Chris Rabb is a consultant, writer, and public speaker focusing on the intersection of social identity, media, civic engagement and entrepreneurship. His forthcoming book is called Invisible Capital: How Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial Opportunity, to be released in Fall 2010 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Currently, Chris is a fellow at Demos, a non-partisan public policy research and advocacy organization based in New York City. He is also a visiting researcher at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In 2001, Chris was awarded an American Marshall Memorial Fellowship by the German Marshall Fund of the U.S.
From 1993-1995, Chris worked in the U.S. Senate and the White House Conference on Small Business where he focused on policies and legislation that impacted small businesses. From 1995 through 2001, Chris worked at Stono Technologies, LLC, a technology-based product design firm which he co-founded in his native Chicago.
Upon moving to Philadelphia, Chris oversaw the entrepreneurial programs for an urban non-profit organization that included management of a nationally recognized business incubator developed in partnership with the Wharton Small Business Development Center (SBDC). Later, he set up a boutique consultancy that provides advisory services for new and small-scale enterprises, including for-profits, civic organizations and political campaigns, that seek assistance with organizational productivity.
In 1999, Chris founded Afro-Netizen, a pioneering, e-mail-based news and information aggregator for African Americans nationwide that amassed over 10,000 subscribers within its first 18 months. Five years later, Chris was among the small inaugural group of bloggers to receive press credentials to cover the 2004 Democratic National Committee Convention in Boston, making Afro-Netizen the first and only credentialed social media outlet to reach a primarily Black audience at that time.
Since his groundbreaking participation at the Democratic and Republican conventions, Chris has been invited to speak at many conferences and events that focus on participatory journalism, social media, civic engagement and social justice.
A former columnist at the Yale Daily News, Chris was also a stand-up comedian while in college and is a trained improvisational comedy performer and professional facilitator with ImprovEdge since 2006.
Chris has been quoted by or featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Knight Ridder, and the Associated Press, and has appeared on various nationally syndicated radio shows on NPR, Air America Radio, Pacifica, Radio One, and XM Radio, and on television on C-SPAN and LinkTV. A published writer and award-winning blogger, Chris has written for such magazines as The Nation, Colorlines, and Mother Jones. He is also a columnist for The Huffington Post.
Chris is a graduate of Yale College and earned an M.S. in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the boards of the Applied Research Center (Oakland, CA) and the Bread & Roses Community Fund (Philadelphia, PA). He is also on the national advisory board of VoiceMale Magazine, a member of the Progressive Communicators Network (PCN) as well as a member of The Media Consortium.
Previous board experience includes a director role at the Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper Company, one of the oldest, continually run, family-owned newspapers in America, founded by his great-great grandfather, John H. Murphy, Sr. in 1892. Chris was the first member of the fourth-generation descendants to serve as a director and a member of the executive committee, and early on became a vocal advocate for modernizing the newspaper's operations and marketing strategy by embracing social media and by digitizing its archives. After ten years of service, Chris resigned in 2007.
An avid genealogist, Mr. Rabb lives in the Mt. Airy community of Philadelphia with his wife, professor Imani Perry, and their two sons, Freeman Diallo and Issa, where he was elected as a Democratic Committeeperson.
