Joe Baer was paddling on the Woonasquatucket River in the 1990’s and started to portage around a dam at what was then the rubble-strewn remnants from a mill fire at Riverside Mills. His hike through this neglected and toxic property, fenced off from the Olneyville neighborhood led to serving on the board of Woonasquatucket River Council and many subsequent connections to organizations, civic issues and neighborhoods in the years since.

He is currently the Director of Cityside at The Wheeler School which is based at the Waterfire Arts Center. Collaborating with dozens of community partners, students take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the twenty-five neighborhoods of Providence and crafting ways to address the many issues they learn about. Joe most values helping kids hear the stories of the people and places of the city.

Chris grew up in Rhode Island, works in Providence and lives nearby. A former journalist, Chris covered news from Block Island to Smith Hill including his last position at Providence Business News. Today, he works as an administrator at the Rhode Island School of Design and volunteers for a nonprofit theater on the side. He’s passionate about ensuring people have the knowledge they need to make informed choices about the world around them. And he reminds people often that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Phil grew up on the East Side of Providence, and has lived in the city as an adult — after leaving Rhode Island for college and graduate school — since 2011. He is the former news editor of the alt-weekly newspaper, The Providence Phoenix. Since the paper’s close in 2014, he has contributed to The Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets. His writing for Rhode Island Monthly has received multiple Rhode Island Press Association awards. He holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the Columbia University School of the Arts. And he has taught writing and journalism classes at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. His debut book, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the «Pill Mill Killer,” was published in 2024.

Phil is passionate about Providence, journalism, and projects — like the Providence Eye — where those interests intersect.

Jo-Anne Hart

Jo-Anne Hart’s training is in interdisciplinary social sciences and in humanities, with M.A, Ph.D., and MFA degrees. She graduated from UCLA and received a fellowship to study Persian literature and language at NYU, where she earned a Ph.D in political science/international studies focusing on the Middle East. Her Master of Fine Arts is in Creative Writing. Jo-Anne has taught at Brown (and is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs there), the Naval War College in Newport, RI, and Barnard College / Columbia University and she is a Professor Emeritus at Lesley University.

Hart also worked as a practitioner in international conflict resolution with the longstanding international peacemaking NGO, Search for Common Ground. Hart was a convener of a US-Iranian working group on avoiding incidents at sea in the Persian Gulf and has lengthy experience leading trainings in mutual threat reduction in the Middle East and in security decision making exercises with the US Army’s Futures Division. She has lectured widely in the US and abroad, including Moscow, Tehran, Kuwait, Heidelberg, and at the Law School of the University of Copenhagen. Hart has met with the President of Iran and debated John Bolton on live TV.

The free educational project Hart created on youth civic literacy and political participation, GrowingVoters.org has a 5th edition and has been downloaded by more than 20k educators from all 50 US states since 2004.  Her work has been translated into numerous languages and published extensively internationally.

With her creative writing Jo-Anne has performed her nonfiction pieces in New England, Sweden, and Norway. She was a Grand Slam Winner at the Ko Festival of Radical Performance, and at the PVD Fringe Festival  2024 her work was voted Best One-Person Show and Best Love Story. Her nonfiction essay titled By-Pass, was published recently by Plexus, the literary journal of the Brown Medical School.

Fraser grew up in the Providence area, relocated several times and returned for good to the city in 1985. He and his wife Betty were drawn to Providence as the perfect environment to raise their two sons and a daughter. They established and owned a publishing company in Providence -Manisses Communications Group Inc. -which provided resources for mental health and addiction professionals for two decades. Later he was co-publisher and owner with his wife of The Block Island Times. He has been in the publishing field for forty years. Fraser is a trustee emeritus of Brown University and was president of the Brown Alumni Association. He served on the boards of The Public’s Radio, The Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting at URI, Phoenix House, The Newsletter Publishers Association, Peace Corps Iran Association, Block Island Residents Association and the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence He is a graduate of Brown University and holds a masters degree from Rutgers University where he studied under an Eagleton Fellowship. He served in the Peace Corps in Iran. Fraser is privileged to be part of The Providence Eye which he believes fills an urgent need for news of Providence essential to the well being of the city.

Rochelle Lee is a long time resident of Providence, who currently resides in Elmwood after several years of living in South Providence. Much of her personal time is committed to supporting anti-poverty and social justice initiatives which connects to her work as an urban planner.  Her work is intended to empower grassroots communities to engage in impactful economic development programs. Rochelle’s career includes more than three decades working in a variety of professional roles investing in working poor neighborhoods, including working in human services, public education, economic developing and financing affordable housing. In that capacity, she worked with many nonprofits throughout the City’s neighborhoods.

Her personal interests include photography, travel, African American History and Art, supporting grassroots led health and wellness, equity and civil rights projects. As an ears to the ground local information that speaks from the voices of people who live and work in our neighborhoods, PVD Eye will contribute to bringing community members together to share and learn from one another. She is a member of the RI Transit Riders, Knight Memorial Friends Group and the grassroots Environmental Justice organizations such as Community Health Innovations of RI, Native Green and Slingshot, an organizing project of the Conservation Law Foundation. She is committed to promoting voter and civic education in under represented and working poor neighborhoods, strengthening civic education in public schools and lifting up access and opportunities for people to inform and influence public policy decisions.

Marsha Miller has lived in Providence since 1988 working as a family doctor at RIGHA, Harvard Community Health Plan, and at Brown Health Services, the latter for the last 20 years. She considers Providence to have been an enlivening place to call home and grow with her family. When not working on the Cultural Calendar at The PVD Eye, you may find her taking ballet classes at AS220, playing pickle ball at Nathan Bishop, or riding her bike to the store. She believes that Providence has vibrant theatre, dance, music, and art, and is hoping that the Cultural Calendar will let people know what they may want to go and see.

Carole Saltz is a new-ish resident of Providence after a lifetime in NYC–and very happy to be here. Before retiring in 2019, I was, for more than 30 years, Director of Teachers College Press at Teachers College, Columbia University where I oversaw operations and staff with a special concentration in editorial acquisitions and a personal interest in arts education, early childhood, and social justice education. The PVD Eye, while a new enterprise, continues a direction that has been important to me throughout my life: to contribute to the development of ideas that can make a difference in the world. She feels that The PVD Eye has become a wonderful way to contribute to her new community while at the same time learning about this vibrant, arts-filled, complex, culturally-rich city. Carole currently serves on the board of the Maxine Greene Institute (and was a founding member of the Foundation for Social Imagination, the Arts, and Education) and provides editorial consulting to the Center for Human Development at CUNY Grad Center.

Deborah Schimberg has believed in Providence ever since she moved here to go to Brown University in 1975. She finds the city fascinating and frustrating, both, and has spent her professional life, effectively, as a serial social entrepreneur, focusing on initiatives in a variety of sectors. Collaborating with many other people, she founded a variety of nonprofit and community organizations, and a small business. Whether for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid entities, she is committed to creating financial and organizational sustainability. The Providence Eye brings together years of experience and investment in the city, and she sees it as everyone’s project to knit the city together.

Julie Van Noppen fell in love with Providence as an undergraduate at Brown. She says, “It is a wholly singular place- historic, mysterious and unapologetically blasphemous. Roger Williams is my hero- standing up to those Massachusetts Puritans took balls and he was the poster boy of community activists- learned multiple Indian languages and advocated for peace. Separation of church and state. His legacy is Providence, a place to find who you are, not who others think you should be. He was a class dude- I’d vote him governor again in a heartbeat.” Julie is celebrating her fortieth year living and working as a muscle therapist and yoga teacher on the West side of Providence. She and her husband Mark have three children, all fierce advocates of community diversity and city living.