Ilyse Hogue
Ilyse Hogue is the Director of the Global Finance Campaign for Rainforest Action Network and a co founder of the Smartmeme Project. Rainforest Action Network uses direct action, grassroots mobilization, and high profile media campaigning to preserve the world's remaining old growth forests and their traditional inhabitants. The Smartmeme Project examines the interface between mass media and social movements and the transmission of new ideas at specific points in the operating system. In both capacities, Ilyse has looked extensively at messaging through media, developing training tools that allow activists to better utilize concepts of mass media, and tracking language in the media as indicators of social and cultural narratives. Ilyse has been part of the media team on many mass mobilizations over the last 5 years, most recently working with the Media Working Group for Direct Action to Stop the War in San Francisco and is a frequent trainer on the interface between direct action and media. Before joining RAN, Ilyse organized community based groups around clean water issues and environmental racism in Austin, Texas and worked with Greenpeace USA ona variety of campaigns including forests and toxics. Ilyse has worked with the global justice movement in the United States and abroad in building alliances from global North to global South around issues of economic globalization and proposed solutions including localization and ecological debt. Ilyse holds a Master's of Science in Resource Ecology Management from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor's of Art in Environmental Science from Vassar College.