Rachel Brown

Rachel Brown is the Executive Director of Over Zero. Any number over zero cannot be divided, and Over Zero supports societies to resist division and create long-term resilience to identity-based conflict.

She is the author of Defusing Hate: A Strategic Communication Guide to Counteract Dangerous Speech, which brings together insights from diverse fields of expertise – from marketing to cognitive neuroscience – to support practitioners seeking to design communications-based interventions for atrocity prevention.

She was a 2014 Genocide Prevention Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide (where she developed Defusing Hate) and has led trainings and project design workshops on counteracting dangerous speech for a variety of organizations globally. Rachel’s work on counteracting dangerous speech has been profiled at international conferences and events (including as a PopTech 2016 speaker) and different media outlets (for example, in the Christian Science Monitor).

Rachel also founded and is the former CEO of Sisi ni Amani-Kenya (SNA-K), a Kenyan NGO that pioneered new strategies to build local capacity for peacebuilding and civic engagement, most notably through the creation of a text-messaging model and platform to support community-based efforts. She was recognized as a 2012 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow for this work, and the organization was profiled in the documentary Peace In Our Pockets.