Danny Vinik

Executive Director

Danny Vinik is avant-garde, unorthodox, an enfant terrible, ne’er do well, poet, rule breaker, contrarian, punk rocker (Danny & the Parkins Sisters 1981) instigator, founder (BRINK 1995), mechanic (1969 Alfa Romeo Spyder) artist, guru, novelist (BLUE PAIGE 1999), architect, non conformist, pioneer digital filmmaker, producer (SPUN 2003) director (TV Party 2005) producer (The Last New Yorker 2006) director (Flor De Muertos 2012) pissing people off, contributing to humanity (The BRINK Foundation) fighting greedy algorithms, still a punk rocker, curator (PIDGIN PALACE ARTS 2020).

Board of Directors

Molly Ragan

President

Molly’s work rests at the confluence of physical and virtual space, employing the embodied everyday human experience in a battle against the total colonization of technology and Big Data. She is interested in designing a future where the two can coexist, where we can expand our understanding of ourselves and our environments through technological innovation while still remaining grounded in body, in community, and in place. 

Molly sees the digital revolution born out of the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to redefine our reflexive relationship with technology. She thinks mutual aid and distributed, decentralized technologies can guide us through the portal into a world defined by an ethics of intersectional care. 

Molly aspires to drive systems-level cultural change through equity-centered design and is excited to contribute her voice to the BRINK Foundation.

Joshua Belhumeur

Vice President

Josh connects extensive skills in design, coding, writing, and production with a deep understanding of people and culture to lead creative teams and produce impactful content and campaigns.

He believes storytelling has the power to awaken our collective consciousness and shape our culture for the better. It’s a power he uses to bring humanity back into our economic system through the fall of mindless consumerism and the rise of brands as a force for good.

Proving to be a talented freelance web developer before he was old enough to drive, Josh landed at BRINK in Tucson as the Lead Developer in 2007. By 2010, he earned an expanded role as the lead business strategist and carried the BRINK banner out east with the opening of a Washington, DC office. After a number of years of steady growth, he eventually took over as Managing Partner and Creative Director, continuing to set the vision of the organization to date.

In 2016, Josh and Danny Vinik began engaging in numerous conversations about the web they both knew and loved and the role it was playing in the polarization, isolation and radicalization of our society. After dedicating to researching and understanding the problem, in 2019 Josh wrote the white paper that would spawn a 501(c)3 called the BRINK Foundation with a singular mission to address these destructive forces baked into the code and ethos of the modern web and give the people the better Internet they deserve.

Louie Stamler

Treasurer

Louie Stamler grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) where he earned a Bachelor degree in 1971. His double major was in accounting and street politics. A matter of life and death started with his draft notice. Activism began at the 1968 Democratic Convention and continued with participation in demonstrations, sit-ins and protest marches in Chicago and Washington DC against the war in Vietnam. Working his way through college he operated a Zamboni at a local ice rink from 9:00 pm until 5:00 am which didn’t pay very well. He took his excellent ice driving experience and drove a Checker cab in the loop from 4:00 pm until 4:00 am, specializing in  driving drunken businessmen around the loop who didn’t mind that he was usually lost. Chicago is a great town for music and he was privileged to see performances by rock greats like The Doors, Janis and Hendrix.

After graduating from UIC he followed his girlfriend Shelly to Tucson, attended the University of Arizona and earned a Master degree in 1973. His Certified Public Accounting practice began in 1976 and continued until retirement in 2018. The practice included tax preparation for all types of businesses and individuals, bookkeeping and all financial statement engagements. Clients included artists, writers, importers, agriculture, mining companies, retailers, manufacturers, cattle ranchers, building contractors, real estate ventures, professional services and high tech.

Louie hopes his experience will help further the goals of The Brink Foundation.

Alex Miller

Alex Miller is an attorney and immigration justice advocate who focuses on asylum access, border externalization, and detention abolition. Alex was born and raised in Tucson and returned in 2019 to join a local immigration legal services provider after spending almost five years working in corporate law in New York City.  Alex still works in immigration justice at a national organization and has a passion for criminal and immigration justice and a wealth of on-the-ground experience designing programs to provide legal services for asylum seekers at the border and in detention. 

Working in a field where the humanity of the community she serves is so persistently cast aside and misinformation runs rampant, Alex is excited to support the BRINK Foundation both in highlighting the real human costs when information is weaponized and in helping to build community and create space for a counternarrative. 

Malcolm Critcher

Malcolm’s worldview was formed by the wild and untamed internet of the late 90s and early aughts, which played a pivotal role in forming his world view in many ways. A great benefit of this unfettered access to the web at a young age was a seemingly boundless landscape of art, which played a major role in his pursuit of creativity as a lifelong passion. As the internet (and Malcolm) matured, he began to notice things changing for the worst. Once an oasis of outlets and voices, the internet increasingly seemed to be being aggregated into the news feeds of a few privileged sites. With this came a daunting realization. If a few specific private outlets control the majority of information being digitally disseminated, how long is it before those tools begin being wielded in a malicious way? In the past few years, Malcolm’s greatest fears have come to fruition as we have seen countless instances of our largest social media entities consistently utilized to foment radicalization, polarization, and frequently acts of horrific violence, all while increasingly using morally questionable tactics to keep their users on the platforms for as long as physically possible.

He hopes by taking a role within the BRINK foundation he can help tell compelling stories that will help the general public start thinking about the mind bogglingly powerful tool of Internet in a more intentional way, both in their personal lives, and how it is impacting our culture at large.

Polly Estabrook

Polly Estabrook is an electrical engineer specializing in radio communications for Near-Earth and Deep Space missions. Over the last 25 years that Polly has worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, she’s had the incredible fortune to contribute to research and development tasks, Mars rovers, and on a mapping satellite to survey Earth’s surface water.  As the science around climate change has become ever more comprehensive and the impact of global warming more apparent, Polly has become active in supporting local and national policies to curb greenhouse gases, support the health of our planet’s ecosystems, and ensure environmental justice. Reining in the misinformation on the Internet and our virtual social segregation are key to enabling us to meet the climate crisis. She is excited to participate in BRINK Foundation to address these issues. 

Yu Yu Shiratori

Yu Yu’s perspective on cultural nuances, representation, and invisible systems expanded as a transplant of Los Angeles to Tucson during a time when the internet became largely accessible to the general public. Through the web of open doors, she uncovered a world of art and music that wasn’t immediately accessible in her physical world. Discovering cultures and ideas that never seemed present in the mainstream eventually led her to examine other aspects of the world which seemed invisible; including the types of ideas and the voices which were amplified, and which ones were diminished.

She credits the arts for raising awareness beyond our individual sense of self, and expanding our tolerance and understanding to ideas and cultures that are not generally in our own network.