Amy Costello ’92

Amy Costello is the founder of Tiny Spark, a nonprofit, independent podcast news program that investigates nonprofits, philanthropy, international development and social enterprise. Tiny Spark was acquired by The Nonprofit Quarterly in 2018. She graduated from Trinity in 1992 with a major in history and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She continued her studies at the Columbia University School of Journalism where she earned a master’s degree; she also taught journalism at Columbia while she worked as a freelance journalist.

Amy Costello’s Tiny Spark’s reports and investigations have been cited by a number of leading news outlets including Slate, The Atlantic and Mother Jones. Her stories have also been featured on NPR, PRI’s The World, Marketplace, the BBC World Service, The Guardian, and The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Before founding Tiny Spark, Amy Costello worked as a producer at NPR and was the Africa correspondent for five years for “The World,” a co-production of the BBC World Service, Public Radio International and WGBH Boston. Her stories were heard by millions of listeners across the United States and around the globe. She traveled extensively across Africa, producing in-depth, documentary-style radio reports on topics ranging from child labor in Ivory Coast to sex abuse among U.N. peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone. She has reported extensively on children in Africa, including stories on child laborers in Ivory Coast, AIDS orphans in South Africa, and Ethiopian children bound for adoptive homes in the United States. Her PBS television investigation, Sudan: The Quick and the Terrible, was nominated for an Emmy Award. In 2007, she returned to campus to share her experiences with students as a speaker in Trinity’s Sower’s Seed lecture series.