Leadership & Goals
Current leadership
Anne Folan is founder and president of Anne Folan & Associates, a creative services firm with offices in New York and Washington DC whose clients are drawn primarily from the financial services and pharmaceutical sectors. She is a graduate of the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
Zena Hitz is founder and president of the Catherine Project, and also serves as one of its volunteer tutors. She is the author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life and of numerous articles on the value of liberal education. Trained in classical philosophy, she is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. Zena can be contacted directly by addressing email to zena.hitz@catherineproject.org.
Kreigh Knerr serves as Headmaster of the Middle School for Great Hearts Irving. His many adventures include teaching, entrepreneurship, and angel investing. Sleigh is the fitting rhyme for his forename.
Thomas W. Merrill is a faculty member in the Department of Government at American University in Washington, D.C. His book, Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment, won the Delba Winthrop Prize for Best Recent Work in Political Philosophy; and he is a co-editor of The Political Thought of The Civil War. He directs the Lincoln Scholars Program, a core texts certificate program for first and second year students at American University.
Maca Olsen is a graduate of the “Great Books” undergraduate program at St. John’s College. She is partner and creative director at Poesis Creative Studio, a graphic design and branding firm.
Mary Peterson is a native Arizonan with deep roots in non-profit and organizational development. She has spent much of her adult life serving in maternity housing, living and working with vulnerable pregnant women.
Jordan Poyner is executive director of the Catherine Project, leading all aspects of its operations and collaborating with the board and founder on intellectual content and strategic direction. He holds an MA in liberal arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis. Jordan can be contacted directly by addressing email to jordan.poyner@catherineproject.org.
Aschely Cone is associate director of the Catherine Project, aiding in aspects of its operations, intellectual content and strategic direction. She holds an BA in liberal arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis, an MA in art history and an MFA in painting. Aschely can be contacted directly by addressing email to aschely.cone@catherineproject.org.
Our Goals
Our organization is driven by the needs of individuals for serious intellectual connection and community. Should the need dry up or be satisfied by other means, our existence as an institution will no longer be justified.
We seek a minimum of structure to meet those needs, with an eye to our basic practical, moral and legal obligations, so as to avoid the bureaucratic overreach and dysfunction so common to our contemporary institutions.
In the short term, we would like to grow as quickly as possible, while seeking to maintain a distinct and serious intellectual culture. We make our courses available to anyone meeting basic registration criteria who has an internet connection or access to email or the postal service.
In the medium term, we seek a global network of teachers and readers in order to reach as many people as possible and so as to learn from as broad a swathe of humanity as possible.
We recognize that online connections are an imperfect substitute for in-person intellectual communities. Thus in the long-term, we hope that our network can form the basis for local, autonomous, brick-and-mortar educational institutions conducted in our spirit, once conditions permit such an undertaking.
We set our order of goals opposite to many businesses. Unlike a business, which may start locally and then seek global reach, we seek global reach first, in the interest of building local institutions in the long term. Our ultimate goal is to create enduring, “hard-wired” support for the studies we promote: learning that is for its own sake, available to anyone who desires it, and integrated by local participants into a given community and its culture. The nature, use, and continued existence of the umbrella organization will be re-evaluated regularly once local institutions are in place.
