Brent Schimke

Interim Executive Director & COO

Brent Schimke is an operations expert with deep experience in building and transforming mission-driven organizations. His work has focused on health equity, patient engagement and emergency public response to improve outcomes in public health and safety. He has led initiatives and advised on operational excellence and strategic communications across startups, local government, and academic institutions. Brent currently serves as Interim Executive Director & COO at EHRP, supporting governance and organizational growth. He lives in Massachusetts.

Alissa Quart

Editorial Director

Alissa Quart is the author of five books of nonfiction including Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (Ecco, 2023), Squeezed and Branded. She collaborated on creating EHRP with Barbara Ehrenreich and has run it for close to a decade. She is also the author of two books of poetry and has written for many publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and TIME. Her awards include an Emmy, an SPJ Award, and a Nieman fellowship. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Deborah Jian Lee

Executive Editor

Deborah Jian Lee is an award-winning journalist, radio producer and author of Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism (Beacon Press). A former Associated Press staff reporter, she has taught journalism at Harvard Divinity School and Columbia University and earned bylines in Esquire, Fast Company, Reuters, ELLE, Foreign Policy, TIME, WBEZ and others. Winner of awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, ASJA and Education Writers Association, she was also a finalist for the AAJA, RNA and Livingston Awards.

Rachel Sanoff

Associate Editor

Rachel Sanoff is a writer and editor from Los Angeles. Her writing on healthcare access, social movements, and education has been published in MTV News, Jezebel, Business Insider, The Guardian, Bustle, and other publications. She was previously the features editor at HelloGiggles and has worked as a social media editor for several magazines and community organizations. Rachel received her Bachelor’s degree from UCLA, where she graduated from the Labor Studies program and researched local workers’ rights campaigns at the UCLA Labor Center.

Leigh Kirchner

Development Consultant

Leigh Kirchner is the Director of Development Consulting at CIMA Consulting. She brings over a decade of development experience to EHRP, including institutional and individual fundraising as well as development operations.

Lauren Alexander

Development Consultant

Lauren is a seasoned fundraising professional with more than 15 years of experience supporting mission-driven organizations. Her background includes institutional fundraising, grant writing, donor stewardship, donor communications, foundation and major donor relationship management, campaign strategy, and cross-functional collaboration. Throughout her career, Lauren has helped advocacy and mission-driven organizations build strong philanthropic partnerships, manage institutional funding portfolios, and translate complex programmatic work into compelling proposals and reports. Her experience spans environmental advocacy, women’s empowerment, equity-focused initiatives, and international development.

Jackson Mucker

Publicity Consultant

Jackson Musker is a publicist, writer, and podcast producer. He evangelizes the good work of bestselling authors (Julia Turshen, Marisa Renee Lee); groundbreaking podcasters (Aminatou Sow + Ann Friedman, Traci Thomas); and forward-thinking organizations like EHRP. For most of the 2010s, he produced the national arts and culture show “The Dinner Party Download,” which was hailed as “the icebreaker that helped public radio loosen up” (LA Times). When he’s not pitching or booking podcasts, he sometimes writes his own, like the audio drama The Sea in the Sky, one of Audible’s Top Ten Listens of 2020. He lives in his hometown of L.A., after studying English at Duke.

Ray Suarez

Special Correspondent

Ray Suarez is the host of Going for Broke, EHRP’s award-winning podcast, and the current John J. McCloy ’16 Visiting Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. Suarez joined the PBS NewsHour in 1999 and was a senior correspondent until 2013.