Board
RealistRevolt’s board has a wealth of experience and wisdom, along with diverse skill sets and expertise.
William Ranney
Bill has extensive experience in finance and general management. He has served as CFO for a number of technology companies in the Washington, DC area. These included companies ranging from start-ups to $100 million IT services companies. In these roles he raised over $75 million in private equity and venture funding and oversaw management of a wide range of corporate and operational functions. Previously, he has also held numerous senior financial positions at Bell Atlantic/Verizon.
Bill has been a long-time sounding board and advisor to Ward and RealistRevolt.
Bill received degrees from Cornell University and the Yale School of Management.
He and his wife have two adult sons and live in Potomac, MD.
Kevin Ellis
Kevin Ellis is the founder of Ellis Mills Public Affairs, LLC, and is a former senior partner at Kimbell Sherman & Ellis, a public affairs consultancy with offices in Vermont and Washington D.C.
An award-winning former journalist, Kevin Ellis provides strategic counsel to companies and nonprofits nationwide in message development, crisis management, PR, and social media. He has led campaigns and counseled companies and non-profits in government strategy, public relations, and crisis communications. At KSE, he helped lead the firm from three employees to 35, extending its reach into national government affairs consulting and strategic communications. The firm directed the government and communications strategy that led to Vermont's historic passage of a same-sex marriage law in 2009.
Kevin serves on the board of directors of Chelsea Green Publishing, a leading environmental and sustainability publisher; VT Digger, an online investigative reporting project; and DownStreet House and Community Development.
He lives in East Montpelier, VT.
Dinah Pokempner
Dinah Pokempner has extensive international legal experience, working for over three decades at Human Rights Watch, eventually serving including Assistant Secretary to the Board, General Counsel, and Acting Legal and Policy Director. As General Counsel she guided Human Rights Watch through two decades of rapid international expansion, creating a dozen affiliated charities to support a growing international donor network. She wrote institutional policies in almost all areas and as a key crisis manager, I handled challenges ranging from detention of staff in war zones to defamation suits to pandemic measures for an international staff, to managing data breaches and more.
More recently she has served as a UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion where she researched, drafted and convened experts on seminal issues of freedom of expression.
She is a member in good standing of the New York State Bar, and a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She received her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law (with high honors), and received her B.A. from Yale University, cum laude.
Paul Ingram
Paul Ingram has extensive experience with government policy discussions over nuclear weapons at the highest levels. He is the founder of Emergent Change, a consultancy that helps raise the game of governments and organizations in driving effective change in nuclear diplomacy even when they have little raw power. He is the originator and developer of the Stepping Stones Process that forms the backbone of the 16-nation Stockholm Initiative for Nuclear Disarmament driven at the foreign minister level. Paul served as Executive Director of BASIC (the British American Security Information Council) where he worked on nuclear weapons issues for two decades. Paul has taught systems approaches on the flagship Top Management Programme at the UK government's National School of Government 2006-2012. He has extensive media experience and between 2007 and 2012 he hosted a weekly peak-time political talk show on IRINN (Iranian domestic TV News in Farsi) addressing issues relevant to global security.
He lives and works in London, England.