Meet The Team

As Founder and CEO of Community Lift Inc., Larry is dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs in Uganda’s Busoga region through access to capital, training, and mentorship. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in East Africa, Larry leads Community Lift with a deep belief that sustainable progress begins when local entrepreneurs have the tools and confidence to lift their own communities.

Before launching Community Lift, Larry served as the first Executive Director of Kibo Group International, where he helped expand programs in clean water, reforestation, and community development. This experience along with 20+ visits to Uganda shaped his conviction that grassroots empowerment—not external aid—drives lasting change.

Under his leadership, Community Lift has supported a growing portfolio of small enterprises across Uganda, from food processing and agribusiness to tailoring and tourism. Each venture creates jobs, builds local wealth, and reinvests profits to help the next generation of entrepreneurs succeed.

Larry’s work reflects his lifelong passion for practical compassion​, pairing opportunity with accountability to spark transformation one business at a time. His guiding belief: when local entrepreneurs thrive, entire communities rise.

​Larry and his wife Kay of almost 60 years live in Shelby Township, Michigan. They have 2 grown sons and one granddaughter.

Elliot Jones brings a deep background in marketing, higher education, and nonprofit leadership to his role on the Community Lift Board of Directors. He currently serves as Director of Marketing for the American Association for Physician Leadership and previously dedicated more than two decades to Rochester Christian University in leadership roles spanning admissions, marketing, and communication. In addition to his professional work, Elliot has taught marketing and communication courses at Rochester Christian University, Harding University, and the University of Mobile, continuing his commitment to equipping the next generation of leaders.

Elliot’s passion for service aligns closely with Community Lift’s mission of backing dreams and building strong communities. He has served on several nonprofit boards and is an active member of the Mission Team at Rochester Church of Christ, where he supports global and local outreach efforts. He also enjoys photography, traveling, and investing his time in creative projects that tell meaningful stories. Elliot and his wife, Shannon, live in Shelby Township, Michigan, and are proud parents of two teenage sons, Trent and Jace.

Kevin Norman brings more than 15 years of experience in technology, business development, and social impact to his role on the Community Lift Board of Directors. He currently serves on the go-to-market team at Span, an AI-native developer intelligence company helping engineering organizations make smarter, data-driven decisions about their people and product investments.

Prior to Span, Kevin spent seven years at Lattice, where he was part of the early team that helped scale the company from Series A to more than $125M in annual recurring revenue. His career has centered on connecting people, purpose, and performance — from building high-growth technology companies to supporting mission-driven organizations.

Kevin’s commitment to community aligns closely with Community Lift’s mission of backing dreams and creating opportunity. He volunteers with the STAY Program at the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis, mentoring youth transitioning from foster care to adulthood. 

Kevin and his wife, Gina, live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Gina is a spiritual director and founder of In Good Company Counseling and Spiritual Direction, an organization supporting individuals and communities through integrative counseling.

With a background in both ministry and medicine, Justin brings a unique perspective to the Community Lift board. He has dedicated his life to fields of service and cares deeply about helping people in need.

After spending ten years as the youth minister at Heritage Church of Christ in Clawson, Michigan, Justin attended graduate school at University of Detroit Mercy and became a physician assistant in 2013. He specializes in pediatrics and psychiatry and currently works at Pure Psychiatry of Michigan, where he’s a sought-after provider known for his compassion and integrity.

Justin developed an interest in mission work as a teenager and has had the opportunity to go on several domestic and international mission trips. He’s also volunteered at organizations throughout the metro Detroit area including City Mission, God’s Helping Hands, South Oakland Shelter, Hope Warming Center, and Oxford/Orion FISH, as well as Kibo Group (a more remote, but internal connection, due to his wife Casey’s role as the director of marketing). 

Justin and Casey live in Oxford, Michigan with their three boys—Wyatt, Henry and Brooks—where they spend most of their free time on baseball fields, and whatever is left after that on the water.

Kyle Martin is a seasoned Financial Technology leader with more than 20 years of experience in SaaS, financial services, and higher education. As a Client Success Team Leader at re:Members, he partners with dozens of nonprofit organizations to optimize their financial systems and data management.

Beyond his corporate leadership, Kyle has served as an adjunct professor at Rochester University since 2013, where he teaches courses in marketing, management, entrepreneurship, and personal finance. He holds an MBA from Eastern Michigan University and a BBA in Marketing from Rochester Christian University.

Kyle’s passion for empowering entrepreneurs began over 15 years ago after reading Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus, which inspired his belief in the transformative power of microfinance. In 2022, he traveled to Uganda with a team from Kibo Group, an experience that deepened his commitment to helping families and small businesses thrive.

As a board member of Community Lift Inc., Kyle brings his expertise and heart for service to support business owners and creators in Jinja, Uganda—proving that small investments can create lasting impact.

Delyan Raychev is an accomplished engineering leader based in the San Francisco Bay Area, known for building and guiding teams that design and operate large-scale, mission-critical systems.

He currently leads the Cloud Platform team at OpenAI, where he focuses on scaling the infrastructure that powers some of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems. Prior to OpenAI, Delyan served as Head of Cloud Native Platform at Intuit, where he led the company’s transition to a cloud-native architecture, improving reliability, efficiency, and developer productivity across Intuit’s global financial SaaS ecosystem.

Earlier in his career, Delyan founded and launched Open Service Mesh (OSM) at Microsoft Azure—the first native service mesh for Azure Kubernetes Service—later donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). He also helped pioneer backend systems for autonomous-vehicle mapping and machine-learning training at Cruise Automation, integrating his passion for distributed systems, reactive design, and data-driven innovation.

Delyan believes that technology, when grounded in collaboration and integrity, has the power to transform both organizations and communities. That belief inspires his involvement with Community Lift Inc., where he supports entrepreneurs in Uganda to build sustainable businesses that uplift entire villages.

Henry Oyier is a technically advanced and business-savvy IT professional with more than a decade of experience managing complex technology environments and leading high-impact development initiatives. Currently based in Michigan, Henry most recently served as a Mobility Specialist at General Dynamics Land Systems, where he successfully designed and implemented enterprise mobility strategies supporting over 1,500 users. His expertise spans systems administration, network infrastructure, endpoint security, and mobile device management through tools such as Workspace ONE, Intune, Azure AD, and SCCM.

Before transitioning to the technology sector in the United States, Henry served as Program Director for Kibo Group International in Uganda from 2014 to 2022. In that role, he led rural development programs across more than 40 villages in the Busoga region, managing multimillion-shilling budgets and spearheading community-driven projects in water, sanitation, energy, and livelihoods. His leadership helped achieve a 95% open-defecation-free rate and an 80% reduction in deforestation through the construction of energy-saving stoves.

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​Henry brings to Community Lift Inc. a rare combination of technical acumen, strategic vision, and a deep commitment to sustainable community transformation—bridging technology and social impact to empower people and improve lives.