Josh Schachter, Founding Director of CommunityShare, is an educator, visual storyteller and social ecologist. As a photographer, he has documented issues ranging from urban revitalization to food security, and his work has been published in venues ranging from the New York Times to the Navajo Times. For 20+ years he has facilitated community-based media projects with youth, teachers, and nonprofit organizations in places ranging from New Delhi to Nigeria. He co-founded VOICES Inc., a nonprofit organization that hired low-income youth to work as journalists to tell the stories of their lives and communities. He also co-founded the Finding Voice Program in Tucson, AZ to support the literacy, multimedia storytelling and civic leadership skills of refugee and immigrant students through real-world learning experiences. His passion for real-world learning started in high school when he researched turtles in South Carolina and Alabama under the tutelage of a herpetologist. This field experience and his time studying lemurs in Madagascar led Josh to pursue a career in ecosystem management. He earned his master’s degree in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where he explored the role of youth-produced media in supporting personal and community transformation.

You can learn more about Josh’s work at  www.communityshare.us, www.creativenarratives.net and www.joshphotos.com.