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David Bornstein has been a journalist, focusing primarily on social innovation, for over 30 years. He began his career reporting on metro issues for New York Newsday, then shifted to international reporting, contributing to numerous publications. From 2010-21, he co-authored the “Fixes” column in The New York Times, which examined efforts to solve social and environmental problems. He is the author of: How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, which has been published in 25 languages, The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank, and Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.
Tina Rosenberg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. She is a longtime New York Times writer, at the editorial page, the Sunday magazine, and most recently as co-author of the Fixes. column. As a freelance, she has written for dozens of magazines, including the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. Her books include "Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America," "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism" and "Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World." "The Haunted Land" won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
Courtney E. Martin is an author and entrepreneur, and a co-founder of The Solutions Journalism Network. Her latest book is Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from my Daughter’s School. Courtney consults with a wide range of institutions, including TED, The Obama Foundation, The Aspen Institute, and IDEO. She is also the co-founder of FRESH Speakers Bureau. Courtney has authored/edited six books, including Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists, and Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women. Courtney has a popular Substack newsletter, called Examined Family, and speaks widely at conferences and colleges. She is the recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre, and an honorary Ph.d. from Art Center of Design. She lives with her family in a co-housing community called Temescal Commons in Oakland, and is currently the storyteller-in-residence at The Holding Co, a lab for redesigning care for the 21stcentury. Read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.
Allen Arthur is a graduate of the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY. An alum of their innovative Social Journalism program, he’s passionate about building trust both on- and offline. Most recently, he led audience development at Documented, a journalism startup covering immigration in New York. As a journalist, he works with currently and formerly incarcerated people. His work has appeared in The Marshall Project, USA Today, YES! Magazine, Documented, and The Crime Report. He also hosts The Art of Return, a live show for formerly incarcerated artists.
Saira is a marketing and communications professional with a background in writing and editing. She has a passion for learning about the field of economic justice and wants to amplify journalism that offers solutions for systemic inequalities. She has an undergraduate degree in journalism and political science, and a master's degree in media management. She lives in Philadelphia but will always be a New Yorker at heart. In her spare time, which she has very little of after keeping up with two preschoolers, she enjoys re-watching The Office, reading, and napping.
Eva holds a B.A. in Global Studies from the International University, Long Island University - Global College. Over the course of her education, she spent four years traveling across five continents, cultivating an intellectually open disposition towards the culturally and academically unique perspectives she encountered. Eva comes to SJN with a reinvigorated passion for storytelling, research, collaborative innovation, and data analysis to create quality material that will set in motion positive social change.
Delaney joined SJN in March 2018 as the administrative associate for the Practice Change team. Previously, she worked at Prudential Financial's Office of Corporate Social Responsibility where she held coordination and support roles in the Spirit of Community Awards program and the Prudential Foundation. She graduated with a degree in English and American Literature from New York University's College of Arts and Sciences.
Melissa Cassutt has over a decade of media experience in the West (and briefly, Florida), most recently serving as Deputy Editor at the Jackson Hole News&Guide. In 2016 she was named the Wyoming Press Association’s Young Journalist of the Year; in 2019 she was awarded a Wyoming Woman of Influence Award in Media and Communications.She recently combined her passion for media and the outdoors, joining the First Hunt Foundation-Wyoming as the Communications Coordinator. She also sits on the advisory board of the Wyoming Women's Foundation and the executive committee of the Jackson Hole-based nonprofit, Womentum. In 2019 she restarted the Wyoming Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and sits as its president. When she's not thinking about journalism, she's thinking about dogs, and when she's not doing either of those things she's backpacking, fly-fishing, hunting, kayaking or aspiring to become a falconer.
Sara teaches journalism as an adjunct at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, serves on the program committee for the JSK Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, where she was a fellow, and supports the Online News Association Women's Leadership Accelerator as a mentor and speaker. Her journalism experience includes digital leader and newsroom manager, grounded in years of reporting and writing at a wide range of news outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Mother Jones, the LA Weekly and NBC. She is the author of a forthcoming memoir about growing up in Bronzeville on Chicago's South Side.
Catherine helped SJN build its presence on the West Coast, and more recently, she’s focused on building relationships with leaders inside and outside of the media whose work has potential synergies with SJN. Outside of her part-time work with SJN, she is a senior reporter for Devex, the media platform for the global development community, where she focuses on technology and innovation. Catherine graduated from Yale University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science and distinction as a Yale Journalism Scholar.
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Jefferson comes to SJN from the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a large non-profit in the Human Services sector where he was responsible for General Ledger Maintenance in relation to Government grants. He graduated from CUNY Queens College with a Bachelor’s in Accounting. Hobbies include watching a good baseball game, or catching a good movie at the cinema.
Cheryl Dahle is SJN’s Climate Initiative Manager. She oversees the organization’s strategy and projects to help journalists cover climate change more constructively, more skillfully, and with greater impact. She has a BSJ from The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and founded Future of Fish, a conservation nonprofit that was a finalist for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge in 2013. She is an adjunct professor at Institute of Design at IIT in Chicago, where she teaches design for systems change.
Michael Davis describes himself as a platform-agnostic storyteller who helps others become better storytellers. He has held an array of top leadership and creative positions at digital news sites, magazines, newspapers and broadcasting outlets. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the 1986-87 academic year. Later he wrote the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street and is a co-executive producer of the feature-length documentary film adapted from the book. He is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he later taught as an adjunct professor.
Angela K. Evans manages SJN’s Labor Cohort and works with journalists across the U.S. that are using solutions journalism to report on workers. She’s a journalist exploring the intersection of systems, people and culture through the art of long-form storytelling. Throughout her career, she's covered an array of topics from immigration, to public health, education, music and the environment. Her recent work has focused on homelessness and housing solutions, producing two seasons of the Unhoused podcast with Boulder Weekly and KGNU. In her free time, she's a yoga instructor, avid mountain biker and snowboarder, and loves traveling to see friends and family across the globe. She’s based in Denver, Colorado.
Nina’s first career was in humanitarian work, as a trainer and manager. She has 10 years of experience in journalism, first as an editor in Russia, and in France as a freelance journalist and author. She has been managing SJN’s work in Europe since 2016, training journalists and newsrooms across countries. She is also coordinating all international projects at SJN.
Michelle Faust Raghavan supports respectful and equitable news coverage of the many communities that make up the United States. She came to the organization as the Pacific West Coast Region Manager. Before that, Michelle spent about a decade reporting on policy issues (mostly health care policy) and hosting for public media stations across the country, including 89.3 KPCC Southern California Public Radio, WCPN/WVIZ in Cleveland, Ohio, WXXI in Rochester, New York, and KAWC in Yuma, Arizona. Michelle is passionate about mentorship and is actively involved with NPR’s Next Generation Radio project.
Liza Gross is a journalist and media leader with over three decades of experience working in executive positions at news organizations and media nonprofits. She specializes in the exploration of transformational models for media organizations focused on sustainability and collaboration. She was Managing Editor of The Miami Herald, Executive Editor of El Nuevo Día in Puerto Rico, and Publisher of Exito!, the Spanish language publication of the Chicago Tribune. As Executive Director of the International Women’s Media Foundation, she worked to support the professional advancement of women in media. She is a member of the Advisory Board of Report for America and a past board member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She lectures widely and conducts frequent media trainings in the United States, Latin America and Europe.
Sarah Gustavus Lim leads the Economic Mobility Initiative at the Solutions Journalism Network, which helps journalists shift their coverage of poverty toward systemic responses that are increasing economic opportunities for individuals and communities. Before joining SJN, she worked in public radio and television for nearly 15 years and led several award-winning, collaborative reporting projects. Sarah also founded the New Mexico Local News Fund to bring together local news outlets, journalists and community members around the shared goal of increasing access to local news and information for all New Mexicans.
Keith Hammonds joined SJN in its early days from Ashoka, where he helped advance the work of news entrepreneurs around the world. He also has been Executive Editor at Fast Company Magazine; a bureau chief and editor for BusinessWeek; a writer for The New York Times in London and Johannesburg; a consultant to New Nation in Johannesburg; director of an emergency food distribution program in Namibia; and coach of the Firebolts, a fearsome girls soccer team. In his spare time, Keith owns and publishes The Boulder Monitor, the leading newspaper in Jefferson County, Montana.
Francine Huff is the Director of Journalism School Partnerships for the Solutions Journalism Network. Previously she was the Knight Chair for Student Achievement at Florida A&M University and director of the Dow Jones News Fund HBCU Digital Media Institute. She was a 2021 HBCU Solutions Journalism Educator Academy Fellow and has been a Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute Fellow. Prior to academia she worked at The Wall Street Journal as spot news bureau chief, a news editor and a copy editor, and at the Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Press and Valley News Dispatch. She was founder and editorial director of Super Savvy Publishing and is the author of “The 25-Day Money Makeover for Women.” She has a master’s degree in communication from Rutgers University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
Julia Hotz is a journalist reporting on systemic solutions to loneliness, anxiety, and depression, with bylines in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, WIRED, Scientific American, Bloomberg, TIME, and more. She’s currently developing a book proposal to explore the science and stories of social prescribing — the radically simple and effective practice of connecting people with activities, resources, and other people to improve their health. With her podcast-partner-in-coolness, Jay Woodward, she cohosts "Google, Tell Me Something Good" -- a daily newscast exploring what's working. Before joining SJN, she wore many non-journalism hats, including: high school English teacher, bartender, pizza shop waitress, math tutor, and summer camp "forest ranger" for five-year-olds who wanted to do everything but be in a forest. She's a proud alum of both University of Cambridge and Union College.
Before joining SJN, Ja'Nel assisted in the creation of KXTV’s Race and Culture Team. Ja’Nel has long had a passion for reporting on the Black experience and elevating the voices of underrepresented communities. During her time as a reporter, she created a wide range of stories for radio, television and digital platforms. As a digital content producer for KXTV, she produced content about California becoming the first state to ban discrimination based on hairstyle and hair texture, examined how marijuana prohibition blocks Black and Hispanic people from the legal cannabis industry. Ja’Nel also served as news director for KVNO.
Maurisse Johnson has held a number of finance & financial systems roles and comes to us from NYCHA where he managed the capital planning and environmental review process. Over the years Maurisse has worked with a few companies in different capacities including Burson Marsteller where he was the Director of Financial Planning & Reporting, Parsons Brinckerhoff where he was the Manager of Reporting & Systems and J.Crew where he was the Director of Financial Systems. Maurisse is a husband, father and a big NY Jets fan. He holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Concordia University.
Kyuwon is a journalist and ethnographer from Seoul whose coverage includes issues of two Koreas, East Asia and cultural transformation. He started his career as an intern reporter for Dong-A Ilbo, a Seoul-based newspaper. His past projects varied from an anthropological study on Mexico's K-pop audience to interviewing 26 North Korean defectors who had been formerly incarcerated in North Korea's prison. In 2016, Moonhee Cho and he co-launched a mobile-based news publication, Issue & Paper which aimed to make the findings of academic papers more accessible and social-friendly. He is a former Air Force Sergeant, graduate of Yonsei University and Fulbright scholar to New York University.
Lysandra is a Communication and Events Specialist for the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center at the University of Nebraska College of Law in Lincoln. Previously, she worked as a reporter for the Seward County Independent covering local politics and rural communities in Southeast Nebraska before pivoting to work with an ag land appraisal software start-up. Lysandra holds a B.A. in Psychology and M.M.C. in Journalism and Mass Communications from Arizona State University. Her claim to fame is hailing from the winter lettuce capital of the world—Yuma, AZ.
Samantha McCann has worked with SJN since 2013, the organization's founding year. Previously, she worked in environmental and fiscal policy research at Seattle University. She has published in The Journal of International Affairs, Scholastic, The Guardian, PRI, & others, and authored the text of an award-winning book of photography, "Columbia University in Pictures." She holds an M.P.A. from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a B.A. in political science from Seattle University.
Amy oversees local collaborations in the West and parts of the Midwest. She has more than 30 years of experience as a journalist for newspapers and magazines. Amy spent a little more than a year as the digital editor at The Salt Lake Tribune. Before that, she was executive editor at The Durango Herald in Durango, Colo. She oversaw the company's three general interest newspapers; a weekly alternative magazine, which she founded; and a quarterly outdoor recreation magazine. She is a Knight-Wallace Fellow Class of '17 at the University of Michigan.
Karen Magnuson most recently served as executive editor of the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, NY, and state editor for the USA TODAY Network. Magnuson is known as a relentless champion for the news industry through her many years of service as a board member and president of the Associated Press Media Editors, and as a board member and co-chair of the Diversity Committee for the American Society of News Editors. Magnuson joined the board of Journalism That Matters, a national organization devoted to inclusive community engagement, in January 2019. She earned a Master of Science in innovation management from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2012.
Kristen is the Salesforce Database Assistant to SJN, graduating with a BS in Geology from the College of William and Mary. Her previous work was in Operations/Database Management at the College of William and Mary, and Project Management at the International Headquarters of Covenant House (meaning she has never met a spreadsheet/CRM she didn’t like). She has a strong penchant for data governance, recognizing the necessity of reliable, integrity-focused, relevant data, and takes great care in this work. (Outside of her work, she is also a vocalist and guitarist, one could say a data management specialist by day-musician by night.)
A print and broadcast journalist, media trainer, and consultant, Ruona's work has been featured on several outlets including the BBC, the Financial Times, Reuters, and Deutsche Welle. She was named Nigeria’s Investigative Journalist of the Year in 2013, and was Nigeria’s first Emmy Award nominee for her work on “Sweet, Sweet Codeine,” a 2018 documentary on drug abuse in Nigeria for BBC Africa Eye. Ruona is also a PhD scholar researching African-Diaspora investigative journalism networks.
Katherine is passionate about how solutions journalism helps communities envision and build a more equitable and sustainable world. Before joining SJN in 2017, she was a journalist and educator who reported on philanthropy, education, religion, and the environment, and taught environmental studies and green business. She lives in Central Oregon where she grows and sells gourmet mushrooms at the local farmers markets. She earned her undergraduate degree in political science from UC Berkeley, and graduate degrees in history and business from Duke University and University of Redlands.
Sonja Petrovic comes to SJN from Imagine Better, a non-profit specializing in using storytelling and ritual in activism. While at Imagine Better, she worked on campaigns as lighthearted as a Star Wars-themed Teacher Appreciation holiday to ones as serious as Heroes Wear Vests, which sought to bring recognition to exploited port drivers in LA and Long Beach. She holds a master's in English from Brooklyn College. In her spare time, she can be found writing, baking, and making mixtapes, like it’s still the nineties.
Alane (Lanie) Presswood earned her doctorate in Rhetoric and Public Culture from Ohio University in 2017. Before joining SJN, she spent seven years as a university instructor and worked as a freelance public speaking consultant. She published her first book, Food Blogs, Postfeminism, and the Communication of Expertise: Digital Domestics, in 2019. Alane lives in Brooklyn, NY with her small dog Ruby, and when not engaged in discussions on higher education and/or best communication practices, she enjoys loose leaf tea, rollerblading, Russian literature, and soapy teen dramas on television.
Alice Quinn comes to SJN from a community-based energy efficiency non-profit and has a background in film production. She's organized national grassroots screenings of the Emmy-winning / Oscar-Nominated documentary film GASLAND, and worked on the production of the film, GASLAND II. From there, Alice has worked on social issue documentaries and fiction projects alike and is passionate about storytelling, social and environmental justice, sustainability, and community building. She holds a BA in Social Thought and Political Economy from University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Carolyn Robinson began her news career as a live show producer, then medical producer, with CNN in Atlanta before relocating internationally, first as a senior producer/reporter in Hong Kong, and then to East Timor, where she ran the local TV station for the United Nations. She’s also produced global talk shows and a documentary with Al Jazeera English. Carolyn has directed media programs in post-revolution Libya, among many journalism support projects in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. She's received multiple notable journalism awards and fellowships for her work, and has trained local journalists in over two dozen countries worldwide.
Jenn is a sociologist and research consultant based out of San Diego, CA. She earned her doctorate in Sociology from Northwestern University and teaches courses on social problems, gender & sexuality, and social movements, as well as more technical courses on research methods and statistics. Jenn has supported projects dealing with human trafficking, violence against women, international LGBTQI activism, culturally competent approaches to humanitarian re-building in conflict zones, and labor organizing in the United States. She is a self-professed ‘data nerd’ and is passionate about using her technical skills to support empathetic and inclusive community building.
Alec is passionate about helping newsrooms align editorial and business objectives to serve their communities in a sustainable way. He researches and provides guidance for leveraging solutions journalism to generate revenue. Before coming to SJN, he worked as a researcher and coach for the Membership Puzzle Project (MPP). He is a co-founder of The Bristol Cable, the UK’s pioneering local media cooperative launched in 2014, where he worked as a journalist and operations coordinator until 2018. He also worked as an analyst for NewsGuard, a company reviewing information websites based on their reliability and transparency.
From Bollywood to Nigeria, Ambika has been creating, teaching and writing at the intersection of storytelling and social good for two decades. She believes in working with local teams, developing work collaboratively, and taking risks in telling authentic, powerful stories. She has produced content for Current TV, UNICEF, Havas, Praekelt.org, UNICEF, UNFPA, and Save the Children and trained for BBC Media Action, Columbia University, and the New York Film Academy. At WITNESS, she oversaw the first brand refresh in the organization’s 25 year history. While Head of Communications at the South African technology organization, Praekelt.org, she led the content curation and writing for the Medium Publication, Mobile For Good, and spoke at over 20 conferences globally, including co-partnering to launch the MERL Tech Joburg. Previously, she worked at the advertising agency Havas where she became an Account Director for their luxury division and spoke at SXSW. She was recently the contributing editor for PRISM's refugee resettlement series, and she is currently a Solutions Journalism LEDE Fellow.
Elizabeth Share is a seasoned fundraising professional and trusted advisor to philanthropists and nonprofit organizations. She is the founder and principal of the philanthropic consulting practice Wise Giving and has previously held positions as Chief Development Officer for The Center for Investigative Reporting, Vice President of the Autodesk Foundation, focused on K-12 education reform, and master coach for The Course in Exponential Fundraising at the Harvard Kennedy School. She serves on several Advisory Boards, including for Nepal Youth Foundation, Beyond Differences and the Prison Journalism Project.
Linda Shaw works with newsrooms on solutions-focused reporting on elections, democracy and education. As editorial director, she also works to expand and improve the support SJN offers its growing network of newsrooms. Before SJN, Linda worked at The Seattle Times, where she oversaw Education Lab, an initiative that rigorously examines promising approaches to education’s toughest problems. Linda has worked as a reporter and an editor, mostly at The Seattle Times and mostly on coverage of public schools. In 2008, she was named beat reporter of the year for large newspapers by the Education Writers Association and in 2011-12, she was a Spencer Education fellow at Columbia University. In 2016, she helped create a multimedia project on race called “Under Our Skin.”
Mikhael Simmonds is a freelance multimedia journalist who specializes in international reporting. He is also the co-founder of Harlem Focus, a multimedia blog/media lab used as a learning tool at the City College of New York, where he taught reporting classes. Over the years, Simmonds has worked with a number of news and non-for-profit organizations including Democracy Now!, GritTV, Seeds of Africa, the YMCA International, and the UN Department of Public Information and NGO Relations. He has also worked closely with the New York Amsterdam News, a 106-year-old Harlem-based African American Newspaper.
Lita Tirak leads the Solutions Story Tracker database and the Solutions Specialist team. In 2020, the Story Tracker reached 10,000 stories about responses to social problems from around the world. Lita received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. She is a researcher, writer, curator, and creative problem-solver.
Leah Todd is the New England region manager and region collaborative manager for the Solutions Journalism Network, building relationships with newsrooms in the New England states. From 2015 to 2018, Leah led SJN’s work in the Intermountain West, including launching and overseeing collaborative journalism projects between dozens of news organizations in Montana and New Mexico. Previously, she covered K-12 education at The Seattle Times, and local government at the Casper (Wyo.) Star Tribune. She has investigated and written about turmoil in Washington state’s new charter school sector; efforts to improve disproportionately high absentee rates among Native American students in Wyoming; Colorado’s attempts to divert mental health patients from overcrowded Emergency Rooms; and how residents in rural communities across the West find and use local news.
Alejandra comes to SJN from the performing arts industry, where she worked in an operational capacity for play publishing and licensing company Samuel French, and marketing and catalog development for Concord Music Publishing. Her work for these organizations focused on supporting and advocating for songwriters, playwrights, and theater makers, while also championing their legacy. She is a graduate of the MA Theater Lab at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Marie joined SJN as a 2018 Story Fellow and lead curator of The Response. She studied international affairs and public policy at Columbia University, where she helped build a massive open online course about global muckraking. Her past experiences include writing about market-driven solutions to poverty at Mercy Corps, researching gender topics in conflict-affected countries at UN Women, and coordinating volunteers at Thin Air Community Radio in Spokane, Washington. Originally from Alaska, Marie loves hiking, road trips, and homemade blueberry pie.
Fara Warner has worked in every storytelling medium from traditional print, books, and digital publishing to virtual reality films throughout her three-decade journalism career. At SJN, she is focused on the challenge of transforming news coverage of the climate crisis from apocalyptic and unsolvable to rigorous evidence-based journalism that catalyzes communities to take action. She lives in West Shokan, N.Y. When she’s not hiking with her Australian Shepherd ‘Eros’, she loves gardening, cycling and yoga.
Holly Wise connects Texas newsrooms with the resources offered by SJN. She is a former journalist, now journalism educator at Texas State University where she teaches upper-level writing and reporting courses. She is the founder of the Texas State Global News Team - an immersive, experiential study abroad program - and the founder of VoiceBox Media, a now-resting news nonprofit that elevated the voices of community changemakers. She is a 2018-2019 Fulbright teaching scholar. She spent a year teaching solutions journalism at Mount Carmel College in Bangalore, India, as well as holding workshops and journalist conversations in Indian cities outside of Bangalore, as well as in Nepal and Kyrgyzstan. She lives in Kyle, Texas, with her husband, toddler daughter and their senior German shepherd. (See all of the above for what she does in her spare time.)
