Jesse Hardman

Jesse Hardman founded the Listening Post Collective, a project that supports community-led journalism outfits in the United States to foster better information sharing and strengthen civic health. He was an early proponent of mapping a community’s information needs to establish more reflective and equitable news and information flow. Along with his amazing LPC colleagues, supported by Internews, he launched an open-source guide that allows anyone to deploy these community-mapping methods. 

Hardman helped launch the Civic Information Index, a data driven tool to help map drivers of engaged, informed, equitable and healthy communities in the U.S., as well as the Immigrant News Coalition, which brings together outlets doing essential journalism for, with and about immigrant communities.  

Hardman has been a regular contributor to NPR, written for the Atlantic and Al Jazeera America, and worked as a video journalist for TIME. He’s taught journalism in a state-of-the-art classroom in New York City, a storefront in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, and a van traveling Sri Lanka’s war zone. He’s created news startups in local communities and humanitarian crisis zones. He’s fluent in Spanish, has a graduate degree in education from Harvard, is a proud dad and part of the Minnesota diaspora.