decrease isolation and led exercises classes to instill a sense of independence and to increase physical health.
Mathieu is now working with at-risk urban youth. Through Determine Your Destiny he is assisting in instilling in youth a belief in their own in success and contributing lesson plans on the topics of time management, success, and trauma. Mathieu is simultaneously working with individuals who have been negatively impacted by Covid-19, who have a high probability of becoming homeless; he is providing services to prevent homelessness and increase family stability.
David Montieth
Board Member
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Montieth has held executive positions in human resources for forty years. Most recently he led the human resources department for Dressbarn, Inc. Prior positions included head of HR for Highland Superstores and for three divisions of Federated Department Stores (now renamed Macy's). He started his career in his hometown of Indianapolis where he was head of human resources for Ayr-Way Stores. Montieth holds a bachelor of arts degree in Psychology from Wabash College.
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Montieth has been active in various industry and community organizations including chairman of the National Retail Federation's HR Specialty Store Roundtable and chairman of the Urban League of Cincinnati. Since his retirement in 2011, Montieth has been a member of the executive committee and a Traveling Mentor for the Business Council for Peace ("Bpeace") helping entrepreneurs in Afghanistan, El Salvador, and Guatemala build their businesses to reduce violence in their countries.
Andrea McClure
Board Member
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Andrea currently serves as the social media manager for Determine Your Destiny. She has held a variety of positions within the organization its early days when the volunteers would perform STEM (Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology) events in public schools.
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Andrea has had a long successful career as a medicinal chemist and her determination and innovation is evidenced by numerous patents and awards.