Leadership Institute Fellows

Laurie Lane-Zucker is the founder and CEO of Hotfrog, LLC (www.hotfrog.org), a global hub of media, networking and commerce for the sustainability and social justice movement. 

Laurie is an entrepreneur, publisher, editor, and nonprofit executive who has spent his entire career working in media and

marketing for environmental and social justice causes and the arts. He is currently founder and president of the Triad Institute, a nonprofit publisher and think-tank focused on global citizenship. Prior to founding Triad, he was co-founder and executive director of The Orion Society, the first and largest network of environmental and social justice groups in North America. as well as an editor and contributing writer for the award-winning magazines Orion (“America’s Finest Environmental Magazine” — Boston Globe) and Orion Afield (1998 IPA Best New Magazine Award Winner).

He has also been editor and/or series editor for a number of important books, including In The Presence of Fear by Wendell Berry, Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership in an Age of Terror by Wendell Berry and David James Duncan, The Open Space of Democracy by Terry Tempest Williams, Place-Based Education by David Sobel, and most recently, God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right by David James Duncan. In the early 1990s, Lane-Zucker, with Dr. John Elder, helped to pioneer (and coined the term) “place-based education,” a rapidly spreading pedagogy of community.

The magazines and books that Lane-Zucker has worked on have received numerous awards and other commendations, including the Independent Press Award for General Excellence, the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the PNBA Book Award. During his tenure at Orion, Lane-Zucker was centrally involved in the creation of Orion Online, Orion’s popular, content rich website, and the Orion Grassroots Network, a North American consortium of over 1000 nonprofit organizations involved in environmental and social justice work. Lane-Zucker’s work was recently highlighted in the book,

People’s Movements, People’s Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements by Bob Ostertag (Beacon Press).

Lane-Zucker’s has also worked extensively in the film industry. He was national marketing manager for Orion Classics (now Sony Pictures Classics), the foreign and art film division of Orion Pictures Corporation. At Orion Classics, he managed advertising and publicity for approximately 50% of U.S. markets. During his time at the company, Orion Classics won Best Foreign Film Oscars in consecutive years for Babette’s Feast and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and received a number of other awards and nominations for its films. Lane-Zucker did his undergraduate studies at Middlebury College (VT) and Edinburgh University (UK) and his graduate work at Columbia University (NY) and the Bread Loaf School of English (VT).