Greetings everyone,

My name is Rich Jurnack and I wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you all to MEOG and introduce myself. I graduated from Temple University in 2007 with a BA in History and Modern Hebrew. Although hampered by a distracting obsession with baseball and an inability to focus my energies on any particular area of history, eventually I aim to attain a PhD in History. In the meantime, I have dipped my foot into issues of American labor justice through internships at a major New York City union and the labor rights non-profit organization "Jobs with Justice". My concern with social justice extends to my work in and passion for MEOG, and I like to think it drives everything I do.

As MEOG's News and Research chairman, I will be responsible for compiling and organizing the educational content that MEOG provides to its site-users. Currently, I am working on a development/historical overview of Guatemala and the issues that the average development agency faces. However, eventually (with help from our volunteers) this will expand into a complete set of issue summaries and historical overviews of every country in which MEOG expands. A daunting task, no doubt, but one that ideally will glue the site together and give interested parties an understanding of the basic problems facing the development community – as well as current solutions.

In addition to the development overviews, I am also tasked with MEOG's RSS development news feed that will keep all our site's members up-to-date on recent news and events of relevance to the development world. Furthermore, with writing that has been called "fustian and quotidian at best" by several of America's top writers, I have designated myself MEOG's top prose artist.

Once again, thank you all for your interest and support, and I look forward to working with everyone who I haven't already met.

Cheers,

Rich Jurnack