Casey Cora Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Illinois, United States

Chicago

Debuting June 2019, Impact Culinary Training is an immersive culinary job readiness program open to Chicago young adults ages 16-24. Founded by Chef Rick Bayless with enthusiastic support of Chicago’s chef community, the program includes eight weeks of professional instruction followed by four-week paid internships at some of Chicago’s best restaurants. The program’s goal is twofold: to help solve the crippling unemployment in the city’s impoverished neighborhoods, and to provide Chicago restaurants with job-ready cooks. The program founders strongly believe a dialogue between Chicago’s best restaurant chefs and young people from underserved neighborhoods can lead to better understanding on both sides.The classes are held in a teaching kitchen inside The Hatchery, a food-and-beverage business incubator in East Garfield Park. The Hatchery is a joint venture between two Chicago nonprofits: Accion, a full-service small business lender and the Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago (ICNC), a business incubator specializing in workforce development.

Chicago, Il

I'm the Media Director for Chef Rick Bayless and the world-class restaurants Frontera restaurant group in Chicago. What does that mean? A whole lot on any given day. At a glance:• Media relations: pitching and placing stories everywhere from community weeklies to the cover of Food & Wine magazine. • Advise and draft extensive briefings, talking points and speeches. Rigorous preparation for national and local media interviews, award ceremonies and high-profile appearances. • Director of Content. Responsible for creative direction, content strategy and execution of social media and newsletter accounts for Rick Bayless and four distinct restaurants (totaling an audience of 2+ million), including concepting, photographing, styling, filming, editing and distribution of content, including our YouTube channel with 13 million views and counting. Also actively manage the RickBayless.com website, which generates about 500,000 unique visitors annually.• Social Impact: As director of the nonprofit Frontera Farmer Foundation, I’ve modernized our entire fundraising and grant-giving cycle, leading to significant increases in giving to Midwest family farms. As the project lead for the grassroots Impact Culinary Training, I’ve brought together a broad range of partners (operations, funders, staffers and students) to launch a groundbreaking culinary training program that creates job opportunities for young people on the city’s West Side.• Television Production: Producer and Script Supervisor for Seasons 11 & 12 of the highly acclaimed, Emmy-nominated cooking show “Mexico: One Plate at a Time” and led the show’s social media promotion and online advertising efforts, as well implementing episode streaming on multiple platforms.

The Frontera Farmer Foundation, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization, is committed to promoting small, sustainable farms serving the Chicago area by providing them with capital development grants. The Foundation envisions a year-round interchange between sustainable farmers and consumers, including farmers’ market patrons and chefs, in which seasonal local agriculture provides the foundation for sustainable regional cuisine.The FFF has awarded nearly $3 million in grants to Midwest farms. Since 2015, I've been at the helm of the organization, serving as the organization's main administrator and liaison between farmers and our grant-giving board. In that time, we've modernized our whole fundraising approach, enlisting features like online auctions, text-to-give efforts and social media campaigns to help smash our fundraising goals, year after year.

Chicago, Il

Producing daily news coverage of the Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Chinatown neighborhoods in the world's greatest city. Written stories. Social Media. Photography. Occasional videography. Radio, too.

Oak Park, Ill.

Please note: A website glitch on Patch.com sites has resulted in the loss of some text in the articles linked below. Responsibilities include assigning, reporting and editing daily news stories, commissioning story art, soliciting user-generated content, engaging and managing communities online and in person, creating multimedia packages, curating content, leading a team of dozens of freelance journalists and bloggers, and growing and maintaining our daily social media presence.

Municipal beat reporter for Oak Lawn, a village of 60,000 on Chicago’s southwest side. Founder of the On the Lawn news blog, evangelist for online journalism and community outreach, and a sometimes-contributor to the newspaper’s “Not So Mighty Dollar” blog.

Produced the newspaper’s breaking news blog; responsibilities on any given day included police reporting, news photography and video, crafting Web headlines and coordinating breaking news coverage across multiple bureaus. Also covered the evening shift as a police reporter and general assignment writer in the newspaper’s flagship newsroom in St. Petersburg.

Ma, Journalism And Media Studies

Activities and Societies: Neighborhood News BureauTaught Introduction to Mass Media and Media Ethics courses to 40-plus undergraduates.

Ba, Journalism