Click here to explore the other CCE Collaborative sessions we have planned!
Each webinar in PSW's CCE Collaborative will feature southwest funders in dialogue with nationally recognized organizations, sharing successes, strategies, and lessons learned from their partnerships to strengthen civic engagement and bring communities together across the region.
Next Session:
February's webinar highlights the importance of local journalism for the civic health of communities. The session will feature a powerful conversation between the executive leadership of the following organizations:
-
KERA is a not-for-profit public media organization serving North Texas through KERA TV, KERA Create, KERA World, KERA Kids 24/7, KERA News 90.1, KXT 91.7, WRR 101.1 and the Denton Record-Chronicle. For over 60 years, North Texans have turned to KERA as a vibrant destination for community engagement and lifelong learning. KERA produces original multimedia content, carries the best in national and international public television and radio programs, and provides online resources.
-
Press Forward is a national philanthropic coalition, launched in 2023, devoted to fortifying local journalism across the U.S.—it mobilizes major funders, backs place-based chapters in 40+ communities, and invests hundreds of millions of dollars so that communities stay informed, connected and engaged.
-
Media Impact Funders is a U.S. nonprofit membership organization founded in 1984 (formally incorporated in 2008) that brings together foundations and individual funders to support and advance media in the public interest—through research, convenings, networking and strategy-development.
Featuerd Speakers
Nico Leone, President and CEO, KERA
Nico Leone is the President and CEO of KERA — a nonprofit public media organization in North Texas reaching more than 5 million people each month. KERA’s mission is to inform and inspire the North Texas community through essential services — including a public television station, three radio stations and a newspaper. Nico began his tenure at KERA in February 2020, just as the coronavirus pandemic began to surge. Under his leadership, the organization was able to not only sustain, but grow its essential services to audiences during a challenging time. Since then, Nico has continuously positioned the organization for exceptional growth and innovation.
Key to Nico’s leadership style is collaboration. Under his tenure, KERA has launched several journalism partnerships — including with the Fort Worth Report and the Dallas Morning News — in order to expand accessible and essential reporting to the people of North Texas. Nico also oversaw the successful merger of two organizations into KERA’s services — the classical music station WRR 101.1, and the Denton Record-Chronicle, Denton County’s primary source of local news. And, as CEO, Nico leads The Texas Newsroom, a first-of-its-kind journalism collaboration between NPR and the four largest public media newsrooms in Texas. Each of these innovative collaborations serves as a model for newsrooms and public media organizations across the country, while also positioning KERA to be more embedded in the communities it serves.
Nico serves on the board of AT&T Performing Arts Center, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, Station Resource Group and Greater Public. He has also previously served on the board of directors for NPR. Prior to KERA, Nico served as General Manager of KCUR in Kansas City, Missouri, where he led the organization to be one of the most collaborative public radio stations in the country.
Nico grew up in small towns in Kansas. He has two degrees in Communications from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he met his wife, Nicole. They live in Dallas.
Abby Rapoport, Executive Director, Media Impact Funders
Abby Rapoport serves as the executive director of Media Impact Funders. Her work has focused on the relationship between communities, media and storytelling. In 2018, she cofounded Stranger’s Guide, a publication that explores how politics, power and culture shape daily life across the globe. It has won numerous recognitions including four National Magazine Awards.
She has served on the board of many non-profits and philanthropies including the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation, the Texas Democracy Foundation, the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and TYPE Media.
Abby began her career as a political reporter at the Texas Tribune, and subsequently worked as a staff writer on politics and policy for the Texas Observer and The American Prospect before serving as Acting Publisher for the Texas Observer. Her writing has also appeared in Glamour, The National Journal and The New Republic among other places.
Melissa Milios Davis, Network Manager, Press Forward
Davis came to Press Forward after seven years as Vice President for Strategic Communications and Informed Communities at the Denver-based Gates Family Foundation, where her primary role was to bring greater visibility to the work of the foundation’s grantees and partners, to facilitate knowledge sharing, and to amplify the quality of life issues and ideas of greatest concern to the foundation and Coloradans. In addition, Davis managed Gates’ Informed Communities grantmaking portfolio, and served since 2020 as Director of the Colorado Media Project, a philanthropic initiative based at Rose Community Foundation that to date has raised more than $6 million for local news and made more than 280 grants to small and large newsrooms, capacity builders, and catalytic projects across Colorado — and helped to rally millions more in aligned grants and impact investments directly to Colorado ecosystem partners.
Davis has more than two decades of collective experience in strategic communications, journalism, fundraising, coalition building, strategic planning, and nonprofit management. Before joining Gates, she was Director of Institutional Giving for BakerRipley, Texas’ largest community development agency. Prior to that, she spent seven years as a director of communications, marketing, public policy and fundraising for Houston A+ Challenge, a nonprofit organization working to improve student success in the Greater Houston region’s public schools.
Davis’ decade as a journalist included award-winning education beat coverage for the Daily Breeze newspaper in Los Angeles, breaking news and digital content production for the Austin American-Statesman and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and public radio news production for the Voice of America in London and both NPR stations (KCRW and KPCC) in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, an M.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, and a certificate in Comprehensive Fund Development from Rice University’s Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Management. She serves on the Membership Committee for Media Impact Funders, on the public policy committee for Philanthropy Colorado, was on the leadership team for ComNetworkDENVER from 2019 to 2023, and was a founding board member of the Colorado News Collaborative.
Questions?
Email Brittany Huber at bhuber@philanthropysouthwest.org.