Alison B.

Background

About Alison B.

Two tenets have guided my career. The first is that the media has an inadequately tapped its capacity for good: creating empathy, eliminating stigma, inspiring action, providing access to knowledge. The second is that smart partnerships achieve more than going it alone. As an undergraduate at Hampshire College, I explored how learning media production could contribute to students’ media literacy and critical thinking. As a graduate student at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, I investigated how global media companies — and others in the private sector — could come together to defeat the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In my career, I have used pop culture to encourage young people — in the U.S. and other countries — to participate in the political process. Today I partner with filmmakers, production companies, and authors to use the stories they tell to instigate action that leads to social and policy change. I began my career at a small nonprofit organization in NC that worked with young people to create their own media. At Rock the Vote, I worked to convince young people that political participation wasn’t a waste of time and to convince candidates that young voters weren’t a waste of money. My work with Rock the Vote led me to Cambodia and Mexico to train young political leaders and to Austria, where —as a Salzburg Seminar faculty member— I engaged with groups from Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa to develop strategies to engage young voters. At the Kennedy School, I worked with the Kaiser Family Foundation and UNAIDS to create a strategic plan for the Global Media AIDS Initiative, mobilizing media companies around the world to dedicate resources to fight the pandemic. After school, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Mary Robinson hired me to develop the strategic plan for the Business Women’s Initiative against HIV/AIDS. Soon after, I landed at Ogilvy PR where I worked with the Gates Foundation to help strengthen their grantees’ capacity to be effective global health advocates. Later, at DDB, I led the agency’s Issues & Advocacy group, where my clients included major foundations (Packard, Gates Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson) and advocates working on abortion and LGBTQ rights. In 2011, I launched Aggregate, a creative strategy group that works with nonprofit organizations, foundations, authors, filmmakers, and production companies to determine how to leverage good stories to create social and policy change.