Meet the Minds Behind Habit for Good
Our team
Dirk Vandewalle
Professor of Government, Dartmouth College — MA, PhD, Columbia
Dirk Vandewalle is an internationally recognised authority on governance in fragile and resource-rich states. A two-time Fulbright fellow, he has spent three decades analysing how weak financial, regulatory, and educational systems can be redesigned for stability and growth across North Africa, the Arab Gulf, and sub-Saharan Africa. Beyond academia, he has served the United Nations and The Carter Center as Senior Political Advisor during Libya’s democratic transition, testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and chaired the Institute of Current World Affairs in Washington, DC. His books Oil and State-Building and A History of Modern Libya are considered standard references in the field.
For Habit for Good, Dirk’s experience in institution-building translates into robust organisational design and ethical governance. He guides our dual-entity structure, ensuring that volunteer data, funding streams, and ESG reporting meet global transparency standards even as we operate across diverse jurisdictions. His network in policy circles helps us secure partnerships with governments and multilaterals, while his media presence—from The New York Times to the BBC—amplifies our story to an international audience. Dirk’s stewardship keeps our mission grounded in rigorous political and economic insight, as well as real-world accountability.
Dan Currell
Former U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Education
JD, The University of Chicago Law School
Dan Currell served as Deputy Under Secretary and Senior Advisor at the U.S. Department of Education from 2018 to 2021, leading cross-agency initiatives on foreign influence, financial aid, and civil-rights compliance in higher education. He coordinated policy through the National Security Council, and his commentary on law, national security, and education appears in The New York Times, National Affairs, and The Dispatch. Earlier, Dan was an Executive Director at the Corporate Executive Board and Managing Director at AdvanceLaw, providing strategic counsel to Fortune-500 general counsel. He also sits on several university boards.
Dan’s regulatory expertise is pivotal to Habit for Good’s training and credential operations. He ensures our online courses, reference-letter workflow, and data-sharing practices meet U.S. and international privacy standards, protecting volunteers while retaining the analytics sponsors need. His background in institutional governance helps us craft clear policy around foreign partnerships and philanthropic funding, and his communication skills sharpen our public narrative when engaging schools, governments, and media outlets. Dan safeguards the legal foundations that allow our habit-building platform to scale responsibly across borders.
Michael Mocco
JD, NYU School of Law · MBA, NYU Stern · AB, Harvard University
Michael Mocco is a real estate and smart community specialist with eight years of end-to-end development experience—from financial modelling and design to project execution and resident engagement. Passionate about sustainable, tech-forward living, he integrates architectural innovation, amenity planning, and data analytics to raise operational efficiency and wellbeing. Fluent in Spanish and proficient in Python, C++, and R, Michael blends qualitative insight with machine-learning techniques to evaluate social-impact investments. At NYU, he leads the Real Estate and Urban Policy Forum, and at Harvard, he combined History with Computer Science, showcasing an interdisciplinary mindset.
Habit for Good benefits from Michael’s ability to convert built-environment lessons into scalable digital infrastructure. He advises on our ESG metrics framework, ensuring that each planted tree or completed training initiative maps to verifiable carbon and social return indicators—critical for corporate sponsors. His background in large-scale stakeholder coordination mirrors our need to harmonise volunteers, NGOs, and technology vendors. By applying smart-building analytics to volunteer data flows, he helps us optimise resource allocation, anticipate demand peaks, and design user-centric product features that keep engagement high and costs controlled.