Hilary Sloane is a journalist, documentary photographer, storyteller, and interviewer whose work is rooted in curiosity about people—who we become, what shapes us, and what happens when we begin listening to one another.

She created and hosts Driftwood Conversations, a podcast featuring artists, scientists, writers, musicians, educators, and others whose lives and work offer a way into broader conversations about creativity, resilience, community, and what it means to be human.

Hilary is also the founder of What’s Good in the World, a nonprofit initiative fiscally sponsored through AHA Projects, that creates opportunities for people to connect through stories, conversation, and creative experiences. The project grew naturally from years of interviewing and photographing people and from Hilary's belief that some of our most meaningful discoveries happen when people who might never otherwise meet are brought into conversation.

As a reporter and on-air contributor for Z107.7 FM, Hilary covers the communities of California's Morongo Basin, reporting on local government, arts and culture, conservation, education, and the people and organizations shaping life in the desert. Read Hilary's reporting for Z107.7.

Her path to journalism and storytelling wasn't conventional. Hilary spent more than three decades in film and advertising as a photographic producer and stylist before moving to the Mojave Desert in 2009. The desert changed both the pace and direction of her life, giving her the space to move more deeply into photography, writing, journalism, and audio storytelling.

A longtime member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, Hilary has also taken her documentary work beyond the desert. As a volunteer photographer with Raleigh International, she traveled to Tanzania and Borneo to document conservation, education, and community projects in rural areas. Her photography has appeared in solo and group exhibitions and in editorial and nonprofit projects. View Hilary's photography.

Across all these projects runs the same curiosity: What supports someone in becoming who they are? What have they learned along the way? And what becomes possible when we share what we know with one another?

Hilary continues to explore those questions through journalism, photography, Driftwood Conversations, and What's Good in the World.

Read Hilary's writing and follow her work on Substack.

Rohini is an Indian-born British writer, mentor, and consultant who has been living in the California Mojave Desert for over a decade. 

Much of her work inhabits thresholds and ontologies, exploring relationships between land and body and the traumatic origins of our dominant socio-cultural systems, which have created a harmful split in our subjective experience of these interdependent relationships. 

She works one-to-one with people across the intersections of decoloniality and indigeneity, through the lenses of mythology, ecological wisdom, and trauma-informed Somatic Experiencing practice, among various other modalities. Her membership container and podcast, Root + Rise, focuses on these topics, offering sustainable pathways to regenerative resolution and healing. In her consultancy work, she tailors these pathways for companies and organizational leaders. 

Rohini is also the Co-Founder & Creative Director of the Arts & Cultural print periodical, Luna Arcana, and has written for PBS SoCal on arts, environmental, and conservation projects.

For What's Good in the World, Rohini will curate programming and projects, so if you have an idea you'd like to collaborate on, email Rohini at rohini@whatsgoodintheworld.org.

Katie Nartonis is a gallerist, writer, journalist, curator, auction specialist, television producer, and documentary filmmaker. Her first career was in film and television, and she won a Humanitas award and an Emmy nomination for HBO’s “The Sissy Duckling” (about a little gay duck) written by Harvey Firestein and starring Sharon Stone, Melissa Etheridge, and Ed Asner. She later transitioned to the fine art auction field, where she spent two decades working in the 20th Century Decorative Arts (Design) departments at LAMA (Los Angeles Modern Auctions), Butterfields, Bonhams, and Heritage auction companies.

Her own documentary films include In Tandem: The Life and Work of Jerry and Evelyn Ackerman (2015) and Jack Rogers Hopkins: California Design Maverick (2023). Both films premiered as featured events at the Palm Springs Art Museum during Palm Springs Modernism Week. She has appeared on PBS for Craft in America as a West Coast Design Specialist and in documentary films on artist/makers Wendell Castle and Garry Knox Bennett. 

Her books include Jack Rogers Hopkins: California Design Maverick (2020), Edwin + Lloyd: The Story of Mentalphysics’ founder Edwin John Dingle and Architect Lloyd Wright (2023), Glimpses of the Joshua Tree Dream (2024) and California Desert Artists Volumes 1 + 2 (2024 + 2025). Her upcoming book, Chasing Eudorah: Adventures in California Design + Art History, will be published in 2026 in collaboration with What’s Good In the World.

She has served on the Animation Peer Group Board for the Television Academy of Arts & Sciences (Emmys), as President of Women in Animation, Los Angeles, and President of the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts & Crafts. She is currently Gallery Director of the HDA: Hi Desert Artists Art Center in Yucca Valley, CA. There, she supports a monthly exhibition schedule for three galleries and produces a rich programming schedule in performative art, writing, dance, lectures, and film.

Wayne Kasting is a designer, educator, and artist whose career has moved fluidly between architecture, costume, fashion, and the visual arts.

Raised on a farm in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, Wayne studied architecture and history at the University of Arkansas before moving to New York City, where he began his career in theatrical costume at the legendary Brooks-Van Horn costume house. He later moved into fashion, designing for Carolina Herrera, Adele Simpson and other major fashion houses. Over the course of his career, his designs were worn by four First Ladies, including Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Pat Nixon and Lady Bird Johnson.

After nearly three decades in fashion, Wayne returned to his early interest in architecture, working on the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills before beginning a second career as an educator. He taught fashion design, patternmaking, draping, and construction at Woodbury University, where he also earned a Master of Science in Architecture in 2023—50 years after graduating from high school.

His recent work brings these worlds together. Through his Tailored Architecture project and current collaborations, Wayne explores the space between clothing, architecture and sculpture, creating work that draws on a lifetime of making, designing and curiosity.

Now retired from teaching, he continues to create, collaborate and explore what comes next.

Brenda Littleton is a writer, Jungian coach, educator, and advocate for the role of creativity and imagination in how we know ourselves and engage with the world. Drawing on decades of experience in education, mental health, corporate life, and the creative arts, her work brings together depth psychology, writing, somatic Active Imagination, and place-based learning. She works primarily with leaders, creatives, and entrepreneurs, grounded in Jung’s understanding that personal growth involves making conscious what has remained unconscious and that creativity can be one of the ways we do so.

Her term personal literacy describes how we learn to read ourselves, others, culture, and the places we live in. Influenced by the French concept of terroir, she explores how landscape, relationship, imagination, and story shape who we become and our responsibility to participate consciously in community.

A former university director of graduate writing, Brenda has worked with emerging and professional writers, coached and edited more than thirty authors, taught writing and critical thinking, and written across television, corporate and government communications, poetry, prose, and personal essay. She is currently with Tin Flea Press and co-hosts Field Guide to Living Story with Hilary Sloane.

Brenda serves on the boards of What’s Good in the World and the Yucca Valley Center for Spiritual Living. Born on Vancouver Island and raised along the beaches of Los Angeles, she now lives in Joshua Tree, California. For twenty-three years, she shared her life with three Arabian horses who became teachers in healing, writing, art, and matters of the heart, and remain part of how she understands relationship, place, and the many ways we learn to listen.