Jordan Coleman is a youth filmmaker, scholar, and athlete. After learning that less than half of African American boys graduate from high school, 13-year-old Jordan, a Nickelodeon voiceover actor, decided to spread his "school is cool" message to young people nationwide. His film, Say it Loud, promotes the importance of education for African American boys and includes interviews with Kobe Bryant, Ludacris, Master P, Rev. Al Sharpton, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and others.

When Coleman is not in school, at work, or playing sports, he travels around the country speaking about the benefits of getting a solid education.  He spoke at an Education Equality Rally during the presidential inauguration and he's a 2009 finalist for the DoSomething Award. Coleman, who plays football, basketball, and baseball, will be a freshman at Hackensack High School in September.

Chicago's Jessica Disu, aka FM Supreme, is a hip hop emcee and lyricist who has shared the stage with David Banner, MC Lyte, Kool Herc, KRS-One, Saul Williams, and others.

Disu spoke at the 2006 National Hip Hop Convention, where she discussed issues including misogyny in hip hop, gentrification, and education. She has also used spoken word as a platform for her messages, leading to the title Poetry Slam Champion twice of Chicago's youth slam competition, Louder Than a Bomb.

As FM Supreme, she has produced and released her music projects: The Diary of a Mad Black Woman Mixtape (2005), Forever Maroon EP (2006), Basik Gumbo LP (2007), and The Beautiful Grind Mixtape (2008), and orchestrated the release parties. In August 2009, she will embark on her first European tour.

FM Supreme has been featured on Chicago Public Radio, National Public Radio, and the Chicago Tribune.

Erik Eckholm is a 24-year veteran of the New York Times. In the last few years he has been a domestic correspondent, traveling around the United States covering poverty and related issues such as prison re-entry and foster care.

He graduated from Occidental College in 1971 and has an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies. Before starting at the New York Times in 1985, he held a variety of reporting and editing jobs.  As his career progressed, he began researching and writing on international poverty and environmental issues. From 1998 to 2003, he was the Beijing bureau chief for the Times. 

Loren Harris is the founder of Thinking Man Consulting, which provides consulting services to improve the effectiveness and impact of philanthropic and social interventions. Harris recently completed his tenure with the Ford Foundation as the program officer responsible the Ford Foundation's youth funding in the United States.

Prior to joining Ford, Harris served as associate program officer for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan.  During his five years with Mott, Harris designed and implemented the Fathers at Work Initiative, funded with the aim of reducing poverty through enabling people facing multiple barriers to obtain well-paying, unsubsidized employment.

Prior to joining the Mott Foundation Loren managed a STRIVE replication site in New York City that specialized in connecting young people to employment.

Harris holds a BA in U.S. history from Queens College in New York and a master's in public administration from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer, anti-sexist activist, and lecturer. Since 1993, he has been using his craft, his voice, and his writings to broaden and deepen how people think about gender, race, sex, violence, music, and visual media.

The former Northeastern University football quarterback was a founding member of the Mentors in Violence Prevention program, the leading college-based rape and domestic violence prevention initiative for college and professional athletics. Hurt also served as an associate director of the first gender violence prevention program in the United States Marine Corps.           

Hurt began his film career with I AM A MAN:  Black Masculinity in America. His most popular documentary to date is Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes. It premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and was later broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens. Since then, it has screened at over 100 film festivals worldwide.

Hurt's writing has been published in several anthologies, including books edited by Michael Eric Dyson and  Kevin Powell. He has also appeared or been heard on NPR, CNN, Access Hollywood, MTV, BET, ABC News World Tonight, and The Michael Baisden Show, among other outlets.

Robert Pérez leads the branding and messaging practice in Fenton's San Francisco office and is also a member of the firm's environmental practice. He has more than 14 years of experience in nonprofit and political communications and also has a strong background in grassroots organizing and legislative advocacy. He currently serves as a senior consultant to One Nation, a funding collaborative focused on providing a rich and accurate understanding of the American Muslim community.

Before joining Fenton, Pérez was the communications director for the California League of Conservation Voters, where he worked to help pass the nation's first state law to curb global warming pollution from automobiles. Earlier, he was a lead communications strategist in helping pass a law protecting students in California public schools from discrimination and harassment based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Rashad Robinson is senior director of media programs for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD.

Curtis Stephen is a New York-based journalist whose work regularly appears in Newsday and City Limits. Stephen was a media fellow with the Open Society Institute, where he wrote a series of magazine features on wrongful convictions. Among his reports, Stephen chronicled the case of Colin Warner, who was wrongfully incarcerated for 21 years in New York for a murder he did not commit, in a cover story for City Limits.
 
A 1999 graduate of Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus, Stephen was the recipient of the Theodore Kruglak Award in International Reporting, when he worked in India with CNN and The Times of India. Prior to his work in print journalism, Stephen worked in network television, where he was mentored by the late journalists Peter Jennings and Ed Bradley.

Stephen has won awards from the New York Association of Black Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists.

Deja K. Taylor has shared the stage with Common, Will.I.am, the Roots, and others. She was featured in Russell Simmon's Brave New Voices for her poem Ode to the Female MC, which aired on HBO.

After competing in Young Chicago Authors "Louder Than a Bomb" Poetry Slam, she competed in the 2008 Brave New Voices Festival. Since then she's made her transition from participant to Coach/Mentor by coaching the Chicago Allstars for the 2009 Brave New Voices Festival. Her one-woman show, Free Deja Taylor, is currently in development.

Sharon D. Toomer is director of communications and membership for the Association of Black Foundation Executives. She is also the founder and managing editor of BlackandBrownNews.com, a digital source of news and community forums. 

As a journalist, Toomer has worked for cable and network news organizations, including CNN and NBC News. She has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Huffington Post.  She has also appeared for commentary and perspective on National Public Radio, Air America, NBC's Today Show, Al Jazeera English Network, MTV and various local radio programs and television outlets.

Toomer graduated from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Rev. Alfonso Wyatt, vice president and project director of the Jericho Faith-Based Technical Assistance Project, has worked with three generations of young people as an educator, counselor, program developer, administrator, mentor and advocate. He has created programs that respond to the needs of young people in foster care, group homes, public schools, community-based organizations, detention facilities, and the broader faith community. 

Wyatt is an ordained minister on the staff of The Greater Allen Cathedral of New York. He attended Howard University, Columbia's Teacher's College, The Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy, Columbia's Institute for Not-for-Profit Management, and New York Theological Seminary. He has served as an advisor to government, foundations, religious institutions, universities, youth serving organizations and nonprofits from around the country. Currently he serves as chair of the Twenty-First Century Foundation.

Manager, Campaign for Black Male Achievement
U.S. Programs

Shawn Dove joined the Open Society Institute in May 2008 as manager of the Campaign for Black Male Achievement. He has more than two decades of leadership experience in youth development, education, and community building.

Dove served as one of the founding directors of New York City's Beacon School movement in the early 1990s while working with the Harlem Children's Zone. As creative communities director for the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts he led a national initiative that partnered community schools of the arts and public housing communities in 20 U.S. cities.

As New York vice president for Mentor/National Mentoring Partnership he initiated a strategic response to the lack of African American and Latino male mentors for New York City's boys by creating a public awareness and recruitment initiative called The Male Mentoring Project.

In 2006, Dove founded Proud Poppa, a publication for African American fathers and is a co-founder of Harlem Men Stand Up, an empowerment project that holds quarterly summits in Harlem. Dove was a Charles H. Revson Fellow at Columbia University in 1993 and received a BA in English from Wesleyan University.