Michael Wood-Lewis

Michael Wood-Lewis has been pulling neighbors together into community since his Indiana childhood spent organizing ball games and visiting neighbors on his evening paper route. Decades later, he and his wife Valerie founded Front Porch Forum, which hosts a pilot network of 140 online neighborhood forums that blankets 25 northwest Vermont towns. Nearly 20,000 households subscribe, including about half of the state's largest city. The resulting news sharing and community building earned a Knight News Challenge 2010 award. Previously, he led an innovative trade association of New England utilities. Earlier, he guided a DC-based consortium of U.S. municipal leaders in developing environmental technologies, building on his experience as an inventor of high-tech recycling equipment. He earned an MS in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as an MBA.