MOVIE PRODUCER CORI SHEPHERD STERN IS SAVING THE WORLD — ONE MIND AT A TIME.

By Corey Sienega

CORI SHEPHERD STERN IS THE EXECUTIVE PRO-DUCER OF THE UPCOMING POST-APOCALYPTIC ZOMBIE LOVE STORY WARM BODIES STARRING NICHOLAS HOULT (X-Men: First Class and next year’s Jack the Giant Killer). She discovered the tale as a short story — then entitled “I Am a Zombie Filled With Love,” later to be expanded by

author Isaac Marion into the novel “Warm Bod-ies” — while late-night trolling on StumbleUpon. Though the Seattle social worker-writer-musician had his phone number listed on his website, no one had ever used it before — certainly no one from Hollywood. But Cori has a knack for discover-ing people with something special to offer.

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WHEN NOT TANGLING WITH ZOMBIES OR VAMPIRES,

Q�As the executive producer of the upcoming film Warm Bodies, Cori Stern helps Nicholas Hoult find a new lease on death as a newly minted zombie.

Portrait by Jason Redmond

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other kids out of this very same refugee camp that Lovetta had been in,” Cori says. (Check it out at akawelle.com/jewelry.php)

Cori and Strongheart aren’t looking to turn the out aid workers or doctors or lawyers. “I don’t care what they want to be… I just have faith that if they really do their own healing work and I can facilitate that work — both on the emotional front, on the educational front — then they’ll do something great in the world whatever it is.”

As evidence, Evelyn Apoko, another Strongheart Fellow, was abducted by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) when she was a little girl. Most of us only recently began learning about Kony and his Uganda-based ter-

rorist group through the viral video and Kony 2012 movement. “Evelyn was on her way to a safe house to sleep and she didn’t make it in time,” Cori says. “The LRA attacked her village, she was taken out of her home and marched through the Sudan. Evelyn was with a group of children — including a 5-year-old boy who was in her arms — when the army started bombing the area. All the kids died except for Evelyn, who barely survived herself.”

Wounded in the attack, Evelyn has gone through unimaginable pain and physical trauma, including dozens of reconstructive surgeries to repair her shattered face.

“Our goal is to turn the Fellows into influencers and advocates, and they will do that naturally just living their lives because they have such unique histories,” Cori says. “So Evelyn’s own history is that there are very few children who survived what she survived who are out there speaking from the point of view of what it’s like to be an abducted child. She attended the House Foreign Relations subcommittee meeting on the issue. She spoke privately with members of the Senate. She’s also spoken up against Rush Limbaugh when he labeled Joseph Kony a possible ‘righteous rebel’ rather than a terrorist. And she’s been a huge voice for the children just based on her own experience.”

Rush retracted his advocacy of Kony just days after Evelyn posted a personal video address to him on Vimeo (which you can see at vimeo.com/30727317).

Strongheart is very focused on the individual in this world where we often talk in terms of the plight of a tribe, a people, and a nation. “I was always interested in how you really solve a problem,” Cori says. “If we can get healing going on an individual level, then those individuals will form groups, then those groups will form communi-ties, and then those groups will form nations. That’s how you get real change. I always thought that’s what it would be like, even when I was a kid. I was like, ‘If you could change these people and you could get them to change other people... If you could reseed the community with a different kind of plant, then what would grow?’”

So what advice can this zombie-and-vampire-lover offer those of us looking to do some good without getting overwhelmed before we get started? Cori keeps it simple: “There are so many problems in the world that can be solved. So many. Just choose something. Just start, do it. It’s like cleaning your house. Just think of the world as your house. You’re not going to go, ‘Oh, it’s too messy. I’m just going to burn it down and walk away. Just pick up your shoes, whatever.’”

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the Dalai Lama; she attends the Africa Leadership Academy — the top-level educational institution for her age group in South Africa; and she’s launching her own Afri-can teen magazine.

Lovetta also designed the Akawelle necklace — its name coined by combining the terms “a.k.a.” and “wel’le” (an African word for love). Fashioned from the brass shell cases strewn seemingly everywhere in war-torn Liberia, the necklaces have found their way to the pages of fashion magazines and are now worn by celebs includ-ing Angelina Jolie and her children (and, as of this publication, me, my mother, some of each of our friends, and maybe you after you read this). “And the proceeds from this necklace are what got all the

with world leaders and people of influence,” Cori explains. The Fel-lows also learn world history and the history of their own tribes and cultures. “When these kids come to us, they’ve never heard of the Holocaust or even the genocide in Rwanda — they don’t know if dinosaurs are real,” Cori says. “They have so much wisdom but they don’t have the things we learned in K-12.”

As successful as the Strongheart program is becoming — and as driven as Cori is in achieving her goal of helping those in need — her path wasn’t always a clear one. Having basically retired/burned out from life as a TV executive at Fox Family Channel (Fun fact: While there, she created Breaker High, giving an early spotlight to now-superstar Ryan Gosling), Cori found herself looking for a way to get in-volved in something more person-ally meaningful. “I thought I was going to maybe write some press releases for the U.N. or something like that. But I ended up finding an online listing that said something like, ‘People dying. Help.’”

The man who placed this mysterious missive was a lone doctor in an African war zone who had a group of some 1,000 orphans trapped behind rebel lines without food or medicine and “was just sending this plea out through the Internet. So I answered it and ended up helping him. That’s how it all got started.”

It was on a trip to a refugee camp in Ghana that Cori met the then 12-year-old Lovetta Conto, who would become the first Strongheart Fellow and the organization’s first great success story. Cori remembers, “Lovetta was the first kid whom I thought, ‘OK, what am I going to do? I can’t leave this kid here.’ And I thought, ‘It’s time to put Strongheart together.’” Lovetta is now 19 years old, and her achievements are already remarkable: She was the top runner-up for the International Children’s Peace Prize; she has met

A screenwriter herself, Stern is also the mind behind the as-yet-unproduced Vampire Truckers, the tale of two young long-haul drivers who find themselves in the middle of a war between bloodthirsty fiends and their more human-assimilated brethren who choose to live off bagged blood rather than taking out the neighbors.

But the thing that makes Cori really geek out isn’t zombies or vampires; it’s that she has a mis-sion to more or less save the world, one exceptional young person at a time. A day before she headed off to Oxford, England, as an invited guest of the Skoll World Forum On Social Entrepreneurship, I sat down with Cori to talk about her search for the best and brightest in some of the worlds most challenged countries.

When Cori was 13, she read a se-ries of articles about children who were surviving in the midst of war. And on that afternoon all those years ago, she had the idea that someone needed to bring these children together and put them with “the best, smartest people” from every area of study — not only because the kids needed help,

but because these young people had something they could offer the world. With the right guidance and healing, Cori believed these kids could actually help the rest of us. And the dream never left her.

A long, winding road led Cori and her partners, Kristi Manning and Zoë Adams, to founding Strongheart Fellowship, an Africa-based international philanthropic program that offers a healing place for “exceptional young people from extremely challenging circum-stances.” Built with the help of numerous volunteers, Strongheart House is currently based in a restored beachside bungalow in Robertsport, Liberia. This is where Cori and her partners introduce their “fellows” to some of the “best and smartest people in the world” in the areas of interpersonal neurobiology, cutting-edge trauma healing techniques, nutrition, and leadership.

The Strongheart Fellows are recruited from around the world using essentially a talent scout program approach, seeking young people between 14 and 25 who show exceptional leadership aptitude; resiliency, which is based

on their reaction and adaptation to extreme circumstance; and inadequate financial resources and access to the highest quality of education available in their country. Strongheart is currently in the process of moving to Austin, Texas where Cori and her partners believe they can create a wider circle of opportunities for people to help and participate.

Cori has an Ernest Hemingway quote on the Strongheart site homepage: “The world breaks us all, and afterwards some are stronger in the broken places.” It’s a philosophy she believes in, that from trauma can come hard-won wisdom: “You speak from a different place when you go through that.”

There are currently 10 fellows liv-ing in the Strongheart House, with past participants having gone on to bigger educational opportunities. The curriculum consists of learning tools to help them operate in the world: academics, mindfulness training, and such basics as dining etiquette, “which is a big deal for a kid who’s grown up never using a knife or fork and suddenly is going to be in situations where they are

03-04. Fashioned from brass shell casings found in war-torn Liberia, the leaf in the Akawelle necklace is, in Lovetta’s words, “to show that even after something as terrible as war, new life can begin.”

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01. Leading by example: after an internship at Seventeen magazine, Strongheart Fellow Lovetta Conto plans to start a magazine in West Africa to “show African kids and Afri-can issues.”

02.Conto tells her story to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

05. Strongheart co-founder Zoë Adams and Fellow Evelyn Apoko embrace Strongheart’s mission arm-in-arm.

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JUNE 201248 49geekexchange.com