UNDIVIDED TEAM
OUR BOARD
Co-founder & Board Member
-
Amy is a former Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State. She served in five countries across the Middle East and North Africa (Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates). The year that affected Amy more than others was the year she lived in a converted shipping container in Baghdad. Amy was inspired by the strength and resilience of the local women she met. She once confronted one of them asking, "after living through eight years of the Iran/Iraq war, two Gulf wars, and bombing campaigns in the late 1990s, how are you not broken?" The local woman’s response was, "my mother." The Iraqi woman explained that through it all, her mother taught her to “live like a survivor”, and to have courage, strength, and love. Those attributes were the ones that helped her live life to the fullest, and see beauty even in the most dreadful conditions. This encounter moved Amy and it was in that moment that Amy knew someday, somehow she would tell this woman’s story, and the story of others like her.
In 2008 Amy left the State Department and began a second career as a nonprofit consultant. She serves on the Board of the Foreign Service Association of Northern California, and volunteers for a variety of organizations focused on international women’s rights and empowerment. Amy has a Master’s degree in International Relations, with an emphasis on Intercultural Communication and Negotiation from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. She is the author of Green Zone Diary: A Diplomat's War Story.
VICTORIA RAISER
President of the Board
-
Victoria is an entrepreneur and filmmaker who has been focussing on creative industries since the beginning of her career. Raiser acquired an extensive design, visual arts, marketing, and brand-building background before co-founding a successful fashion startup. The company grew into an international business with stores in Europe and the US. Raiser transitioned into the entertainment industry in 2003 where she leveraged her entrepreneurial experience in starting and executing creative projects from AZ. In 2007 she founded her own production company Liria Films which merged into Manifest Global Media in 2018. The company focusses on motion pictures, documentaries, gaming for good and content creation for causes.
REXANNE MARTIN
Secretary of the Board
-
Rexanne is a journalist and documentary filmmaker that has focused on investigative storytelling since 1995. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual Communications from the University of California, San Diego and a Master of Arts in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder. While in graduate school, she was hired by CNN to cover the Oklahoma City Bombing Trial in Denver. She then worked at both the Miami Bureau and the Atlanta Headquarters for CNN USA where she covered Presidential Elections, Hurricanes, Big Tobacco and Clinton/Lewinsky among others. After working in domestic news, she was hired by CNN International where she was an integral part of the editorial coverage for such stories as the rise of Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, War Crimes in the Balkans, The Good Friday Agreement, Castro/Cuba Relations, Russia’s Vladmir Putin and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After leaving CNN, Martin began working in development for several Bay Area non-profits, focusing on outreach programs for low-income families. In 2018, she Co-Founded Manifest Global Media to focus her investigative skills on supporting the stories that need to be told.
DANNY STOIAN
Board Member
-
Danny escaped Communist Romania and grew up in Silicon Valley thanks to the resolve of his mother who sought to raise her family free from censorship, repression and anti-semitism. The influence of strong women early in his life, including matriarch grandmothers and an social activist sister, as well as an appreciation for having a global community perspective about the social issues he found himself caring deeply about, led Danny to pursue a career in the Foreign Service. Danny has dedicated the majority of his diplomatic career, during which he has been impacted greatly by a host of female mentors, to confronting the most vexing realities of inequality, disempowerment, and conflict across the Middle East, Africa and South Central Asia. Danny has continuously found inspiration and hope in the strength of the women from these regions, and is committed to amplifying their voices and supporting their role in economic development, peace building and social action. While serving in Rwanda, Danny befriended Rosamond Carr who at the age of 82, in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, founded an orphanage on her flower plantation in the foothills of the Virunga volcanoes. Upon her passing, Danny helped establish Imbabazi to preserve her legacy of impactful work in the community. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Danny worked in management consulting and, as an entrepreneur, helped launch several successful start-ups. He currently serves on the board of rasa.io and is a frequent lecturer at Cornell University and American University Business School.Description text goes here
LINDSAY MARTINEZ
Board Member
-
Lindsay grew up in West Virginia and Costa Rica before receiving her BA in Sociology and Latin American Studies from Vassar College, and relocating to New York for her Masters of Arts in Anthropology at Columbia, where she focused on health and human rights with a specific focus on the microimpacts of international trade agreements on health outcomes. After working on trainer training projects in Mexico, Ukraine, and Kenya, where she focused on maternal mortality and communicable chronic disease education and outcomes, she pivoted her career to real estate and then to tech. She has been in the real estate tech space for over 10 years, is an entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tourus. She is passionate about the advancement of women and is a mentor for emerging female tech leaders, and is based in New York.
OUR TEAM
Executive Director
Creative Director
-
Naomi’s motivation to be a visual storyteller stems from her raw experiences with the injustice towards, and under-representation of so much of the world she has traveled. Naomi is based in Boulder, Colorado but she was born and raised in Takoma Park, Maryland. At 8 years old, Naomi’s family spent a year living in Ahmedabad, India sparking her unwavering interest in exploring the world. At 20, Naomi chose to leave college to serve in the military. She felt military service was a way to serve her community but also vastly expand her perspective on the world. She was honorably discharged from active duty, by which time she had witnessed what she describes as “the best and the worst of humanity,” sparking her interest in storytelling as a medium to bring awareness to others.
Once home to the US, re-integrating into civil society and everyday life in Colorado was very difficult for Naomi. She went back to the University of Colorado at Boulder to finish her BA in International Affairs while seeking solace and healing in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. In the wildlands of the American landscape Naomi found her center and her purpose. She has now completed a Master’s degree in multimedia, photography, and design at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University in New York. Naomi is the executive producer for Clandestine Media Group, a media house based out of Denver, Colorado. As a visual storyteller, the stories she is most passionate about are those that encourage conversation about culture, conservation, human rights and women’s voices.
-
Kathleen Flynn is a New Orleans based photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, who focuses on stories of struggle and injustice. Flynn has spent nearly 20 years as a working journalist, including a decade at the Tampa Bay Times and three years at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune.
She has covered in-depth community news, veterans issues throughout the country, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Thailand, immigration in Mexico, post-conflict Liberia, India’s booming pharmaceutical industry, and the war in Afghanistan. Her work has been recognized with six regional Emmys, honors from the Overseas Press Club, World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Edward R. Murrow awards, the Nieman Foundation, the National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism, and with a Casey Medal, which was awarded for the nation's best reporting on children, youth and families.
In 2019 the National Press Photographers Association awarded their Humanitarian Award to Flynn, for her career covering human rights issues and injustices. She is a member of wOME
STORYTELLERS
NINA WATERS
SARAH BERMAN
ALICE TREMBOUR