Since its inception, MHz Foundation’s mission has been to bring global culture and perspective to the world via digital programming with Curationist.org.
Founded as MHz Networks in 2001, it originated as an American broadcaster and project of the Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corporation (CPBC), servicing the Washington, D.C. marketplace, with international television programming, namely: Chinese, Russian, French, South African and Turkish programs.
After twelve years of operation, CPBC formed MHz Networks in 2013 as a non-profit entity. MHz Networks existed to carry forward the broadcast operations to service their local American market, with rich cultural content from around the world. Within the exit agreement, MHz Networks would continue to broadcast on CPBC’s spectrum, with a stipulation that if ever CPBC were to sell off their spectrum rights, MHz Networks would receive a portion of the proceeds.
In 2015, MHz Networks changed its name to MHz Foundation. At the same time, a new independent for-profit entity was created under the name MHz Networks, LLC., which operates MHz Choice, a subscription-based streaming service that continued to offer access to international content. Divesting for-profit activities allowed MHz Foundation to focus on its non-profit mission to enrich and champion global content curation.
Also in 2015, CPBC began the process of auctioning off under-utilized spectrum licenses under an incentive option of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who sought to reclaim traditional spectrum of under-utilized wavelengths, in order to foster innovation within the space. Under the agreement with CPBC, MHz Foundation shared a portion of their auction proceeds. This served as the seed revenue for MHz Foundation’s public interest activities moving forward.
Today, the MHz Foundation expands its reach beyond the Metro DC area to the world through MHz Curationist. Launched in 2019, Curationist strives to make global arts, culture, and heritage available to all through a free knowledge platform and website.
The MHz Foundation is a Virginia-based 501(c)(3) corporation.
Benjamin Rees has seventeen years of experience in partnerships and business development in professional services and VOD industries. Benjamin is a global citizen, born in Australia, obtained United States citizenship, and has traveled to over a dozen countries in Asia, Americas, and Europe, making his worldview wide and inclusive. Benjamin brings that open worldview to MHz Curationist.org and the MHz Foundation. He is currently employed at a public company accounting firm, and his experience includes account strategy, revenue planning, and business development. From 2005-2008, Benjamin was Director of Partnerships and Business Development at IMAKE Software and Services, which specialized in open-source, highly scalable, content management, and entitlement software. He was responsible for managing partnerships with OEMs and system integrators, and provided financial analysis and due diligence resources.
Kevin Karjala is an experienced senior program delivery consultant with a focus on wireless technologies and expertise in leading business and technology impacting initiatives. He has worked with clients in multiple industries including cable, wireless, and media. Kevin excels in areas of large cross functional program delivery, software development, application, and device testing, requirements gathering and process design and execution.
Casey is the Director of Music Licensing at SiriusXM satellite radio, where he is responsible for licensing sound recordings for transmission to 35 million U.S. subscribers. Casey was previously CEO of the Future of Music Coalition, a Washington, DC-based education and advocacy organization for musicians and composers. He is also a musician, author, and music/media professor at Georgetown University and Berklee College of Music, where he has authored Berklee's first comprehensive course on music policy for its graduate degree program. Casey regularly speaks on issues such as emerging business models, creators' rights, technology policy, and intellectual property at worldwide conferences, universities, and in the media. He has testified before Congress on copyright and has written hundreds of articles on the impact of technology on the creative community in scholarly journals and other publications. Casey is an in-demand commentator in media outlets such as NPR, Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Billboard, L.A. Times, CNBC and more. Casey also serves on board of the Alliance for Media Arts and Culture—an organization dedicated to expanding opportunity for media makers in all 50 states and around the world. His book William S. Burroughs & the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll was published by University of Texas Press in 2019, followed by Music Copyright in Practice: an Authoritative Guide (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Casey also runs the DC-based label Lux Eterna Records and is the proud dad to two highly musical daughters.
Ben is a chef/organizer/artist based in Detroit. Hall’s work revolves around the forms community takes particularly at the Russell Street Deli, a 30-year-old heritage restaurant in Detroit’s Eastern Market, which Hall owns and operates as a long-term, sited project dealing with labor structures, how capital routes itself, and hierarchical power structures.
As a chef, Hall produced the first fully integrated, serially repeated, chef-driven school meal, in a major municipality producing a vegan, soy-free, gluten-free soup, at cost, for children at Detroit Public Schools where 55,000 students eat for free and 88 percent are financially eligible for school lunch. Hall is in the process of repeating this in Houston, Texas where 165,000 children will eat three different soups every two weeks, under the federally mandated nutritional and financial guidelines. Hall worked specifically on those guidelines as an active grassroots lobbyist for the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act. Additionally, he has been repeatedly active as a lobbyist primarily working on wage rights for low wage workers including giving congressional briefings and also lobbying on the Global Food Security Act with Oxfam.
As an artist, Hall most recently presented a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and performed at the Moers Jazz Festival, as a core member of Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain orchestra project. As a music producer and organizer, he produced over 300 performances in Detroit for visiting artists at Entropy Studios, a performance project for experimental sound artists. Using the recording studio there he also produced 60 recordings for numerous artists and performers on the Brokenresearch record label. Hall also founded and organized Bap-tizum.com, the largest Black/AfAm spiritual music archive in the world. He is a member of the American Folklore Society.
Dr. Chalas has over a decade of experience working in the arts and culture sector both in Canada and the United States where she was responsible for educational and public program development and delivery, exhibition curation, as well as conducting and using research and evaluation information to improve teaching and learning. She currently teaches at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Chander is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and a PhD from Brown University. His first monograph, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century, examined the appropriation of British Romantic tropes by colonial poets throughout the nineteenth century. He has also edited a collection of short fiction by the nineteenth century Guyanese author, Egbert Martin, and co-edited, with Tricia A. Matthew, a special issue of European Romantic Review on generic experimentation in Romantic abolitionist literature. Professor Chander is currently working on The Collected Works of Egbert Martin, with the support of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant, and developing a second monograph, Browntology, which considers the philosophical groundings of brownness in Enlightenment European thought in order to show how the figure of the model minority haunts foundational efforts to define the human.
Christian Dawson is Executive Director of MHz Foundation, where he works to use the Internet as a tool to bring us closer together as a global society. Dawson is also Co-founder of Open-i Advisors Inc., as well as the Internet Infrastructure Coalition. Before that, Dawson spent nearly two decades leading web hosting provider ServInt. He is a staunch advocate for Internet freedom as a tool for social and economic growth.
Virginia Poundstone is the Director of Product and Content at the MHz Foundation. She leads the emergent vision for Curationist and the teams working hard to build it. Based in New York City, she is a visual artist, educator, and community organizer.
Prior to joining the foundation, she taught classes across disciplines at Columbia University, Parsons The New School of Design, and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), She ran core courses like 3D Design Foundations, Sculpture 1, and Critical Reading and Writing. She also taught courses she designed and developed: Publishing as Form, formally and critically examined the process of making ideas public through publishing; Objects of Networks, considered the functional purpose of connection and how networked objects shape our worldview; NYC: Food students conducted primarily outside the classroom exploring the food systems of the city as field research that culminated in a collective system design project.
She was a founding board member and Co-Executive Director of the Bed Stuy Parents Committee, a volunteer grassroots non-profit advocating for school equity in her local public schools. Their work was documented in the critically acclaimed podcast School Colors, a narrative podcast from Brooklyn Deep about how race, class, and power shape American cities and schools.
She is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation awardee, was granted an Agnes Varis Fellowship as well as a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and has had numerous artist residencies at fantastic places like, Pioneer Works, the Banff Center for Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She is a member of the cooperatively artist run gallery, Essex Flowers, in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
As the Chief of Staff, Amy brings over 15 years of client service experience on small to large scale teams. She ensures on-budget and goal-aligned operations across the departments. Her focus is to maintain year-over-year growth by advancing strategic initiatives. As well as to manage and align the organization’s goals to projects from concept to implementation to measurement. Day to day, Amy provides holistic organizational clarity, leadership and support to all departments, contractors, vendors and employees of MHz Foundation.
Brandon J. Roy brings to the MHz Foundation his rich brand management experience in the consumer goods industry, entrepreneurial spirit, and fund development experience in the not-for-profit sector. As the Marketing and Promotions Lead for MHz Foundation, Brandon is responsible for leading marketing initiatives that seek to nurture and grow the Curationist community. He is instrumental in building the organization’s brand, promoting its mission and the shared values of our global community.
Craig has gained more than 20 years of accounting experience in various industries from sports retail, commercial banking, public practice, higher education, and government (municipal and provincial). His expertise lies in budgeting, accounting and reporting for large scale capital projects. Craig’s career has included working as the accountant of record for the construction of a $300 million dollar science and academic building in Southern Alberta, Canada, and being the controller of a $30 million dollar Credit Union in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. As the controller for the MHz Foundation, Craig is responsible for maintaining an accurate set of financials, the basis for which the Foundation can make sound financial decisions, and to act as a financial resource, and trusted advisor to the MHz team.
By Postal Mail:
MHz Foundation
303 W Broad St #206
Richmond, VA 23220
By Email:
[email protected]
One thing that unites us all is our passion for MHz Foundation’s mission. If you’re motivated, passionate for arts and cultural content and open access, and thrive in an entrepreneurial environment, this is the place for you.
Current Job Postings:
Job Title: MHz Foundation Director of Development
Employment Type: Part-time Contractor
Time Commitment: 60 hours a month
Reports to: MHz Foundation Executive Director
Proposed Start Date: 14/02/2021
Overall responsibility:
We are seeking a Development Director to cultivate and implement a strategic plan in order to raise vital funds for our organization in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner, around the continued development of our Curationist platform, found at https://www.curationist.org/.
The Development Director will work within various organizations to secure funding and sponsorships, to both foster and manage the organization’s key financial relationships. From managing department leaders and team members in establishing fundraising plans, maintaining donor relationships, and securing new ones, the development director will be in charge of advancing the company’s initiatives through actively seeking partners.
Key areas of responsibility:
Qualifications:
Details:
Job Title: Community Manager
Employment Type: Part-time Contractor
Time Commitment: 40 hours per month
Reports to: Director of Development
Key Collaborators: Executive Director, Social Media Expert, Chief of Staff, Director of Product & Content, Community Liaison
Proposed Start Date: 14/02/2021
Key Areas of Responsibility:
Qualifications:
Details:
Job Title: Community Liaison and Advisory Board Lead
Employment Type: Part-time Contractor
Time Commitment: 60 hours a month (30 in month one)
Reports to: MHz Foundation Executive Director
Proposed Start Date: 14/02/2021
Key areas of responsibility:
Qualifications:
Details:
For further information on MHz Foundation careers, please contact: jobs(at)mhzfoundation.org.