Mel Grau is the director of program management at The Poynter Institute. She leads a team of producers, project managers and customer service experts that bring Poynter’s teaching programs to life. Her goals are to connect people with their purpose, journalistic ideals to real world action, and present state to future sustainability. Grau previously wrote and edited The Cohort, Poynter’s newsletter about gender in media, and has taught at Poynter’s Leadership Academy for Women in Media. She is known for her work on expanding parental leave in journalism, her commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and her video storytelling about the power of journalism. Grau is also a Certified Scrum Product Owner, from Scrum Alliance. Grau graduated from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. She spent five years in business and marketing roles outside of the journalism industry before moving to Tampa Bay to take her audience-centric, revenue-oriented approach to Poynter.