Professor Sakena Yacoobi co-founded Creating Hope International and is President and Executive Director of the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL).

Yacoobi founded AIL in 1995 to provide teacher training to Afghan women, to support education for boys and girls, and to provide health education to women and children. Under Yacoobi’s leadership AIL has established itself as a groundbreaking, visionary organization that works at the grassroots level and empowers women and communities to find ways to bring education and health services to rural and poor urban girls, women and other poor and disenfranchised Afghans.

AIL was the first organization to offer human rights and leadership training to Afghan women. After the Taliban closed girls’ schools in the 1990s, AIL supported 80 underground home schools for 3,000 girls in Afghanistan. AIL was also the first organization that opened Women’s Learning Centers for Afghan women—a concept now copied by many organizations throughout the country. Using their grassroots strategies, AIL now serves 350,000 women and children each year through its Educational Learning Centers, schools and clinics in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As Founder and CEO of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN), Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, MBE has over two decades of experience as a peace strategist working globally on conflicts, crises, violent extremism and peacebuilding with civil society, governments and the UN.

Through ICAN, she spearheads the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL) comprising independent women-led organizations active in 40 countries globally, preventing violence and promoting peace, rights and pluralism. Under her leadership, ICAN has developed the multi-donor Innovative Peace Fund (IPF) to channel resources to local women-led peacebuilding organizations. Since its inception the fund has committed $7,000,000 across 25 countries. ICAN’s Better Peace Initiative (BPI) is also a flagship program providing strategic guidance, practical tools and capacity development for UN, governments, and civil society on best practices in inclusive design and gender responsiveness in peace processes.

From 2020 to September 2022, Ms. Naraghi Anderlini served as Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Centre for Women, Peace and Security, working to deepen links between scholarship, policy and practice in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and introducing the network of Women Mediators Across the Commonwealth (WMC) to the Centre.

Throughout her extensive career, Ms. Naraghi Anderlini has led groundbreaking initiatives in research, thought leadership, policy and practice. Key highlights include being a civil society leader, advocate and drafter of the seminal UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on WPS in 1999-2000; directing the Women Waging Peace Policy Commission in 2002-2004 with design and delivery of the first multi-country research initiative on the evidence of women’s contributions to peace processes; and publication of her book, Women Building Peace: What they do, why it matters (Rienner, 2007). Ms. Naraghi Anderlini designed and led the 10-country UNDP global initiative on “Gender, Community Security and Social Cohesion” as the first in-depth studies on the role and vulnerabilities of men in fragile contexts; she was appointed to the UN’s Standby Team (SBT) of Mediation Experts as the first Senior Expert on Gender and Inclusion working on Somalia, Libya and Syria, Sudan among other cases; and designs and delivers curricula on gender responsiveness in PVE and mediation for senior governmental, UN staff and mediators.

In November 2022, Ms. Naraghi Anderlini commenced an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 2018, she has been an adjunct Professor at the Columbia University School of International Public Affairs (SIPA). She serves on the Steering Board of the UK’s National Action Plan on Women Peace and Security and Prevention of Sexual Violence, the Commonwealth’s Panel of Experts on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), the WMC’s Steering Committee. Ms. Naraghi Anderlini also serves as Co-Chair of the Principles for Inclusive Peace Initiative.

Media: BBC World Service television and radio. Her editorials have appeared in numerous publications including The Guardian, The Observer, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Le Monde Diplomatique, Open Democracy, Common Dreams, and Ms. Magazine.

Awards: In 2020 in recognition for her work and for services to international peacebuilding and women’s rights, in the UK she was awarded an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). She was the 2016 Greeley Peace Scholar at the University of Massachusetts, and recipient of the 2014 UN Association Perdita Huston Award for human rights.

Personal: Ms. Naraghi Anderlini speaks four languages and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University. Iranian by birth she is a UK and US citizen, and has identical twin daughters.

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.

Dawn Engle is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the non-profit organization, The PeaceJam Foundation, which brings youth together with thirteen Nobel Peace Prize Laureates including the 14th Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Engle has been nominated eight times for the Nobel Peace Prize herself. She is the co-director of the award-winning documentary film, PEACEJAM and co-authored the book, PeaceJam: A Billion Simple Acts of Peace. In addition she directed the award-winning documentary films, 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy and Mayan Renaissance, which is the first in a series of feature length documentaries in PeaceJam’s Nobel Legacy Film Series.

Engle began her career as an economist, working for the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. She was the youngest women ever appointed to serve as Chief of Staff to a U.S. Senator. In 1991, she co-founded the Colorado Friends of Tibet, and in 1994, she and artist Ivan Suvanjieff began working together to create the PeaceJam program. Suvanjieff and Engle married in March 2000, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu presiding over the ceremony. In September 2008, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi and six other Nobel Peace Laureates joined together to launch PeaceJam’s Call to Action campaign calling for one billion acts of service and peace by the year 2018.

Known as the co-founder and COO of scrappy-start-up-turned-global-women’s- media-company, BlogHer, Inc. Since selling BlogHer in 2014, Elisa Camahort Page now consults with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and organizations at inflection points when they are contemplating pivots, diversifying and scaling their revenue streams, and looking for better ways to control their narrative.

As one of BlogHer’s co-founders, Elisa was named among Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs, one of the most influential women in Web 2.0 and technology by Fast Company, and as one of the seven most powerful people in new media by Forbes Magazine. As a speaker, she’s delivered keynote presentations and conducted high-profile interviews across the globe to audiences numbering in the thousands. A sampling of speaking engagements include: INFORUM@Commonwealth Club, United State of Women,TEDx, DLD Women, SXSW, DENT, and BlogHer.

When not speaking or conducting interviews with luminaries such as Guy Kawasaki, Tig Notaro, Christy Turlington Burns and Luvvie Ajayi, Elisa is working with leaders at every level to identify, prioritize, and strategize their next big leaps, ensuring that they build a diverse, inclusive community and workforce, online and off.

Most recently, with the success of her book, Road Map for Revolutionaries, published by Ten Speed Press, she is working to provide practical tactics for engaging in effective day-to-day activism and advocacy at all levels in today’s gridlocked, heavily-surveilled, and politically volatile landscape.

2011 Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist, trained social worker and women’s rights advocate.

She currently serves as Executive Director of the Women, Peace and Security Program at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and is the founder and current President of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, the founding head of the Liberia Reconciliation Initiative, as well as co-founder and former Executive Director of Women Peace and Security Network Africa (WIPSEN-A). She is also a founding member and former Liberian Coordinator of Women in Peacebuilding Network/West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WIPNET/WANEP). She travels internationally to advocate for human rights and peace & security.

Ms. Gbowee’s leadership of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace – which brought together Christian and Muslim women in a nonviolent movement that played a pivotal role in ending Liberia’s civil war in 2003 – is chronicled in her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers, and in the award-winning documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. Ms. Gbowee holds an M.A. in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University (Harrisonburg, VA), and a Doctor of Laws (LLD) honoris causa from Rhodes University in South Africa and the University of Alberta in Canada.

Ms. Gbowee advises numerous organizations working for peace, women’s rights, youth, and sustainable development, and has held distinguished fellowships at Barnard College and Union Theologi­cal Seminary. In 2016, Ms. Gbowee was awarded the Lifetime Africa Achievement Prize (LAAP) for Peace in Africa by the Millennium Excellence Foundation. Ms. Gbowee serves as a Sustainable Development Goals Advocate for the United Nations and as a Member of the World Refugee Council. In 2017, Ms. Gbowee was selected by the United Nations Secretary General to serve as a Member of United Nations Secretary-General’s High Level Advisory Board on Mediation. In 2018, she was appointed to the Gender Equality Advisory Council Secretariat for Canada’s G7 Presidency.

Leymah is the proud mother of eight children.

Mallika Dutt wakes leaders up to our interconnected truth and inspires us to question our current paradigms. She provides us with approaches and tools to strategically shake up and re-envision the world. Mallika has honed this approach through decades of experience leading culture change in entrepreneurial, nonprofit, and philanthropic fields. Her unique methodology combines ancient wisdom, contemplative practices, and social justice activism. The result? Connection and transformation.

As a strategic innovator, Mallika has pioneered effective approaches for social change through the founding of several nonprofits, including Breakthrough and Sakhi for South Asian Women. She has also provided transformational leadership in her roles as a Program Officer for Human Rights and Social Justice at the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi Office, the Director of the Norman Foundation, and the Associate Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University.

Now, Mallika leverages her experience as a changemaker to catalyze a new, interconnected leadership, through program design, facilitation, public speaking, and coaching. Her intersectional methodology incorporates creative and contemplative approaches, including: narrative strategy, storytelling, somatic embodiment, energy medicine, yoga and mindfulness practices.
A recipient of multiple awards, she received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2016. Mallika has served on several boards and committees and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A graduate of NYU Law School and Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, Mallika began her career as an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton. She is also the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from her undergraduate college, Mount Holyoke.

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda from Zimbabwe is a trained human rights lawyer with extensive experience in conflict resolution and mediation.

For some twenty years, she has worked to advance women and children’s human rights, with a special focus on crisis countries and addressing issues of violence against women, peace with justice, property rights, sexual and reproductive health and rights and HIV. Since 2007, Gumbonzvanda has been the General Secretary of the World YWCA, a global movement of 25 million women and girls in over 120 countries.

Prior to this, she served for ten years with the United Nations with UNICEF and UNIFEM and was a member of the UN Civil Society Advisory Group on 1325. She has previously worked with the Zimbabwe Women Lawyers Association and in the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs in Zimbabwe. Gumbonzvanda has a master’s degree in private law with specialisation in constitutional property law from the University of South Africa and completed postgraduate work on conflict resolution at Uppsala University, Sweden.

She serves on various boards of development organisations including Action Aid International and Save the Children UK and the steering committee for Girls Not Brides. Gumbonzvanda is also on the High Level Group on HIV Prevention and Sexual health for young people in Eastern and Southern Africa, advisor to the Dutch Government in the planning of the Human Rights Thematic Forum for ICPD+20 and currently serves as Chair of CIVICUS and the NGO Committee on the Status of Women in Geneva.

As a Chicago creative artist and entrepreneur, Priya Shah is building a network of artists and collaborators dedicated to igniting social awareness and change through art and imagination.

Shah’s ever-evolving passion for art and travel has led her to help better communities in Chicago and around the world. Her volunteer work in developing countries has allowed her to shape her purpose and connect issues impacting youth, both locally and abroad. This has culminated into her founding the non-profit organization The Simple Good, which aims to connect the meaning of “good” from around the world in order to empower at-risk youth to become positive activists through art and discussion. By uniting communities under a universal truth, Shah hopes to bridge understanding across all walks of life in order to bring down obstacles separating us in working towards improving the lives of our children and in turn, our future. In March 2015, Priya was asked to present her journey at TEDx River North where she delivered a passionate talk called “How the Simple Things Create Hope.”

Since then, she has received a number of honors including being selected as an Ariane de Rothschild Fellow at Cambridge University, Brand Ambassador for Marc Fisher’s #MAKEYOURMARC Women in Philanthropy, winner of MADE Magazine’s Impact List 2016, Chicago Women’s Magazine Changemaker, amongst others. Most recently, she is the Executive Producer for a documentary film on bringing The Simple Good to post-genocide Rwanda called ‘Project: Building Hope.’