MeHAF Staff

Email Dania

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Dania Bowie (she/they/ella) joined the team in May 2025, bringing a strong foundation in gender justice advocacy and community-rooted resource mobilization. As a skilled facilitator, organizer, and strategist, she is committed to building equitable, human-centered nonprofits and reimagining philanthropy to better serve Maine’s communities. Her organizing work is grounded in grassroots workers’ rights and feminist movements across the state, and she brings a deep belief in transformative leadership rooted in community and driven by systems change. In addition to her organizing, Dania maintains an active artistic practice and was named a 2023 Ashley Bryan Fellow for her writing. She finds creative inspiration in the emerging punk-country music scene, hiking Maine’s trails, and disappearing into a good book. Dania holds a B.A. in Government and Legal Studies with a concentration in political theory from Bowdoin College, class of 2018

Email Emily

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Emily Creamer (she/her) joined MeHAF as the Program and Grants Associate in June 2023 and was promoted to Program Officer in 2025. Emily manages MeHAF's Discretionary and Meeting Support Grants programs as well as coordinating with and supporting grant applicants and grantees. Prior to joining MeHAF, Emily specialized in person-centered advocacy for older adults who have experienced abuse, neglect, and exploitation in Maine. She comes to philanthropy with six years of experience in the aging field which includes work in intergenerational programming, legislative advocacy, case management, transitional housing services, and community outreach and education. Emily understands the importance of accessible and affordable resources that uphold autonomy and choice for Maine's communities. She values collaboration and trauma-informed support both for those who utilize services and those who provide them. Emily graduated from the University of Maine’s School of Social Work in 2018 with her BSW and again in 2019 with her MSW.

Email Lelia

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Lelia L. De Andrade (she/her) joined MeHAF in May 2025. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She most recently served as Maine Deputy Secretary of State for Community Relations, with responsibilities that ranged from delivering voter outreach and education programs to conducting investigations, and staffing a legislative working group. Prior to that she spent fifteen years at the Maine Community Foundation, where she was the Vice President of Community Impact. There, she managed a large and diverse portfolio of grant programs, and spearheaded efforts to increase the accessibility of grant programs, especially for organizations working in underserved communities. Before working in philanthropy, Lelia was an educator and trainer. She was the Associate Director of the Center for Preventing Hate Violence, where she developed and delivered civil rights, bullying prevention and conflict resolution programs to organizations across the country. She was also a college professor, who taught at Miami University and Lawrence University, before joining that the faculty in the departments of Sociology and Africana Studies at Bowdoin College. During her time at Bowdoin, she was a two-time recipient of a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Dubois Institute for African and African American Studies. Her academic training focused on power and social inequality, ethnic identity and social research methodologies.

Email Charles
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Charles Dwyer (he/him) joined MeHAF as Program Officer in December 2012. He has 16 years of public health experience, most recently serving as the health department liaison in the four county area of the Mid-coast. From 2006 to 2011 he served as the Director of the State Office of Rural Health and Primary Care which began convening the statewide Health Workforce Forum and the Maine Tele-health Collaborative under his leadership.

Other roles at the Maine CDC have included Assistant to the Director of the Division of Infectious Disease; HIV, STD, and Viral Hepatitis Program Manager, Public Health Educator, and Disease Intervention Specialist.

Charles is proud to be a former AmeriCorps National Service Volunteer and a lifelong resident of Maine, Charles graduated from the University of Southern Maine, School of Social Work in 1996. He completed the Northeast Regional Public Health Leadership Institute in 2002, and continues to explore opportunities to learn and grow both personally and professionally.

Email Jake
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Jake Grindle (he/him) joined the MeHAF staff in September of 2015.  In his time at MeHAF, Jake has served as a Program Associate and Program Officer and became the Foundation's third President and CEO on January 1, 2025. Prior to his time at MeHAF, Jake worked at Western Maine Community Action, where he served as the Project Coordinator for the Maine Community Action Health Navigator Project. In this role, Jake spearheaded community outreach and enrollment efforts for the statewide consortium of CAP agencies engaged in health insurance Marketplace enrollment.

Prior to work at Western Maine Community Action, Jake served as Field Director for the Northeast Archaeology Research Center and the University of Maine at Farmington. He has also worked as a Community Organizer for the Maine’s People Alliance and Maine People’s Resource Center, as a waiter at numerous restaurants, and was a founding member and organizer for Visible Community in Lewiston.

A lifelong Maine resident, Jake is a graduate of the University of Maine at Farmington.

Email Holly
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Holly Irish (she/her) is MeHAF’s Grants Manager. She joined MeHAF in December 2011 as the Program Assistant, became Program and Communications Assistant in 2016, Grants Associate in 2019, and began her current role in 2021. Holly is responsible for a range of duties related to the effective and efficient administration of the Foundation’s priorities. She oversees grants management responsibilities to facilitate and ensure the successful implementation, monitoring, and reporting of MeHAF’s various grants programs. Holly works closely with Program Staff to plan the fielding, execution and monitoring of all grants and other program activities, and provides quality control of grantmaking procedures and systems. Before joining MeHAF, Holly worked as a Communications Assistant at Kennebec Behavioral Health, where she provided support to the Director of Communications, the CEO and the Executive Assistant. Holly is a native Mainer and a graduate of Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield.

Email Ruta
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Programs & Focus Areas: Aging

Ruta Kadonoff (she/her) joined MeHAF as Senior Program Officer in December 2016 and became Vice President for Programs in 2020. In addition to coordinating the work of the program team, she oversees MeHAF’s Healthy Older People strategic focus area and staffs the foundation’s Program and Grants Committee. Ruta came to this position with over 20 years of experience in fostering and advocating for quality improvement and person-centered approaches in long term services and supports for older people. She has held leadership roles in a diverse set of national organizations focusing on policy, research and practice change. Ruta grew up in Connecticut and moved to the Washington, DC area to attend The Catholic University of America where she received a B.A. in political science. She subsequently completed a Masters of Health Science degree in Health Policy from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Master of Arts degree in the Management of Aging Services from the Erickson School of Aging Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Email Dani
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Dani Kalian (she/her) provides administrative support and assistance to the President and other staff. She oversees general office operations and facility management as well as provides support to the Board of Trustees, Governance Committee, and Strategic Planning Committee.

Dani joined MeHAF in 2008 as the administrative assistant and has been the Foundation’s Executive Assistant since 2011.

Dani attended St. Bonaventure University in New York before moving to Maine where she graduated from Andover College.

Email Julie
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Julie Montefesco (she/her) joined MeHAF as the Finance and Human Resource Manager in January of 2026. She has been a nonprofit finance and operations leader for over 15 years and has experience helping mission-driven organizations stay financially strong and compliant.

Julie’s work centers on practical financial leadership and she brings experience in budgeting, forecasting, cash flow management, audits, Form 990 filings, and managing complex federal and state grants to MeHAF. In her role at MeHAF, she is responsible for the finances, human resource management, contracts, and working with the foundation’s investment advisors and the Board of Trustees’ Finance Committee

Previously, Julie served as Director of Finance & Administration for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Maine, where she oversaw finance, HR, IT, and day-to-day operations. She also worked for the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault in a similar role. She has also provided bookkeeping support to smaller nonprofits serving marginalized communities across Maine

Email Jeb
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Jeb Murphy (he/him) joined MeHAF as Communications Associate in November 2018 and became Communications Manager in November of 2021. Jeb has worked in the communications field across the nonprofit sector in Maine for nearly a decade, beginning in Franklin County doing Outreach and Education work in the field of sexual assault prevention.

Understanding the unique needs of different parts of the state he then moved to larger scale work, advocating for shelter animal rights and awareness with the Maine Federation of Humane Societies and eventually supporting the mission of Community Health Centers at the Maine Primary Care Association (MPCA). While at MPCA, Jeb began working both statewide and nationally on creating best practices for Enrollment Assisters and became a nationally recognized figure in promoting outreach and enrollment for the Affordable Care Act. This work eventually led to him and a number of national colleagues creating the National Association of Health Access Assisters.

Email Frank
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Frank Martinez Nocito (he/him) joined MeHAF as a Program Officer in January 2019 and became a Senior Program Officer in 2023. Frank is an innovative Public Health Nutrition professional with over two decades of diverse state, national and international experience in program development, management and outcome evaluation, policy initiatives, and public-private collaborations. After earning a Master of Science degree from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, he worked at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Italy where he focused on human nutrient requirements and public-private partnerships. For most of the past decade his work has focused on improving government benefit programs, health equity, and access to healthy food for marginalized populations.

Prior to MeHAF, Frank worked for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as the Project Director of the Healthy Incentives Program (HIP), pioneering the implementation of three first-in-the-nation, healthy food access pilot programs for low-income families, for which he received both statewide and national accolades. HIP significantly improved SNAP recipients’ health, increased farmer incomes, and decreased food insecurity in Massachusetts. Before turning to public health policy, Frank earned two Bachelor degrees in Nutrition and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as a degree from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY.