Board of Directors
Robert Maynard, President
 In June 2006 Robert (Bob) was elected President of the Board of Directors of the American Foundation for Children with AIDS after a year of serving as Secretary/Treasurer.
Bob participates in several other Humanitarian organizations. He is the Founder and Director of the World Housing Foundation, a Washington, D.C. based humanitarian organization created for the purpose of providing affordable housing to those in need on a global basis. He also sits on the Board of Children's Emergency Foundation of America and acts as Treasurer of that organization.
Bob is the President/CEO of Concept Venture Companies, Inc., a Kansas based development and management company that provides services, solutions, and systems specifically to the foodservice vertical market as well as management and G & A functions to general business. Additionally, he is a principal and the Executive Vice President of ComTECH Construction Systems, LLC, a company operating in the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., specializing in the installation of cellular antennas on water tanks and tall buildings. He is knowledgeable in creating operational structures, taking them from conception, through growth, and into on-going procedures. He has been involved in and been responsible for eighteen start-up businesses and twenty-seven P & L centers.
A seasoned traveler, Bob is experienced in working with charitable foundations, consequently interlacing corporate business with humanitarian endeavors.
Bob holds a Bachelor of Science in Administration of Justice and a Minor in Business from Southern Illinois University.
Bob and his wife, Teri, currently reside in Lawrence, Kansas.
Nick Cassino, Vice President
 Nick Cassino joined AFCA’s board of directors in May 2005
As the Managing Director for CB Richard Ellis in Tacoma, Washington Nick oversees a full service commercial real estate company, which is part of one of the largest commercial real estate services companies in the world.
Nick, together with his wife Val, look forward to shifting their life focus towards full-time humanitarian work. They have been active in international humanitarian work over the years and have formed their own non-profit foundation called “Picture the World” . One goal is to meld this foundation, or at least the concept of it, into their life focus as they redirect their time and resource commitments away from their current careers towards a “second career” . . . one that will be spiritually rewarding and life- enriching while serving the needs of those in the world who have the least.
Nick earned a BA degree in Political Science from Western Washington University and a Masters in Economics from Fordham University.
Mary Engelking, Secretary/Treasurer
 Mary Engelking was born and raised in the US in the small farming community of Trenton in north central Missouri. She was the youngest child of Russell and Marylin Whisler, both lifelong residents of North Missouri. Mary had a very typical rural childhood, which revolved around helping family, friends and neighbors, sports, work, and community service and involvement. At the end of her high school years, Mary chose to accept an Air Force ROTC scholarship to study Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. During Mary’s four years at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, she studied evenings at Wright State University, working on a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering.
During her 12 years in the Air Force, Mary had a variety of fascinating assignments in fields such as strategy, program and project management of aircraft acquisition and logistics. Among the training Mary received was a year of intensive Russian language study at the Defense Language Institute. Throughout these 12 years Mary lived in the states of Ohio, California, Texas, South Carolina, and Arizona, and abroad in Germany, Belarus, and Russia.
A defense conversion project is one in which an item developed for use by the military is converted to use in the civilian world. Examples would include the Hummer, GPS, Tang, and Mary Engelking. Mary took her skills in management and Russian and her desire to serve and joined Habitat for Humanity (HFHI). Mary spent three years as a volunteer in the International Partner program, doing work on community development projects in Kyrgyzstan, England, and Bulgaria. Besides learning much about construction, Mary acquired experience in training, organizational development, evaluation, fund raising, and finance. Mary also had the honor of doing a fellowship at the National Center for Nonprofit Boards in Washington, DC. At the end of her three years as a volunteer, she was hired by HFHI to be the Director of Programs for Europe and Central Asia. Based in Budapest with active programs in 16 countries, she spent a lot of time traveling from country to country, community to community, helping initiate and strengthen the community-based, affordable housing programs. Additionally, Mary set the stage for explosive growth in services and support by the organization to communities all across the region.
Mary left HFHI and formed her own consulting group, Mary Engelking & Company. It’s the type of straight-forward name an engineer would select. For three years Mary’s company has been providing management services and consulting to non-profit organizations in North America and Europe.
Mary’s passion is working directly with people who are trying to improve their lives and communities. She believes that organizations must work in cooperation. She believes many voices and hands are needed in a full spectrum of activities and at all levels of society and governments to address and resolve the issues of corruption, poverty, and social justice around the world.
Karen Drill, Director
 Karen Drill is originally from Montana, the land of the “Big Sky”, but since 1990, when she left Montana for college, has been continuously challenged and intrigued by the world beyond the borders of her home state. She never tires of hearing peoples’ stories, learning from their lives, and contributing in as many ways possible to improving access to education and health care for everyone. She thrives on experiences that stretch her mind and pull on her heart, which is why she has joined the board of directors of American Foundation for Children with AIDS.
Karen is consistently active in learning either by reading or through personal experience, although she likes to think of reading more as a supplement to personal experience rather than a substitute for it. She is very active in numerous outdoor activities and sports, thoroughly enjoys documentary films, and thinks that conversation is one of the most rewarding uses of time.
Karen, a Princeton University and Northwestern University graduate, has opted to tie all of her interests together by pursuing a doctorate in Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago in Chicago, IL, which, thus far, has proved to be the right choice.
Fr. Harold Bradley, SJ, Director
 A veteran of World War II, Father Bradley, like so many others, was influenced by that experience. A Kansas City boy, he served in a tank company of the Texas National Guard in Italy and was deeply affected by what he lived through during those years. Yet, for Father Bradley that was "essential in the formation of my personality."
He has been a member of the Jesuit order for fifty years.
In a theme that has dominated his life in the church, a veteran’s rage at loss has become a priest’s passion to help others break out of poverty and illness, to give them the opportunity to flourish and grow old. Father Bradley has served in Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador working with underprivileged people and sharing God’s love. He has been a professor in Georgetown University where he started a program to bring disadvantaged boys and girls from Central America to trade schools in the United States, returning them with skills to pave their way into middle-class lives in their own countries.
Today, Father Bradley works at Marquette University, with an AIDS project in Africa, led by Marquette professor Karen Ivantic-Doucette. The program brought 12 nurses from Kenya to the United States for intensive training in AIDS treatment. Those twelve have in their turn trained three thousand other nurses in Kenya for AIDS care.
Father Bradley also serves as part of the Pediatric Aids Canada board of directors.
John Schaefer, Director
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