Joe Marx, senior advisor with Burness, provides strategic guidance on a range of projects and priorities for the company. He is thrilled to work with a team of outstanding, mission-driven people who are deeply committed to serving others and doing work that helps people globally live healthier lives and build thriving communities.
Joe has more than three decades of communications and policy experience. He has worked as a journalist, speech and op ed writer, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, and in all facets of public interest communications including media relations, content creation, strategy, and management.
Most recently, Joe served as Communications Senior Director with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In his more than two decades at RWJF, he provided counsel and direction to foundation leadership and helped develop and lead initiatives that included using the power of sports to unite people of all cultures, backgrounds, ages, and abilities to build community and improve health. Initiatives that Joe helped develop and lead helped change the narrative about health beyond mere medical care—shifting our understanding that health is shaped by where we live, and the conditions we live in such as clean air and water, affordable, healthy, and livable housing, good schools, and safe places to be active and gather as a community, and is influenced by unfair laws and policies that place more value on some lives than others, based on race and class and other factors.
At RWJF and in his previous work as a science writer and Director of Media Relations for the American Heart Association’s Washington Public Affairs Office, Joe led communications initiatives to take on the tobacco industry and drive down youth and adult smoking. He worked closely with Congress, the White House, the FDA and others to pass the first smoking ban on airlines and give the FDA the authority to regulate dangerous tobacco products and specious tobacco product marketing targeted to kids.
When not immersed in communications, Joe enjoys cycling, reading, and music—he’s the drummer in a rock band celebrating 45 years together. He loves to spend time with his wife Eileen traveling and connecting with friends and family, especially their two adult children and their dogs Odin and Daisy.