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.

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.

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.

Sameena Nazir is the founding president of Potohar Organization for Development Advocacy (PODA), a women’s rights NGO working for the promotion and protection of human rights in rural areas of Pakistan since 2007. As an international development professional, she brings over 25 years of experience in designing and implementing rights-based programs on women’s empowerment, sustainable development, leadership skills and community resilience. She specializes in linking public policy with grassroots issues to design strategy solutions.

Sameena’s work contributes to the realization of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Her current projects include advocacy for the “Right to Legal Identity” for rural women and minorities in Pakistan (SDG 16) and the “Right to Freedom of Movement” for Afghan refugees transiting through Pakistan after August 2021. Her in-depth understanding of gender issues and sustainable development processes has roots in her own life as a community activist that motivated her to start a community school and an organic agriculture farm in her native village in Chakwal, Pakistan as a teaching model for food security, community seed bank for rural women and small farmers.

Sameena is a recipient of the Benazir Bhutto Human Rights Defenders Award (2010) and InterAction Humanitarian Award (2009). She serves as Syndicate Member of University of Chakwal in Pakistan and as Pakistan Section president for Geneva based Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF). Since 1998, Sameena has led on-the-ground humanitarian and legal literacy projects for women and children in Afghanistan, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, Pakistan and Yemen. She has directed a regional comparative study on women’s economic, social and political rights in 18 countries in the Middle East and North Africa published in 2005 and available here. Sameena has worked at several international organizations including Networks of Change, USA (2016-2018), National Endowment for Democracy (2017), Freedom House (2003-2006) and International Human Rights Law Group in Washington DC (1998-2003). She started her career as a journalist in 1990 with Islamabad based daily The Muslim. Her landmark reporting on a custodial rape case (Bani police station 1992) led to the first ever rape conviction of a police officer in Rawalpindi.

Sameena is a master trainer on Gender and Social Cohesion. She has moderated meetings at all levels and made presentations at national and international forums including at the United Nations in New York, Geneva and at the World Economic Forum and universities across the globe. She completed a Master’s in International Agriculture & Rural Development from Cornell University. She also has an English and Law degree from the Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan.

Samina Ali is an award-winning author, activist and cultural commentator. Her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), was the winner of France’s prestigious Prix Premier Roman Etranger Award and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction. The book, about a young woman’s arranged marriage and political awakening, was partly inspired by Samina’s real-life experience growing up bi-culturally in Hyderabad, India and St. Paul, Minnesota.

At the heart of Samina’s work is her belief in personal narrative as a vital force for achieving women’s individual and political freedom – and in the power of new and traditional media as platforms for social transformation. As the curator of the groundbreaking, critically acclaimed virtual exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, Samina illuminated the multi-dimensional realities of women’s lives to challenge fears and misconceptions of Muslims and Islam within and beyond Muslim communities.

Weaving her personal story with a passionate appeal for women’s equality and justice, Samina’s current project is an account of her near-death experience delivering her firstborn and an unsparing look at gender bias and the crisis of preventable maternal deaths in one of the most advanced healthcare systems in the world. In this memoir-in-progress, Samina describes how she defied the odds by boldly charting her own path to recovery, from relearning to walk alongside her son’s first steps, to retraining her mind — word by word — to write what would become her debut novel.

Samina has spoken extensively at a wide range of universities, from Harvard and Yale Universities to community colleges, as well as at other institutions worldwide, including as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department, a Master Teacher for the Mama Gena School of Womanly Arts and a featured presenter at the Nobel Women’s Initiative 2017 International Conference. The recipient of fiction awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, she has been featured in The Economist, The Guardian, Vogue, National Public Radio (NPR) and elsewhere. A regular contributor to The Huffington Post and Daily Beast, she has written for The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications.

Never one to say no to a challenge, Samina defied the odds — again — and gave birth to a second child. She now lives happily with her husband, son and daughter in California.

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.

Joyful Clemantine is a social entrepreneur, connector, an internationally renowned speaker, and a New York Times Bestselling Author. Her memoir THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS debuted with Crown Publishing in April 2018, and since has been published in seven languages. Joyful is currently the founder of 10Houses, a private network dedicated to cultivating entrepreneurship and equity, and a co-founder and connector of THINGY, an online platform whose mission is to capture, organize, and share creative ways of being to foster belonging.

Joyful lives to connect communities and transform individualistic perspectives into balanced structures of exchange and interaction. She catalyzes development personally, locally, and globally by centering the mind, body and spirit as a site for personal and communal growth.

Joyful provides practical, emotional and mental strategies to rewire habits and make decisions that serve equity in self, the home, the community and the workplace.

Informed by her personal experiences growing up in nine different countries, mostly in war torn regions across central and east Africa, Joyful emboldens communities to bring awareness to divisive labels and ideology embedded in oppressive identities based on class, race, and gender. She invites everyone to bring awareness and action back to self: Who are we without words? Who are we without labels?

Joyful received her BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University with a focus in African and Women’s Studies in 2014.

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!”

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.