Dr. Paulette Brown-Hinds is the publisher of Black Voice News and founder of Voice Media Ventures, a strategic media and content creation firm. She was elected to the James Irvine Foundation board in January 2018 and lives in Riverside.

She has over thirty years experience in media, communications, and community engagement and has served as the lead Black Media strategist for a number of statewide government and political campaigns. She has won statewide and national awards for her column Rants & Raves. As an educator, she teaches an annual course at UC Riverside connecting students in media and the arts with the broader community.

Her interest in local journalism and doing work for the public good has led her to serve on the boards American Press Institute, CalMatters, California Press Foundation, and the California News Publishers Association, the largest and oldest trade association for the news publishing industry in the state. In 2019 she served as president of the board of The James Irvine Foundation, becoming the first African-American elected to lead the organization. She is also the first African-American to chair the Inland Empire Community Foundation board.

As a life-long student of African-American literature, culture and history she leads Underground Railroad Study Tours, manages a collection of rare antebellum artifacts, and is the founder of Mapping Black California, a geospatial technology community mapping and STE[A]M initiative, with a goal of building a “smart and connected” African-American community in the Golden State. In 2019 she was featured in the book “Women and GIS” published by Esri Press.