Danny Glover

HONORARY CHAIR

Danny Glover combines his acting career with a dedication to the common good. He is well-known for his film and television works, including the Lethal Weapon series, Beloved, To Sleep with Anger, and Freedom Song. He serves as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, works on behalf of AIDS victims in the U.S. and Africa, and helps a wide range of organizations advance the causes of civil rights and economic justice.

Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Bill Fletcher Jr has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. He is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice; and the author of ‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.

Robert Lang

Robert Lang is the founder and president of Toronto-based Kensington Communications, a television production company with an established international reputation for ground-breaking documentary specials, innovative factual series, and interactive digital media productions. He is a documentary filmmaker, a founding member of the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC), and the founder of the Crosscurrents Documentary Fund at Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival.

Ziggy West Jeffery

Ziggy is the publisher at Truthout, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on social justice reporting. He began his career in independent media as a volunteer Joomla developer for The Real News Network in 2008. He is an industry leader in digital content distribution, traffic conversion, fundraising strategy and independent news administration.

Catherine Murphy 

Catherine Murphy is an independent documentary film producer who has spent much of the last 20 years working in Latin America, including directing the film Maestra telling the stories of the youngest women teachers in the 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign. She is founder & director of The Literacy Project, a multi-media documentary project on adult literacy in the Americas. Murphy served as senior staff producer at the TeleSur TV Washington bureau and has produced content for PBS, TeleSur, Avila TV, Pacifica Radio National, WBAI and KPFA. While in Caracas in 2009, she founded Tres Musas Producciones, a collaborative production house of independent women producers working in film, music, and literature. Four short stories based on her interviews were published in Eduardo Galeano’s most penultimate book, Espejos.

Susan Nestadt

Susan Nestadt is the founder of ULUNTU, a centre for early childhood education and services for young, vulnerable parents in Baltimore. She serves on the Board of Safe and Sound Campaign, the Baltimore Outreach Center for Homeless Women and Children, and the Baltimore Streetcar Campaign. Previously, she worked for Catholic Charities Sex Abuse Unit for over 20 years. Susan has a BA from University of Witwatersrand in early childhood education, an MSc from Goucher College in dance therapy, an M.Sc. from Johns Hopkins University in special education, and an MSW from University of Maryland in social work.

Jessica Rose

Jessica Rose is a skilled financial manager, strategist, and business developer focused on alternative finance, social ventures and non-profit management. She is passionate about impact investing, employee firm ownership, and other market-based solutions to inequality.

Jessica has spent her career at the intersection of business and social impact, first as a microentrepreneur and community organizer, and later as a socially responsible business strategist and finance executive. She was a driving force behind several national quality jobs initiatives, including OwnRochester, a municipally-sponsored cooperative business incubator, Employee Ownership News, a news service covering the cooperative and ESOP beat, and The Fund for Employee Ownership, a pilot impact investment fund designed to create quality jobs with ownership pathways. She is the author of several journal articles and papers examining the role of capital in expanding employee firm ownership, including a set of impact investing guidelines for sponsored employee firm buyouts.

Jessica currently serves as Chief Financial Officer at a prominent non-profit organization in the impact investing industry.  Previously, she was Chief Financial Officer at The Democracy Collaborative, a Washington-based progressive think tank.

T. M. Scruggs

T. M. Scruggs is an ethnomusicologist whose geographical specialty is Latin America and the Caribbean. He taught at the University of Iowa from 1994 to 2009, as well as universities in Nicaragua and Venezuela. He now lives in Berkeley, California.