Bay Area, CA – Cristi Hegranes, founder and executive director of Global Press Institute, was honored by CBS 5 TV/KBCW TV with a silver Jefferson Award today.
Hegranes, among nearly 50 honorees in 2011, was selected as one of the Bay Area’s five silver medal award winners and her name will be sent to the national committee for consideration for the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Award for Outstanding Public Service Benefiting Local Communities. In 2011, the Jefferson Award Steering Committee (comprised of representatives from Bay Area non-profit organizations) chose Hegranes to be honored with one of the CBS 5 TV/KCBS Radio weekly Jefferson Awards. At that time Rosemary Roach, director of public affairs and non-news programming, said, “Every quarter the steering committee has the difficult task of choosing weekly honorees from many outstanding nominations. In selecting Ms. Hegranes they looked at her impact and vision in creating the Global Press Institute. Beyond that, they felt her work inspired, sustained, innovated, and served a need.”
The national committee, based in Delaware, will determine which candidates from around the country will be invited to attend the 2012 Jefferson Awards Gala held in Washington, DC on June 19 as well as select the five national winners who will be honored that evening. CBS 5 noted that the Bay Area has been well represented in the past with about five of their candidates receiving the national honor.
“This is a great day for GPI,” Hegranes said upon learning of the Silver Jefferson Award. “It has been an amazing process to watch the world begin to recognize our impact, our ability to create change. With this honor, and in each day that I am fortunate enough to do this work, I give all of the credit to the women of GPI around the world who have given breath to this vision and who surmount unimaginable challenges in the name of voice, awareness and change.”
The idea for creating the Global Press Institute came to Hegranes when she was working as a foreign correspondent in Nepal.
“Although I spoke Nepali and had an extensive network of local sources from years of work and travel in the region, I realized that no matter how familiar I was with Nepalese culture, I would always be an outsider in the society, a foreigner who would always face an unbridgeable gap in the social, historical and political context of reporting,” Hegranes said. “It seemed obvious that those most qualified to be reporting the news were the locals, not a woman from the West.”
During that trip, Hegranes met Pratima C., a woman living in a tiny, remote village in Eastern Nepal. Although Pratima had dropped out of school after the fourth grade, she was literate and highly respected in her local village. As the community matriarch and mediator, she had access to exceptional sources and fascinating stories about the region’s struggles with civil war, disease and crushing poverty.
“Women like Pratima were savvy, inspired and passionate about their communities and should be at the forefront of news reporting,” Hegranes says she quickly realized. “If women like Pratima were given the opportunity to be trained in the principles and practices of ethical journalism, the news they could produce would not only change their lives and that of their families, it would also change the world.”
With her mind set on making this happen, Hegranes set to work on establishing the Global Press Institute—originally the Press Institute for Women in the Developing World—when she returned to the United States.
Less than two years later, the first training program began in Chiapas, Mexico during the fall of 2006. Today, GPI employs more than 130 women and operates in 25 countries throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
About Cristi HegranesHegranes, a native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was recently named to the Top 40 Under 40 list by the North Bay Business Journal and has received the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, the Clarion Award for Investigative Journalism and a Lifestyle Journalism Prize, among others. In 2011, GPI and its reporters received four prestigious journalism honors including the Society of Professional Journalist’s Journalism Innovation Prize and the Reuter’s Schork Award for Foreign Reporting, which went to GPIs senior reporter in Zimbabwe, Gertrude Pswarayi, for her work uncovering instances of political rape in Zimbabwe.
Hegranes holds a master’s degree from New York University, served as a fellow-in-residence at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg and received a Bachelor of Arts from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Hegranes teaches Communications Law, Media and Government and News Entrepreneurship at two universities in the Bay Area.
About the Jefferson AwardsThe Jefferson Awards are a prestigious national recognition system honoring community and public service in America. The Jefferson Awards are presented on two levels: national and local. They were founded in 1972 by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, U.S. Senator Robert Taft, Jr. and Sam Beard to create a Nobel Prize for public service. Today, their primary purpose is to serve as a “Call to Action for Volunteers” in local communities.
About the Global Press InstituteGlobal Press Institute (GPI) uses journalism as a development tool to educate, employ and empower women, who produce high-quality local news coverage that elevates global awareness and ignites social change.
GPI is building a network of professional women journalists throughout the developing world who earn a fair wage for reporting on their local communities. Their unique coverage of issues overlooked by mainstream media contributes directly to the development and empowerment of their communities, brings greater transparency to their countries, and changes the way the world views their people and cultures.
GPI syndicates its original news content to partner outlets around the globe with the aim of increasing local and global access to the important stories covered by GPI reporters. As of 2011, more than 5 million people in 160 countries had access to GPI news coverage.
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