You might be wondering what we’ve been doing since our last official post in April 2013. We’ve been busy! Come holler at us over at our new adventures.

Baratunde Thurston is now the CEO and co-founder of Cultivated Wit and co-host of the podcast About Race. He wrote the New York Times bestseller How To Be Black and served for five years as director of digital for the satirical news outlet The Onion. When he’s not delivering talks at schools and gatherings such as SXSW and TED, he writes the monthly back page column for Fast Company and contributes to the MIT Media Lab as a director’s fellow. Baratunde has advised the Obama White House, has more than 10 years’ experience in standup comedy and more than 30 years’ experience being black. Keep up over at Baratunde.com. Above, you can find his SXSW 2012 keynote on The Power of Comedy to change the world. I was in the audience and loved it. Check it out: You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, etc.

Cheryl Contee today is the CEO and co-founder of the digital agency Fission Strategy, which helps the world’s leading non-profits, foundations and social enterprises use the Internet in innovative ways to create change globally. She is also the co-founder of Attentive.ly, a rising tech startup specializing in cutting edge influencer marketing technology. Attentive.ly has attracted over $2 million in seed capital, a rare achievement for a female-founded, minority-founded and female tech-led startup. Attentive.ly has won several industry awards and Cheryl’s work was featured in Essence Magazine. Cheryl’s experiences in startup land led her to partner with Van Jones and Amy Henderson of DreamCorps to co-found. #YesWeCode, which represents the movement to help over 100,000 low opportunity youth to become high quality coders & technologists.

In 2014, Cheryl was named as an Affiliate of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 2014 and as one of The Influencers 50 in Campaigns and Elections magazine. Cheryl was included in the first The Root 100 list of established and emerging African-American leaders. Huffington Post listed her as one of the Top 27 Female Founders in Tech to Follow on Twitter in 2011, as did Black Enterprise. Fast Company named her one of their 2010 Most Influential Women in Tech, activist category.

Cheryl has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, C-Span, Black Enterprise, BBC, Current TV, MSNBC and CNN, among other media appearances. She is also proud to serve on several boards and advisory committees including Netroots Nation, Focus100/Digital Undivided, Guttmacher Institute, Citizen Engagement Lab and serves as an ambassador for Social Venture Network (SVN).

You can check out some of her recent coverage in Black Enterprise or her writings in the Guardian and Huffington Post.

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