Consultant
I occasionally contract with environmental non-profits whose mission I support, for design, to produce a multimedia project, to write or develop a new evidence-based storytelling strategy for them.
Good communicators don’t produce releases that read like advertisements, nor media notices strewn with phrases like “unique and revolutionary breakthrough,” "landmark findings," "robust, innovative and cutting-edge." Rather, they will create a stream of newsworthy announcements, compelling feature stories, good imagery, data visualizations, and multimedia, all relying on principled graphic design. They want to communicate findings by crafting narratives with neat explanations, succinct quotes, and memorable metaphors. Carried with stories that convey the implications and benefits of research to a general audience, a knowledgeable writer should be able to frame a message in the appropriate way — appealing to selected values for the intended audience.
Clients have included the Woods Hole Research Center, the Land Trust of Santa Barbara, and American Forests. I have also worked with PBS, NPR, the BBC, The Guardian, and CBS Sixty Minutes, on press liaison for environmental scientists.
Hidden Corner is an environmental education program, and communications professional project developed in lieu of a thesis for my master's degree. Human Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan wrote, "We turn space into place through personal experience. If space is abstract and universal, place is imbued with meaning by virtue of experiences we have had there ... " The program was designed to achieve this for families with children in grades K through elementary school, in both the Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez watersheds. The site has recorded ~ 20,000-page hits per month for the last seven years.