Meet the teams guiding the growth and development of the Media Viability Accelerator
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MVA Forward program team
Dan Spealman
Chief of Party, MVA Forward
Dan Spealman is the Chief of Party for the MVA. He has over 25 years of experience in international development – leading expansive international programs and portfolios; as well as working with and strengthening hundreds of civil society and media organizations. Previously, he served as Chief of Party on the INSPIRES program at Internews – leading a consortium of organizations on the cutting edge of protecting civic space. Prior to that, he served as Program Director for the Aga Khan Foundation USA and has also held that role in the East Africa office – managing and designing programs across AKF’s myriad sectors and geographies. Before AKF, he was the Sr Technical Adviser for Civil Society & Local Governance at USAID/Kenya – overseeing their civil society programs in the run-up to the 2013 elections and designing USAID’s devolution effort in the country. He was also with Pact for 14 years, and his latest roles there were as Country Director of Pact Nigeria, and Sr Program Manager on the USAID Global Civil Society Strengthening award.
Zoë Tipler
MVA Partnerships Manager
As Partnerships Manager for the Media Viability Accelerator Zoë leads outreach to and engagement with media support organizations, funders, and media outlets.
Zoë has over 10 years’ experience working in the independent media sector. She started out in magazine publishing, and media business development before joining Open Society Foundations’ Program on Independent Journalism, and then the Soros Economic Development Fund, where she worked on impact investments to independent media. Zoë speaks Portuguese, holds a BA in Philosophy from King’s College London and an MA in Journalism from Columbia University Journalism School.
Sophie Vandyck
MVA Communications Officer
Sophie is responsible for communicating the advancements and successes of the MVA platform and MVA Forward initiative to a wide range of audiences. On the MVA Forward project, Sophie leads communication strategy and is responsible for a wide range of communications products. She enjoys using storytelling and visual communications to help audiences understand the value and impact of the MVA. Sophie also focuses on Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting efforts for the project.
Sophie holds a BA Hons in French and Russian from the University of Manchester and an MSc Development Studies, specializing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from SOAS, University of London. She previously worked at Internews and other international non-governmental organizations on gender-sensitive programming for projects supporting Digital Rights and Health and Welfare. She speaks French, Russian and German.
Alexandra Salazar-Anaya
MVA Senior Program Associate
Alexandra began her career at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), starting as an intern with the Africa team and progressing to a Program Associate with the Latin America and Caribbean team, where she worked on elections and democracy projects in Central and South America. As a student, she also worked with UNICEF Peru as a junior consultant. Alexandra holds a BA in Psychology and Spanish from Bates College.
As the Senior Program Associate for Internews’ Media Viability Accelerator (MVA) Forward project Alexandra works to help advance the project’s objectives. Her contributions include managing project logistics, supporting financial and administrative processes, and assisting with high-level reporting, monitoring and evaluation activities.
Alexandra is a native Spanish speaker and often uses her language skills on the project to communicate with partners and to support efforts to add languages to MVA platform.
Rachel Appleton
MVA Business Operations and Finance Officer
As a member of the Internews Business Operations team, Rachel brings over 20 years’ accounting and financial management experience to her role on the MVA Forward. Joining Internews in February 2019, Rachel initially supported payroll management for the entire organization before transitioning to provide business operations support on a variety of Internews USG-funded programs. Rachel is proud to bring business operations support to the MVA Forward project with duties comprised of providing budgetary guidance, forecasting, and management from project award to close out along with supporting subgrant and procurement processes and new proposals among other responsibilities.
Jason Lambert
Head of Product
With overall responsibility for the MVA platform, Jason combines experience in business and technology management with insights from consulting with independent media in more than 40 countries since 2008.
As Internews’ Senior Director of Media Business, Jason’s wider role is to bring new, scalable business solutions to the existential challenges facing news media globally. A serial founder and innovator, he leads Internews’ Newsgain consulting team and has been instrumental in the creation of Ads for News which brings increased programmatic advertising revenue to fact-based news media globally.
Jason holds an Executive MBA and Master in Management of Technology from the Technical University of Denmark, a BA in Economics and Psychology from Middlesex University in London, and is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Innovation Leadership program. He is based in Copenhagen, Denmark.