Center For Health Leadership

WORKSHOP SPEAKER BIOS

Dan Cohen, Full Court Press

Dan Cohen founded Full Court Press in 2001 with a vision of providing public relations, public affairs and crisis counsel to companies, foundations and non-profits who wish to use strategic communications to make social change. Dan is a veteran public relations, political communications and media strategist. He applied his belief in brand building public relations to all of the General Mills Brands including Wheaties, Cheerios, Box Tops for Education & Betty Crocker. His work at General Mills in the mid-1990's was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as being on the forefront of leveraging brands to greater PR success. Dan was a political consultant for initiatives and Democratic candidates for offices from mayor to Congress. He was recently named by the East Bay Business Journal as one of its "40 under 40," and serves on the Board of Directors of Alameda County Meals on Wheels. Dan is also on the Board of the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. Dan is a licensed attorney but chooses to practice strategic communications … his passion.

Mike Kirkwood, Polka CEO

Mike Kirkwood founded Polka, a personal health platform, as part of a thesis that patient centric health needed a platform.  Polka is a highly personal life stream about a person's health affairs that connects to devices, applications, and platforms.   Mike has spoken at Health 2.0, mHealth, and the Quantified Self as an advocate for the personal information and personal controls of the information flow.  He is a volunteer on a handful of industry working groups, including OpenID, Kantara Initiative, and tri-chair of the California HIE patient engagement workgroup.

Mike's background is as an enterprise architect and entrepreneur.  He sold his first company in 1996 to Excite, and has played leadership roles in web, B2B, and B2C at some of the fastest moving technology companies, including Cisco, Sony, and Apple.

Caricia Catalani, Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley; Co-Director, VideoVoice Collective; Researcher, RTI Interantional

Dr. Caricia Catalani, DrPH, MPH is a researcher, teacher, and advocate whose work focuses on the use of community-based participatory research and new media, and particularly participatory video practices, for the advancement of public health and social justice. She is founder of the VideoVoice Collective – a health advocacy and research organization that works to turn documentary film on its head by putting digital video cameras in the hands of those who know their communities best. She is also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, training students, faculty, and staff in the use of video for health research and advocacy. She is also a post-doctoral researcher at the Research Triangle Institute International, working to develop and test innovative health and information technology tools that increase access to HIV education, testing, and treatment in India.  In 2009, Dr. Catalani earned her Doctor of Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley, with an emphasis on new media and community-based participatory research for health. In 2005, she earned her Masters of Public Health with a concentration in Maternal, Child, and Reproductive Health from Columbia University. Dr. Catalani has worked with communities internationally and nationally to develop local and empowering strategies for the improvement of health and wellbeing since 1996.

Julieta Kusnir, KPFA Radio

Julieta has contributed to bilingual radio programming in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1999.  Her radio pieces have aired on NPR, KQED, KCBS, KALW, PRI, and across the Pacifica network among other media outlets. Julieta continues to produce and host segments of La Raza Chronicles on KPFA radio with an emphasis on health issues. Julieta’s long time interest in health inequities, and particularly those in the Latino community, drew her back to the university to complete a Masters of Public Health. Her areas of interest in the public health field include the framing of media coverage of health issues, and the media's impact on public engagement in the political process, as well as popular education strategies . In 2008,  she received an Ethnic  Media Health Fellowship through the California Endowment.   She spent the summer of 2009 as a health reporter at KQED through the Kaiser Family Foundation. Along with producing radio and lecturing at San Francisco State University, she provides trainings for KPFA radio's apprenticeship program.

Holly Minch, Lightbox Collaborative CEO

Holly launched the LightBox Collaborative in 2010 to harness fresh talent to help jump start strategic thinking, create clarity in real time, and identify actionable approaches to engage communities toward worthy causes. Because she believes it’s easier to draw people into your ideas when you’re having fun, Holly has created game-based tools for facilitation of accelerated strategy dialog; the fun format belies the deep questions she help teams tackle on a regular basis.

Holly’s work has been honored by the Council on Foundations with a Gold Award for Excellence in Public Policy Communications. Holly was named by PR News as a “Young PR Star,” recognizing her as a PR leader and creative practitioner in the industry. She was Editor of Loud and Clear in an Election Year, a guidebook created to help nonprofits convey their messages in the crowded election environment.

Her experience includes her work as Vice President of Spitfire Strategies, where she created communications programs for grantees of the nation’s largest foundations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Holly was Executive Director of the Communications Leadership Institute, where she helped nonprofits use high-impact communications to achieve social change. Holly also served as Director of the SPIN Project, assisting hundreds of grassroots groups with strategic communications resources. She launched the successful SPIN Academy, now in its 12th year. Holly started out as press secretary for the Sierra Club, alternately doing battle with and cozying up to the Washington, D.C. press corps. She was primary contact for the national media and created national, regional, and local campaigns.

Beth Kanter, Zoetica CEO

Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog (http://www.bethkanter.org), one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits and co-author of the highly acclaimed book, The Networked Nonprofit, published by J. Wiley in 2010.

Beth is the CEO of Zoetica, a company that serves nonprofits and socially conscious companies with top-tier, online marketing services.  In 2009, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.”  She is currently the Visiting Scholar for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation.  She is 2010 Society of New Communications Research Fellow for 2010.

She curated NTEN’s “We Are Media: Nonprofit Social Media Starter Kit,” an online community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.

Beth contributed a chapter to “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN both published in 2009.  A much in demand speaker and trainer, she was the keynote speaker for the Cambodian Bloggers Conference in Phnom Penh, The Connecting Up Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Minnesota Council on Nonprofits, Making Media Conference in Chicago and others. She has presented about nonprofits and social media at some of the leading social media industry conferences including O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns, Gnomedex, SWSX, Blogher, and Podcamp.

More coming soon!