“Meet the (TRP) Team”

Krista Barnes founded The REEL Project in 2008 shortly after completing a humanitarian education project in Kala Refugee Camp, Zambia. Krista has worked on various humanitarian projects in both South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, she has worked in the international film festival market on documentaries and independent films for over ten years as both a freelance producer and publicist. The concepts inherent in The REEL Project are based on her love for film, connecting people and development work.

Prior to the founding of The REEL Project, Krista studied at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she earned undergraduate degrees in International Development Studies and Cultural Anthropology. She is currently working towards her Masters in African Studies from UCLA and was the 2011 recipient of UCLA’s Rishwain Social Justice Entrepreneurship Award.

Christian Mbuta Malela has a Bachelor’s degree in Social Communication from Tanganyika Lake
University in Bujumbura, Burundi. He has spent more than ten years working on humanitarian projects in Moba and Kalemie in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with the UN High Commission for Refugees and The Reel Project. His previous employment with AIRD, UNHCR , GIZ & GTZ, UNHCR, ACTED and ECHO have allowed him to develop strengths within the realms of logistics and protection.

He had been trained and worked in the field and  office over the past 6 years. A hard worker, dedicated, honest, and always going above and beyond his mandate. His skills in logistics, research, protection and communication are vital to TRP’s on the ground assessment.

He currently continues to greatly help and assist TRP in facilitating our work in the Katanga region.

Jory Tremblay co-founded and solely funded Design Made Simple LLC, a systems integration that provided services to commercial business by delivering the development, coding and documentation through a sister company in India. He later worked as a Managing Partner at Schwab Healthcare Strategies assisting in building the first ACO in the US. As an investor and SVP of Business Development at Fetch Technologies, Inc. an artificial intelligence and machine learning based software company, Mr. Tremblay led the sales team, marketing, implementation, service delivery, account management and product development, and was responsible for launching the first five products to grow company revenue three fold in a little over two years.

He also served as SVP and then as President of EspressoSat, Inc. where he developed and led the company’s efforts to assess opportunities in emerging markets to bring the “social entrepreneur” model focused on telecom infrastructure to markets in Africa and the Caribbean.

He understands compliance and how to navigate in emerging and frontier markets from his ongoing work in Haiti & Africa on Telecom and infrastructure projects during the past many years. This has led to a valuable understanding of on-the-ground operations and significant contacts in the multilateral and bi-lateral community. He has a Bachelor of Science in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.