About Us

---

Hélène Biandudi Hofer is a journalist and a documentary filmmaker. For nearly a decade, she led an award-winning news magazine program focused on exploring remedies to societal challenges. Her work spans investigating police reform in Camden, New Jersey, to examining education opportunities in South Sudan. Most recently, Hélène developed and managed the Solutions Journalism Network’s Complicating the Narratives (CTN) project. CTN is a journalistic practice that can transform news coverage about controversial issues. She trained more than a thousand journalists across 125 newsrooms throughout the world. Hélène has worked with CBS, NPR, and PBS. She credits her passion for journalism to her Nkoko [great-grandmother], who was the oral historian of the Biandudi family in Kinshasa, DRC. 

Amanda Ripley is a New York Times bestselling author and an investigative journalist. Her projects combine storytelling with data to help illuminate hard problems—and solutions. Her books include High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why. Ripley also spent a decade writing about human behavior for Time magazine in New York, Washington, and Paris, helping Time win two National Magazine Awards. She has reported from Colombia, South Korea, Finland, Poland, the United Kingdom, Israel, Jordan, Oman, and France. Ripley is also a trained conflict mediator and a (less well-trained) soccer coach. She lives with her family in Washington, DC.