Pre-recorded discussion with Matthew Podolsky (Producer) and Ru Mahoney (Impact Producer), moderated by Heather Souvaine Horn (Deputy Editor, The New Republic)

Heather Souvaine Horn is a deputy web editor at The New Republic. She has previously held editing and writing positions at GlobalPost and The Atlantic.

Matthew Podolsky is a documentary filmmaker, podcaster and co-founder of the Wild Lens Collective. Matthew’s films include the Emmy-nominated Bluebird Man, and the feature length film Scavenger Hunt, about the California condor. Both films won numerous awards and screened at film festivals across the globe. Matthew is also a host and producer of the Eyes on Conservation podcast, a top-rated interview series focused on global conservation issues, as well as the producer of Common Land, a new radio documentary series that tells the creation stories behind protected areas.

Ru Mahoney is an Impact Producer working at the nexus of storytelling, communication science and action. She's worked on films for National Geographic, BBC, and PBS. After several years in the film industry she founded Project Impact in 2020 to scale up capacity for research-driven strategies supporting the world's most important stories. Project Impact builds a curated team of experts for each film, blending award-winning creativity with a data-driven strategic process so that great stories can lead to measurable, real-world solutions.