Denise Tejada is Report for America's Service Project Manager. Tejada has over a decade of experience managing and training reporters through a tailored curriculum. She worked with YR Media (formerly Youth Radio) as a Senior Producer and Editor and has worked with several reporters across the country on multimedia stories. Denise was the lead reporter of Trafficked, a yearlong investigation into child trafficking in Oakland. The two-part audio story aired on NPR’s All Things Considered and won a George Foster Peabody Award, Gracie Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. The latest project Denise worked on, 18-to-29 Now: Young America Speaks Up, as an editor won the Edward R. Murrow award. During her free time, she enjoys spending quality with her two daughters and watching true crime shows.
Amy Bonn is Report for America’s Manager of Sustainability for the East Coast and is based in Plattsburgh, New York. Previously, Amy was founder and principal of Finch Network, LLC, a community development consulting firm specializing in grant writing, strategic planning and program evaluations for local, regional and national nonprofits and municipalities. Amy also worked for United Way of Tompkins County, Rural Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and LeMoyne College. The national service movement has informed and inspired Amy’s work since 1994 when Amy started her nonprofit career with AmeriCorps VISTA in Nevada. She then served as a VISTA Leader with the National Alliance to End Homelessness and went on to be a VISTA supervisor and Project Manager. In 1999, Amy was selected to be a National Service Fellow with the Corporation for National and Community Service and conducted a year-long research project on the sustainability of AmeriCorps VISTA projects. Amy holds a B.A. in American Studies and a teaching certificate from the University of Rochester and a graduate degree in Community and Rural Development from Cornell University. In 2018, Amy became an approved trainer through the Grant Professionals Association.
Selin Thomas is Report for America's Story Coordinator. Originally from Philadelphia, Thomas received her degree in journalism from Boston University in 2014. Her first assignment, for the Pulitzer Center, was reporting on refugees along the Turkish-Syrian border.
She has worked as a freelance journalist in New York since 2016, when she completed her Master of Arts in politics and global affairs at Columbia University Journalism School; her thesis investigated the historical and economic causes of the persecution—ultimately genocide—of Burma’s Rohingya.
Jessica Mahone is Manager of Impact and Evaluation at Report for America. Previously, she was a researcher at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University where she led research on the production of local journalism in American communities.
She has also worked as a research associate leading impact measurement for the public square team at Democracy Fund and as a researcher on the journalism team at Pew Research Center, publishing on the relationship between local news and civic engagement as well as about the demographics of those interviewed by local journalists.
Jessica has a B.A. in religion from King University, M.A. degrees in communication and sociology from East Tennessee State University, and a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Florida.
Jimmy Martinez is Report for America's Deputy Director of Local Sustainability and Development, assisting in local fundraising efforts for news organizations in Report for America's southwest region.
Martinez began his nonprofit career at Fidelity Charitable, managing relationships with high net worth and ultra-high net worth donors, as well as national nonprofit leaders. After gaining expertise in donor-advised funds, he moved to Los Angeles to be a philanthropic wealth advisor for donors at Liberty Hill Foundation. He also managed several giving circles during this period.
Martinez recently relocated to Dallas, where he founded the Dallas Forward Fund, a giving circle that supports social and economic justice programs in Texas.
Ben Brody is Director of Photography for Report for America, providing training and mentorship for corps members and local newsrooms. Brody spent most of his career photographing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, first as a soldier, and later as an independent photojournalist working on The GroundTruth Project's landmark multimedia project Foreverstan.
He holds an MFA in photography from Hartford Art School and is the author of the critically-acclaimed photobooks Attention Servicemember and 300m. He teaches photography itinerantly at Williams College, and developed and led a landmark community photojournalism program for teens in Boston during the pandemic.
Brody also gardens, forages, repairs engines small and large, fells, splits, stacks, and burns firewood, welds, builds furniture, and manages a small publishing company in western Massachusetts.