Makani Themba-Nixon is the Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a non-profit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy to advance health justice. She is also the Project Director of the Communities Creating Healthy Environments National Program Office.

Makani has nearly 20 years of experience working with community-based coalitions in public health. She is a highly sought-after trainer, technical assistance provider, and ethnographer. Her publications have helped set the standard for policy advocacy work and contributed significantly to the field’s current emphasis on media and policy advocacy to address health problems. She has extensive networks in communities of color.

While head of The Marin Institute’s Center for Media and Policy Analysis, Makani directed the RWJF-funded Media and Policy Advocacy and Technical Assistance Project. The three year, seven-coalition project to address alcohol, tobacco and other drug problems resulted in some of the field’s most cutting edge initiatives of the 1990s. Policy victories included the groundbreaking Baltimore billboard ordinance, the Oakland, California conditional use permit ordinance (the first of its kind to regulate existing alcohol outlets), and a policy in Macon, Georgia that rehabilitated buildings seized in illegal drug sales into affordable housing for low-income family ownership. All of these policies were widely replicated, affecting practice nationwide.

Makani has published numerous articles and case studies on race, class, media, policy advocacy and public health. She is the co-author of Media Advocacy and Public Health: Power for Prevention, a contributor to the volumes We the Media, State of the Race: Creating Our 21st Century, along with many other edited book projects. Makani was recently chosen as one of “Ten Black Thinkers” asked to comment on Black conditions as part of the NAACP Crisis magazine’s 60th anniversary commemoration of the landmark article What the Negro Wants. Her latest book, co-authored with Hunter Cutting is Talking the Walk: Communications Guide for Racial Justice.