People-Centered Solutions: A Workshop on Ethical Interviewing
Hosts: Jessica Kantor & Ambika Samarthya-Howard
This hands-on workshop helps civil society practitioners, founders, and funders interview clients and beneficiaries through a solutions-focused storytelling lens that centers the individual rather than the outcome.
Through guided exercises and discussion, participants will explore empathy, informed consent, and agency, while learning to identify extractive framing and recognize how it unknowingly shows up in promotions and campaigns.
Together we’ll practice determining whose perspectives need to be centered and how power dynamics shape narrative choices.
Attendees will learn the solutions journalism framework of response, evidence, insights, and limitations, and how to co-create narratives that respect lived experience.
Session co-hosts:
Jessica Kantor is an independent journalist specializing in health, human rights, and social impact. Her work can be found in Fast Company, Healthcare Quarterly, Innately Science, and others. She has been a Solutions Insights Lab interviewer since 2023. Additionally, she provides communications strategy and writing for civil society who are working on the Sustainable Development Goals. She has produced content and moderated for global forums such as Horasis, SOCAP, The International Women’s Peace Group, and Cerrito Forum. Her Simon and Schuster book, Saving Lily, is a guide for treatment providers, loved ones, and individuals in active addiction, on how to navigate the world of substance abuse and treatment. She is a living kidney donor based in Los Angeles.
Ambika Samarthya-Howard is a communications strategist and documentary video producer who has been creating and disrupting at the intersection of storytelling and social good for two decades. She is currently the Managing Director at the Solutions Insights Lab, a research-to-action initiative housed within the Solutions Journalism Network, which has created work for foundations such as Skoll, Rockefeller, Oak and the Livelihood Impact Funds. SIL leverages the Solutions Journalism approach of investigating responses, evidence, insights, and limitations of solutions to current issues and then applied a social science analysis across the work to provide actionable wisdom. She has produced content for UNICEF, Havas, UNFPA, and Save the Children and has presented at over 20 conferences globally, including MERL Tech and SXSW.
This venue has a capacity of 60.