Our History
Media Literacy Now was founded by the organization’s former CEO, Erin McNeill, in 2013. As a parent of two boys, now young men, she had a lot of questions about the cartoons and commercials her children were watching and the kinds of messages they were sending to her sons.
In 2011, Erin worked with then-State Senator Katherine Clark of Massachusetts to introduce a bill that called for Department of Elementary and Secondary Education support to provide media literacy standards, resources, and training for K-12 teachers. During this process, she learned that people around the country were interested in doing the same, but unsure where to begin, which is what prompted her to launch Media Literacy Now, a national organization, to help passionate advocates in every state get a running start by sharing the experience and tools developed in Massachusetts.
More than ten years later, Media Literacy Now continues to leverage the passion and resources of the media literacy community and advocates around the country to address the urgent need for media literacy education.
