Zephyr Teachout is a visiting assistant law professor at Duke University. She directed Internet organizing for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign and serves as national director of the Sunlight Foundation

Ai-jen Poo is lead organizer and founder of Domestic Workers United, where she works to win fair pay and legal recognition for domestic workers in the New York metropolitan area.

Zack Exley is an organizer and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. As an Open Society Fellow he is writing a series of articles about the evolution of the organizing model used by the Obama campaign and about efforts by community and labor groups that used many of the same principles and practices. He is also exploring ways to enable local leaders, organizers, and social service providers in Missouri to mobilize diverse constituencies that do not normally work together.

Exley is a founder of the New Organizing Institute and worked with the Obama campaign as a consultant and researcher. He was online director for the British Labor Party's 2005 campaign, director of online organizing for Kerry-Edwards 2004,  and organizing director at MoveOn.org. He served as an adviser to the Dean campaign and spent much of the 1990s working as a union organizer.

Director, Democracy and Power Fund
U.S. Programs

Bill Vandenberg is the director of the Open Society Institute Democracy and Power Fund, a social change grantmaking program housed within U.S. Programs.

Prior to joining OSI, Vandenberg lived in Denver for 17 years, where he was the executive director for the Colorado Progressive Coalition, the statewide, multiracial nonprofit that he co-founded in 1996.  Vandenberg led the coalition's work to advance civil rights, with highlights including long-time leadership in the state’s pro-affirmative action coalition, stewardship of the organization’s immigrant justice and juvenile justice system reform organizing, and lobbying successfully to pass one of the nation’s strongest anti-racial profiling laws.

He also led campaigns to raise Colorado’s minimum wage in 2006; expand grassroots support for rolling back the most onerous provisions of the “Taxpayer Bill of Rights,” the nation’s most restrictive and anti-government public investment law; and build the largest non-partisan voter mobilization drive in Colorado history, recognized by TrueMajority in 2004 as one of the nation's top-five community-based voter programs.

Vandenberg is an experienced organizer, nonprofit lobbyist, campaign strategist, media spokesperson, and multiracial coalition and organization builder and has served on boards or steering committees for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, Colorado Unity Coalition for Affirmative Action, Denver Foundation Expanding Nonprofit Inclusiveness Initiative, Rights for All People/ Derechos Para Todos, Shadow Theatre Company, and USAction.

He is a 1991 graduate of Boston College and a 2007-2008 fellow in the Rockwood Leadership Program's yearlong national fellowship for transformative leadership in the nonprofit sector.