As Senior Institutional Giving Officer, Lauren engages institutional funders to support Wiki Education’s work. In her role on our Advancement Team, Lauren cultivates a diverse group of mission-aligned organizations to support Wiki Education’s programs. Her work includes grant management, developing reports to demonstrate programmatic impact, expanding foundation relations, and supporting new strategic partnerships.

Lauren brings a broad range of fundraising experience to Wiki Education, including work at nonpartisan nonprofit think tanks and experience across both the public and private sectors. Most recently, she led institutional giving work at the Milken Institute across health, finance, strategic philanthropy, and international pillars, and previously served as Development Officer at the Pacific Council on International Policy. 

Lauren earned a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from The George Washington University and continued her education at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California. She completed her Masters of Public Administration at the University of Southern California in 2023. 

Lauren has called Los Angeles home since 2015. She enjoys fine arts, volunteering, and Formula 1 racing. 

As Chief Administration and Financial Officer, Jordan works directly with Senior Leadership to build budgets, create financial forecasts, and make strategic recommendations, ensuring financial sustainability for our organization. Having owned two financial firms and served over 500 businesses in the Bay Area and beyond, Jordan brings a wealth of knowledge to her new role. Before joining our staff, Jordan worked with Wiki Education in a consulting capacity since 2016.

Jordan holds a BFA from University of California, Santa Cruz, where she focused on Intermedia Arts with a particular interest in Political Theory courses. Throughout her career in finance, Jordan has applied her background in philosophy, ethics and the duty of the arts to cultivate her holistic perspective towards organizational goals.

In her off-time, you can find Jordan in beautiful natural spaces on or around water – she loves to kayak, sail, swim, and spend time on the beach. Jordan also enjoys opportunities to build community by lending her professional skills to small businesses and upstarts.

Kelly Doyle Kim joins Wiki Education as Project Manager: Digital Heritage, focusing on the 250 by 2026 Campaign in our Wiki Scholars & Scientists program. In recognition of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, this new initiative will improve Wikipedia’s depth and coverage of American history.  Kelly will work closely with our Scholars & Scientists team, the American Association for State and Local History, and other cultural heritage organizations and professionals throughout the project. 

With over a decade of experience in the Wikimedia and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sectors, Kelly is deeply passionate about bridging gaps in the cultural narrative and ensuring that diverse voices are represented in the digital space.

Prior to joining Wiki Education, Kelly worked at the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, where she focused on addressing Wikipedia’s gender gap and amplifying the achievements of women in the US. She also previously served as Community Manager for Democratic Commons at mySociety, Wikimedian in Residence for Gender Equity at West Virginia University Libraries, and as an instructor in our Wiki Scholars & Scientists program.

Outside of work, Kelly enjoys exploring new restaurants, crafting pottery in her garage studio, and spending time at the local beaches of Charleston, South Carolina, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

Danielle will serve as Senior Institutional Giving Officer, a new position on our team. Collaborating closely with Kathleen Crowley, Director of Donor Relations, Danielle will work with foundations, cultural and academic institutions, corporations, and other institutional sources to expand donor relationships and funding opportunities for our programs. Her role will include the management and oversight of grants, contracts, and sponsorships, including prospect research, grant submissions and required reporting, and ensuring stewardship for institutional supporters, appropriate donor recognition, and a positive experience for all of our supporters. 

Most recently, Danielle served as Director of Institutional Partnerships at the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), where she developed a portfolio of institutional grants. Before GLSEN, Danielle secured national grants and general operating support as Senior Manager of Fundraising for The New Teacher Project (TNTP), and managed corporate and foundation portfolios at Children’s Aid and the YWCA of the City of New York. 

Danielle holds a master’s degree in evolutionary biology and ecology from Smith College. She has directed a research team, co-authored a book chapter on the adaptive diversity of microbial eukaryotes, and has expertise in a variety of molecular techniques.

In her free time, Danielle likes to write, lift weights, and see how long her cat will tolerate belly rubs.

Please join us in welcoming Danielle!

I’m excited to share that Colleen McCoy has joined Wiki Education as our Communications and Outreach Coordinator. In her role, Colleen supports the development and implementation of communications across all departments, including outreach to new and ongoing partners. She also leads key projects for our Wikipedia Student Program’s Knowledge Equity initiative in partnership with the Mellon Foundation, manages our blog and social media channels, and will represent Wiki Education at conferences and webinars.

Colleen holds a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and International Studies, a bachelor’s degree in Integrated Strategic Communication, and a master’s degree in International Education Policy and Management with a graduate certificate in Latin American Studies. She brings nearly seven years of higher education experience at Vanderbilt University in both outreach and communications, first at Vanderbilt’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, and most recently in the Office of Undergraduate Education. In her previous positions, Colleen led public programming, created curricular resources and professional development workshops for K-16 educators, coordinated a national book award to celebrate diverse children’s literature, and developed external, internal, and executive communications.

In her free time, you’ll find Colleen planning new travels, trying to keep her Spanish skills from getting rusty, kayaking and hiking with her husband, and jumping into a new book.

Welcome to the team, Colleen!

Megan Newsome joins Wiki Education as our Data Scientist for the Visualizing Impact project. Over the next year, she will develop an AI system for building lists of Wikipedia articles within a specific topic, so that we can show the aggregate impact our programs are making in topics of interest. As an astrophysics PhD student at UC Santa Barbara, Megan has been putting her data science skills to use studying black holes and supernovae. She’s also a passionate advocate for civic engagement and voting rights, and a triathlete.

Melissa Joseph is serving as our part-time Scholars & Scientists Outreach Coordinator. She’ll be working to recruit subject matter experts to take part in a series of courses on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Melissa’s honed her outreach skills in past work as a college affordability advisor for a nonprofit. When she’s not working for Wiki Education, Melissa is a professional opera singer who recently made her debut at Opera Philadelphia as Musetta in La Boheme, then went on to cover the title role of Treemonisha at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and was a Steans Fellow at the Ravinia Music Festival in Highland Park, IL. She has bachelor’s and master’s degree in Music from Georgia State University. Outside of singing, Melissa enjoys spending time with friends and family, discovering new food/bubble tea spots, and traveling.

Welcome, Megan and Melissa!

I’d like to officially welcome Brianda (She/They) to our staff! Brianda is joining us in the role of Wikipedia Expert, where she will support student editors while they make high-quality content contributions to Wikipedia. She will spend most of her time monitoring and tracking student contributions on-wiki, answering questions, providing feedback, and explaining Wikipedia rules and policies in concise ways to new student editors. I’m very excited to have Brianda join us and think her experience and expertise will be a valuable addition to the Student Program.

Most recently, Brianda worked for the San Diego Youth Symphony and Conservatory’s Opus Project in the role of Community Program Coordinator. In this capacity, Brianda coordinated music instruction, working closely with students, teachers, and their families. Brianda’s deep commitment to equity is evident throughout her experience in education, supporting students from historically marginalized communities in different capacities. Before Opus, Brianda worked as a Program Assistant for the Upward Bound program at CSU-Fullerton where she helped hundreds of historically underserved high school students prepare for college. Brianda has held a number of internship positions further highlighting her passion for equity driven work, including positions at The Justice for Janitors Project at UCLA, Mayme E. Clayton Library & Museum, and the Museum of Social justice.

Brianda was raised in Orange County, CA. She graduated from UCLA with a major in History and a minor in Latin American Studies. While at UCLA, Brianda actually participated in a Wikipedia assignment in a course on Labor History and recalls how impactful the experience was. She is a native Spanish speaker, and is learning French and Korean. In her free time, you can find her exploring the streets of San Diego on her 2-wheeled steed, tracking down the tastiest tacos in Tijuana, or grooving to live music somewhere in SoCal. When not out and about, Brianda enjoys keeping her plant babies alive and trying to squeak out some notes on the clarinet. She’s also content with a good book in hand, accompanied by some light mezcal sipping or a warm cup of hot chocolate.

Join me in welcoming Brianda!

I’ve been a Wikipedian for 18 years. Were it a person, on Friday August 26, my account will be old enough to vote. Over the years, my role has changed from new user to administrator, from pure volunteer to that odd dual role of volunteer editor and Wiki Education staffer. In the last year I experienced an odd identity crisis when the edit count of my work account surpassed that my volunteer account. While my activity waxed and waned over the years, the drive to contribute, to make the internet better by making free knowledge widely available, has remained a constant.

Over those years, Wikipedia has changed dramatically, as has the knowledge environment in which it is embedded.

So many Wikipedians origin stories include an encyclopaedia — maybe bought by parents making a significant financial sacrifice, or an older edition purchased at a garage sale. For me, it was different. I grew up, not just in a world where knowledge was scarce, but also where it was fleeting. I learned about the world through the stories in daily newspapers. Not only did you need to catch it the day it was published — unless, for some reason, you clipped the story, there was no way to go back. Hard facts were only what you captured in your memory, and when people debated what had happened a week or a year or half a decade ago, the only verification was what you remembered.

My perceptions of what was available changed once I went to university, and later to grad school. But even though I knew so much more was available, it still wasn’t accessible. A journal database search was something you needed to request. And whether you read it in a book or a journal, your ability to access a fact depended on the quality of the notes you had taken, and on how well you organized the slips of paper that you worked from.

The internet changed things, but not always for the better. My first decade online (1994 to 2004) saw the birth of the World Wide Web and the rise of the search engine. Though it was growing explosively, the content that was online represented only a sliver of human knowledge. You could find all kinds of weird and wonderful facts online, but finding the same website twice might be a challenge. And whether to trust this arcanum was an open question.

The early 2000s brought further changes. The rise of Web 2.0 and the blogosphere meant that these websites developed more of an identity. The blogger’s creed — I link, therefore I am — meant each blogger was a window onto a world of other sites, often less popular, less widely read, but more likely to be written by an expert. But these were also the days of the Bush administration and their “Post-truth politics”. Bloggers were some of the few to challenge the alleged rationale for the invasion of Iraq, but other blogs and websites emerged as cheerleaders for the administration, or as proponents of dodgy ideas like intelligent design or what was then called global warming skepticism.

This was the state of the world when I began to contribute to Wikipedia. The old ethos of write what you know was crashing into not just a strengthening verifiability policy, but also a (still nascent) idea that you should include citations and a debate over what constituted a reliable source. Calls to include citations also faced another challenge — for many Wikipedians, sources meant sources that were available online. Even if you did consult a scholarly source, before things like Google Scholar and Google Books the only way to search these sources was something like Web of Science, which were slow and clumsy to navigate (assuming you were fortunate enough to have access to a university library).

In a world like this, with Wikipedia on the rise, knowledge was still fragile. The neutral point of view policy gave amateurs the ability to document what experts said without having to decide which experts were correct. The techno-utopian view that we might be above these debates between scholars makes sense until you realize that you need some way to distinguish between the serious scholars and the cranks. To make matters worse, members of the community might support the cranks or worse yet — you might be the one who believes the cranks.

The community eventually figured out a lot of this. Addenda like the “due and undue weight” section of the neutral point of view policy were eventually written. As the breakdown of cultural transmission of the norms of the project broke down under the weight of the “eternal September” of 2006 (where the size of the community exploded), more and more policies and guidelines were written down. The adage that policy was “descriptive, not prescriptive” became less and less true. And the encyclopaedia became less fragile.

Eighteen years after I first registered my account on the English Wikipedia, I’m amazed at what the project has become. When I started contributing to Wikipedia it was at the front lines of “post-truth politics”. Today, not only is it one of the most important sources to combat misinformation and disinformation, it’s also the place where the quality and reliability of sources is debated with more commitment and enthusiasm than anywhere else I’m aware of. It’s far from perfect, it may not even be good enough, but in aggregate, it’s probably the best hope for non-specialists looking for accurate information.

And that is a big achievement.

Knowledge equity has been a cornerstone of our programs since our founding. Thanks to our efforts, content related to equity on Wikipedia has steadily improved over the years. By empowering students and other subject matter experts to add content to Wikipedia, we ensure the public’s most used reference is more equitable, accurate, and complete.

Not only have we helped diversify Wikipedia’s content, we’re also helping to ensure the group of content contributors is more diverse. Only 22% of Wikipedia editors identify as women in our region, and 89% identify as white. In contrast, 67% of Wiki Education’s program participants identify as women, 3% identify as non-binary or another gender identity, and only 55% identify as white.

We’re bringing a more diverse writing voice to Wikipedia, and we’re adding more equity-focused content. But we want to do more: That’s where the Equity Outreach Coordinator role comes in. We’re thrilled to announce Andrés Vera is fulfilling this new role.

Andrés, as the Equity Outreach Coordinator, oversees the targeted outreach for courses in equity content areas and the inclusion of diverse institutions in the Wikipedia Student Program, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). He will also work to encourage more instructors who teach courses related to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other equity-related disciplines at other institutions to teach with Wikipedia.

Equity has been an important strategic priority for Wiki Education for years now, and it’s integrated into everything everyone on staff does on a daily basis. In creating this Equity Outreach Coordinator role, we are creating space to ensure we are actively recruiting a diversity of courses and an even more diverse set of participants for our Wikipedia Student Program. We’re making a deliberate investment aimed at taking our Equity work to the next level.

Andrés brings a unique perspective to Wiki Education. He has worked as a music teacher, a music ensemble manager, and a freelance community development professional. He holds a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and a professional diploma in Music performance and regularly performs around the world as a concert cellist. Andres has worked with Wiki Education in a contractor role for years. He is extremely passionate about and knowledgeable of our mission, and has a contagious enthusiasm for all that he does. We’re thrilled with his work so far and look forward to seeing where he takes this position.

Please join me in welcoming Andrés in his new role!

I’m thrilled to announce Wiki Education’s newest team member, Nanette James. Nanette started this month as our Director of Sales.

A former librarian with extensive experience in sales, Nanette’s background makes her the perfect fit for Wiki Education. Nanette will play a key role in our effort to scale up our Scholars & Scientists Program. She’ll sell Wikipedia and Wikidata courses to universities, academic associations, cultural institutions, corporate sponsors, and individuals by identifying leads, performing online sales activities, and educating prospects about why they should engage in our programs. Nanette will also project revenue on an ongoing basis and ensure that sales goals get met or exceeded.

In her free time, Nanette enjoys listening to music, reading, and spending time with her family.

Please join me in welcoming Nanette to Wiki Education!