Young Professionals Network

Prior to this year, she was living in Andorra, teaching English and youth leadership to upper-secondary school students as a Fulbright Fellow. Her professional experience is rooted heavily in education and non-profit work, having worked as a social justice educator and community organizer in Greater Boston, and an English language teacher at the high school and university level in Spain. Her academic and professional passions include education for women and girls, human rights, youth empowerment, and transferable comparative analyses across developing and middle-income nations. Drawing from her experiences living and working in Nigeria, Boston, Spain, and Andorra, she hopes to dedicate her career to serving the world’s most vulnerable populations through the use of cross-cultural collaboration. This cross-national engagement, she believes, is the key to sustainable peace. She hopes to find meaningful work where she can apply her skillset and make a valuable contribution to the global community.

A widely published journalist, he is author of “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age” (Yale, 2017), a correspondent for The Daily Beast, a columnist for Tablet Magazine, and a frequent contributor to a wide array of publications including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Politico, Foreign Policy, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary among many others. Kirchick works on European politics, American politics, and U. S. grand strategy. He began his professional journalism career at The New Republic covering domestic politics, lobbying, intelligence, and American foreign policy. In 2010, he moved to Prague to become writer-at-large for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, traveling widely to cover the politics and cultures of the 21 countries in RFE/RL’s broadcast region. Among the stories he reported on were the fraudulent 2010 presidential election in Belarus, ethnic cleansing in Kyrgyzstan, and the Libyan Civil War. Prior to Brookings, he spent four years as a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative in Washington. He has been a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow in Berlin, a Hoover Institution Media Fellow and a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow, and he is a professional member of the PEN American Center and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Kirchick has spoken at venues around the world including the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, the Stockholm Free World Forum, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the Royal United Services Institute, the Henry Jackson Society, the Institute for Human Sciences, Yale, Columbia and Princeton Universities, in addition to numerous other venues. He is a frequent commentator on television and radio. Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Kirchick is a graduate of the Roxbury Latin School and holds degrees in both history and political science from Yale.

Blanche joined Institut Montaigne in 2015 as Policy Officer. She was actively involved in the analysis of the programs of the 2017 presidential campaign. She also conducted Institut Montaigne’s work on digital technology and its link with tourism and higher education. In 2017, she contributed to publishing a major report on investment in Sub-Saharan Africa. Before joining Institut Montaigne, Blanche worked for cultural institutions like Centre Pompidou museum in Paris. She has an acknowledged expertise on public policies and a comprehensive knowledge of the French and international cultural sectors and industries. Blanche holds a Masters degree in Public Affairs from Sciences Po Paris. She also studied History, Art History and Cinema at the University College London (UCL).

His first experiences in investment management were through internships in private equity and  getting awarded in competitions such as the Uber case competition and Goldman Sachs case competitions where he had to provide strategic recommendations to grow company revenues and increase share prices. However, his consequent experiences in sourcing and analyzing investment opportunities in West African and East African private equity funds and providing strategy recommendations in management consulting have confirmed his desire to use a private sector approach for Africa's advancement which will be complemented with sharing best practices between different countries. He holds a Bachelors degree in Finance from American University.