Heather McCuen is a social strategist and startup advisor specializing in building connected, resilient communities and has spent the last decade focused on culture building and organizational justice in the private sector. She spent several years as a visiting professor of Social Media for Social Innovation for the United Nations mandated University for Peace’s Center for Executive Education and taught strategic civil resistance and media strategies at The School of Authentic Journalism (2013-2017), after attending the program as a scholar in 2012. She currently serves as the President of the Board of Directors for the Fund for Authentic Journalism, and is one of the founding organizers of the annual Salon of Authentic Journalism, which held its inaugural session in Mexico in April of 2025.
Since her time as part of a volunteer disaster task force in New York’s Ground Zero following September 11th, 2001, she has volunteered for emergency response organizations including the Red Cross, All Hands and Hearts, and DASI (Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault Intervention Services) to deepen her expertise in crisis stewardship, community building and conflict transformation. She earned her Master’s degree in Media, Peace and Conflict Studies from the United Nations mandated University for Peace, an executive certificate in the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (in association with the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington DC), and is a graduate of Harvard University’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI), a joint program with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. As a writer, her first love was (and is) theater, and she has written several plays, including Hope In Chaos (2011) and Nobody’s Bones (2013).
Heather believes passionately that Authentic Journalism is, to use the words of Václav Havel, “the art of the impossible, namely, the art of improving ourselves and the world.”