Our Team
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.
Cameron Hickey is the CEO of the National Conference on Citizenship. Hickey is an award winning journalist and technologist who founded the Algorithmic Transparency Institute at NCoC to empower journalists, researchers, and civil society advocates to increase accountability for digital platforms.
Prior to NCoC, Hickey led the Information Disorder Lab at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. As a journalist, Hickey covered science and technology for the PBS NewsHour and NOVA where won a News and Documentary Emmy Award and a Newhouse Mirror Award for his reporting.
Kate Barranco is the Youth Engagement Program Lead for the American Conversation Project and the founder of Conscious Futures Studio, a design and strategy practice working at the intersection of civic imagination, intergenerational collaboration, and futures thinking. She designs research, curricula, and participatory experiences that treat young people as co-creators of the future rather than its future audience, with recent work for organizations including New America, CoGenerate, Democracy 2076, and Youth MOVE National, where she also serves on the Board of Directors.
Kate's approach is grounded in trauma-informed facilitation and systems research, developed through interdisciplinary study in Culture and Politics and Cognitive Science at Georgetown University and through work in the global mental health field in Europe. She was later selected for a role supporting trauma-informed leadership development at USAID, a position eliminated before she began as the agency was dismantled at the start of the current administration. That experience deepened her interest in how institutions can build lasting capacity for imagination and repair even amid disruption. She lives in Washington, DC.
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.
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.