(Boston, MA -March 7, 2024) – The Board of Trustees for Boston public media producer GBH has elected Elise McDonald and Richard Weissbourd as trustees. The Board elected McDonald and Weissbourd at the March 6, 2024 meeting.
“GBH’s Board of Trustees has been invaluable in helping guide our strategy and future direction,” said GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg. “As a mission-focused organization and one of the largest producers of public media content at both the local and national levels, we look forward to adding Elise McDonald and Richard Weissbourd as trusted voices to the GBH Board of Trustees.”
“Elise McDonald and Richard Weissbourd bring extensive experience from the fields of business, management, academics, and education to the Board of Trustees for GBH,” said Ann Fudge, Chair of the Board of Trustees. “I’m so pleased to welcome them to this board of exceptional leaders dedicated to evaluating paths forward for GBH’s ongoing commitment to creating innovative public media for all audiences.”
The new Trustees are:
Elise McDonald, a Managing Director on the Generalist Investment Team at Harvard Management Company where she has worked since 2003. Before joining Harvard Management Company, Ms. McDonald worked at Waveland Capital Management and Heitman. She is also the Chair of the Investment Committee and a member of the Board of Trustees at The Winsor School. Ms. McDonald earned her BS in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from Stanford University and her MBA from Harvard Business School.
Richard Weissbourd, a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government. His work focuses on moral development, the nature of hope, vulnerability and resilience in childhood, parenting, and effective schools and services for children. He directs the Making Caring Common Project, a national effort to make moral and social development priorities in child-raising and to provide strategies to schools and parents for promoting in children caring, a commitment to justice and other key moral and social capacities. He leads an initiative to reform college admissions, Turning the Tide, which has engaged over 300 college admissions offices. He is a founder of several interventions for children facing risks, including ReadBoston and WriteBoston. He is also a founder of a pilot school in Boston, the Lee Academy, that begins with children at 3 years old. He has advised on the city, state and federal levels on family policy, parenting and school reform and has written for numerous scholarly and popular publications and blogs, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today and NPR. He is the author of The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America’s Children and What We Can Do About It (Addison-Wesley, 1996), named by the American School Board Journal as one of the top 10 education books of all time. His most recent book, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development (Houghton Mifflin 2009), was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 24 books of 2009.
About GBH
GBH is the leading multiplatform creator for public media in America. As the largest producer of content for PBS and partner to NPR and PRX, GBH delivers compelling experiences, stories and information to audiences wherever they are. GBH produces digital and broadcast programming that engages, illuminates and inspires, through drama and science, history, arts, culture and journalism. GBH is the creator of such signature programs as MASTERPIECE, ANTIQUES ROADSHOW, FRONTLINE, NOVA, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and Arthur and Molly of Denali and a catalog of streaming series, podcasts and on-demand video. GBH’s television channels include GBH 2, GBH 44, GBH Kids and national services GBH WORLD and Create. With studios and a newsroom headquartered in Boston, GBH reaches across New England with GBH 89.7, Boston’s Local NPR; CRB Classical 99.5; CAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station and as a partner to NEPM in Springfield. Dedicated to making media accessible to and representative of our diverse culture, GBH is a pioneer in delivering media to audience members who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind and visually impaired. With PBS LearningMedia, GBH creates curriculum-based digital content for educators nationwide. GBH’s local programming includes Boston Public Radio, Greater Boston, Stories from the Stage, The Culture Show, Basic Black and High School Quiz Show. GBH has been recognized with hundreds of the nation’s premier broadcast, digital and journalism awards. Find more information at gbh.org.
Media Contact:
Emily Balk
GBH External Relations
314-550-2448
emily_balk@wgbh.org
