people
Scott Tillitt is founder and
principal consultant and writer. The Collective also includes an
immediate
family of experienced collaborators
and, indirectly, a constantly expanding universe of professional and
social communities: marketing and PR professionals, writers and
editors, grassroots groups, nonprofit professionals, artists and
creatives, activists, hipsters and culture shapers.
 Photo:
Dan Fiege
|
Scott is a socially conscious communicator, equal parts publicist,
marketer, entrepreneur and writer. He has an insatiable interest in big
ideas and the behaviors that drive people, what resonates with them,
and how to communicate with them.He has 15-plus years of experience promoting ideas, products and services in various culture-shaping (and sometimes suffocating) worlds — advertising, media, interactive design, photography, technology, television and fashion. Some years ago, he broke the trance of an increasingly cynical consumer culture and started applying his corporate skills to the public good, promoting progressive social issues.
In his new incarnation, he worked with Josh
Baran on the media relations for
the 2003 New York visit of the
Dalai
Lama, handling various press
events and nearly 500 foreign and
domestic journalists from all forms of media. (He later handled media for subsequent visits of His Holiness.) He founded Antidote
Collective in 2004 and has since worked with a range of groups, people,
films and books covering the environment,
religion and
spirituality, social justice, health care and
education
— from Phil Donahue
to Rainforest Action Network to the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.
He has helped
clients on both US coasts and places in between, in
Europe, and down under in Australia. (See Clients.)
In early 2009 Scott founded a new kind of collaborative workspace in
Beacon, NY. Partly inspired by the coworking movement, BEAHIVE
adds a civic and Local Living Economy dimension and is building a community of members with a
range of creative and technical talents and a desire to improve their
professional lives, their personal lives and the community. He opened a second location in Kingston in November, 2009, and is planning a third in Hudson to open Fall 2010.
He’s on the
steering committee of Progressive PR
Professionals - PR/PR/PR (a
network of 900-plus communicators) and volunteers with the Taproot
Foundation (which provides pro
bono services to nonprofits; read a consultant
profile of Scott by Taproot). He has been on the steering committee of Slow Food Hudson Valley (one of 850 Slow Food chapters worldwide that promotes good, clean and fair food) and a member of the Public Relations
Society
of America
(Association/Nonprofit section) and the Publicity Club of New York (PCNY), the oldest ongoing organization for the PR professional in the country.
For many years you could find Scott's name in
the masthead of Photo District
News
(PDN),
the award-winning international magazine for photographers and visual
creatives.
In his previous life, he was in
the New York office of interactive pioneer Red Sky
(later folded into Agency.com),
where he led the external communications efforts to build awareness of
and differentiate the $50 million, eight-office agency. He has managed
marketing communications and media outreach at a leading
advertising/media trade association, handled client campaigns for a
boutique Silicon Alley PR firm, and managed a $14 million retail
account at electronic retailer QVC
(during media mogul Barry Diller's
time there). He sports
a degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
His personal antidotes are a
strong meditation practice and holistic living, which keep him centered
and positive and his mind agile and creative (relatively speaking). He
lives with his two cats in Beacon, New York, just
north of NYC in the verdant Hudson Valley.
collective collaborators
|
"...
an idea or product that deserves the label 'creative' arises from the
synergy of many sources and not only from the mind of a single person."
social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention |
|
Josh has been a communications and public relations professional since 1982. He is best known for his work in the areas of nonprofit communications, public affairs, crisis management, entertainment, publishing, religion and technology. During his long and varied career, he has worked with an extraordinarily broad range of clients, companies, and leaders–from Bill Gates and the Dalai Lama to Arnold Schwarzenegger; from Time Warner, Miramax and Sony Pictures to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and Amnesty International; from Earth Day 1990 to managing communication for cases before the United States Supreme Court. He has created and managed public affairs campaigns involving environmental protection, public health and human rights.
Josh has been intimately involved in many high-profile campaigns and projects, counseling leading foundations, nonprofit organizations, corporations, media companies, film studios and music companies. One of his special areas of expertise is in the intersection between entertainment and political, social and religious issues.
 Photo: Emily Potter
|
Following a 20-year career as a corporate public relations executive, Wendell left his position as head of communications for CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, to help socially responsible organizations. In widely covered testimony before a US Senate committee in 2009, Wendell disclosed guarded internal practices of health insurers, describing, among other things, how the industry has developed and implemented strategic communications plans, based on deceptive PR, advertising and lobbying efforts, to defeat reform initiatives.
Since then Wendell has testified before two House committees, briefed several members of Congress and their staffs, appeared with members of Congress at several press conferences, spoken at more than 100 public forums, and has been the subject of numerous articles in the US and foreign media.
Wendell currently serves as the Senior Fellow on Health Care for the Center for Media and Democracy, an independent, non-partisan public interest organization, and speaks out on both the need for a fundamental overhaul of the American health care system and on the dangers to American democracy and society of the decline of the media as watchdog, which has contributed to the growing and increasingly unchecked influence of corporate PR. He also serves as a Consumer Liaison Representative for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
Prior to joining CIGNA, Wendell headed communications at Humana Inc., another large for-profit health insurer, was director of public relations and advertising for the Baptist Health System of East Tennessee, and a partner in an Atlanta PR firm. He began his career as a journalist, later covering Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court, and penning a weekly political column for the Scripps-Howard News Bureau in Washington, DC. Wendell has also served as press secretary to a Tennessee gubernatorial candidate and as a lobbyist at both the state and federal levels.
Wendell is accredited in public relations (APR) by the Public Relations Society of America, is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Club, and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of WhoWhatWhy.com. He lives in Philadelphia.
