Mike Gecan is a senior organizer for the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, and a member of the IAF National Staff Executive Team. He currently oversees IAF organizations in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey and in the Chicago, Lake, and DuPage counties in Illinois. Previously, he was the Lead Organizer for East Brooklyn Churches. A long-time organizer, Gecan began his career in Chicago with the Northeast Austin Organization before he moved on to the Citizens Action Program, The Organization of the Northwest, and BUILD in Baltimore. 

In 1983, he co-founded the Nehemiah Homes Efforts in New York and Philadelphia. The Nehemiah houses have revitalized blighted neighborhoods and allowed working-class families to buy homes with an affordable downpayment of 20-30% of their income; the houses have seen extraordinarily low foreclosure rates. To date, 2,900 Nehemiah houses have been built in Brooklyn, 1,000 in the South Bronx, 900 in Baltimore, 135 in Philadelphia, and 147 in Washington DC.

Gecan is the author of two books, Seen Through Our Eyes and Going Public, and has published various articles in the Village Voice, Boston Review, New York Times, Washington Post, and other publications. He graduated from Yale College.

Mark Winston Griffith is the senior fellow for economic justice at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank. Previously, he served as the co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, a policy and community resource organization that promotes economic justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Griffith acquired much of his grassroots organizing and frontline advocacy experience as the founding executive director of the Central Brooklyn Partnership, a neighborhood-based organization that built the capacity of local people to exert economic power, and as the founding President of the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union, which at the time was the country’s largest black-owned, community-based financial cooperative.

Griffith’s articles and public policy analysis have appeared in dozens of publications including the New York Times, The Nation, New York Daily News, Village Voice, Source, Spin, and Mother Jones magazines. He is a board member of Free Speech TV based in Denver Colorado; City Futures, which includes City Limits magazine and the Center for an Urban Future; and the Brooklyn Cooperative Federal Credit Union.

Griffith is a graduate of Brown University (BA, 1985) and the University of Ibadan in Nigeria (MA, 1988). He was a 1993-1994 Revson Fellow at Columbia University, a 1999 Union Square winner, a 2001-2002 winner of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership fellowship, and a 2003-2005 Open Society Institute Community Fellow.