StoryCorps is delighted to welcome Sandra M. Clark, who will join the organization as our new CEO in mid-February 2022. Sandra has built a distinguished career in media and currently serves as vice president for news and civic dialogue at WHYY, the main PBS and NPR affiliate in the Philadelphia area where she manages all news operations across radio, TV, web, and digital media. At WHYY, Sandra led the newsroom’s audience growth and diversification strategies, community engagement initiatives, and managed local news partnerships and funding opportunities. During her five-year tenure, she also led the station’s diversity, cultural competency, community engagement, and trust-building efforts.
As StoryCorps’ second-ever CEO, Sandra—together with Founder and President Dave Isay—will lead all aspects of the organization. Dave said, “Sandra’s vast experience, extraordinary leadership, strong moral core, and deep understanding of our nation and its media and social landscape make her the perfect person to serve as StoryCorps’ next CEO. I can’t wait to work alongside her in the evolution of this organization.” The search was conducted by Ann Blinkhorn of Blinkhorn, a firm that specializes in identifying and attracting transformative leaders.
A Pulitzer Prize
Prior to WHYY, Sandra served as managing editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer where, among other accomplishments, she implemented two of the paper’s most successful reader engagement initiatives and led the paper to a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2014. In 1983, she began her career at the Inquirer and served in various roles there over the years.
Sandra is a long-time advocate for diversity, inclusion, and equity and last year was named one of The Philadelphia Tribune’s Most Influential African American Leaders. She also serves on a number of boards, including the News Leaders Association and the advisory board for the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication.
Shining a Light
Having grown up in a military family, with an African-American father from Louisiana and a Japanese mother, one of Sandra’s greatest joys is cooking—what she calls a “treasured inheritance” of history and food for the soul from her rich multicultural upbringing.
Sandra has always loved hearing the stories of everyday people and learning new places and cultures, having lived in Kansas, Louisiana, Japan, West and Southern Africa, and now Philadelphia, and traveled to many more places. She says one of her most “humbling and life-altering experiences” was as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. Her two-year assignment was on an island with no running water or electricity, but what was most memorable were people with “an abundance of ingenuity and incredible generosity, and so much more to teach me than I could leave them.”
Throughout her life and career, this fundamental belief in the potential of every person has led Sandra to shine a light on those within organizations and the larger communities in which we live, who have much to contribute but are too often unseen and unheard. StoryCorps’ core belief in the power of people’s stories is what attracted her to the organization.
She remarked, “StoryCorps is a national treasure with unlimited potential to grow and reach more diverse audiences…we are living through unprecedented times and StoryCorps is well positioned to help heal the divisions by reminding us all of the power of empathy and our shared humanity.”
She added, “I am not a crier–never have been. But I confess, StoryCorps [stories] get me every time.”