A network of inheritance.

Reverend Joel L. King Jr. is the first cousin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They grew up together, in the same house. Joel does not speak about Dr. King from books. He speaks about him from breakfast.

Forty years in Christian ministry have given Joel a pastor's instincts for nonviolence as a daily practice, not a slogan. He has served on the Ohio Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission since its founding in 1985, represents Ohio on the National MLK Advisory Committee in Atlanta, and serves as chaplain for the Gahanna Police Department. He carries his cousin's work forward not as inheritance, but as assignment.

Tushar Gandhi is the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. After the death of his father Arun Gandhi in 2023, he asked Dr. Terry Oroszi to serve as Arun's US representative; together, they committed to reviving the Season for Nonviolence that Arun founded in 1998 with Coretta Scott King's support. The center exists because of that handoff.

An author, social activist, and humanitarian, Tushar leads the annual Gandhi Legacy Tour in India and speaks worldwide on his great-grandfather's philosophy of satyagraha in a polarized century. His scholarship is available at tushargandhi.in.

Gregory Foster is the cousin of Coretta Scott King and serves as Vice Chair of the Gandhi-King Center. A career social worker, he has spent his working life inside the agencies that exist for the people other agencies stopped seeing. He came to the center the way most of its board members came: through a relationship that already existed.

Carolyn Foster is the Executive Director of the Gandhi-King Center. She is cousin through marriage to Coretta Scott King and has spent twenty-eight years inside the public school system supporting children and families, with additional work as a suicide crisis counselor. Her career has been a long lesson in what it costs people when systems fail them, and what it takes to hold the door open anyway.

She and her husband Gregory share a deep faith and a shared call.

Angela, Baroness Harris of Richmond DL is a life peer in the United Kingdom House of Lords, elevated in 1999. As Deputy Speaker and the long-standing Liberal Democrat voice on policing and Northern Ireland, she has spent more than a quarter-century inside the British conversation on public safety and civic accountability. Before the peerage she chaired North Yorkshire County Council and the North Yorkshire Police Authority.

Lady Harris serves as Patron of the Gandhi-King Center for Nonviolence, a relationship rooted in two decades of overlap between her UK policing work and the center's US law enforcement engagement.

Read about the Patron's role →

Brian Polkinghorn was Arun Gandhi's collaborator for more than twenty years. When Arun died in 2023, Brian carried that thread forward by helping bring his colleague Dr. Terry Oroszi into the Gandhi family's American work. The trip to India that Arun could not make is when this center began.

Distinguished Professor of Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution at Salisbury University, Executive Director of the Bosserman Center for Conflict Resolution, and Co-Director of UNU-RCE Salisbury USA, Brian has worked in conflict zones in more than thirty countries, including Bosnia, Ireland, Haiti, Colombia, the Philippines, South Africa, East Timor, Indonesia, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Myanmar, and Ukraine. He has served as a Fellow at Harvard's Program on Negotiation, a US Presidential Fellow, and is a two-time Senior American Fulbright Scholar and a United States Fulbright Alumni Ambassador.

Dr. David Ellis is the center's Treasurer. A toxicologist by training, he works at Battelle Memorial Institute and teaches at Boonshoft School of Medicine. He has served as treasurer for multiple nonprofits before this one and brings the financial discipline a small humanitarian organization needs to stay accountable.

David traveled with the original India delegation that introduced Dr. Oroszi to the Gandhi family. He has been part of this center from before there was a center.

Dr. Terry Oroszi founded the Gandhi-King Center in 2024, in the months after the death of Arun Gandhi. Tushar Gandhi asked her to step into his father's American work; Rev. Joel King and Gregory Foster brought the King side of the lineage to the table; the center was incorporated in Dayton, Ohio as a 501(c)(3) private foundation later that year. She organized the 2024 Season for Nonviolence event that first brought members of the Gandhi and King families to Dayton together.

Her work outside the center carries the same throughline. She is Vice Chair of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Wright State University's Boonshoft School of Medicine, where she founded and directs the nationally recognized CBRN Defense Certificate Program and the Emerging Technologies Laboratory. She is a Harvard Kennedy School alum (Leadership in Emerging Technology, 2025), a member of the Forbes Technology Council, a U.S. State Department speaker, a regional Executive Committee member of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, and a U.S. Army veteran who served on a Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical defense team. She came to peace work through national security, not despite it.

Regionally she co-founded the Dayton Think Tank with former Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley to convene crisis preparedness across sectors. Internationally she mentors at-risk girls in Afghanistan and India, unpaid, on education, resilience, and leadership.

External coverage of the founding India trip →