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Expect the Unexpected: Building in Plan B

Speakers

  • Director, JustFilms, Ford Foundation
    Cara Mertes’ career focuses on supporting and connecting independent film communities globally as a public television executive, independent executive producer/director, funder, curator and teacher. Currently Director of Ford Foundation’s JustFilms, she funds content, networks and leadership fostering independent film/digital storytelling. She has served as Director, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and Fund and Executive Producer of the POV documentary series on PBS, where she was awarded with multiple Emmy, George Foster Peabody, and duPont-Columbia awards. She has executive produced several Oscar-nominated films, including Street Fight, My Country My Country and The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) and led major Ford Foundation funding and support for Academy Award winner CITIZENFOUR. She served as executive director of American Documentary Inc., and has taught and written about the independent documentary movement. Mertes is a member of NATAS, WGA and AMPAS.
  • CEO, Solutions Journalism Network
    David Bornstein is CEO and co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which works to establish the practice of solutions journalism — rigorous reporting that examines responses to social problems — as an integral part of mainstream news. He has been a newspaper and magazine reporter for 25 years, having started his career working on the metro desk of New York Newsday. Since 2010, he has co-authored, with Tina Rosenberg, the “Fixes” column in The New York Times. He is the author of three books: How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (2003, Oxford University Press), The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank (1996, Simon & Schuster), and Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know (2010, Oxford University Press).
  • Founder, OneSky
    A former screenwriter and independent filmmaker, Jenny Bowen founded Half the Sky (now OneSky for all children) in 1998 in order to give something back to China, her adopted daughters’ home country, and to the many orphaned and abandoned children then languishing behind institutional walls. Under Ms. Bowen's leadership, OneSky has grown into a global NGO whose mission is to train communities and caregivers to provide nurturing responsive care and early education that unlocks the potential hidden in our world’s most vulnerable young children. OneSky now works in Mainland China, Vietnam, Mongolia, and Hong Kong. In China, OneSky (now through its local implementing partner, Chunhui Children’s Foundation) has transformed the lives of many thousands of marginalized children and helped China re-imagine its entire child welfare system. In Vietnam, OneSky has tailored its approach to address the needs of 1.2 million children of factory workers, opened the Da Nang Early Learning Center, and, in partnership with government, is now scaling its training for home-based childcare providers throughout the country. In Hong Kong, in 2020, OneSky opened its regional training base—the P.C. Lee OneSky Global Centre for Early Childhood Development—in order to build a better future for the disadvantaged children of Hong Kong and the Asia Pacific region. Among other awards, Ms. Bowen has been named named the American Chamber of Commerce's Women of Influence Non-Profit Leader of the Year, received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and was chosen by popular vote to carry the Olympic Torch on Chinese soil. She serves on China’s National Committee for Orphans and Disabled Children and on the Expert Consultative Committee for Beijing Normal University’s Philanthropy Research Institute. She is the author of the memoir, Wish You Happy Forever: What China’s Orphans Taught Me About Moving Mountains, published by Harper Collins.
  • Co-Founder, Grain Media
    2014 saw the completion of Orlando’s debut feature length documentary, Virunga, executively produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, and its global release as a Netflix Original production. Winning 27 International awards, it is the perfect showcase of his ability as a compelling storyteller with an cinematic eye for striking images and a nose for far reaching investigations. Having previously directed award-winning films, spanning Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Arctic, and covering all manner of stories from a skateboard school in Afghanistan through to the tracking and arrest of pirates in West Africa, it’s no exaggeration to say that Orlando is one of the world’s leading young documentarians with a bright future ahead of him. He has been particularly lauded for his ability to draw out intimate personal stories and combine them with an eye for striking visual aesthetics. He has been nominated for an Academy Award Award, a BAFTA, a Director’s Guild of America Award, a Producer’s Guild of America Award, an Independent Film Spirt Award, a Royal Television Society Award and has won over 40 other international film awards to date.