Vika Dudaney is GroundTruth's Financial Analyst. An MBA graduate of Indiana University, she studied Finance and Entrepreneurship. Prior to pursuing her MBA, her professional experience includes grants management at a large healthcare research organization, financial reporting at a CPG company and strategic planning and business process improvement at an NGO.
Vika enjoys visiting National Parks where she can hike and experience amazing views. She also loves to ice skate and plays recreational ice hockey. In the fall, you can find her cheering "O-H!" for her favorite football team, the Ohio State Buckeyes.
Moni Basu is an Editor-at-Large at The GroundTruth Project. She is also the Michael and Linda Connelly Lecturer in Narrative Nonfiction at the University of Florida. Before teaching, Moni worked as a reporter and editor at CNN, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers. She still writes as a freelancer and her most recent work has been published in the Bitter Southerner and Flamingo magazine. She is also a distinguished professor of practice in the narrative nonfiction MFA program at the University of Georgia. She loves terrific storytelling. Her 2012 e-book, Chaplain Turner’s War (Agate Publishing) grew from a series of stories on an Army chaplain in Iraq. A platoon sergeant gave her the name “Evil Reporter Chick” and she was featured once as a war reporter in a Marvel comics series. Basu’s work has been recognized with national and international accolades but she is most proud of her latest award: the 2020 University of Florida Teacher of the Year. Born in Kolkata, India, Basu grew up straddling two cultures, which explains her interest in exploring the complexities of race, ethnicity and identity. English is not her first language and she has never taken a class in journalism.
Rachel Dalloo is a summer editorial intern for The GroundTruth Project & Report for America. She comes to us through the Emma Bowen Foundation. Rachel is a Senior at Baruch College in New York City, currently pursuing a bachelor’s of arts degree. There, she is double majoring in journalism & political science and double minoring in economics and English. At Baruch, she is heavily involved with the student publications. She is the editor-in-chief for Refract Magazine, Baruch’s cultural and contemporary student-run magazine. She can be found on Twitter at @R_Dalloo.
Kara Follosco is Report for America's program assistant. She is a 2020 graduate of Bucknell University, where she majored in education with a concentration in human diversity. As a student, she was the new student orientation coordinator, where she managed a dozen orientation leaders, hired 100 project assistants, and oriented 1,000 first-year students.
Idalia Gonzalez is Report for America's communications officer. Previously, she was digital communications strategist for the US Human Rights Network, where she worked with grassroots organizations to shape stories for advocacy at the local, national and international levels.
Gonzalez holds a master's degree in human rights from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in Romance languages and literature from the University of Chicago. She has lived and worked in France, Cambodia and other countries. She speaks Spanish and French and enjoys learning new languages.
GroundTruth's Senior Editor Lison Joseph brings a wealth of reporting and editing experience gained at newsrooms across the U.S. and India.
Before joining GroundTruth, Lison was a deputy editor overseeing coverage of business and the economy for the Philadelphia Inquirer. There, Lison mentored early-career journalists to execute hard-hitting accountability stories on the intersection of corporations, labor and government.
Previously, he was an assistant business editor at the Dallas Morning News, where his team covered such core Texas concerns as energy and real estate, along with two of the country’s largest airlines, Southwest and American. His reporting teams have won awards from Associated Press Managing Editors and Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
In his first editing role, Lison managed a team of reporters writing about India’s thriving technology sector for the Economic Times, the most-read business newspaper in Asia. Before that, he covered technology, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals as a staff writer for Mint, India’s second-largest business newspaper, published in partnership with the Wall Street Journal.
As a peace studies graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, Lison spent six months in Cape Town monitoring legislation for a local nonprofit and researching the local media’s role in strengthening democracy in post-apartheid South Africa.
Lison holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Mahatma Gandhi University and a post-graduate diploma from Asian College of Journalism. He speaks four languages.
Maria Elena Fernandez is the Corps Excellence Regional Manager for Region 3 (Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia). She is an award-winning journalist and author who lives in Miami, Florida. An entertainment journalist for 15 years in Los Angeles, Fernandez has covered Hollywood for New York magazine, Vulture, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, and NBC. Before moving to the West Coast, Maria Elena spent many years on the crime beat at The Washington Post and the Atlanta-Journal Constitution and covered the AIDS epidemic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. A two-time author, Maria Elena’s nonfiction book, “And Don’t F&%K It Up: An Oral History of RuPaul’s Drag Race,” was published by Grand Central Publishing in 2023. Her children’s book, "The Secret of Fern Island," was published in 1996 under a pseudonym so that she wouldn’t be stalked by screaming children. A longtime member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Maria Elena is a mentor for The Latinas in Journalism Mentorship Program and has mentored at Write Girl in Los Angeles. In her spare time, Maria Elena obsesses over her dogs, husband, food, wine, and precious beach time. Her most favorite thing in the world is traveling.
Vincent D. McCraw is the Corps Excellence Regional Manager for Region 2 (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin). McCraw is a journalist with more than 40 years’ experience in print and digital media. He has covered news stories on municipal government, politics, civic and community affairs in the Detroit, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. media markets.
A native of D.C. and a 1980 graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta with a B.A. in mass communications, McCraw started his journalism career as an intern at the Atlanta Journal in 1980. From 1981-1985, he was as a reporter and city editor at The Atlanta Daily World, one of the nation’s oldest Black newspapers.
During a 15-year career at The Washington Times, McCraw covered the mayoral administrations of Marion Barry and Sharon Pratt Kelly. He covered D.C. politics, government and community affairs and frequently covered Congress and the White House on issues that affected the District of Columbia. In his later years at the Times, McCraw was an assistant city editor directing a team of reporters covering the District government.
In 1999, McCraw joined the Metro Desk of The Detroit News as an assistant city editor directing a team of reporters covering Detroit government, politics and community affairs. He served in several roles at the paper including slot editor on the Copy Desk, and assistant city editor for the Neighborhood News weekly tabloids that offered coverage of communities in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties.
In 2008, he joined the News’ Digital Breaking News Desk as an editor-producer and in February 2019, he accepted a buyout offered to eligible News employees, ending a 20-year career at the paper.
McCraw joined the National Association of Black Journalists initially through its Atlanta chapter in 1980 and has been a member of the national and local chapters in Washington, D.C. and Detroit. In 2015, he was elected Vice President-Print of the Detroit chapter of NABJ. In that role he managed the chapter’s social media platforms.
In 2016, he was appointed president of Detroit NABJ and a year later elected president, position in which he currently serves. As the chapter’s president, he is the public face of the organization that advocates for diversity and inclusion in newsrooms in Metro Detroit and sponsors skills-oriented programs for its members, students and emerging journalists. In 2018, he and a team of Detroit NABJ officers and members were instrumental in the planning and execution of the annual national convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Detroit after a 26-year absence. The convention attracted 3,016 journalists and media professionals to the city and ranks among the top five in attendance of NABJ’s conventions in the past 10 years.
Amy Tardif is the Corps Excellence Regional Manager for Region 1 (Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington D.C., West Virginia). She is formerly the Regional Manager of StoryCorps in Chicago. She’s also an independent fact-checker for various podcasts including Futuro Studios’ Pulitzer Prize winning Suave and Michigan Radio & NPR’s Peabody Award-winning Believed. She was an editor for the Public Media Journalist Association (PMJA) Editor Corps providing relief for stations during the pandemic. Amy served as a Managing Editor for NPR's Next Generation Radio Project five times. Prior, she was WGCU Public Media’s Station Manager and News Director in Florida where she also won a Peabody Award for her documentary Lucia’s Letter on human trafficking. She was the first woman in radio to Chair the Radio, TV, Digital News Association (RTDNA), and she served five years on the Public Radio News Director’s (now PMJA) Board. She’s a sought-after voice coach and former audio and video reporter and host, including for public and commercial TV. Her two sons live in Florida.