Charlottesville Tomorrow announced today the addition of two new members to its Board of Directors, Shantell Bingham and Dr. Christopher Ali. With these newest additions, along with Angilee Shah, William Lewis, and Troy Robinson, who joined the Board earlier this year, Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Leadership Team has added five new Board Members in 2020.
“We’re honored to welcome five distinguished community members who care really deeply about the future of local media to the Charlottesville Tomorrow Board of Directors,” said Executive Director Giles Morris. “Each of them brings diverse skills and life experiences that will push forward our mission to make journalism connect to people’s lives in ways that foster a vibrant, inclusive, and interdependent community.”
2020 Board of Director Announcements
Angilee Shah is an editor and entrepreneur who tells great stories for diverse, inclusive communities. She specializes in building teams and content for people and communities too often left out of media narratives. Angilee spent six years as a founding editor of Global Nation, PRI’s The World’s coverage of immigration in the US, where in one year she brought 50 new contributors to the program. As a reporter and editor, her work has been read and heard around the world, including a book about everyday lives in China and a trio of investigative stories about the end of Sri Lanka’s 30-year civil war. She is building a new media company with a ground-up approach to narrative reporting, to tackle the big stories with an editorial process designed for and by the people being covered.
Bill Lewis is a retired partner in the D.C. office of the Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, LLP law firm. Previously, Bill was Director of the congressionally-established National Commission on Air Quality, and prior to that, Executive Officer of the California Air Resources Board. In the 1990s, he taught a seminar on the federal Clean Air Act at the University of Virginia Law School. Bill is a co-founder and chair emeritus of The Montpelier Foundation and was chair or a member of its governance committee for 19 years. He served as board president of the D.C. nonprofit FLOC (For Love of Children) and was a founding director of the organization that restored the nation’s first full-service African-American YMCA, now known as the Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage. Bill served on EPA’s Clean Air Act Advisory Committee and was listed in Best Lawyers in America and Super Lawyers of Washington, D.C. He received a B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina and a J.D. with honors from its School of Law.
Troy Robinson is an entrepreneur, businessman, media professional, and civil rights leader with deep roots in Central Virginia. Troy owns and operates the Inspirational Cuts Barbershop and Inspirational Limo and Bus Company in Ruckersville, the Order Up Mobile Food Cart in Charlottesville, and is co-host and manager of the In My Humble Opinion Talk Radio Show and The Body Radio Show, two highly-rated FM radio talk programs. A graduate of Orange County H.S., Troy is a certified IBEW union electrician and a graduate of the Community Investment Collaborative’s business training programs. He comes from a long line of African American civil rights and community leaders – his maternal great grandfather built the first school bus for black children in Culpeper County out of farm parts and his paternal great grandfather was a close advisor to the Washington, D.C., civil rights leader Dorothy Height. Troy works to leverage his experience as a businessman, media professional, and man of faith to create a more equitable society.
Shantell Bingham is the Program Director of the Food Justice Network. She is a graduate from the University of Virginia’s Master in Public Health program and has a bachelor’s degree in Global Public Health. Shantell was awarded the prestigious Castanea Fellowship in 2020. While completing her studies, Shantell built strong relationships with various communities in Charlottesville. For two years, she served as a Program Director of Madison House’s Bridging the Gap, a program which mentors refugee youth. While directing this program, she mentored a group of kids from Tanzania and coached a girl’s U12 outreach soccer team of immigrant and refugee kids for SOCA. Shantell received the Dalai Lama Fellowship, which awarded her funds to co-found the organization called Growing for Change, an urban garden initiative which co-designs personal gardens for citizens living in public housing and low-income areas. As a Dalai Lama Fellow, Shantell received training in ethical leadership, collaborating across differences, designing ethical systems, and mindfulness.
Dr. Christopher Ali is an Associate Professor in the University of Virginia Department of Media Studies. He joined the Department in the fall of 2013 after completing his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include: communication policy and regulation, critical political economy, critical geography, comparative media systems, localism and local news.
Christopher’s first book, Media Localism: The Policies of Place (University of Illinois Press, 2017) addresses the difficulties of defining and regulating local media in the 21st century in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada and the implications these difficulties have for the long-term viability of local news.
Currently, Christopher is the Faculty Fellow at the Benton Foundation. In 2016-2017, Christopher was a Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, where he completed an intensive research project on the state of small market newspapers in the United States titled, “Local News in a Digital World: Small Market Newspapers in an era of Digital Disruption.”
Founded in 2005, Charlottesville Tomorrow is a hyperlocal journalism nonprofit committed to elevating the voices of the people most impacted by local decisions and policies. We strive to deliver stories that incorporate the highest standards of journalism through the use of in-depth reporting, data, diverse perspectives, human-focused storytelling, creative formats, and exhaustive sourcing. We recognize that media coverage has a natural tendency to prioritize vocal, powerful, and organized interests, so we work to ensure that our coverage represents balanced, diverse, and equitable perspectives.
