About Us

Barbara Ganley, Founder and Director

To help small communities bring storytelling to civic engagement and change efforts, Barbara left the writing faculty of Middlebury College in 2008 to found and direct Community Expressions, LLC.  At Middlebury she co-founded and directed the Project for Integrated Expression and pioneered the integration of digital storytelling and blogging in the liberal arts and use of social media in service learning.  Her experience with social media, community mapping, dialogue, facilitation and storytelling to engage citizens and to effect change has brought her to work with small towns in the Northeast and the Rocky Mountain West as well as foundations, academic institutions and nonprofits on local, national and international levels.

Barbara gives interactive talks and workshops around the world, and writes widely about storytelling and communities, including the forward to the 2012 edition of Joe Lambert’s Digital Storytelling, Capturing Lives, Creating Community. In 2010 Orton Family Foundation published her essay, Re-Weaving Community, Creating the Future Storytelling at the Heart and Soul of Healthy Communities. She collaborates with and advises nonprofits and sits on various boards dedicated to community and storytelling, including Children’s Radio Foundation’s Advisory Board and University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana’s Ethnography of the University Initiative External Advisory Board and The YoungWriters Project as Creative and Strategic Advisor.

Remy Mansfield, Storytelling Fellow 

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Remy served as Community Expressions’ first Storytelling Fellow, consulting on projects with the Orton Family Foundation, developing youth workshops, and researching strategic design of CCDE. Remy cut his teeth in the experiential education realm with years of work for The Chewonki Foundation, and has since concentrated on education,development, and environmental sustainability. He has worked on international education design utilizing technology, creating and directing curricula for study abroad programs in South Asia and North Africa. Currently, Remy is the co-founder & director of The Modern Story – a grassroots educational program seeking to bridge the digital divide in India and around the world for first-generation learners. Remy looks forward to researching and using education, technology, and business knowledge to find localized solutions to sustainable development in rural communities. He considers himself lucky to be working with kids in some of the most beautiful parts of the country, and to be working with Barbara again.

Remy is now a graduate student at Harvard University School of Education.

Alex Yule, Digital Fellow & Webmaster

2009 – 2010

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Alex specializes in bending the laws of technology to his whim. He  graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in Geography, and finished his undergraduate career with a paper on using animated maps to portray massacres from the Holocaust (presented at the Association of American Geographer’s annual meeting). He has also written extensively on Heavy Metal music, as well as produced a radio show on various stations for the past seven years. An avid blogger, writer, cartographer and general technological evangelist, Alex plans to delve further into the world of geovisualization, using the technologies of the web to deliver meaningful exploratory tools that bring data to life (see his work with ESRI, Code for America and now Textizen). As the inaugural Digital Fellow his primary responsibilities included the design and upkeep of the original website, as well as planning and implementing the Centers for Community Digital Exploration.

View his mapping, writing and photography portfolios at his homepage, or read up at his blogs (Write Nothing and A Yuletide Apocalypse) and follow him on twitter.

More recently Alex was a Code for America Fellow and now co-founder and COO for Textizen.

Jaga N.A. Argentum, Storytelling & Design Fellow

2011 –

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Jaga is the European addition to Community Expressions. Born near Amsterdam, he has also lived & worked in Oslo as well as Berlin and Manchester. Now he continues to wander around Europe changing countries too often to keep track. He is an experienced visual artist, graphic & sound designer and trainer with a passion for pushing the online boundaries and  bringing the virtual world into our real lives. In his art, design work and narratives he employs the tools of storytelling to raise questions on current society, inequality and the importance of our childhoods; often his work will focus on those considered underdogs. Drawing inspiration from his own life and the world around him, Jaga not only contributes his design skills to Community Expressions but also acts as a trainer and consultant on both an internal and external level.
As a true city boy he regrets not having a picture showing him in some wild rugged nature activity, but he has kayaked once.
 Jaga’s work can be found at Cowbird, Medium, Vimeo, Issuu and his own site Perpetual Fuss. Follow him on Twitter .
Elizabeth Ganley-Roper,  Communications Fellow
2012
img_99101Elizabeth is the most recent addition to Community Expressions. She has helped prepare and co-teach our workshops and  re-designed the website. She is an experienced researcher, writer and editor, skilled in digital communications and passionate about women’s empowerment, human rights, social justice and education. She has researched and written material for a wide range of online and print publications including the feminist website, Adios Barbie, and has developed and edited content for nonprofit organizations including Supportive Community, dedicated to women’s economic development, and the Social Economic Academy, an educational and activist center.
Elizabeth has recently relocated to Brooklyn after spending the past two years living and working in Italy, Israel and Turkey. She is now a digital strategist at Blue State Digital.

Our Founding Advisory Board

Bryan Alexander, Director of Research, NITLE

Bryan researches and develops programs on the advanced uses of information technology in liberal arts contexts. His primary research interests concern mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, and social software. Other interests include digital writing, copyright and intellectual property, information literacy, project management, information design, and interdisciplinary collaboration. He maintains and contributes to a series of weblogs, including Liberal Education Today. Bryan lives up in the Green Mountains of Vermont with his beloved family, many animals, and a great many trees. There he bakes, lifts weights, carries wood, and thinks about movies.

Beth Kanter

Beth is a nonprofit technology consultant working with nonprofit organizations in the areas of training, planning, research, curriculum development and evaluation. She has worked in the nonprofit sector for 25 years, beginning her work with nonprofit arts organizations. She worked as a management evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts for its Challenge and Advancement Programs for over eight years. As a decade-long consultant with the New York Foundation for the Arts, she designed and managed many arts and technology programs, including Arts Wire where she served as the online community builder. She has worked with a wide range of nonprofit technology providers on various projects over the past five years to the present, including N-TEN, Npower, CTCnet, Summit Collaborative, New York Alliance of Arts Organizations, Legal Services Corporation, CompuMentor, and others. Beth has been blogging about nonprofits and technology for several years on her professional blog, Beth’s Blog (http://beth.typepad.com). She is the nonprofit contributing editor for the Blogher (http://www.blogher.org) and is an active blogger in CompuMentor’s Netsquared (http://www.netsquared.org) community site that is focused on how nonprofits can use new tools for social change. She is a member of the Harvard University’s Berkman Center Blogger group where she has been a speaker on the topics of nonprofits and blogging.

Sarah Kramer

Sarah is a multimedia journalist for The New York Times, where she contributes to their web site and writes for the paper. Prior, she was the senior producer and a founding staff member of StoryCorps, the Peabody-award winning public radio project, where she oversaw all StoryCorps content, including the weekly Morning Edition broadcasts, the StoryCorps book and the podcasts. She is also an NPR contributor, most recently producing Sound Portraits’ radio documentary “The Ground We Lived On” which won the Radio Impact Award from the Third Coast Audio Festival. Her background in radio and video journalism includes mentoring at WNYC’s Youth Radio Series, Radio Rookies, and working as a field producer on documentary films for PBS and HBO including American Experience’s Miss America and HBO’s In Memoriam, September 11, 2001. She also directed Bunk 22, which showed at the IFP. Kramer has a BA from Middlebury College and an MS in Journalism with a concentration in radio from Columbia University.

Alan Levine, Vice President, NMC Community and Chief Technology Officer for the New Media Consortium (NMC)

Alan is widely recognized nationally and internationally for expertise in the application of new technologies to educational environments and was a pioneer on the web going back to 1993. An early proponent of weblogs for information sharing, he shares his ideas and discoveries at CogDogBlog. In his current post with the NMC, Alan has infused the organization with applications of web 2.0 tools, including a new NMC web site as an online community featuring rich media, user-generated content, folksonomy tools, and social presence. He has established web sites for the NMC Campus Observer (Second Life activities at sl.nmc.org) and the NMC Virtual Worlds initiative (virtualworlds.nmc.org) running on open source blog software and created new wiki sites to support the NMC Horizon project activities and a hub for Second Life resources.

Joe Lambert, Executive Director, Center for Digital Storytelling

Joe founded the Center for Digital Storytelling (formerly the San Francisco Digital Media Center) in 1994, with wife Nina Mullen and colleague Dana Atchley. Together they developed a unique computer training and arts program that today is known as the Standard Digital Storytelling Workshop. This process grew out of Joe’s long running collaboration with Dana on the solo theatrical multimedia work, Next Exit. Since then, Joe has traveled the world to spread the practice of digital storytelling and has authored and produced curricula in many contexts, including the Digital Storytelling Cookbook, the principle manual for the workshop process, and Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community.

Nancy White, Founder, Full Circle Associates

A “Jill of all trades,” Nancy uses her facilitation, communications marketing, and leadership abilities for over 25 years in a wide range of settings: broadcast media, not-for-profit and business communities. She started Full Circle Associates, a collaboration and communications consultancy, to provide assistance to non-profits and businesses and help them connect through online and offline strategies. She has a particular interest in the application of online interaction tools and techniques to virtual teams, communities of practice, in international community development, and with all types of learning communities. Lately she has added graphic facilitation and other visual approaches to her toolkit and has been developing the concept of community technology stewardship with Etienne Wenger and John Smith. Some of this will be shared in their forthcoming book, “Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities of Practice” (2009).

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