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David Lerner has over twenty years of hands-on experience in media advocacy for human rights and social justice causes. From advising clients on the best strategy to implementing multi-dimensional communications campaigns, Lerner is one of the top publicists in his field.
Prior to founding Riptide with poet and writer Kathy Engel, Lerner served as press representative for the Center for Constitutional Rights, promoting the Center's cutting-edge litigation and public education campaigns. Working with leading civil rights lawyers he developed expertise in litigation publicity.
Lerner has extensive contacts in both the human rights and social justice communities around the world. He grew up as a political activist, attending many anti-war and civil rights rallies as a teenager. As a student at the innovative Friends World College, he traveled extensively, living abroad in both Europe and Latin America, including several months working with street children in Bogotá, Colombia. He is proficient in Spanish and harbors a dream of learning Greek, or at least mastering the alphabet! |
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| Shonna Carter has been with Riptide Communications since 2001 and has worked with The Restaurant Opportunities Center to publicize abusive labor practices in the restaurant industry, as well as the opening of COLORS Restaurant, a cooperative restaurant owned collectively by its employees. She has also worked with Bread and Roses, the cultural wing of Union 1199 on their innovative photo project and book by Harper Collins, unseenamerica, which taught workers the art of photography as a means for documenting their lives.
Prior to joining Riptide, Carter worked with investigative reporter Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice, wrote for InterPress Service, and was a Community Affairs Reporter and Art section Editor for Global Information Network (GIN), a daily news service covering events in developing countries. Carter recently took a year off to pursue a master’s degree at The Journalism School at Columbia University where she concentrated in newspaper journalism. Carter also has a degree from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study where she majored in Journalism, Arts and Politics. |
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| Karmen Ross has worked as a communications professional in the public interest law sector since 1993. She directed the Emmy award-winning documentary film, Calling the Ghosts, which chronicles the lives of two women survivors of detention camps and systematic rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was a communications consultant to the Permanent Mission of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the United Nations for their International Court of Justice proceedings against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) for violations of the Genocide Convention. She also served as a consultant to the Center for Constitutional Rights for Doe v. Karadzic, a federal civil action against the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, which received a record judgment of $4.5 billion in the year 2000. Ross has also worked as an independent journalist with 60 Minutes, 20/20, and The Boston Globe, covering stories of war criminal living at large both in the United States and Europe. She was the first communications director for the International Center for Transitional Justice based in New York.
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| Odile Weissenborn is the newest member of the Riptide Communications staff. Odile spent nine years at CNN on various assignments, covering the United Nations during the infamous months leading up to war in Iraq, and producing breaking news including coverage of 9/11. She left television journalism in 2005 to help launch the nonprofit National Organization for Empowering Caregivers. She recently completed a fellowship at Coro New York Leadership Center, where she studied public policy, and worked as Communications Manager at The Connections Place, a nonprofit advancing awareness of mental health issues. A graduate of Vassar College, she's fluent in Spanish; her family hails from Argentina.
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| Elaine Elinson has worked as a media advocate for the civil rights community in California for more than two decades. She is currently a communications consultant for numerous public interest legal organizations, including the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and several plaintiff law firms.
From 1980 to 2001, Elinson served as communications director for the ACLU of Northern California, directing media campaigns on a wide variety of issues, including racial profiling, immigrants’ rights, the death penalty, and juvenile justice.
Elinson has developed and implemented media strategies in local, state and national media markets, gaining coverage most effective for her clients, ranging from the New York Times and Sixty Minutes to California’s vibrant ethnic media. She is an experienced media trainer for both clients and lawyers who are facing the cameras, and has taught seminars on media advocacy at Stanford Law School, Hastings Law School and U.C. Berkeley School of Journalism.
A former reporter and editor with Pacific News Service, Elinson is coauthor of Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines, which was banned by the Marcos regime. Elinson is writing a history of civil liberties in California that will be published by Heyday Books in 2009.
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Lina Srivastava is the Principal of Lina Srivastava Consulting LLC, which focuses on employing strategy, innovation and participation to create social change. She works with nonprofit organizations, corporate entities, activists and artists to advance their social change initiatives through planning, analysis of organizational structures, partnerships, and communications and media, particularly using documentary film, video and technology.
Lina is the former Executive Director of Kids with Cameras, and the past Interim Executive Director of the Association of Video and Filmmakers. She has provided strategic support to the social networking sites Art Tribes Network and ResistNetwork, and to films such as Born into Brothels, The Devil Came on Horseback, Fire Under the Snow and Project Kashmir. Lina has consulted with a wide-ranging group of organizations dedicated to social change, for example, a nonprofit dedicated to collecting genocide survivors' stories, a network teaching leadership skills to young women from Latin America and Africa, and a research institution that is the world's foremost expert on small arms and violence. Trained as an attorney at New York University School of Law, Lina is based in New York, New York.
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| Bronx native Gloria Bransky has been working at Riptide for over ten years as a full-charge bookkeeper and overall financial wizard. She also keeps a keen eye on Riptide's administrative procedures. Prior to joining Riptide, Bransky worked at Associated Camps and Jay Gold Films. She is also a strong advocate for environmental health and safety in her community of Co-Op City. |
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