Nora Ferrell
Nora Ferrell is a custom trainings consultant for Community Media Workshop. For more than 10 years, Nora has handled communications for nonprofit organizations. Since arriving at the Workshop in June 2010, Nora managed the production and release of two reports—The NEWNews 2010 and Realizing Potential: What Chicago’s Online Innovators Need—about Chicago’s shifting media landscape. She oversees the Workshop’s busy training and custom consulting schedule and has conducted media, message development and social media trainings for LISC’s Institute of Comprehensive Community Development, the Greater Chicago Food Depository, the Mott Foundation and Alliance for Research in Chicagoland Communities.
Before joining the Workshop, Nora served as communications director and editor at Minnesota 2020, a statewide nonprofit think tank. While there, Nora organized statewide media tours and helped the new nonprofit launch its blog and maintain an active social media presence. Prior to Minnesota 2020, Nora was a senior account executive at Chicago’s public interest public relations firm Valerie Denney Communications. During her eight-year tenure at VDC, Nora oversaw public relations for a number of nonprofit organizations and community groups including the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center, the Healing Our Waters Coalition, Metropolitan Planning Council, the Illinois Poverty Summit and LISC-Chicago.
In 2007, Nora’s media work around police torture in Chicago won the Publicity Club of Chicago’s Edwin J. Shaughnessy’s Quality of Life Award. Nora earned a BA in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is happy to be back in Chicago with her husband and son.
