Executive Director

 

Morgan Malone,
Executive Director

Morgan is City Bureau’s Executive Director. With a strong background in administrative operations, city government, inclusive placemaking, and economic development, Morgan brings experience in community-driven partnerships, complex systems change, organizing and advocacy, and social impact program design to City Bureau.

Read more about Morgan here.

 

Chicago Programs

Marilyn Carteno,
Events and Outreach CoOrdinator

Marilyn is City Bureau’s Events and Outreach Coordinator. She is an educator and theater artist who is committed to creating spaces where folks feel heard and welcomed. In this role, she will plan and facilitate City Bureau’s public events as well as develop relationships with civic and community organizations in Chicago’s BIPOC neighborhoods.

Read more about Marilyn and her work.

Bettina Chang,
co-founder and Chicago Programs Lead

Bettina is the Chicago Programs Lead of Chicago Programs at City Bureau, and formerly executive digital editor of Chicago magazine. She also edited at DNAinfo Chicago and Pacific Standard.

ARIel cheung, editorial director

Ariel is City Bureau's Editorial Director. She is based in Chicago and previously worked at the Chicago Tribune, Modern Luxury and DNAinfo. Her passion for proactive community-focused journalism brought her to City Bureau, where she oversees Chicago coverage produced by the fellowship program, local Documenters and the Newswire newsletter.

 

Sarah Conway,
Senior Reporter & Special projects manager

Sarah is an award-winning journalist that believes in the healing power of storytelling. Over the past six years with City Bureau, she has led reporting teams covering neighborhood economic development, criminal justice reform, and food justice. She writes intimate narrative stories rooted in investigative and community-centered reporting.

India Daniels,
Civic Reporter

India has a background in curriculum design, copy editing and nonprofit coordination. She writes about civic power via the Newswire, a twice-weekly email newsletter based on Chicago Documenters’ questions and insights from local government meetings.

Read more about India and her work.

Grace Del Vecchio, Editorial Program Coordinator, Chicago Documenters

Grace is a City Bureau’s Editorial Program Coordinator for Chicago Documenters. She is a proud Philadelphian with a background in organizing, reporting and producing. Grace is passionate about developing newsroom practices that prioritize opportunities for Chicagoans to grow as storytellers and stakeholders while developing their own relationships with civic engagement and participation.

Read more about Grace and their work.

 

Jerrel floyd,
engagement reporter

Jerrel is City Bureau’s Engagement Reporter. Previously, he was a ProPublica Illinois fellow and a local government reporter with the Post and Courier in Charleston, SC. He has covered a wide range of topics from growth and development to education and health. In this role, he will develop a beat centered on public and affordable housing and food accessibility as well as mentor early-career reporters in our Civic Reporting Fellowship program.

Read more about Jerrel and his work.

W.D floyd,
director of community engagement

W.D Floyd is the Community Engagement Director at City Bureau. He is a multidisciplinary practitioner whose work is grounded in the desire to illuminate the dignity of those who have traditionally been framed through a lens of degradation. 

Read more about W.D. and his work.

Natalie Christian-Frazier,
DOCUMENTERS COMMUNITY MANAger

Natalie is from the West Side of Chicago. She utilizes her eclectic background in filmmaking, food service and journalism to cultivate a rich and vibrant Chicago Documenters community.

Read more about Natalie and her work.


Documenters Network and National Impact

JODY CHONG, DOCUMENTERS NETWORK DIRECTOR

Jody is the Documenters Network Director. Based in Atlanta, she leads the strategy to grow and support Documenters programs across the country. Her work is grounded in justice and liberation for all people. Jody has a background in nonprofit operations, strategy, and economic justice programs and policy.

Read more about Jody and her work.

NavJOT HEER, Documenters Network Coordinator

Navi is a Documenters Network Coordinator with City Bureau. She comes from the Central Valley of California with a background in architecture, urban planning, and community organizing. Currently based in Chicago, Navi aims to foster connections between people and ideas, dismantle expertise, and co-create dignified spaces for systems-impacted people to thrive.

Read more about Navjot and her work.

Rafael MuÑoz-Echavarria, Documenters Network coordinator

Rafael is a Documenters Network Coordinator with City Bureau. He is a proud chilango that comes to City Bureau from WUWM in Milwaukee, where he was the Community Engagement Coordinator. Rafa brings deep community organizing experience, including with a restaurant workers-led organization; a people-first approach to community building; and strong facilitation and collaborative journalism skills.

Read more about Rafael and his work.

 

Max Resnik,
director of network services, documenters network

Max is the Director of Network Services for the Documenters Network at City Bureau. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Max works with civic and media organizations across the country to equip community members to document and amplify important local information from public meetings.

Read more about Max and his work.

Daniel simmons-Ritchie,
Software Developer

Dan is the Software Developer for the Documenters Network. Based in Austin, TX, Dan builds software to help Documenters across the country track and record information from public meetings and coordinates with the Network’s open source community. Before he was a developer, Dan was an award-winning investigative reporter.

Kris smith, Network Manager, documenters network

Kris is the Network Manager for the Documenters Network. In this role, they use their background in nonprofit administration, consulting, project management, and trauma-responsive and healing-centered facilitation to support the network to thrive. Based in Philadelphia, Kris grounds their work in co-creating spaces for people and communities to critically think, deeply feel, and self-determine aligned actions.

Sonam vashi, Director of Network success, documenters network

Sonam is the Director of Network Success for the Documenters Network. Based in her hometown of Atlanta, she leads the development of strategies to support a thriving network of community journalists. She has a background in local reporting, archival research, and nonprofit leadership as a cofounder of Canopy Atlanta.

Read more about Sonam and her work.

 
 

Communications & Development

TYRA BOSNIC, Lead Development Writer

Tyra is City Bureau’s Lead Development Writer. Born and raised in Chicago, Tyra comes to the work with a background in journalism and state government that has centered on tapping into the power of words to redefine narratives and foster collective healing.

Read more about Tyra and her work.

Kristen Fallica, Director of communications

Kristen is City Bureau's Director of Communications. Drawing on her diverse background in digital strategy, education, nonprofit leadership, and public programming, Kristen is energized by developing marketing and communications strategies to help City Bureau expand its reach and impact. 

Louise Macaraniag,
DEvelopment coordinator

Louise is City Bureau’s Development Coordinator. She is a writer, organizer, and activist who is committed to creating a more equitable, pro-people media landscape for community members and organizations.

Read more about Louise and their work.

 

Yasmin Zacaria Mikhaiel,
digital producer

Yasmin is City Bureau's Digital Producer. With a background in theatre (dramaturgy and criticism), education, and oral history, their multidisciplinary work as a queer, fat, brown, femme amplifies and archives stories that go lost/stolen/forgotten. They have hands on City Bureau's socials, newsletters, and website and enjoy working collaboratively to promote civically-made journalism programs and projects.

Read more about Yasmin and their work.

caroline1.jpg

CAROLINE OLSEN,
DEVELOPMENT manager

Caroline is City Bureau's Development Coordinator. She comes from a background in multimedia producing, storytelling and nonprofit communications. A former reporting fellow, she's excited about returning to City Bureau to help build a sustainable movement toward community-driven media systems.

Read more about Caroline and her work.

 

Operations

Harry Backlund,
co-founder and Operations and Development Lead

Harry is Operations and Development Lead at City Bureau and the founding publisher of the South Side Weekly, a volunteer-run community newspaper in Chicago. 

Eli Ramirez,
Operations and finance Manager

Eli is City Bureau’s Operations and Finance Manager. Once a music educator and hospitality professional, he deeply values creating long-lasting and meaningful relationships with folks that love Chicago.

Read more about Eli and his work.

Cristina salgado,
Director of people and culture

Cristina is the Director of People and Culture at City Bureau. She values storytelling, community and healing justice. Her life's work has been about co-struggling with young people and building student voice programs and practices. She is bringing her culture building and organizing skills to continue innovating our equitable hiring process, as well as our internal systems and structures.

Read more about Cristina and her work.

shabaka verna,
operations coordinator

Shabaka is City Bureau’s Operations Coordinator. He pulls from his background in multimedia, special events and information systems to fuel ingenuity and equip people to dream big. In this role, he maintains administrative systems to ensure City Bureau’s space is used to have a positive impact on staff and community.

Read more about Shabaka and his work.

 
 
 

Advisors

 
andrea1.jpg

Andrea Hart,
Co-founder, Consultant

Andrea Faye Hart is a co-founder of City Bureau and serves as a Growth Support Consultant. She is currently causing good trouble as a Dean’s Scholar at Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School in Nashville.

darryl1.jpg

Darryl Holliday,
Co-founder, Consultant

Darryl is a co-founder of City Bureau and previously served as the Executive Director of National Impact at City Bureau. He's a Studs Terkel Award-winning journalist, founder of the Illustrated Press and reporter formerly with DNAinfo Chicago.

 

Board of Directors

Lee_Akili_highrez-8234.jpg

Akili Lee is a social entrepreneur who has spent 15 years creating human-centered and technology empowered systems that provide equitable access to opportunity. He is the co-founder of the Digital Youth Network (DYN), an organization that addresses the urgent need to redesign learning by cultivating equity in our systems and agency in the lives of young people. Akili has led the design and development of two ground-breaking technology platforms that power the DYN learning systems. He is the creator of iRemix, one of the earliest youth-focused social learning networks. Akili is the co-founder of Remix Learning, a social enterprise that provides proven learning products to schools, non-profits and city agencies.


joe+germuska+headshot.jpg

Joe Germuska is the Executive Director at Northwestern University Knight Lab, a community of designers, developers, students, and educators working on experiments designed to push journalism into new spaces. He is also the project lead on Census Reporter, a Knight News Challenge project to make U.S. Census data easy for journalists to use. Before joining the Knight Lab, Joe was a founding member of the news application team at the Chicago Tribune and a project board member for the PANDA project, another Knight News Challenge winner.


sheila+solomon+headshot.jpg

Sheila Solomon is an award-winning former newspaper reporter and editor and has worked for the Hampton Monitor, Daily Press, Newsday, The Charlotte Observer and Chicago Tribune. She’s chair and a co-founder of Journalism Funding Partners, a nonprofit helping to secure and manage grants to support local journalism. She’s also Strategic Alliance Manager at Rivet360 (based in Chicago). Among her honors is being inducted into the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications Hall of Fame at Hampton University (Hampton, Va.) receiving the Ida B. Wells Award given by Medill and the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Chicago Headline Club’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Sheila is a judge for the National Headliner Awards, serves on the board of Growing Community Media, The Obsidian Collection leadership team and The News Literacy Project’s national leadership council.


Headshot_TianaEpps-Johnson.jpeg

Tiana Epps-Johnson is the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Technology and Civic Life. Prior to CTCL, she was the New Organizing Institute's Election Administration Director. She and her team provide resources and training to support local election administrators in modernizing the ways they communicate with voters. They also publish free, open-source civic datasets that have been accessed over 200 million times through some of the most powerful tools that drive civic participation. Tiana earned a MSc in Politics and Communication from the London School of Economics and a BA in Political Science from Stanford University. In 2015 Tiana joined the inaugural class of Technology and Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. And in 2018 Tiana was selected to join the inaugural class of Obama Foundation Fellows.


Matt Denn is a managing director at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, a global venture philanthropy firm that supports high impact social enterprises.  An attorney, Matt previously served as the elected Attorney General, Lieutenant Governor, and Insurance Commissioner of Delaware, as well as appointed chief counsel to the Governor.  Matt is the co-chair of the Redding Consortium on Educational Equity, a Delaware government body dedicated to improving education for Delaware students, and is the co-founder and vice chair of Action for Delaware’s Children, a children’s advocacy organization in Delaware.  Matt also serves on the boards of Cultural Brokers, a California non-profit that works to assist families involved in the child protection system, and First Place for Youth, a non-profit that operates supported housing for young people aging out of foster care.