Our Board - Immigrant Pathways Colorado

BOARD OFFICERS

Susan Thornton, founder and Co-Chair of IPC

She is a native of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and a Master’s degree in Journalism from UCLA, then worked as a member of the Los Angeles News Bureau at U.S. News & World Report. Following her move to Colorado, Susan was a consulting writer for numerous news magazines, and for eight years was an opinion columnist for The Denver Post.

Susan is a strong believer in preventing social and other problems; for 10 years she held a clinical faculty appointment in Preventive Medicine at UC Health Sciences Center, where she wrote/edited numerous books and training videos before running successfully for the Littleton City Council. She served 16 years on the Council, eight of those years as Mayor of Littleton, where she co-founded the Metro Mayors Caucus, sat on the Board of the Colorado Municipal League, and led communities across the U.S. caught up in Superfund litigation.

Susan was a founder of the Littleton Leadership Academy and today is the founder and chair of the South Metro Community Foundation. She is a consulting writer for the Special District Association of Colorado and other organizations.

She and her husband have extensive international travel to far-flung countries, such as Borneo, where they erected solar panels to provide electricity at a remote orangutan research station. They have a grown son who is married to an immigrant from Bulgaria, who Susan says has greatly enriched their lives, and one lovely granddaughter.

Susan enjoys time with her granddaughter, playing the Great Highland Bagpipes, taking tai chi and ballroom dancing lessons, visiting with friends, reading and community-organizing.

Debora “Vera” Ryan, Co-Chair of IPC

She is a retired Registered Nurse. Prior to retirement, she was an instructor at Arapahoe Community College teaching CNA certification courses, and teaching the “Language of Medicine” to Japanese nursing students at Spring International Language Center. Most of her nursing career primarily involved cardiology, cardiovascular research and quality assurance.

Born and raised in Rockford, IL, Vera earned not only a degree in nursing, but dual Master’s degrees in Exercise Physiology and Cardiac Rehabilitation. She completed her Master’s thesis at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm Sweden.

Vera is married and has two daughters and three grandchildren. Her extensive interests include international travel, entertaining, organic gardening, making her own food, canning, fly fishing, camping, snowshoeing, and spending time with her family, including grandchildren. She also volunteers for a woman’s shelter.

Connie Shoemaker, Secretary of IPC

She is co-founder and director emerita of Spring International Language Center.

Connie grew up in a Mexican/Italian neighborhood in West Denver where her love of writing began on the staff of the West High newspaper. On scholarship to Colorado State University, she continued dating her high school sweetheart and future husband, Floyd, who joined her to edit the Rocky Mountain Collegian newspaper in their senior year.

Connie continued to work as a part-time reporter and columnist in Missouri and Michigan as her husband pursued a PhD in Mass Communication and Social Change. With a new degree and three children in tow, the family made a life-changing decision to move to Cairo, Egypt, for four years, where Floyd initiated an M.A. in Mass Communication and Social Change at American University. Connie combined raising the family with her love of writing: Associated Press special reporter, author of a book of poetry, and writing instructor at the University.

Back in Colorado, Connie began writing a book about Egyptian women that was sponsored by a grant from the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute and was instrumental in establishing Bridge International Language Center. In 1979. she and three colleagues founded Spring Institute for International Studies. A few years later, the founders divided Spring into two separate entities, with the focus of Spring International Language Center (SILC) on intensive English for international students. They later established additional Centers on the Denver Auraria campus and at the University of Arkansas- Fayetteville. Marketing trips for SILC and consulting trips for the U.S. State Department have taken Connie to the Middle East, Tunisia, Europe and Latin America.

An award-winning author of numerous books, she has also facilitated classes on Telling and Writing Your Life Stories for Denver University’s Osher Life Long Learning Institute. Connie and her husband feel blessed to have six grandchildren, including three grandsons who live in Cyprus.

Anya Eagan, Treasurer of IPC

She is an immigrant from Belarus. A Senior Vice President of South Metro FirstBank, Anya has a degree in Business Administration, earned in Belarus. She is married and has three children. Her oldest son, just nine years old, is a competitive junior golfer, and the family travels frequently across the U.S. to support him in competitions.

Diane Huling, Grants Manager and Database Administrator for IPC

She is a native of Denver whose father emigrated from the Ukraine at the age of two.

Diane earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics with a minor in Philosophy from the University of Denver. She worked for former Denver D.A. Dale Tooley as a Neighborhood Watch coordinator, responsible for organizing one-quarter of Denver and bringing citizens and police together to help lower crime rates. She also worked in information technology for the State Department of Natural Resources for over 10 years, many of them when Ken Salazar was Executive Director.

She retired as the Director of Information Technology at the Colorado History Museum, where she was responsible for leading the project that gave the Museum a new, then-current computer network to replace the unconnected machines that existed when she arrived.

In addition to managing IPC’s grants, Diane enjoys spending time with friends and her daughter and two grandchildren, and participating in aquatics, gym and tai chi activities, reading, gardening and crafting.

BOARD MEMBERS

Tiffany Andrews works in higher education, assisting New American students with their educational and employment goals. She previously worked in hospitality and healthcare, and enjoyed meeting people from around the world as she did so.

Her interests include taking long walks, reading about anything and everything and spending time with her family.

Shirlaine Castellino is the Director Emeritus of Spring International Language Center’s Intensive English Program.

A native of The Philippines, Shirlaine came to the U.S. in the mid-1980s for graduate school. She holds a Master’s of Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, a Master’s in teaching English from Silliman University, The Philippines, and a Bachelor of Science from Silliman University.

Shirlaine loves international travel and teaching English as a Second Language where students in the classroom come from many different cultures. She is married to an immigrant from India and has two adult children and one baby granddaughter.

In her spare time, Shirlaine enjoys traveling, reading, dance fitness (palango), hanging out with family and friends, and being a grandmother!

Letebrhan (Letay) Gebre-Egziabher was born and grew up in in Tigray, Ethiopia, coming to the U.S. as a student many years ago.

She attended Spring International Language Center to learn English, then earned a Master’s degree in Database Technology and a Bachelor’s in Accounting. She has been working as a Software Quality Engineer for more than 20 years.

Letay has two adult children who graduated from Heritage High School in Littleton and are now working abroad.

Letay began her volunteer work at University Park Methodist church over 30 years ago when the church was sponsoring immigrants, and she continued to volunteer at the St. Andrew Methodist Church in the children’s area.

She is heavily involved in fundraising for Ethiopia. With friends, she furnished a library for an elementary School in 2010, installed rain water catchment for elementary school children who had no access to water in 2013, and sent medical supplies with the help of Project Cure for a hospital in need in 2020.

Jennifer Gueddiche is the founder and owner of Community-Based Consulting in Denver. Previously, she was Director of Programs at Spring Institute for Intercultural Learning and Chief Operations Officer of the Rocky Mountain Welcome Center. She was the founding Director of the African Community Center in Denver, a refugee resettlement agency, from 2001-2015.

Having grown up in Pittsburgh, PA, Jennifer earned a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Purdue University and a Master’s in International Development from Denver University. She is married to an immigrant from Tunisia; the couple have a grown son who is focused on a career in music, and a daughter currently attending Colorado Mountain College.

Jennifer and her husband travel internationally at frequent intervals and are building out a 2022 Ford Transit to travel across the continent with their dog, Zeus.

Julia Guzman, a native Spanish-speaker, is an immigration attorney in solo practice at Guzman Immigration, where she focuses primarily on family-based immigration cases, humanitarian visas, DACA, and citizenship. She also sits on the Executive Committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Association of Colorado and on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Global Committee of the YMCA of Metro Denver.

The child of Nicaraguan immigrants, Julia grew up in Houston, TX, 10 minutes from the Johnson Space Center. She graduated from the University of Texas-Austin (Plan II/ French major, Spanish minor) and earned her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.

Julia married her childhood sweetheart and has two children. In her spare time, Julia’s interests are singing, photography, dancing, nature hikes and participates with her husband in a weekly podcast about horror movies called Castle of Horror.

Mike Harrison says he is “doubly retired,” having worked for 27 years with John’s Manville Corporation before retiring in January of 2000 from his position as Vice President and General Manager. He then completed his seminary studies and served as Associate Pastor of Bethany Evangelical Free Church for 12 years, stepping out of that responsibility in 2017. He still serves in leadership at Bethany.

Mike spent the first 10 years of his life in Bismarck , North Dakota. His family then moved to Billings, Montana, where he graduated from High School. He then moved to Colorado to attend college. In 1973, Mike graduated from CU Boulder with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. In 1982, he received an MBA from the University of Denver, and in 2003, he earned a Master of Arts in Global Leadership from Fuller Seminary.Emer

As a Missions leader at his church, Mike has traveled extensively, visiting and engaging with churches and missionaries in 10 countries. He has led 14 short-term mission trips ranging from 10 days to 3 weeks and is very involved with the Hispanic culture in Colorado through both the North Littleton Promise ministry as well as a Spanish-speaking sister church, Vida Nueva Para Denver, that meets at Bethany.

Mike and his wife have two married daughters and four grandchildren, all living in the Denver area. Mike says that his woodworking interests have given way to “grandparenting,” serving in church leadership, and sitting on five non-profit boards that serve the poor, marginalized, and immigrant communities in the area.

Courtney Loehfelm has been Executive Director of the Arapahoe Community College Foundation, for the past 15 years. Prior to that, she was a real estate agent and office manager in Buffalo, NY.

Born and raised in a suburb (Orchard Park) outside of Buffalo, Courtney earned an
Associate’s Degree from Eric Community College, followed by a Bachelor’s Degree in Speech Language Pathology from Buffalo State College.

Courtney enjoys working with international students at ACC. She and her husband share their home with a son, a daughter and two dogs. She enjoys live music, kids’ sports, movies, working out, and the Buffalo Bills.

Gerre Shenkin was born in Denver and has lived here most of her life. She says she first saw Denver as a small city with few immigrants, but she learned from her grandparents — who escaped from Germany and Russia — the wonder of being able to immigrate to America. She holds Master’s degrees in Reading English and in English as a Second Language.

Gerre travels extensively to Europe, and she and her late husband sailed by themselves to many parts of the world, including Greece, Tonga and islands in the Caribbean. For about 10 years, she lived in Mexico for three months a year.

Gerre has three daughters, 15 grandchildren and 50 great-grandchildren! Her daughters live in Durango, CO, Vancouver, Canada, and Israel. She makes frequent trips to see them.

Gerre taught English as a Second Language at Denver University and Spring International Language Center for a number of years. When she retired, she continued teaching in many Immigrant programs. She loves being around people from other countries (one Japanese student lived with her family for three years) and is a life-long learner, taking adult classes on many subjects.

Carrie Warren-Gully was elected in 2021 to serve as an Arapahoe County Commissioner, and now chairs the Board of Commissioners. Prior to that she was elected to the Littleton Public Schools’ Board of Education, where she served as the Board’s Vice President for seven years.

A native of Englewood, Colorado, Carrie earned undergraduate degrees in Biology and Political Science from Mount Holyoke College. She went on to earn a Master’s in Public Administration from the University of Colorado, Denver.

Carrie and her husband have three grown sons. She says she is lucky that her mother (an amazing mentor — in her 90s and still practicing law!) and siblings live nearby.

Carrie loves to spend time outdoors and in the mountains. She enjoys cooking when she has the time, and feeding and entertaining family and friends.