Our Team
Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro is a social entrepreneur, applied researcher and educator with more than 15 years of experience advancing journalism through leadership and innovation. She is the co-founder and former CEO of the National Trust for Local News, where she built the largest nonprofit local newspaper company in the United States. She currently serves as a strategic advisor to foundations and news outlets. She recently authored Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale: A Field-Level Analysis of Infrastructure Needs, published by Media Impact Funders. She also serves as a Senior Fellow at the National Conference on Citizenship, where she leads the American Conversation Project in partnership with Cortico and the MIT Media Lab.
Hansen Shapiro has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a Research Lead and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She has taught executive-level courses on strategy and organizational change at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY since 2019. Her published research spans business models for local news, membership strategies, and public media sustainability. She holds a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University and a BA from Swarthmore College.
Rubén Álvarez Silva, M.Ed. is the founding Program Director for the American Conversation Project, bringing over 22 years of dedication to fostering civic engagement. A "double-Demon" from DePaul University, where he also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies program, Rubén's civic work is rooted in his home community of Little Village, Chicago. There, in his predominantly working-class Mexican immigrant community, he learned the importance of intentional relationship-building and community organizing to advocate for a new neighborhood high school, oppose environmentally hazardous economic development, and elect community leaders. He pairs his professional commitment with personal dedication to campaigns for environmental justice, housing, decriminalization, and immigrant rights.
As an educator, Rubén believes education should provoke personal and societal transformation by deepening one’s awareness through scholarship, experience, dialogue, and reflection, engaging students as partners in the process. He resides on the southwest side of Chicago with his three children. In his free time, he enjoys swimming, biking, running, yoga, and perfecting the art of pancakes in honor of his paternal grandfather, Ignacio "Nacho" Álvarez.
Alex Kelly Berman is the Chief Program Officer at Cortico. Her work as a civic media practitioner emphasizes the power of recorded conversation to build community and deepen understanding. Her previous work centered on oral history, public programs, and program design across libraries, nonprofits, and youth media organizations.
Vy Dao is a sociologist whose work emphasizes storytelling’s role in creating shared culture. Her previous work centered on ethnographic methods and qualitative inquiry. Currently, she is the Director of Learning and Practice at Cortico. This nonprofit creates powerful technology tools for communities to engage in healthier public discourse and to lift up underheard voices.