Saru Jayaraman is the co-founder and President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. After 9/11, together with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), which grew into a national movement of restaurant workers, employers and consumers. She then launched One Fair Wage as a national campaign to end all subminimum wages in the United States. The story of Saru and her co-founder’s work founding ROC has been chronicled in the book The Accidental American, and the story of the One Fair Wage campaign has been profiled in the award winning documentary, Waging Change. Saru is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

She was profiled in The New York Times “Public Lives” section in 2005, named one of Crain’s “40 Under 40” in 2008, was 1010 Wins’ “Newsmaker of the Year” and New York Magazine’s “Influentials” of New York City. Saru was listed in CNN’s “Top10 Visionary Women” and recognized as a Champion of Change by the White House in 2014, a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2015, and the SF Chronicle ‘Visionary of the Year’ in 2019. She has appeared on CNN with Soledad O’Brien, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, Melissa Harris Perry and UP with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the Today Show, and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Saru is also the author of four books including her latest, One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America (The New Press, November 2021). Additional publications include Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press, 2013), Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning, (UC Press, 2020). She attended the Golden Globes in January 2018 with Amy Poehler as part of the Times Up action to address sexual harassment.

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.

Dr. Tererai Trent is one of today’s most internationally recognized voices for quality education and women’s empowerment. Distinguished as Oprah Winfrey’s “All-Time Favorite Guest,” Dr. Trent is a scholar, humanitarian, motivational speaker, educator, author, and the founder of Tererai Trent International, which aims to provide quality education in rural Africa.

Rooted in humble beginnings, Dr. Trent grew up in a cattle-herding family in rural Zimbabwe. Despite facing many obstacles, she never lost sight of her dreams for an education. Dr. Trent could not have imagined that her steadfast determination, hard work and belief in her dreams would eventually earn her a prominent global platform with world leaders and international audiences where she leads the global charge in the fight for quality education and women’s rights. Dr. Trent has been a two-time keynote speaker at the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit where she used her growing voice to appeal to international businesses to invest in equal access to quality education. She is currently an adjunct professor in Monitoring & Evaluation in Global Health at Drexel University, School of Public Health.

Her new book, The Awakened Woman: Remembering & Reigniting Our Sacred Dream, published in 2017, has a foreword by Oprah Winfrey and was the Winner of a 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Her picture book, The Girl Who Buried Her Dreams in a Can, is based on her story of perseverance, and encourages children to explore their imagination and dream big. Dr. Trent has become a symbol of hope for everyone, and living proof that anything is possible. Her favorite motto is “Tinogona,” meaning, “It is achievable!”

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.

Fereshteh Forough is an advocate of Afghan women’s literacy and a true believer in women’s empowerment through education and technology.

Fereshteh Forough is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Code to Inspire, a non-profit organization committed to educating female students in Afghanistan and improving their technical literacy.

Fereshteh is from Herat, Afghanistan and was born in Iran as a refugee during the USSR invasion in Afghanistan. She finished her high school education in Iran. After the fall of the Taliban, Fereshteh moved to Herat with her family where she received her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Herat University and then a Master’s degree from Technical University of Berlin in Germany. She taught as a professor in the Computer Science Faculty of Herat University for three years.

Fereshteh was a 2013 TED speaker on digital literacy and communication without borders and a 2015 Clinton Global Initiative speaker. Her goal with Code To Inspire is to spread the message of peace and to empower women everywhere. She is an advocate of using digital currency like Bitcoin, and was the first to formally promote its use in Afghanistan.

Kori Cioca is a proud veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard. She is also a survivor of military sexual assault.

The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that 20% of active-duty female soldiers and 1% of active-duty male soldiers are sexually assaulted while serving in the U.S. military. Only 8% of reported cases are ever prosecuted, and 2% result in convictions.

In 2005, Kori was violently raped by her supervising officer. He hit her across the face, dislocating her jaw, and relegating her to years of pain, both physical and emotional. The commanding officer was never convicted, and the Department of Veterans Affairs denied Kori the medical benefits to pay for the surgery she needed for the nerve damage to her face. Kori is presently receiving nerve block injections and has spent years on a soft food diet.

Kori bravely tells her story in the acclaimed documentary film The Invisible War, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards. Focusing on the powerful stories of rape victims, The Invisible War exposes the systemic cover-up of military sex crimes, chronicling women and men’s struggles to rebuild their lives and fight for justice. It also features hard-hitting interviews with high-ranking military officials and members of Congress that reveal the perfect storm of conditions that exist for rape in the military, its long-hidden history, and what can be done to bring about much-needed change.

Kori is now speaking at military bases and events around the country and is an advocate for survivors of military sexual assault. In 2012 Newsweek magazine named her one of the world’s “150 Most Fearless Women” and she was one of fifty women to make MORE Magazine’s 3rd Annual Fierce List. In 2014, Kori received an Outstanding Hero of the Year Award from the American Red Cross.

Kori lives with her husband (also a Coast Guard veteran) and their two children.

Mónica Ramírez is a long-time advocate, organizer, and attorney fighting to eliminate gender-based violence and secure gender equity. For over two decades, she has fought for the civil and human rights of women, children, and immigrants. In 2003, Mónica created the first legal project in the United States dedicated to addressing gender discrimination against farmworker women, which she later expanded to create Esperanza: The Immigrant Women’s Legal Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2014, Mónica founded Justice for Migrant Women to provide technical assistance to lawyers, advocates, political leaders and law enforcement on addressing workplace sexual violence, as well as other issues confronting migrant women. She is also a co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas (The National Farmworker Women’s Alliance), which is the first national farmworker women’s organization in the US.

In November 2017, Mónica wrote a letter to women in the entertainment industry on behalf of Alianza that was published in TIME magazine and has been credited with helping to spark the TIME’S UP movement. In 2018, she attended the Golden Globes with Laura Dern as a part of the TIME’S UP action. Mónica is a leader in efforts to build a cross sector movement to end workplace sexual violence. She has also been recognized as a prominent voice in advancing the rights of low-paid workers, immigrants and women in the United States.

Mónica has received numerous awards and recognitions for her work, including Harvard Kennedy School’s inaugural Gender Equity Changemaker Award, the Feminist Majority’s Global Women’s Rights Award, and Forbes Mexico included her on its 2018 list of 100 Powerful Women, among other recognitions. In November 2018, she was awarded the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for Social Progress on behalf of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas for the “Dear Sisters” letter and their role in the TIME’S UP movement.