As Director of Communications and Public Engagement for First Peoples Worldwide, Shannon supports public facing advocacy and oversees transmedia content creation, media relations, and social and digital media strategy.
Shannon has over 20 years experience in strategic institutional communications for the nonprofit, human rights and cultural sectors. Before coming to First Peoples Worldwide, he consulted on a number of First Peoples projects, including the public campaign for the landmark case study Social Cost and Material Loss: The Dakota Access Pipeline, stakeholder advocacy support for Equator Principles revisions, and amplification of investor engagement for the removal of Native mascots in sports. Prior to that he directed institutional and executive communications for Japan Society in New York. Highlights among dozens of institutional benchmarks and over a thousand individual galas, panels and cultural presentations, were supporting visiting world leaders and high-level social innovators, introducing atomic bomb survivors to national high schools, a youth leadership development exchange program that focused on public welfare and corporate responsibility, a nationwide rural revitalization project, and providing crisis communications and critical recovery and reconstruction aid to victims of Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami.