Sydney Apple
Director of Foundation and Nonprofit Work, Protagonist
Sydney Apple is the Director of Foundation and Nonprofit work at Protagonist. Sydney specializes in Narrative Analytics and research design, with an expertise in using data to understand complex problems. In her six years at Protagonist, she has worked on dozens of projects across the Foundation and Nonprofit sector, specializing in analyzing narrative content through the lenses of racial justice, gender justice, and collective power across a variety of social issues. Sydney holds a BA, magna cum laude, in Economics and a minor in International Conflict and Cooperation from Boston College, where she was a Gabelli Presidential Scholar. Sydney also studied Spanish at the Granada Institute of International Studies in Spain and Arabic (MSA, Levantine) at the Sijal Institute in Amman, Jordan.
Justin Arenstein
Founder and CEO, Code for Africa; co-CEO, ICFJ+
Justin Arenstein is the founding CEO of Code for Africa—the continent’s largest civic technology network—and the co-CEO of ICFJ+—a new organization created by ICFJ and CfA that will provide unique and innovative services worldwide for journalists and the broader civic information ecosystem.
Beginning as an anti-corruption investigative journalist in South Africa, Arenstein launched the nation’s first rural social justice wire-service, African Eye News Service (AENS), before helping pioneer the region’s first rural lifestyle magazine publisher (HomeGrown Magazines) and Mpumalanga’s first commercial radio station (MPowerFM). He is a former ICFJ Knight Fellow—who grew CfA through his fellowship—and a former Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where he explored data journalism, augmented reality/metaverse, and civic engagement media.
Outside of CfA work, Arenstein serves on a range of advisory boards for organizations ranging from the Partnership for AI and the World Bank/IFC, to WEF’s Global Futures Council on Information Integrity, the global Code for All civic technology association and FT Futures NextGen media strategy team, on issues from data-driven investigative journalism to digital democracy strategies in Africa.
Tom Casetta
Station Manager, G-Town Radio/WGGT-LP 92.9fm
Tom Casetta is the current Station Manager for G-Town Radio, a community station based in Germantown, Philadelphia, He has been involved with community and alternative Media projects since the early 80’s and joined G-Town Radio in 2012 where he served as Program Director prior to his role as Station Manager.
Maritza L. Félix
Founder and Director, Conecta Arizona
Maritza is an award-winning freelance journalist, producer, and writer in Arizona. She is the founder of Conecta Arizona, a Spanish-language news service that connects people in Arizona and Sonora primarily through WhatsApp and social media. She is the creator of Cruzando Líneas, a podcast of new border narratives. She is co-producer and co-host of Comadres al Aire.
In 2022, Maritza was named Innovator of the Year by the Local Media Association and received the 2022 Cecilia Vaisman Award for Best Hispanic Multimedia Journalist from Northwestern University and NAHJ.
She is a senior fellow in the JSK Community Impact Fellowship program at Stanford and a graduate of the Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership in Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She is also a fellow of The Carter Center, the Education Writers Association (EWA), Feet in 2 Worlds (Fi2w), IWMF’s “Adelante” and Listening Post Collective; she is part of Take The Lead’s 50 Women Who Can Change the World of Journalism 2020. Felix has twice been named “Arizona’s Best Spanish Language Journalist” and one of the “40 Hispanic Personalities Under 40 in Arizona.”
Nancy Gibbs
Director, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School
Nancy Gibbs is the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice and Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her work focuses on the challenges facing the information ecosystem and their implications for civic health.
She was formerly the Editor in Chief of TIME, the first woman to hold the position, and is the award-winning author of more cover stories than any writer in TIME’s 100 year history. Leading TIME through a period of industry upheaval, she built the largest audience in its history, evolving it from a weekly print magazine to a global, 24/7 digital news operation. She has interviewed five US Presidents and is the co-author of two New York Times best-selling presidential histories, including The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity.
Gibbs graduated from Yale, summa cum laude, and has a degree in politics and philosophy from Oxford, where she was a Marshall scholar. She is an independent director of Column, a public benefit corporation launched by former Harvard students with a goal of providing sustainable revenue to local newspapers and making public information for accessible.
Jesse Hardman
Founder and Senior Program Advisor, Listening Post Collective
Jesse Hardman is the founder of the Listening Post Collective which seeks to strengthen community information ecosystems around the US and improve civic health via journalism. Hardman worked for more than 20 years as a multiplatform reporter, contributing to NPR, Time, Al Jazeera America, the Atlantic and more. He was a professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He also has partnered with community media all over the world to respond to humanitarian crises in places like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Chile, Tunisia, and the US/Mexico border.
Sandy Herz
Co-founder, WUCO Impact
Sandy Herz is an established philanthropic leader, strategist and storytelling evangelist. Most recently, Sandy served as President of Sobrato Philanthropies, leading an ambitious growth strategy for a multigenerational Giving Pledge family, supporting their individual philanthropy and expanding their collective philanthropy from local place-based giving to include global initiatives such as climate change. Previously at the Skoll Foundation, she led Skoll’s early Connect & Celebrate programs, including the Skoll World Forum, before diving deep into storytelling, curating Skoll’s award-winning film, media, and publishing portfolio and developing a multisector network strategy leveragingpartnerships to attract resources and amplify the impact of Skoll entrepreneurs. During her recent sabbatical, Sandy interviewed 100 leaders across business, philanthropy, and the arts and now shares her learning in a new Substack, The Elephant & Butterfly.
Flora Lichtman
Host, Science Friday
Flora Lichtman is host of Science Friday, a science show broadcast on over 500 public radio stations, and on all podcast platforms. Previously, Flora created and hosted Gimlet’s Every Little Thing, a listener call-in podcast that ran for 200 episodes, averaging a million monthly downloads. She was nominated for an Emmy for her writing on Netflix’s Bill Nye Saves the World, and again for the New York Times Op-Doc video series she co-directed, Animated Life. She got her start as a researcher at a NATO oceanographic lab in Italy, where she sailed around the Mediterranean looking for whales. (A good gig.)
Sara Lomax
President and CEO, WURD Radio
Sara M. Lomax is the President and CEO of WURD Radio, Pennsylvania’s only African-American owned talk radio station. She is credited with transforming WURD Radio from a legacy talk radio station to a multimedia communications company providing cutting edge, original programming on air, online and through community events. In 2021, Sara co-founded URL Media (which stands for Uplift, Respect and Love), a national network of Black and Brown owned and led media organizations that share content, distribution and revenues to increase their long-term sustainability. Prior to her work with WURD and URL, in 1992 Sara co-founded HealthQuest: Total Wellness for Body, Mind & Spirit, one of the country’s first nationally circulated consumer magazines focused specifically on Black health and wellness. Sara has received numerous awards including an Honorary Doctorate from Arcadia University. In 2024 she completed the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. She is an avid yoga and meditation practitioner and the mother of three amazing sons.
Joy Mayer
Founder and Executive Director, Trusting News
Joy Mayer is the founder and executive director of Trusting News, a nonprofit initiative that studies how people decide what news to trust and helps journalists and the public understand each other. She and her team train newsrooms on strategies for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust. She launched Trusting News in 2016 after a 20-year career in newsrooms and as a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism.
Ryan Merkley
Chief Operating Officer, NPR
Ryan Merkley is the Chief Operating Officer at NPR. He was most recently the CEO of Conscience, an emerging biotech non-profit, using AI and collaborative science to address areas of market failure in drug development. He was also a Fellow with the Aspen Institute, working on topics like AI, open source and intellectual property, data and privacy, and information integrity. He is the founding chair of the Flickr Foundation.
Merkley spent over a decade as a c-suite executive in technology non-profits, including Chief of Staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he helped grow and strengthen its global network; five years as CEO at Creative Commons, focused on products, education, and sustainability; and Chief Operating Officer at Mozilla, helping to establish new strategy and build collaborative teams. He served as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, and was a Senior Advisor to Mayor David Miller in Toronto, where he led the Mayor’s budget policy and initiated Toronto’s Open Data project.
Julia Minson
Associate Professor, Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Julia Minson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is a decision scientist with research interests in conflict management, negotiations, and judgment and decision making. Her main line of research addresses the “psychology of disagreement” – How do people engage with opinions, values, and judgments that conflict with their own?
Her work examines disagreements around hot-button, identity-relevant topics — conflicts around politics, values, and professional, and health decision-making. She is interested in simple, scalable interventions to help people become more receptive to the opposing views of others.
Minson also studies group decision-making to uncover the psychological biases that prevent managers, consumers, and policy-makers from maximizing the benefits of collaboration. This includes research on the under-weighting of advice, “wisdom of crowds,” and overconfidence.
Much of Julia’s research is conducted in collaboration with the graduate and post-doctoral members of Constructive Disagreement Lab (CDL). Julia is also the founder of the Constructive Disagreement Project — a project dedicated to disseminating cutting edge research and developing interventions for professionals in government, education, healthcare, and the media.
Ashwath Narayanan
Co-founder and CEO, Social Currant
Ashwath Narayanan is the Co-founder & CEO at Social Currant, a DC based managed service and platform that matches social impact organizations and nonprofits with the influencers and content creators across social media platforms. He founded Social Currant while a student at The George Washington University and continues to manage the firm & platform after graduating in May 2022. He can be reached at ashwath@socialcurrant.co.
Liz Kelly Nelson
Founder, Project C
Liz Kelly Nelson is a leader in journalism innovation, dedicated to helping independent journalists and media creators build sustainable careers in a rapidly evolving media landscape. With a background in newsroom leadership, digital media strategy and creator economy expertise, Liz has worked across the journalism ecosystem — supporting reporters and journalism creators across mediums, advising media startups and collaborating with major institutions on the future of independent journalism. As the founder of Project C, a concept she developed during her 2024 Sulzberger Fellowship at Columbia University’s Graduate School of journalism, she is focused on empowering journalists to embrace new models, find sustainable revenue and create impactful work outside of traditional media structures. Prior to Project C, Liz led teams at Vox, USA Today, Gannett and AOL.
Andy Norman
Executive Director, CIRCE – The Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative
Andy Norman is a cognitive scientist, award-winning author, and Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies the evolutionary origins of human reasoning, the norms that make dialogue fruitful, and the nature of responsible thinking about what matters. He writes for national magazines like Free Inquiry, Skeptic, and The Humanist, and is frequently asked to speak on topics related to science and human values. In his book Mental Immunity, he develops the conceptual foundations of cognitive immunology—the emerging science of immunity to misinformation. Andy is the Executive Director of the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative (CIRCE) and the Chief Catalyst of the Mental Immunity Project, an ambitious attempt to protect everyone from information manipulation.
Rita Parhad
President, Protagonist
Rita Parhad, Ph.D., is President of Protagonist, overseeing their work with nonprofit and foundation clients. She has over twenty years of professional experience in the private and non-profit sectors, government, and academic research. At Protagonist, Rita has led dozens of Narrative Analytics projects across many issue areas, including higher education, reproductive rights, racial equity, criminal justice reform, climate change, health equity, and the social safety net. Current work focuses on strategy development for narrative power-building and advancing narrative change. Rita holds a BA, magna cum laude, in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame, an MPA in Public and International Policy from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and a PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley, with specialization in international relations, comparative politics, and social science research methodology.
Janai Raphael
Strategy Officer for Access, Lumina Foundation
Janai Raphael is the Strategy Officer for Access at Lumina Foundation where her work focuses on increasing enrollment and re-enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs. Janai has spent most of her career guiding underserved students to and through college and has worked with organizations like the College Advising Corps, National College Attainment Network, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Achieve Atlanta, where she managed Georgia’s largest need-based aid program. She holds a BS from the University of Georgia and an MA in Higher Education from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Maria Ressa
2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and CEO, Rappler, Philippines
Professor, Columbia University’s School of International & Public Affairs
Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, the top digital only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler’s CEO, Maria has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government, forced to post bail ten times to stay free. Rappler’s battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts.
For her courage and journalistic integrity, Maria has received numerous accolades. In October 2021, she was one of two journalists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
In 2022, she was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General to the Leadership Panel of the Internet Governance Forum and serves as its Vice-Chair.
She is a Professor of Practice at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she leads projects within the Institute of Global Politics related to artificial intelligence and democracy.
Maria authored Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and From Bin Laden to Facebook. Her most recent book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, was released in November 2022 and has been translated into more than 20 languages. Maria focuses critical attention on the breakdown of our global information ecosystem and how interconnected communities of action can hold the line to protect democratic values.
Dillon Scott
Artist
Dillon Scott has been celebrated by the New York Times for possessing a mind that is “a fire hose of ambition and enterprising passion”. As an artist in the 21st Century, he is deeply committed to his role in promoting positive change and inspiring others.
As a supporter of contemporary and underrepresented voices, he has championed the Viola Concerto by Roberto Sierra as well as the Viola Sonata and String Quartet No.1 by George Walker by helping to create some of the first full digital performances of each work. In 2023, Dillon directed a schoolwide project at the Curtis Institute of Music that highlighted the chamber music of black composers which resulted in much publicity from organizations such as the Violin Channel and Project 440.
Dillon was a finalist in both the junior and senior divisions of the Sphinx Competition and was awarded first place at the Nelly Berman Young Classical Virtuosos of Tomorrow. Dillon was also featured on NPR’s From the Top. He has performed as a soloist with the Sphinx and the Indianapolis Symphony orchestras. He has also performed as a soloist at the Kimmel Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.
He is currently pursuing his Bachelor of Music degree at the Curtis Institute of Music where he studies with Edward Gazouleas and Roberto Diaz. There he also holds the Mark. E. Rubenstein Fellowship. During the 2022–2023 season, Dillon served as principal violist of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra where he received the prestigious Helen T. Carp Distinguished Service Award. In past summers, Dillon has attended the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival as a Solo Apprentice as well as the Verbier Soloist Academy, where he received the “Spirit of Verbier” Award. He has also attended the Perlman Music Program, Kneisel Hall, the Sphinx Performance Academy, and the Dali Quartet International Festival.
Nima Shirazi
Vice President, Spitfire Strategies
Nima Shirazi has over two decades of eclectic experience working at the intersection of culture and politics, media and narrative, advocacy and the arts. A Vice President at Spitfire Strategies, Nima develops communications strategies and campaigns dedicated to dismantling systems of oppression, extraction and disinformation. He has provided training, counsel and coaching for foundation executives and nonprofit communications leaders across the country on community power-building, reputation management, ethical storytelling and narrative change.
Nima was a founding member of the Narrative Initiative and currently co-hosts the award-winning media criticism podcast “Citations Needed.” A widely recognized political and media analyst, Nima is also a member of the Radical Communicators Network, a global community of practice for organizers and strategists working to build narrative power for justice and liberation, and the Gulf/2000 Project, an academic forum and digital resource service operated by the Sage Institute for Foreign Affairs. Born and raised in New York City, Nima’s work has traversed the film, music, theater, philanthropic and nonprofit worlds. He used to tour the country as a drummer in rock bands and now serves on the board of directors for Proteus Fund.
Ivan Sigal
Interim Executive Director, Free Our Feeds
Jai Smith
Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Lehigh Daily
Jai Smith is a software developer and tech entrepreneur with over five years of experience building and scaling digital properties. As local news evolves in the digital age, he strives to build a platform and brand to empower the next generation of young, diverse journalists to serve residents across the greater Lehigh Valley better.
Brian Waniewski
Executive Director, Harmony Labs
Brian has a record of establishing innovative organizations at the intersection of tech, media, social impact, research. Before Harmony Labs, he served as managing director at Institute of Play. He also served on the core founding teams for Quest to Learn, a New York City public school that leverages game design to make school engaging and culturally relevant for young people; and GlassLab Games, a Silicon Valley development shop transforming digital games, like SimCity, into classroom learning environments with real-time formative assessments built in. Brian was trained as a poet. He has worked as a speechwriter, a management consultant, a professor, cook, and gardener, and built by hand a timber-frame cabin in the woods, where he spent five years reading, writing, and meditating.
Chris Wink
Co-Founder and CEO, Technical.ly
Christopher Wink is a journalist and entrepreneur who is cofounder and CEO of Technical.ly, the news organization with a community of technologists and entrepreneurs. Founded in 2009, it is one of the country’s longest running online-only local news sites. He specializes in local economic development, including entrepreneurship and tech workforce trends, journalism strategy and building trust online. He was previously publisher of Generocity.org, which reports on the nonprofit sector, and a former media director for a homeless advocacy nonprofit. He is lead organizer of Philly Tech Week, cofounder of Baltimore Innovation Week and curator of the Klein News Innovation Camp, other events that bring together smart people. In 2022, Wink was named one of Pennsylvania’s most influential impact leaders, and in 2017 Folio magazine listed him as one of the 100 most innovative media leaders in the country.