Let’s Hear It

Lisa Witter has always played to win. Since coming into the world "with a bang" after her mother went into labor at a demolition derby, she has focused on the intersection of politics and communications. Running for president on Showtime's American Candidate, writing The She-Spot: Why Women are the Market For Changing the World and How to Reach Them with Lisa Chen, becoming the head of Fenton Comm...

Drew Altman took a relatively small grantmaking foundation and transformed it into a media powerhouse. As the President and CEO of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, better known as KFF, Drew has turned his organization into one of the most influential and valuable non-partisan sources of health news in the country. What other foundation can say that about their field of interest? Drew sat dow...

Villy Wang's mother wanted her to be a corporate lawyer. Raised by a single mother in public housing in New York, she was supposed to be a hard-charging, successful professional - a leader in her field. And she certainly is, but what she created is not quite what her mother had in mind. Villy is the Founder, President, and CEO of BAYCAT, a non-profit organization that takes youth development and e...

This is the third in our bonus series of keynote speeches from ComNet 2019. Trabian Shorters is the CEO and Founder of BMe Community, which provides fellowships for Black leaders in the US, and which trains organizations in matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trabian’s amazing talk explains his work to promote what he calls “asset framing” – describing people by their aspirations and tale...

In 2018, Desmond Meade helped pull off the unthinkable. He united Florida voters by leading the campaign to pass Amendment 4, a grassroots citizen’s initiative that restored voting rights to over 1.4 million Floridians with past felony convictions. The initiative passed by nearly thirty percentage points – a rout in a state that is famous for being split down the middle. The following year Desmond...

Stacey Abrams is one of the most exciting and inspiring leaders of our time. Last week, she came to the Communications Network conference and gave the kind of speech that reminds us why we're in this business. Then she sat down with Communications Network CEO Sean Gibbons and took questions from the audience of a thousand people who had listened with rapt attention punctuated by explosions of laug...

We couldn’t resist – ComNet 19 is next week and we’re so excited that we’re bringing you a bonus edition of Let’s Hear It! Eric spoke with two of the staff from the Communications Network who are helping to make it all happen this year - Carrie Clyne, Deputy Director of Events and Community, and Tristan Mohabir, who is Director of Operations and Editorial. Carrie and Tristan talk about how they ar...

If you worked in foundation communications in the past thirty years, chances are that David Morse helped you – directly or indirectly. At the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and then the Atlantic Philanthropies, David helped advance the field of strategic communications like few others. Many of the modern concepts of communications strategy were born in his office or thr...

If you are interested in using communications for social change, the Communications Network Annual Conference is the single most exciting event of the year. From October 2-4, over a thousand foundation and nonprofit professionals will gather in Austin, Texas to learn from each other about how to use communications to make a difference. Stefan Lanfer of the Barr Foundation and Jade Floyd of the Cas...

Hunter Johansson could have easily traded on his twin sister Scarlett's fame for all kinds of rotten purposes. Instead, he co-founded a nonprofit to put solar panels on the roofs of first responder stations in Puerto Rico to save lives and protect the planet.   Hunter sat down with Eric to talk about why he co-founded Solar Responders, he speaks about the opportunities and challenges of having sha...

In five years as CEO of the San Francisco Foundation, Fred Blackwell has emerged as one of philanthropy’s foremost leaders dedicated to advancing racial and economic equity. As a community foundation, the San Francisco Foundation is able to raise money, make grants, and do the kind of political advocacy that private foundations cannot. Fred and his colleagues have used these tools to focus on hous...

Doniece Sandoval took a bit of time off from her career as a marketing and communications leader to take stock of her life and her future. Little did she know that she would be soon leading one of the most extraordinary social service organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that she would use her many skills to find new ways to connect with that region’s unhoused population. Doniece launc...

By the time Alfred Ironside arrived at the Ford Foundation in 2006, he had already had a career that most of us could hardly imagine – from leading disaster communications at the Red Cross to media relations at UNICEF, with stints in advertising in Bulgaria to a newspaper in Jerusalem to boot – Alfred Ironside may be the James Bond of communications. As the Vice President for Global Communications...

In June of 2016, the MacArthur Foundation announced that it would award a single $100 million grant to a single organization that was making a difference on a specific solution. They opened up a competition to allow organizations to vie for the award in a campaign they called 100&Change. The winner was the Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee, which created a project to help refu...

Beth Kanter became a nonprofit social media phenomenon because she used a new technology – blogging – to take and share notes about her work. She became an expert on what makes a healthy workplace because she wasn’t feeling 100% and decided to write a book about how feeling good contributes to better functioning organizations. She was scared by math, so she wrote a book about how to measure result...

It’s hard to talk about Jim Canales without getting a little gushy. He’s generous, funny, and way too modest for someone who has spent more than two decades as an amazing leader in our field. And as the president of the Irvine president from 2003-2014 and the Barr Foundation since then, Jim has established himself as one of philanthropy’s very best communicators. Oh, and he’s also just incredibly...

Na’ilah Suad Nasir once wanted to be a first-grade teacher, and she ended up as President of the Spencer Foundation – the country’s largest foundation dedicated solely to education research. Along the way, she served on the faculty in the Education Department at Stanford, she was chair of the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley (go Bears!), and she went on to be Vice Chancellor for...

Phil Buchanan, the President of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, has been helping foundations do their work better for almost two decades. But given that philanthropy is one step removed from the action, does that mean that Phil is helping people to help people who help people? What role do foundations and the organizations that support them play in improving people’s lives? And maybe most i...

For anyone who works in the field of nonprofit or foundation communications, the name Kristen Grimm looms large. She started as an intern at Fenton and within just a few years she was running the company, at age 28. She launched Spitfire Strategies when she was in her early thirties, and in the intervening decade and a half she has built the organization into one of the most highly respected nonpr...

Jesse Salazar is one of the most thoughtful and intelligent people you will ever be lucky enough to meet. If Jesse sounds wise beyond his years, it’s not just his soothing baritone – it might also be a result of his incredibly interesting background. Living in the only Hispanic household in his rural Pennsylvania community, he learned how different perspectives inform each other. As the youngest c...

Minna Jung has had a varied and wonderful career in nonprofit and foundation communications. She has run communications at a large foundation (Packard), a national non-profit (Earth Justice), and she’s even a published author (a children’s book called William’s Ninth Life). Minna talks about the pitfalls of professional ambition, the challenge of being creative while still getting the day-to-day w...

If anyone knows how foundations can and should use communications, it’s Grant Oliphant. Grant, who was formerly communications director at the Heinz Endowments, now runs the organization as its president. As a former board chair of the Communications Network, the national organization of foundation and nonprofit communications professionals, Grant may be one of the country’s great champions for ou...

How do we communicate in ways that are authentic, emotional, and evocative?   At a time when we are bombarded by reports, books, blogs (okay, and podcasts), the Race Card Project at the Aspen Institute invites people to tell their own stories about race and identity in a whopping six words. To date, they have collected over a quarter million six-word stories. As it turns out, six words can reduce...

Larry Kramer is the President of the Hewlett Foundation and he has stood out for being candid, opinionated, and seemingly unafraid of what the rest of the philanthropy world thinks of him. Lucky for him that he’s an incredibly nice guy, and lucky for us that he’s endlessly entertaining. In Eric Brown’s freewheeling conversation with Larry, the Hewlett president holds forth on trying to get the rig...