JSK names 10 Community Impact Fellows for 2021-2022

Paulette Brown-Hinds — Riverside, California
publisher, Black Voice News; co-founder, Media in Color
JSK Community Impact Fellow

Paulette Brown-Hinds is the publisher of the Black Voice News and co-founder of Media in Color. Paulette has over 30 years working in community media, and has served as a practitioner and strategist utilizing Black media as a trusted source for community news and information, as well as an advocate for California’s community media sector. As a co-founder of Media In Color, she is working with a collaborative of media professionals to ensure California’s news media organizations in communities of color are self-sufficient civic actors informing, empowering, and advancing the interests of their communities. As publisher of the Black Voice News she is working to transform the print publication into a digital leader in solutions based data journalism drawing on its 50-year history of justice seeking reporting. Important to that work is her Mapping Black California geospatial community mapping initiative. In 2020 she was awarded Google News Initiative innovation challenging funding to develop a data hub and content sharing platform for the Black Press.  Paulette serves on numerous news industry boards, including the California News Publishers Association, where she served as board chair in 2019, becoming the first African-American elected to lead the organization.

Lawrence Daniel Caswell — Cleveland, Ohio
field coordinator, Cleveland Documenters
JSK Community Impact Fellow

Lawrence Daniel Caswell is the field coordinator for Cleveland Documenters, which equips residents to better participate in local government and builds community around the exchange of civic knowledge.  Lawrence has worked in non-commercial community media for more than 27 years. As a long time programmer and eventual General Manager of WCSB 89.3fm, Cleveland State University’s community-focused radio station, he learned the importance of listening to and working alongside those often overlooked by traditional media.  Lawrence built on that experience during 11 years at ideastream, Northeast Ohio’s public media company. At ideastream, he dove deeper into broadcast journalism, multimedia, and social media production, while learning to use those tools to explore civic engagement and community building.  In his work with the non-profit start up Unify Labs, he went a step further and developed comprehensive strategies for community building and engaging communities in civic knowledge.

Celeste Fremon — Los Angeles, California
founder and editor, WitnessLA
JSK Community Impact Fellow

Celeste Fremon is the founder and editor of WitnessLA, a nonprofit independent news site focusing on criminal justice with a special focus on how violence prevention, the juvenile justice & criminal justice systems, and school discipline affect the health and well-being of California’s communities. She also edits WLA’s weekly newsletter, The California Justice Report.  She is the author of “G-Dog and the Homeboys” (Hyperion 1995, University of New Mexico Press, 2004, 2008) and the upcoming “Downfall,” about corruption and brutality inside the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.  She taught journalism as an adjunct professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, and as a visiting lecturer teaching at UC Irvine’s literary journalism program. Now she guest lectures on journalism and public policy at USC Annenberg, UC Irvine, Occidental College, and UCLA.

Simon Galperin — Bloomfield New Jersey
founding director, Bloomfield Information Project
JSK Community Impact Fellow

Simon Galperin is a journalist, technologist, and organizer working in media and policy to strengthen democracy. He is the founding director of the Bloomfield Information Project and of the Community Info Coop, a nonprofit organization leading development of new models of public participation and funding in journalism, media, and technology.  As a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, Simon launched and continues to run the organization’s Info Districts Project to establish special improvement districts as a model for funding local news and information now with partnerships in New Jersey, Colorado, Massachusetts, California, Brazil, and the UK.  Through the organization’s award-winning public service journalism lab, the Bloomfield Information Project, Simon puts theory into practice, building a community-run news service to serve Essex County, New Jersey’s working-class, and communities of color.  Previously, Simon worked in business development roles at GroundSource, Opinary, and ProPublica. He graduated from the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY with an M.A. in Engaged Journalism in 2016. Simon is also a former EMT and outdoor educator who speaks English as a second language.

Geoffrey King — Vallejo California
founder and executive editor, Open Vallejo
JSK Community Impact Fellow

Geoffrey King is the founder and CEO of the Informed California Foundation and its first project, Open Vallejo.  From 2013–2016, Geoffrey led the Technology Program at the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit organization that advocates for press freedom worldwide. He previously served as a First Amendment litigator representing journalists, activists and artists in free expression and open government matters. Geoffrey has taught privacy law at UC Berkeley since 2011.  Geoffrey served as co-chair of the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists Freedom of Information Committee from 2011–2015, and was an active member of the committee through 2017, during which time the chapter received national SPJ awards for diversity, communication, freedom of information advocacy and overall excellence.  A Vallejo native, King is a graduate of Vallejo public schools. He attended Diablo Valley Community College before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. with Highest Distinction. He holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Jennifer Larino — New Orleans, Louisiana
co-founder and president, Lede New Orleans
JSK Community Impact Fellow

Jennifer Larino is co-founder and president of Lede New Orleans, a media education nonprofit. Larino has spent the past decade covering local news in metro New Orleans, most recently as a lead reporter for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune where she covered local business news and assisted in managing the paper’s breaking news and crime team.  Prior to joining The Times-Picayune, Larino was managing editor at New Orleans CityBusiness, a local business weekly. She founded Lede New Orleans in 2019 with local filmmaker and educator Ejaaz Mason to increase representation in local media. She currently oversees operations, instructional and editorial content, fundraising and strategic planning for Lede New Orleans, which trains Black, Brown, Latinx, Asian and LGBTQ+ youth, ages 18-25, to tell the stories of marginalized communities in New Orleans.

Sara Lomax — Philadelphia Pennsylvania
president and CEO, WURD Radio
JSK Community Impact Fellow

Sara Lomax is president and CEO of WURD Radio, Pennsylvania’s only African-American owned talk radio station and co-founder of URL Media, a network of Black and Brown media organizations that share content, distribution and revenues to increase their long-term sustainability.   She has transformed WURD Radio from a legacy talk radio station to a multimedia communications company that provides original programming on air, online, through video and community events. Sara also launched two important initiatives: an environmental justice journalism platform called ecoWURD.com and Lively-HOOD, a multimedia project that connects Black Philadelphians to jobs, career readiness and entrepreneurship opportunities to address the persistent wealth gap in the Black community.  A graduate of University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Sara has written for several local and national publications. During 2020 she was a coach in the Major Metro Table Stakes Program and was the Program Lead for the BIPOC Sustainability Accelerator designed to empower Black and Brown owned media organizations.

David Rodríguez Muñoz — Salinas, California
photo editor, The Salinas Californian
JSK Community Impact Fellow

David Rodríguez Muñoz is a photojournalist and reporter who uses solution journalism to build community. He has worked on a range of stories including housing discrimination facing migrant farmworkers in Monterey County and covered the California wildfire season. His most recent project, “Living in the Shadows,” which featured an indigenous family struggling during the coronavirus pandemic, was produced during a fellowship with the non-profit photography organization Catchlight.  He discovered his passion for photography growing up in east Salinas. At a time where violence defined the neighborhood, he found purpose photographing the people around his community.  Today, he tells stories with images and text in his dual roles as the photo editor and education reporter for his hometown newsroom, The Salinas Californian, where he is the photo editor and education reporter. He earned a BA degree in photojournalism from San Francisco State University.

Jodi Rave Spotted Bear — Halliday, North Dakota
executive director, Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance
JSK Community Impact Fellow

Jodi Rave Spotted Bear is the executive director of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit media organization located in Twin Buttes, North Dakota. After a career in mainstream journalism, she returned to her ancestral lands on the Fort Berthold Reservation to found the alliance. The reservation in western North Dakota is home for the federally recognized Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes.  Journalism has been a lifetime calling for Jodi. She earned a journalism degree in news editing with an emphasis in history from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She’s the recipient of multiple journalism awards for news stories and column writing. Her work is featured in “The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity,” published by Columbia University Press.  Jodi was a Harvard Nieman Fellow, an MIT Knight Science in Journalism Project Fellow and was recently selected as a 2021 Bush Fellow for leadership.

Sonam Vashi — Atlanta, Georgia
co-founder and operations director, Canopy Atlanta
JSK Community Impact Fellow

Sonam Vashi is co-founder and operations director of Canopy Atlanta,  a community-led nonprofit newsroom telling stories chosen, produced, and presented with local residents.  A lifelong Atlantan, she is also an award-winning reporter whose work covering criminal justice, immigration, and the South has appeared in the New York Times, Atlanta magazine, ProPublica, CNN, the Washington Post, National Geographic, and several others.  She earned a BA degree in political science and journalism from Emory University. She is working with professors at Emory University to investigate Jim Crow–era racial terrorism in Georgia, including the 1906 Atlanta Massacre.