Founder & CEO - Alyssa Royse
An award-winning journalist, PR professional and community advocate, Alyssa Royse is intricately involved in the charitable community, serving on several boards and countless committees. As a journalist, her stories have appeared regularly in The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, Seattle P-I, Puget Sound Business Journal, as well as local and national magazines.
Alyssa is a co-founder of the Twin Towers Orphan Fund, a 100% volunteer organization that raised money for the children who lost one or both parents in the terrorist attacks of September 11. For her work creating and managing the TTOF, Fast Company magazine named Alyssa one of the top 50 entrepreneurs in the world.
As a marketing and PR professional, her achievements have ranged from pre-launch PR and positioning for a major online pharmacy to content and editorial oversight for an online retailer for which she was recognized with a local, regional and national Addy. As a PR consultant in Seattle, Alyssa's work with a wide variety of clients - from multi-national corporations to start-ups and non-profits - resulted in PR News naming her one of the country's top 15 PR professionals under 35 in 2002.
Alyssa's primary charitable work tends to focus on The Arts and Education. She began her career as a teacher with an innovative non-profit organization that offered curriculum enriching classes in the struggling Saint Louis Public Schools. She designed and implemented curriculum to teach creative writing and theater arts in elementary schools, for which she received a great deal of media attention and personal reward. She then took her teaching to the juvenile detention system where she used language as a way to help students explore themselves and their lives. She also designed a curriculum called "The Culture Of Childhood" that taught anthropology to fourth grade students by looking at what it was like to be 10 years-old in countries around the world.
She has degrees in playwrighting and anthropology - an odd, but surprisingly useful, set of skills if one wants to look at the worlds problems and find ways to create dialogue about them.
Director of Technology / Staff Photographer- Matt Freedman
Matt brings 20 years of experience in software development to his position as Director of Technology at Just Cause. Much of that time has been spent at the University of Washington in Seattle, though he has also worked for other universities and companies. Matt is also an iPhone developer, and founder of www.monkfishlabs.com, home of "coffee table books for the iPhone."
Matt is also a professional photographer, specializing in commercial and editorial assignments, portraiture, fine art erotica, and events. In his occasional free time, he also enjoys hiking, climbing, snowboarding, and whirlyball (this was the first of his strategic alliances with Alyssa Royse, as they destroy their competition on the court.)
Matt's charitable involvement is diverse, but tends to focus on the environment, Cuba policy reform, democratic political candidates, and drug policy reform.
Matt has a Bachelor of Science cum laude from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as well as photography training from the Photo Center NorthwestArt Director Chris Roberts
Chris Roberts is a Seattle based graphic designer specializing in brand, print and package design. This means that his approach to graphic design is from the inside out, maintaining the core values and strategic planning behind the business or product represented. A bullet proof visual solution is provided through listening and research while an eye is kept on the big picture: the perception of our target audience.
His company, CRGD, provides a broad range of creative services including the design of trademarks, identity systems, packaging, print collateral, marketing materials, web sites, signage, displays, informational and environmental graphics. A commitment to working on time and on budget is a major priority.