Eva Haller, a luminary in the nonprofit world, joins the News Literacy Project board

“Eva brings a wealth of experience in both the business and nonprofit worlds to the project’s board at just the right moment,” said NLP board chair Don Baer. “We welcome her expertise as we raise our profile and expand our reach.”

Haller, who as a teenager in Nazi-occupied Hungary was active in the resistance, has held leadership roles in nonprofits in New York City and elsewhere. For the last three decades, she and her husband, Dr. Yoel Haller, have been devoted to social, educational and environmental activism and philanthropy.

Earlier in her life, she was a co-founder of the Campaign Communications Institute of America, a highly successful consulting firm that revolutionized the use of telephone marketing by Fortune 100 companies and political campaigns.

Haller said she was drawn to NLP’s mission after meeting Miller three years ago. She and her husband have attended several NLP events in New York City and have supported NLP in a variety of ways.

“In Nazi Hungary there was no freedom of speech, and in Soviet-occupied Budapest there was no freedom of thought,” Haller said. “In America today we desperately have to retain, maintain and encourage critical thinking and the courage of our convictions. Therefore, we must protect and grow the News Literacy Project, because news literacy is our most precious insurance against totalitarian slavery of thought.”

Haller has been honored with the Mandala Award for Humanitarian Achievement in 2011 (presented by the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City), the inaugural Award for Excellence in Mentoring at Forbes’ Power Redefined Women’s Summit in 2013, and a Lifetime Achievement Award by the United Nations Population Fund in 2013. More recently, she was named a visiting professor at Glasgow Caledonian University, where she received an honorary doctorate and was awarded the 2014 Magnusson Fellowship.

For more than 17 years, she was board chair of Free the Children USA (now part of WE Charity), a high-profile organization that partners with communities to work from within to break the cycle of poverty.

She is a trustee of the Rubin Museum of Art and the University of California Santa Barbara Foundation. She also serves on the boards of the Creative Visions Foundation, which uses arts, media and technology to ignite positive social change; Sing for Hope, which promotes the power of the arts in under-resourced areas by, among other things,  placing 88 pianos on the streets of New York City each year; Video Volunteers, which uses video to give a voice to India’s “untouchables” caste and other unheard communities; Asia Initiatives, which supports the economic empowerment of poor women and their families in South Asia; and A Blade of Grass, which promotes socially engaged art across the United States.

She previously was on the boards of the Jane Goodall Institute and Women for Women International. In 2015 she was appointed to the Prince’s Charities Canada Advisory Council, which promotes the charitable work of the Prince of Wales.