On the move
Renee Fillette has been appointed as executive director of The Dutchess Outreach Board of Directors.
Fillette will take the role after the retirement of Brian Riddell, who served in the capacity for 31 years.
Fillette is an executive who brings more than 16 years of experience in child welfare, domestic violence, peer support, autism, behavioral health, homelessness, food insecurity, care management, substance abuse, Head Start and education.
In 2003, she founded the first new foster care agency to be licensed in New York state in over 30 years. It was there at St. John Bosco that she learned about leadership and management of a non-profit. She grew the agency from its original budget of $300,000 to nearly $2 million, serving high-risk children in community-based group homes.
Several years later, she served as the executive director at Grace Smith House, a Dutchess Countybased agency for survivors of domestic violence. It was under her tenure that the agency expanded its services to offer a teen dating violence prevention program in all 13 school districts throughout the county.
In 2014, she earned her doctorate in public service: leadership and management of non-profits and moved into a newly created position of chief operating officer at Astor Services for Children and Families. During her time at Astor, she led the restructuring of a $65 million agency, major service expansions in the Bronx, and performance improvements to enhance the quality of care provided and the fiscal health of the agency.
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Writer Dinaw Mengestu has been named Bard College’s Catherine T. MacArthur Professor in the Humanities for the spring semester.
Mengestu, a recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Foundat ion Award, is director of t he Writt en Ar t s Program at Bard. He is the author of t hree novels: “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” (2008), “How to Read the Air” (2010) and “All Our Names” (2014).
Mengestu, was born in Ethiopia and raised in Illinois. His fiction and journalism have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times.
Mengestu was chosen for the 5 under 35 Award by the National Book Foundation and was named on the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010.
He is also the recipient of a Lannan Fiction Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards. His work has been translated into more than 15 languages. Mengestu has a bachelor of arts degree from Georgetown University and a master of fine artrs degree from Columbia University. He has been at Bard since 2016.
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