Sonya Renee Taylor is a New York Times best-selling author, world-renowned activist and thought leader on racial justice and transformational change, international award winning poet, and founder of The Body Is Not an Apology (TBINAA), a global digital media and education company exploring the intersections of identity, healing, and social justice through the framework of radical self-love.

Sonya is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love (1st and 2nd editions), Your Body Is Not an Apology Workbook, Celebrate Your Body (and Its Changes, Too!), poetry collection A Little Truth on Your Shirt, The Book of Radical Answers (That I Know You Already Know) (Dial Press 2022), and co-editor with Cat Pausé of The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors over the past two decades, from her National Individual Poetry Slam Championship award in 2004 to her 2016 invitation by the Obama administration to participate in the White House Forum on LGBT and Disability Issues. More recently, she served as an inaugural Edmund Hillary Fellow in Aotearoa (New Zealand) from 2017-2020.

Sonya resides in Aotearoa / New Zealand and continues to share her insights globally as a highly sought-after international speaker, artist and educator on issues of radical self-love, social justice, and personal and global transformation.

Recognized as one of 50 Game Changers of PR by PR News and a Champion of PR by PRWeek, Vanessa Wakeman is one of a few black women to found and own a social change agency— helping to shift the paradigm of an industry that is led primarily by white men. She shapes narratives and stories that reflect our multicultural world.

Vanessa is a futurist and strategic advisor. Her work through her company, The Wakeman Agency, focuses on the ecosystem of social change and advancing the efforts of mission-driven causes. Growing up in New York, Vanessa’s activism and commitment to social justice were instilled early on. She organized the workers at her first job, a catering company, to demand and win better labor conditions —when she was only 15. After working her way through college at some of New York City’s top law firms, she landed a position at Morgan Stanley. There, she created a record number of career opportunities for women and people of color in the firm’s technology department.

Vanessa is a trusted advisor to nonprofit organizations and socially responsible companies in the U.S. and internationally. She has successfully led initiatives to support values-driven transformation and communications for boards of directors, leadership, employees and other stakeholder groups.

Vanessa is highly knowledgeable in developing communication strategies, assessing organizational culture, creating safe spaces for difficult conversations, and helping to build frameworks for organizations to cultivate healthy and equitable environments.

During the COVID- 19 pandemic and in the wake of the recent racially motivated murders, she has been called upon by a number of organizations to help them re-imagine their values, culture and operations, through the lens of racial justice.

As a public relations expert and thought leader, Vanessa has created and executed highly successful engagements for clients that include The Alliance for Financial Inclusion, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, The New York Women’s Foundation, Hispanics in Philanthropy, and many others.

Vanessa is an outspoken voice on the need for more inclusion and equity in the public relations and nonprofit sectors, while also working to amplify the voices of underrepresented groups in the media. Most recently she created She Roars, the first thought leadership training program designed for women. The Narrative Justice Project soon followed, which is a free media training program developed specifically for people of color.

Vanessa has been a keynote presenter, session leader and panelist on topics ranging from philanthropy to thought leadership for women. Recent speaking engagements include UN Women, Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits, Utah Association of Nonprofits and the Women’s Leadership Institute at Manhattanville College.

In addition to her work at The Wakeman Agency, she serves on the Board of Directors of the Public Relations Society of America Foundation and the Commission for Public Relations Education, leading the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee to develop higher education curriculum standards through a multicultural lens.

Gina Clayton-Johnson is the Founder and Executive Director at Essie Justice Group, launched in 2014 to harness the collective power of women with incarcerated loved ones to end mass incarceration’s harm to women and communities.

Gina has spent more than a decade advocating for Black communities as a community organizer in Los Angeles and witnessed the impact of incarceration on women both in her personal and professional life. Through the relationships she built with her clients at The Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, Gina recognized women who have loved ones behind bars face systemic patterns of harm. When someone she loves was sentenced to 20 years in prison, Gina began to look for organizations and publications that addressed criminal justice with a focus on women with incarcerated loved ones and found none. She founded Essie Justice Group for those women. Gina returned to California and recruited the 1 in 4 women and 1 in 2 Black women who have loved ones in prison to develop a model that both heals and unlocks the powerful advocacy potential of women with incarcerated loved ones.

At Essie, Gina’s award-winning, isolation-breaking Healing to Advocacy model facilitates journeys of collective healing, provides resources that offer beams of support to women and families during crisis, and develops leadership in women with incarcerated loved ones to become fierce advocates for transformational change.

In 2018, Gina led a research team to co-author Essie’s groundbreaking report Because She’s Powerful: The Political Isolation and Resistance of Women with Incarcerated Loved Ones to answer the question, “Is mass incarceration the largest barrier to gender justice today?” The report found that the impact of incarceration on women is psychologically and physiologically damaging, and that incarceration is an undetected or ignored driver of emotional, mental, and physical health crises among women. With this expertise, Essie’s Healing to Advocacy program, and staff culture and wellness approaches underscore the power of Black feminism, community, and Sisterhood.

Gina is also a formidable policy expert as the central architect for the BREATHE Act, the largest federal civil rights bill in history, through the Movement for Black Lives. The BREATHE Act also paved the way for the People’s Response Act, co-authored by Essie.

Gina is an Equal Justice Works Fellow, a Soros Justice Fellow, an Echoing Green Global Fellow, a Harvard Public Service Venture Fellow, and a JMK Innovation Prize Awardee. Gina was named “Top 14 Women Who Rocked 2014” by Colorlines, a San Francisco Magazine Soldier of Social Change in their “Women In Power Issue,” one of the “Woke 100 Women” by Essence Magazine, and is a 2016 recipient of JustLeadershipUSA’s Redefining Justice Award. Gina is also featured in Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed Netflix documentary 13th.

Kamilah Willingham is writer, national activist, and civil rights advocate. Kamilah’s work is grounded in advancing the rights of survivors of sexual violence in prisons, schools, and beyond, highlighting the culture of silence and inequity that dominates social and systemic responses to gender-based violence. In 2016 Kamilah spearheaded the viral social media campaign, #JustSaySorry. This campaign encouraged survivors of campus sexual assaults and gender-based violence to petition for an apology from their institutions, calling attention to the resilience of survivors and the failures of schools to to submit to basic measures of accountability.

Kamilah investigates the consequences of patriarchy and misogyny, at the intersections of race and sex, and illustrates how our culture, norms and institutions are complicit in this abuse. Kamilah has trained a variety of stakeholders, from prison guards to campus officials, on their responsibilities to prevent and address sexual violence among their ranks and within their environments. Through this work, Kamilah invites audiences to explore healing from trauma as a path to resistance and revolution. Through her nuanced and personal perspective Kamilah helps audiences imagine alternative systems for healing and reconciliation outside of our justice system.

Since graduating Harvard Law School in 2011, Kamilah’s scholarship has been published in Teen Vogue, VICE, Huffpost, The Nation, The Establishment, and others. Kamilah shared her personal experience of surviving sexual assault and civil rights violations as a student at Harvard Law School in the award-winning 2015 documentary THE HUNTING GROUND. She currently sits on the board of the Equal Rights Amendment Coalition and is a mother of two.