Robert Reich is an American economist, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. He was Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997. He was a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. Reich is a political commentator on programs including Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN Tonight, Anderson Cooper's AC360, Hardball With Chris Matthews, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNBC's Kudlow & Company, and APM's Marketplace. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century, and The Wall Street Journal in 2008 placed him sixth on its list of Most Influential Business Thinkers. Most recently, he is the author of The System: Who Rigged it and How to Fix It.

Reverend William Barber II began leading regular "Moral Mondays" civil-rights protests in North Carolina's state capital, Raleigh, in April 2013. The Wall Street Journal credited Barber's NAACP chapter with forming a coalition in 2007 named Historic Thousands on Jones Street People's Assembly, composed of 93 North Carolina advocacy groups. Historian and professor Timothy Tyson named Barber, "the most important progressive political leader in this state in generations," saying that he "built a statewide interracial fusion political coalition that has not been seriously attempted since 1900." In May 2017, Barber announced he would step down from the state NAACP president to lead "a new 'Poor People's Campaign'", named Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival in honor of the original 1968 campaign founded by Martin Luther King. In 2018, Barber was named a MacArthur Fellow (popularly known as the "Genius Grant") for "building broad-based fusion coalitions as part of a moral movement to confront racial and economic inequality."

Nicholas Kristof has coauthored several books with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, including A Path Appears and Half the Sky. Together they were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for their coverage of China. They also received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009. Now an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, Kristof was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. He won his second Pulitzer in 2006 for his columns on Darfur.

Sheryl WuDunn has coauthored several books with her husband, Nicholas D. Kristof, including Half the Sky and A Path Appears. Together they were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for their coverage of China. They also received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009. WuDunn worked at the New York Times as a business editor and foreign correspondent in Tokyo and Beijing. She now works in banking.

Willow Bay is the dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and holder of the Walter H. Annenberg Chair in Communication. A veteran broadcast journalist and a leader in digital communication, Bay was previously the director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. Before that, Bay came to USC Annenberg from her post as senior editor and then senior strategic adviser of The Huffington Post. Her prominent broadcast experience includes reporting and anchoring for ABC News’ Good Morning America/Sunday and serving as a correspondent for Good Morning America and World News Weekend. Bay is the author of Talking to Your Kids in Tough Times: How to Answer Your Child’s Questions about the World We Live In.

Diane Ravitch was born in Houston, Texas, and graduated from Wellesley College and Columbia University. She is a research professor of education at New York University and the author of eleven books. Ravitch is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Alex Caputo-Pearl is the elected president of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and previously taught for 22 years in the Compton and Los Angeles school districts. With a deep commitment to community organizing, he helped build the work of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union, as well as helping to found numerous coalitions. In 2006, Caputo-Pearl was administratively transferred from Crenshaw High School by the superintendent in retaliation for his teaching and organizing, and was reinstated to Crenshaw shortly thereafter when parents, youth, and educators protested. In his time as UTLA president since 2014, he is proud to have collectively achieved moving UTLA to a social movement union model, forming Reclaim Our Schools LA and more. Caputo-Pearl is active in CFT, CTA, AFT, and NEA, including being on the AFT Executive Council.

Andrea Bernstein, who won a Peabody award for her work uncovering abuses of power in the Bridgegate scandal, is the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power and the co-host of the Trump, Inc. podcast from WNYC and ProPublica.

Kristen Muller, as Southern California Public Radio’s Chief Content Officer, oversees the station’s programming, podcasting, and excellent local journalism. She leads an award-winning team of hosts, reporters, producers, and editors who are dedicated to informing, entertaining, and connecting the diverse communities of LA.

Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Science Journalism. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

Lera Boroditsky is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD and Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford. Her research is on the relationships between mind, world, and language (or how humans get so smart).

Anand Giridharadas is the author of Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling as well as an editor-at-large for Time, an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. A former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, he has written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He has given talks on the main stage of TED and at Harvard, the Aspen Ideas Festival, South by Southwest, and more. His writing has been honored by the Henry Crown Fellowship of the Aspen Institute, Society of Publishers in Asia, the Poynter Fellowship at Yale, etc. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Sarah Jones, called “a master of the genre” by The New York Times, is a Tony and Obie Award-winning performer and writer known for the multi-character, one-person Broadway hit Bridge & Tunnel, and her current, critically-acclaimed show Sell/Buy/Date. Jones has given multiple TED Talks as well as performed at The White House’s United State of Women Summit and The World Economic Forum. A UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, through global performances Jones has raised awareness on ethnic, racial, and economic issues in the U.S.

Joel Simon has been the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) since 2006. Simon has led the organization through a period of expansion, helping to launch the Global Campaign Against Impunity, establishing a Journalist Assistance program and an Emergencies Department, and spearheading CPJ’s defense of press freedom in the digital space through the creation of a dedicated Technology Program. Simon has participated in CPJ missions around the world, from Argentina to Zimbabwe. He has written widely on press freedom issues for publications including Slate, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, World Policy Journal, Asahi Shimbun, and The Times of India. He is a regular columnist for Columbia Journalism Review.  He is the author of the three books, Endangered Mexico (Sierra Club Books, 1997); The New Censorship (Columbia University Press, 2015); and We Want to Negotiate: Inside the Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages, and Ransom (Columbia Global Reports, January 2019).

Federico Motka is based in London and is the co-founder of the social enterprise FieldWorks. In 2013, when serving as an aid worker at a Syrian refugee camp, Motka was kidnapped and held captive over a nine-month period. This is the first time Motka has spoken publicly about his time in captivity.

Sewell Chan is an American journalist who currently serves as a deputy managing editor at the Los Angeles Times. From 2004 to 2018, he worked at The New York Times in a variety of reporter and editorial positions—most recently as the international news editor in the London office and before then as the deputy editor of the Op-Ed and Sunday sections. Chan was previously a staff writer at The Washington Post and has written for The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Professor Richard L. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, and is co-author of a leading casebook on election law. Professor Hasen was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal in 2013, and one of the Top 100 Lawyers in California in 2005 and 2016 by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He has authored eight books, most recently The Case Against the Supreme Court (2014), and more than 200 law-review articles. He has argued several cases before the Supreme Court and various circuits of the United States Court of Appeals.

Adam Winkler is a professor at UCLA School of Law, where he specializes in American constitutional law. His scholarship has been cited by the Supreme Court of the United States and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Atlantic, Slate, and Scotusblog.

Rick Wartzman is director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society at the Drucker Institute, a part of Claremont Graduate University.  He also hosts a podcast on the intersection of business and society called The Bottom Line and is a regular contributor to Fast Company. His latest book, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America, was published  in 2017.

Antonio Damasio is a University Professor; David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Neurology and Psychology; and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and the recipient of many awards, including the Asturias Prize in Science and Technology; the Honda Prize; and the Pessoa and Signoret prizes. Damasio is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens, Looking for Spinoza, and Self Comes to Mind, which have been translated and taught in universities throughout the world.

Manuel Castells is University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California. He is as well, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at the Sorbonne in Paris, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. He has published 30 books, including his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, translated in 22 languages. He is the only scholar to have received the two most prestigious international prizes in social sciences, the Holberg Prize and the Balzan Prize.