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I’m a writer, editor, and communications strategist for purpose-driven organizations.

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Spine Tingler •

Death becomes you, darling

Kill your darlings.

It’s a common adage in writing. Variants will have you murdering kittens or even babies — basically anything precious that you’ve been nurturing on the page to the detriment of your overarching story. It’s about getting cold-blooded and clear-eyed: sacrificing the saccharine for your prose’s higher purpose.

In horror, some creators take this directive literally, making quick work of a would-be final girl...
Psyche •

Why do so many of us blame ourselves after a loved one’s death? | Psyche Ideas

My dad had a bad death.

The lead-up was long – a decade-old stroke had forced an early retirement from carpentry – but the end was abrupt, avoidable. Shocking.

A night out drinking with friends like he’d done countless times before, but that his body, now 68 and sustained by blood thinners, could no longer handle. A slip getting into bed that caused a brain bleed, invisible and irrevocable by the time his roommate found him the next day.

My sister and I, both in the thick of COVID-19 bouts, need...
HealthLeaders Media •

AI in Hiring: Friend or Foe?

AI is making a splash in talent pools. Or is it a belly flop?

According to a February report from Rutgers University's Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, 71% of workers are concerned about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and just as many are worried about employers using the tech in hiring and promotion decisions.

That means HR leaders who want to attract and keep top talent must champion the ethical application of emerging tools in People domains.It's a task that's easi...
Design Observer •

DO20 | Timnit Gebru: DAIR

Timnit Gebru made headlines in December 2020 when she announced that Google, where she was co-leading the Ethical AI research team, fired her. She chalks the move up to her decision to stand by an academic paper she co-authored warning about the dangers of the AI increasingly enmeshed in our lives — dangers like encoded bias, environmental tolls, and labor exploitation, which have an outsized impact on marginalized groups.

She leveraged her sudden public platform into the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), now a team of 15 social and computer scientists, engineers, refugee advocates, labor organizers, and activists from around the world who are working toward safer, more expansive solutions for — and with — the communities that big tech overlooks and exploits.
Interact Software •

Discussing politics in the workplace: how to keep the peace

In 2024, the world will hold an unprecedented number of elections. By year’s end, nearly half the global population, spread across more than 60 countries, will experience a national election that stands to shape life – and work – for the foreseeable future.

Since 2020, people have watched their employers speak out on hot button topics ranging from coronavirus and civil rights to Brexit and the Israel-Hamas war – and they’ve learned how to parse genuine stands from opportunistic grandstanding.

It means political discourse, once considered a corporate taboo, is becoming table stakes for a growing segment of the workforce.
HealthLeaders Media •

How to Build a Workplace Wellbeing Program That Actually Works

Wellbeing is having a moment.

Mental health, resilience, and burnout alleviation are among today’s top healthcare HR focuses, according to sweeping research that professional services firm AON released in December, which pulses benefits trends across 160 U.S. health systems and more than 3.3 million employees.

But it's no small feat to cultivate a shared sense of wellness and engagement in the hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of people who make up a modern workforce. In fact, a new s...
Design Observer •

DO20 | Cindi Leive: The Meteor

A feminist media collective dishes up gender and worker equity at scale.

According to CEO and co-founder Cindi Leive, stories interrogating gender and racial injustice are the entrée, not a side dish at the feminist media collective The Meteor. Too often, she says, feminist content is treated like the broccoli of women’s media: shunted to the plate’s periphery and mistaken for being richer in roughage than flavor.

“That idea of anything feminist being for nutritional value only feels outdated,” says Leive, who previously served as Glamour’s editor-in-chief for over 16 years and co-compiled the 2018 New York Times bestseller Together We Rise by and about the leaders of the March for Women's Lives. Feminists make art. Feminists make meaning. And “feminists are freaking hilarious,” she says.
Design Observer •

DO20 Grant | Marshall “Mr. P” Pollard: The Creative School

The U.S. education system is failing Black students — and it’s by design.

Public charter schools “are not doing what we want them to do. They are doing what they are designed to do,” says Marshall “Mr. P” Pollard. He’s founder and executive director of The Creative School, in Washington, DC’s Ward 8, where just 20% of those aged 25 and up have a four-year college degree. One in five families lives below the poverty line.

“If you do everything right and you graduate from high school, you have a really shitty chance to make that into the middle class,” Pollard says. “So these systems — even if you play the game — are not working.”

He’s laying the foundation for something different: A generation of “queens and kings” empowered “to use story as a way to connect their people in order to design solutions.”
Design Observer •

DO20 | Mariana Matus, PhD, and Newsha Ghaeli: Biobot Analytics

Mariana Matus, PhD, and Newsha Ghaeli founded Cambridge, Mass.–based wastewater intelligence firm Biobot Analytics in 2017 — years before studying sewage was sexy.

Wastewater-based epidemiology, or wastewater surveillance, gained prominence when the coronavirus pandemic took hold in 2020. It involves monitoring biomatter in sewage to identify population-level patterns in infectious disease and dangerous substances. At its best, it can function as an always-available early warning system, enabling researchers and public health officials to take swift action to prevent infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.

It can also make public health more equitable.
HealthLeaders Media •

6 Ways CNOs are Improving Teamwork for 2024

2024 will be restorative, if CNOs have their say.

Amid geopolitical conflict, financial headwinds, and ramped nursing shortages and unrest, there's a lot of healing that needs to happen. Starting with the healers.

“The current times have required a new level of operational rigor [and] a keen focus on the people providing the care and service,” says Kate FitzPatrick, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN, executive vice president and Connelly Fou...
Design Observer •

DO20 | New Red Order + facilitators Jackson Polys, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil

At the center of an empty lot in Queens, New York, a five-foot beaver and a 16-foot tree — both animatronic — discuss the origins of private property. The tree’s trunk is interrupted with a humanesque face, wizened and pale. Its branches hold an array of electronics: three LED TVs, a cell tower, and a satellite dish. The screens loop a video about groups voluntarily returning ancestral land to Indigenous people.

It’s just one of the many topsy-turvy attractions at The World’s UnFair, an Indigenous-themed carnival that opened in the fall of 2023 to a crowd of 600 people.

The public art installation is the latest — and most significant — undertaking of the New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society that uses provocative art and humor to help North Americans identify, confront, and subvert their “ludicrous inheritances” of settler colonialism, says Jackson Polys.
HealthLeaders Media •

How to Keep a Five-Generation Workforce Happy

We’re in an unprecedented moment for people leaders.

“This is the first time in our history in the United States of having five generations at work,” says Larry Callahan, MA, chief people officer at Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Health, which has more than 22,300 workers across 16 hospitals and more than 750 care locations throughout the state.

For HR leaders, it all signals fresh challenge—and opp...
Design Observer •

DO20 | Edwin Keh: Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel

The fashion industry is notorious for its waste. The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA) is changing that one lean, mean “green machine” at a time.

“Real-world problems are multi-disciplined problems,” HKRITA’s CEO Edwin Keh tells Design Observer. “That desire to be useful and the privilege of being involved in — and trying to solve — interesting, complex, and consequential problems has always been something that motivates and fascinates me.”
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Specialties and samples

Journalism + editorial writing

Brand journalism + content marketing

 Photo by Lum3n on Pexels

Internal communications + engagement

 Photo by Alex Andrews on Pexels
Work with me

About

Hi, I’m Delaney (she/her), a writer, editor, and communications strategist who cares a whole hell of a lot about words and the people who use them. If you’re here, I bet you do, too, so let’s create something beautiful together.

Over the past decade, I’ve worked with media, membership, and learning organizations to develop exceptional content, strategies, and communities.

Today, I use this experience to help purpose-driven and community-based organizations, publishers, and progressive nonprofits advance their missions. I believe that creativity and community make us human, and I love working with those who nourish our humanity through food, art, knowledge, and equity. 

I’ve won Specialized Information Publishers Association awards for my contributions to journalism, content marketing, digital strategy, and membership product development. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in English from Northeastern University and am a member of Resource Generation, which organizes young people with wealth and class privilege in the U.S. to work toward economic and racial justice. 

During off-hours, I enjoy horror movies and musicals in equal measure. Ditto my pup Spud and his namesake, both of which can be found more often than not in my Brooklyn, NY, apartment, along with my husband Todd, who makes a mean hashbrown.

Contact

Let's create something beautiful together! Get in touch any of the ways below.

Work with me: delaneyrebernik.com
Chat with me: rebernik.delaney@gmail.com
Meet with me: calendly.com/rebernik-delaney

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