Kerry Washington is an Emmy-award winning, SAG and Golden-Globe nominated actor, director, producer, activist, and New York Times Best Selling author who continues to make and write history. Kerry received recognition for her role as Olivia Pope on the hit ABC drama Scandal, breaking barriers as the first Black woman since 1974 to headline a network TV drama. Washington has also starred in more than 30 film and TV projects including, The School for Good and Evil, The Prom, Confirmation, Django Unchained, Ray, The Last King of Scotland, Save the Last Dance, Lift, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Our Song.  Washington is currently in production on the second season of the Onyx Original UnPrisoned and will next be seen on the big screen in Tyler Perry’s SIX TRIPLE EIGHT for Netflix.

During the Obama administration, Washington was appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. There, she helped spearhead the Study on Arts Education, an initiative to expand arts access in schools; Film Forward, a partnership with the Sundance Film Festival; The National Student Poets Program; and Turnaround Arts at The Kennedy Center. She currently serves on President Biden’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and Americans for the Arts’ Artist Committee.

In 2016, Washington launched her production company, Simpson Street, developing feature, television, digital, theater, and podcast projects, guided by the belief that creative courage is good for the culture. They embrace the broadest scope of humanity through the magic of story and characters. Washington has starred in, as well as executive produced projects such as Little Fires Everywhere and Unprisoned. In addition, she produced the Broadway show and Netflix adaptation of American Son as well as the documentary THE FIGHT. Washington earned her first Emmy award serving as a producer on ABC's Live In Front of A Studio Audience alongside Norman Lear and Jimmy Kimmel.Washington made her debut as an author in 2023 with the publication of her memoir, Thicker than Water, which shares an intimate view into her private and public worlds as an artist, advocate, entrepreneur, mother, daughter, wife, and Black woman.

Washington has been honored as one of TIME Magazine’s 2022 Women of The Year, in addition to appearing on the magazine’s 2014 Most Influential People list. She has also been honored with The Hollywood Reporter’s Equity in Entertainment Award, the NAACP President’s Award, the GLAAD Media Vanguard Award, and ACLU Bill of Rights Award. In 2022, Washington partnered with LAUSD and a coalition of industry leaders and actors to launch The Roybal School of Film and Television Production, a magnet school aiming to drive transformational change across the entertainment industry for students from underserved communities.

Troy Andrews

From the moment he picked up a trombone bigger than he was and joined the 2nd Line parades in his home neighborhood of the Tremé, renowned New Orleans musician Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews knew that music would be his life. Studying under local music legends, his horn became the vehicle that would transport him around the world. Founded by Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews in 2012, Troy Andrews Foundation dba Trombone Shorty Foundation (TSF) has supported this time-honored tradition of passing it on through its music education programs designed for New Orleans youth aged 12 - 24. TSF’s mission is to inspire the next generation of talented youth through music education, instruction, mentorship, performance, and cultivating business acumen. By honoring the New Orleans tradition of “playing it forward,” from the earliest jazz legends onward, the foundation preserves and perpetuates the musical heritage of a city where music plays a central role in its culture.

W. Kamau Bell

W. Kamau Bell is a stand-up comedian, television host, director, and producer. He won three Emmy awards for his CNN series, United Shades of America. Kamau also won a Peabody award for his four-part docuseries, We Need To Talk About Cosby. His newest project is the HBO documentary, 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed. Kamau’s first book has the easy-to-remember title, The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6' 4", African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama's Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian. His second book was the New York Times Bestseller Do The Work: An Antiracism Activity Book. He is on the board of directors of DonorsChoose, and he is the ACLU’s celebrity ambassador for racial justice. Kamau and his wife Melissa Hudson Bell are the co-founders of Who Knows Best Productions, a media production company in Oakland, California.

Sinead Bovell

Sinead Bovell is a futurist and the founder of WAYE, an organization that prepares youth for a future with advanced technologies, with a focus on non-traditional and minority markets.

Sinead is a regular tech commentator for CNN, talk shows, and morning shows; she's been dubbed the A.I. educator for the “non-nerds” by Vogue Magazine; and to date has educated over 300, 000 young entrepreneurs on the future of technology.

Sinead is a 11x United Nations speaker; she has given formal addresses to presidents, royalty and Fortune 500 leaders on topics ranging from cybersecurity to artificial intelligence, and currently serves as a strategic advisor to the United Nations International Telecommunication Union on digital inclusion.

Patti Davis

Patti Davis is the author of fourteen books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her new book is titled Dear Mom and Dad, A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew. She is the daughter of President and Mrs. Reagan. Patti created a support group, Beyond Alzheimer’s, for caregivers, which she ran for six years starting in 2011. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times.

Bernardo Guzmán

Bernardo Guzman is a retired software engineer and entrepreneur who lives in North Carolina with his wife, Maria. He's built and upgraded systems for a number of companies — most recently Microsoft and Wayfair. An avid amateur musician and composer, he posts photos from his daily birdwatching adventures at @berguzwildlifepics on Instagram. He's lived in the United States since 1988 and is a dual U.S. / Mexico citizen.

Maria Guzmán

Maria Guzman is a retired teacher who lives in North Carolina with her husband, Bernardo. She taught Spanish in schools in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Washington state, and was active in the pro-life movement for a number of years. She is a voracious reader and cook, loves to dance, and regularly hosts her neighbors for dinner parties and get-togethers. She's lived in the United States since 1988 and is a dual U.S. / Mexico citizen.

Mónica Guzmán

Mónica Guzmán is Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels; author of "I Never Thought of it That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times"; host of A Braver Way podcast; and founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity. She was a 2019 fellow at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, and a 2016 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. In 2023 Moni was the inaugural McGurn Fellow at the University of Florida, working with researchers at the UF College of Journalism and Communications and beyond to better understand ways to employ techniques described in her book to boost understanding. A Mexican immigrant, Latina, and dual US/Mexico citizen, she lives in Seattle with her husband and two kids and is the proud liberal daughter of conservative parents.

Chief Clark Kimerer

Retired Assistant Chief Clark Kimerer served in the Seattle Police Department for 31 years, the last sixteen as second-in-command. His legacy includes an unwavering dedication to constitutional policing, social justice and scientific, equity-based decision making, for which he was inducted into the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy Hall of Fame upon his retirement in 2014.

He is currently on the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security; writes, lectures and provides expert witness analysis on fair and impartial policing; and has served for almost 30 years as both member and Chair of the Seattle Downtown Emergency Service Center Board of Directors, one of the region’s largest permanent supportive housing and emergency shelter programs serving disabled, unhoused adults.

Cord Jefferson

Cord Jefferson is an Academy Award and Emmy award-winning writer and director who has worked on some of the most complex and popular series of the past decade and has earned praise for being one of the most multifaceted and versatile storytellers.

Jefferson made his feature writing and directorial debut with “American Fiction” starring Jeffrey Wright which has garnered 5 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jefferson. In total, the film has received 74 wins, 14 honors and 128 nominations this season. The film made its world debut at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival where it received critical acclaim and won the festival’s top prize, the People’s Choice Award. MGM’s Orion pictures released the film in December 2023.

Most recently, he won a Film Independent Spirit Award in the category of “Best Screenplay” as well as a Critics Choice Award and BAFTA Award for “Best Adapted Screenplay.” He was also nominated for “Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a First-Time Theatrical Feature Film” at the DGA Awards, the “Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures” at the PGA Awards.

It has been announced that Jefferson will write and executive produce Amazon Prime Video’s limited series adaption of John Katzenbach’s novel “Just Cause” alongside acclaimed writer John Wells, starring Scarlett Johansson in her first major television role.

Jefferson’s recent credits are a powerhouse of critically acclaimed television series that include the groundbreaking limited series Watchmen, for which he won an Emmy award for Outstanding Writing For A Limited Series alongside Damon Lindelof, for their episode “This Extraordinary Being.” Other credits include the philosophical comedy The Good Place, and drama series tour-de-force Succession. Among the accolades that Jefferson has earned for his work on these series are two Writers Guild Awards and an NAACP Image Award for writing The Good Place’s “Tinker, Tailor, Demon, Spy” episode. Jefferson was also the winner of the AFI, and has been nominated for the DGA, PGA and SAG awards.

Jefferson’s other credits include the HBO Max series Station Eleven; Netflix’s Master of None, where he wrote the episode “New York, I Love You”; Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore; and the Starz comedy series Survivor’s Remorse.

Prior to making his way into television, Jefferson was a journalist, most notably serving as the West Coast editor for Gawker. During his tenure in journalism, Jefferson also wrote for such outlets as The New York Times, National Geographic, NPR, USA Today, MSNBC, Bookforum, and The Daily Beast, among others.

Stephanie Land

Land’s instant New York Times bestseller Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive, the basis for the hit Netflix series of the same name, recounts her harrowing saga as a single mom navigating the bureaucratic nightmare of living below the poverty line. President Obama named Maid to his 2019 Summer Reading List, noting its “unflinching look at America’s class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work.” A "raw and inspiring exploration of a mother's resilience" (Entertainment Weekly), the Emmy-nominated Netflix original series Maid has reached over 67 million households making it one of Netflix's most watched limited series ever. Land’s second memoir, Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education, picks up where Maid left off as she faces the new challenges of being a poor college student and single parent. As The New York Times writes, “Land is not just exploring her own story, but also the larger implications of what it means to fall between the cracks of American capitalism.” Her writing about economic and social justice, domestic abuse, chronic illness, and motherhood has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, among many other outlets.

Sharon Lavigne

Sharon Lavigne is native to St. James, Louisiana, a small country town along the Mississippi River. Growing up, Sharon lived off the land. Sharon was a Special Education teacher for 38 years in the St. James Parish school system. In 2018, Sharon founded RISE St. James, a faith-based, grassroots, nonprofit organization fighting for clean air and water as well as the eradication and expansion of petrochemical industries in St. James Parish. She hosted the first meeting in her den with approximately 10 individuals present. During this year, Sharon retired to dedicate herself full-time to the fight for environmental justice. Ms. Lavigne has adopted the mantra “To love a community is to find ways to heal the community.” In June 2021, Sharon received recognition when she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her environmental activism in her community. In February 2022 Lavigne received the Mary Magdalene Award for Courageous Women of Faith from the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, in New York City. Most recently, Lavigne received Notre Dame's 2022 Laetare Medal, the most prestigious honor given to an American Catholic layperson. Sharon is a mother of six and a grandmother of twelve, she’s blessed to have her family’s support in protecting the environment and the eradication of air, water, and land pollution in majority Black communities.

Sage Lenier

Sage Lenier is an activist working to build an education system that enables the next gen to become climate solutionists. She got her start teaching her own program at UC Berkeley, which broke records for largest-ever student-led class. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The World Economic Forum, Forbes, and Teen Vogue, and has brought her to speak at public forums around the world. TIME Magazine named her a 2023 Next Generation Leader for her work with Sustainable & Just Future.

Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl

Jonathan M. Metzl MD, PhD is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University. The award-winning author of six books including Dying of Whiteness and What We’ve Become, he hails from Kansas City, Missouri, and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Maurice Mitchell

Maurice Mitchell is a nationally recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and National Director of the Working Families Party.

Born and raised in New York to Caribbean working-class parents, Maurice began organizing as a teenager—and never stopped. As a high school student, he served as a leader for the Long Island Student Coalition for Peace and Justice. At Howard University, after a classmate was killed by police officers, Maurice led organizing efforts against police brutality and for divestment from private prisons. He went on to work as an organizer for the Long Island Progressive Coalition, downstate organizing director for Citizen Action of NY, and Director of the NY State Civic Engagement Table.

Two tragedies changed the course of Maurice’s life. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy destroyed his home in Long Beach, NY and left him living in hotels for months. Eighteen months later, after Mike Brown was killed by police in Missouri, Maurice relocated to Ferguson to support organizers on the ground. Seeing the need for an anchor organization to provide strategic support and guidance to Movement for Black Lives activists across the country, he co-founded and managed Blackbird. Maurice was a key organizer of the Movement for Black Lives convention in Cleveland in 2015.

In 2018, Maurice took the helm of the Working Families Party as National Director where he is applying his passion and experience to make WFP the political home for a multi-racial working-class movement.

Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA

Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in March 2021 to serve as the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. As the nation’s top doctor, Dr. Vivek Murthy helps to advance the health and well-being of all Americans and has worked to address critical public health issues. He has issued Surgeon General Advisories on the youth mental health crisis and social media’s impact on youth mental health, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, and on burnout in the health worker community. Dr. Murthy also issued a Surgeon General’s Framework on mental health in the workplaceand he is the first Surgeon General to host a podcast, House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy, where he invites guests and listeners to explore how we can all build more connected and meaningful lives.

As Vice Admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, Dr. Murthy oversees more than 6,000 dedicated public health officers serving underserved and vulnerable populations.

Dr. Murthy previously served as the 19th Surgeon General under President Obama. Raised in Miami, Dr. Murthy received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard, his medical degree from the Yale School of Medicine, and his Masters in Business Administration from the Yale School of Management.

Michele Norris

Michele Norris is one of the most trusted voices in journalism. She is the author of the New York Times Best Selling book, Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race And Identity (Simon & Schuster Jan 2024.). Michele’s critically-acclaimed book explores these cultural issues during the period bookended by the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump and punctuated by a global pandemic, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the storming of the nation’s Capitol. Michele is also a Columnist for The Washington Post Opinion Section, the Host of the Audible Original podcast, Your Mama’s Kitchen, and her voice will be familiar to followers of public radio, where from 2002 to 2012 she was a host of National Public Radio’s afternoon magazine show, All Things Considered. Norris is also the Founding Director of The Race Card Project, a Peabody Award Winning narrative archive where people around the world share their experiences, questions, hopes, dreams, laments, and observations about identity --in just six words--as the starting point for conversations about race and belonging.

Angela Patton

Angela Patton's transformative leadership at Girls For A Change (GFAC) has significantly impacted creating an empowering environment for Black girls. Her dedication extends beyond accolades to real-world changes, profoundly affecting Black girls' lives. Patton's initiatives, from advocacy to creating healing spaces, highlight her commitment to ensuring Black girls are seen, heard, and valued. Her work, including the impactful "Daughters" documentary and campaigns for social change, underscores a deep-seated commitment to fostering a more inclusive and equitable future. Patton's efforts embody a beacon of hope and inspiration, showcasing the power of dedicated advocacy in transforming lives and communities.

Prentice Penny

Prentice Penny is an Emmy nominated, Peabody, and Golden Globe winning writer-director-producer who has brought his unique voice and sensibilities to some of today’s most beloved projects. With a passion for storytelling that inspires audiences to reconsider how they view the world, Penny and his multi-media production company, A Penny For Your Thoughts Entertainment, have dedicated creative efforts towards telling stories that offer fresh perspectives and explore beyond the beaten path to challenge the way we think about our culture and one another.

Penny is best known for his role as showrunner, executive producer and frequent director for HBO’s hit award-winning comedy “Insecure.” The culture-shifting series has garnered awards recognition for star Issa Rae, supporting cast, crew members and creative team from The Peabody Awards, Emmy, and NAACP Awards, among others. Since its debut, the series has been praised for its honest, powerful and poignant conversations about race, relationships, sexuality and what it’s like to navigate the awkward time in your life that is your late 20s and early 30s.

Up next, Penny is directing and producing “Black Twitter: A People's History” which will world premiere at SXSW in March 2024. Based on Jason Parham’s Wired article “A People’s History of Black Twitter,” this three-part series charts the rise, the movements, the voices, and the memes that made Black Twitter an influential and dominant force in nearly every aspect of American political and cultural life. It will debut on Hulu in Spring 2024.

Penny founded his multi-media production company, A Penny For Your Thoughts Entertainment, which specializes in content that explores the nuances of human experience through diverse characters and storylines. With a passion for storytelling that inspires audiences to reconsider how they view the world, Penny created the company with a focus on projects that offer fresh perspectives that explore beyond the beaten path to challenge the way we think about our culture and one another. The company has an overall deal with Onyx where it develops and produces projects for all Disney platforms, including Hulu, which serves as the primary home to Onyx films and television.

Among the other projects Penny has in development are “New Kid”, which Penny will direct for Universal based on the # 1 New York Times bestseller, produced through A Penny For Your Thoughts Entertainment, and HBO series “The Untamed,” an epic fantasy tale based on the culturally diverse Asunda line of comic books. He is also working on “Queens,” the story of an interconnected group of immigrant women in New York City, as well as a feature film "The Compton Cowboys" for Fox Searchlight, and a drama tv series called "The Stationary Shop".

Additionally, among Penny’s past credits are several acclaimed comedy series, including co-executive producing on the Golden Globe-winning freshman season of Fox’s comedy “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” working as a supervising producer and writer critically-acclaimed cult favorite “Happy Endings” which earned two NAACP Award nominations for the show in the “Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series” category, along with working on the hit ensemble series “Scrubs” and the seminal sitcom “Girlfriends.” Penny also created, executive produced, and ran the NAACP Award-winning show “The Hustle.” Billed as the first scripted hip-hop dramedy, “The Hustle” was Fuse Network’s landmark show with guest stars including Jadakiss, Freddie Gibbs, and DJ Skee among others. Penny was also an executive producer on “Pause with Sam Jay,” HBO’s Late-Night Show with ‘SNL’ writer Sam Jay. Along with its scripted projects, the company has also ventured into unscripted programming, which includes, the original lifestyle series “Upscale with Prentice Penny” for truTV.

In addition to TV, Penny’s recent project, the Netflix original film "Uncorked", marked the multi-hyphenates feature directorial and screenwriting debut. Starring Mamoudou Athie, Niecy Nash and Courtney B. Vance, the film earned rave reviews and quickly become Netflix’s #1 movie in the U.S. the week of its release. Loosely based on Penny’s family history, the film at its core is a father-son story about love, sacrifice and following your heart. Cementing Penny as a talented filmmaker to watch, the film’s skillful storytelling offered an intimate glimpse into family dynamics with added nuance and dimension, expanding and overturning the traditional stereotypes of Black father-son relationships.

Penny, a native Angeleno, attended USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, majoring in “Writing for Screen and Television.”

Rebecka Peterson

2023 National Teacher of the Year Rebecka Peterson is a math teacher who loves stories. Rebecka is in her 15th year of education, the last 11 of which have been at Union High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Rebecka uses her platform as National Teacher of the Year to highlight teachers’ stories of the good that is happening in education. She believes that when we learn each other’s stories, we carry a piece of each other with us. This helps us to authentically advocate for our students, teachers, and their communities.

Dr. Yusef Salaam

Yusef Salaam is best known as a member of "The Exonerated Five," a group of five boys—four black and one Latino— who were tried and falsely convicted of a crime in a frenzied case that rocked the world. On April 19, 1989, when a young woman was brutally raped and left for dead in New York City’s Central Park, the five innocent boys were accused and became known collectively as “The Central Park Five.” Spending between seven and thirteen years behind bars, all of their lives were upended and changed forever, including Yusef who was just 15 years old at the time.

Their convictions were vacated in 2002 after previously unidentified DNA had finally met its owner - a convicted murderer and serial rapist who confessed to the crime. The convictions of the boys, now men, were overturned and they were exonerated, becoming "The Exonerated Five."

Since his release, Yusef has committed himself to advocating and educating people on the issues of false confessions, police brutality and misconduct, press ethics and bias, race and law, and the disparities in America’s criminal justice system. He also released a New York Times bestselling memoir, Better, Not Bitter, which details how he turned his story into a tool for change in the pursuit of racial justice.

Yusef currently serves as a member of New York City's 9th City Council District, bringing his experiences with the criminal justice system to help make impactful change within the government.

Documentarians Ken and Sarah Burns released the documentary The Central Park Five, which told of this travesty from the perspective of Yusef and his cohorts. Yusef was later appointed to the board of the Innocence Project and released a Netflix Feature limited series called When They See Us based on the true story of the “Central Park Five” with Ava DuVernay, Oprah Winfrey, and Robert De Niro.

The Central Park Five received a multi-million-dollar settlement from the city of New York for its grievous injustice against them. Yusef was awarded an Honorary Doctorate that same year and received the President's Lifetime Achievement Award from President Barack Obama.

Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde Thurston tells a better story of us, weaving together threads of race, technology, democracy and climate through his work as an Emmy-nominated host, producer, writer, and public speaker. He is the host and executive producer of the PBS television series America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, creator and host of How To Citizen with Baratunde which Apple named one of its favorite podcasts of 2020, and a founding partner of the new media startup Puck. His comedic memoir, How To Be Black, is a New York Times best-seller. In 2019, he delivered what MSNBC’s Brian Williams called “one of the greatest TED talks of all time.” Baratunde is unique in his ability to integrate and synthesize different and difficult topics in a style that’s intelligent, compassionate, and humorous. Baratunde serves on the boards of Civics Unplugged and the Brooklyn Public Library and lives in Los Angeles, California.

Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock

A native of Savannah, Georgia, Reverend Raphael Warnock was born the eleventh of twelve children and grew up in public housing with a family that was short on money but long on faith, love and humor. A product of good public policy, Reverend Warnock became the first in his family to earn his bachelor’s degree after graduating from Morehouse College, and the first to earn a doctorate after graduating from Union Theological Seminary. In 2005, he was chosen to serve as Senior Pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, the former pulpit of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and he is distinguished as the youngest pastor selected to serve in that leadership role at the historic church.

Reverend Warnock has long believed his ministry of service doesn’t stop at the church doors, and as a pastor and longtime social justice activist he has worked to expand health care access, protect access to vital nutrition benefits, secure the right to vote for every eligible American, and end mass incarceration. In 2021 Reverend Warnock won a closely-contested special election to become Georgia's first Black Senator and help Democrats secure the Senate majority. He was reelected to a full term in 2022, where he currently serves on the Senate Agriculture, Banking, Commerce and Aging committees, and he continues to use his moral voice in the Senate to center people in Washington’s policy-making—from working to end rampant gun violence, cap insulin costs for everyone who needs it, and close Georgia’s health care gap, to advocating for America’s farmers and rural communities, and fighting to lengthen and strengthen the cords of our democracy by protecting the sacred right to vote.

Dorian Warren

A progressive scholar, organizer and media personality, Dorian Warren has worked to advance racial, economic and social justice for more than two decades. Like the organizations he leads, Warren is driven by the innate conviction that only social movements – led by the people most affected by racial, economic, gender and social injustice – can change their communities and public policies for the better.

Dorian is co-president of Community Change, the co-founder of the Economic Security Project. He taught for over a decade at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where he was co-director of the Columbia University Program on Labor Law and Policy. He's the co-author of The Hidden Rules of Race, co-editor of Race and American Political Development, and numerous academic articles. He also worked at MSNBC, where he was a Contributor, fill-in host for "Melissa Harris-Perry" and "Now with Alex Wagner." After growing up on the South Side of Chicago, Dorian received his B.A. from the University of Illinois and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. His great-grandparents were sharecroppers, his grandparents were janitors and his mother was a teacher in Chicago’s public schools for more than 40 years.

Ana Zamora

Ana Zamora is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Just Trust. Previously, Ana served as the Director of Criminal Justice Reform at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where she incubated her investment strategy to shift the American criminal justice system away from solely punishment and incapacitation to accountability, dignity, redemption, and healing. Ana later transitioned that work into an independent organization, launching The Just Trust for Education (c3) and The Just Trust for Action (c4) with a $350M seed investment from CZI.

Alaphia Zoyab

Alaphia leads Luminate Strategic Initiatives’ Campaigns & Media team which focuses on exposing to a large audience the harms of the Big Tech industry on democracy and society.

Alaphia has more than a decade of campaigning experience, first at Amnesty International and then as a senior campaigner at Avaaz. One of Alaphia’s successes includes campaigning to stop the takeover of Sky Television in the UK by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. She previously worked as a news anchor and journalist at New Delhi Television.