Tracy Katrina Ebanks, MBA - Executive Director and Founder

Ms. Ebanks graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in Health Sciences and quickly moved on to a post-baccalaureate in counseling in anticipation of medical school. Later she would obtain an MBA from HULT International Business School. She would eventually decide to forego medicine in favor of more immediate, hands-on experience. Ms. Ebanks then spent the next several years working at different clinics affiliated with Planned Parenthood before founding City Embrace Counseling and Resource Center. Ms. Ebanks founded City Embrace to help fill the persistent void that exists in mental healthcare for survivors of abuse around the world. She currently serves as a member of the committee for Ending Human Trafficking, part of the San Francisco Rotary Club, and as a General Advisor to FinAbility, a non-profit created to make financial resources accessible to domestic abuse survivors.

Roseanna Duenas —Outreach Director

Roseanna Duenas is a California native of Mexican heritage. She is a board certified Physician Assistant with a foundation in Psychology, Roseanna seeks to understand connections between peoples of our global community. With a Master in Public Health she had the opportunity to better understand global issues that play into societal health. . Roseanna strives to connect her passions of travel and health to be able to meet both the social and health care needs of our global community.  

Natalie Albee - Rise Up Roatan Program Director

“My favorite thing about working at Rise Up Roatan is that I never really know what to expect for the day. Everyday is a surprise, I get to work with the most amazing, smart, unpredictable, happy, and most enthusiastic kids. These children walk 2+ miles before and after school to come to English classes. If that’s not determination and eagerness to learn than I don’t know what is…Knowing that 4 hours a week with them is changing their lives forever is truly spectacular.”  Born and raised in Pearland, Texas, Natalie started her journey in Roatan, Honduras just 2 days after graduating college!  Natalie graduated December 2015 with a Bachelors of Science from the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hospitality at the University of Houston with an emphasis in Facility Operations and Event Coordination.  Recruited out of college, Natalie moved to Honduras to manage a luxury 7 room boutique hotel located in Sandy Bay. After 8 months of working in the hospitality industry Natalie joined the Rise Up Roatan team in July 2016 and is now the manager of operations or better known as “teacha” at our Roatan Center, completing administrative tasks, creating and teaching English curriculum, fundraising, campaigning, and social media marketing. Since she has joined our organization it has grown in participants and has touched the lives many. “ I can’t see myself doing anything else. These kids and these women are like family, we all strive to bring hope, love, and purpose into everything we do, everything we created.”

Board of Directors

Syda Day Patel, Vice Chair

Syda is a graduate of Yale Law School, where she was a director of the Lowenstein Human Rights Law Clinic and specialized in work for women in developing countries.  She was a chosen as a Coker Fellow for teaching civil rights law and legal writing.  She was also awarded the Lewis Fellowship at Harvard Law School, where she ran a seminar on Human Rights Law and continued her writing and work for women in developing countries. 

Marco Mazzone, Treasurer

Marco is a graduate of Management from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy and an MBA from London Business School. He has worked for the Boston Consulting Group before joining the executive team at the largest retail pharmaceutical chain in Central America. He comes to City Embrace with a passion for providing affordable health care and education to the underserved population on Central America. His strong strategic background, and knowledge of Central American culture and mental health challenges, gives him a unique and well rounded perspective on the mental health care, and education needs in developing countries where City Embrace has presence. 

Kevin Quennesson, Secretary

Kevin Quennesson is trained at the Ecole Polytechnique in France, Stanford and Georgia Tech in the US. He joined Apple in 2006 and took the lead of Quartz Composer for MacOS 10.5 Snowleopard. He worked on the first iPhone SDK, built the first public apps on SDK 1.0, and gave the first WWDC session introducing the SDK to developers. He later joined Cooliris, where he built Adjitsu, which was sold to Amobee in 2011. In 2013, Kevin co-founded Everpix, a consumer startup to “clean-up our photo mess” using deep learning. He sold the tech to MyHeritage while the team joined Twitter in 2013.

At Twitter, Kevin worked with corp dev to shape Twitter’s AI & deep learning strategy. This lead to the Madbits acquisition in 2014 (deep learning), Whetlab in 2015 (bayesian optimisation/meta deep learning), and Magic Pony in 2016 (AI for video compression, and AR). He went from engineer to manager of the group.

Kevin has 9 patents, published in 5 conferences.