Board of Directors

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Carole Armel

Carole Armel is a management consultant specializing in organization development, matrix management systems, and course design including “Creative Thinking/Critical Thinking” developed with Philip Stein.

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Her clients have included the NASA Space Program, New Jersey Division on Aging, Merrill Lynch, Maryland and Connecticut Hospital Associations, Miami Dade Medical Center Campus, and American Society for Quality. She has been associated with Legacy projects since 1989. Her work has included management consultation, assisting in planning and delivering several projects, grant writing, and developing a task matrix for the Summer Program. She has six children and five grandchildren. A major interest and avocation is gardening and garden design. She is a New Jersey and Florida Master Gardener and has had a garden design and maintenance business.

Mahavir (Robert) Homsy, Ph.D.

Mahavir (Robert) Homsy, Ph.D. is a retired applied mathematician and electrochemical computational fluid dynamicist. The last half of his career was spent applying decision theory in support of US Government policy in

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the fields of R&D portfolio management, arms control, and international security. He worked for various branches of the federal government in Washington, DC., including the Departments of Energy, Defense, and within the Intelligence Community. His spiritual practice is heavily based in Buddhism and various devotional practices. Mahavir has been a student of Ram Das and Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche.

He and his wife, Maggie, and their two young children spent a year living in the World Community in Bedford following the 2015 loss of all of their possessions in a California wildfire that destroyed 1200 homes, including theirs. No doubt this has been one of the most tangible experiences of impermanence that he will live through in his lifetime. Mahavir and family are living now in St. Helena, CA in the Napa Valley wine country. Among his avocations is a long-standing love of sailing and performing East-Indian music.

Judith Larson

Judith Larson has been a teacher for more than 20 years, teaching in both traditional classrooms and schools using the Montessori Method of education. She holds a Masters in Education and is certified in the

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Montessori Method. Judith also has extensive experience in administration. She was the Director of her own Montessori school and was the Human Resources Manager for a rehabilitation clinic where she developed many policies and procedures and served on the executive committee. She has also served as a member of the Blue Ridge Montessori School board.

Phil Louer 

Phil Louer studied sociology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. After college he began working in the building trades and has been operating as a Class A residential contractor since 1980.

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In 1985, Phil co-founded North American Gem Carvers- a consortium of unique artists working with precious stones and minerals. North American Gem Carvers’ art can be seen in museum exhibitions and galleries across the country.  Phil is a small business owner and an entrepreneur.  One of Phil’s pastimes is folk dancing, and since 1985 he has been performing with the Hoorah Cloggers, an Appalachian dance performance troupe at many festivals and annually at Legacy’s Global Youth Village.

Ed Stern

Edward Stern worked in the US Department of Labor in Washington, DC for 41 years, as a senior policy/program analyst and supervisory economist. After joining OSHA in 1985, he supervised research

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and economic modeling of the costs, benefits, and feasibility of proposed regulations in the Directorate of Policy. He guided teams of health scientists, engineers, doctors, systems analysts, and attorneys from OSHA, the Department, and the public sector to develop online “Expert Advisors.”
These delivered OSHA decision-making expertise to the public via the Internet. In 1999 and 2000, Stern was the spokesperson on this strategy for Vice President Al Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government. In 2002, he was appointed by the head of EPA to the 2nd Compliance Assistance Advisory Committee.  Later, he also served as OSHA’s technical advisor to the U.S. Surgeon General’s workgroup on Second-Hand Smoke.  Currently, Stern writes on workplace violence in occupational safety and HR magazines.
Anne Elise Thomas, Ph.D. 

Anne Elise Thomas, Ph.D. is a trained ethnomusicologist with expertise in the music and culture of the Middle East. She spent several years living in Jordan and Egypt while she completed her doctoral research.

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She has extensive experience as an educator and youth facilitator and has coordinated and taught world music activities at Legacy’s Global Youth Village since 2005. Mother of two young daughters, she is also an accomplished performer of the qanun, a 78-stringed lap harp played in Arab classical music.
Shanti Thompson

Shanti Thompson is an executive staff member of Legacy International (Vice President: Training) with more than 30 years experience in program administration, financial management, and grant-writing.

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She has directed and/or co-directed projects in Ukraine, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Indonesia, funded by the U.S. Department of State, United States Agency for International Development, and other funders. She has compiled and edited Legacy’s three curriculum manuals, and designed various training programs and training of trainers programs. Since 2000, she has served in the positions of Treasurer and Secretary for Legacy.