Deepak Bhargava has been executive director of the Center for Community Change (CCC) since October, 2002. The Center is a national social justice organization whose mission is to build the power and capacity of low-income people, especially people of color, to change the policies and institutions that affect their lives. The Center now focuses on strengthening the capacity of grassroots organizations, connecting them together to take on major public policy issues, developing new leaders for the sector, increasing civic participation of low-income people of color, and developing new ideas.

Prior to becoming Executive Director, Bhargava was the director of public policy at CCC and focused on building coalitions of grassroots organizations to address important public policy issues, ranging from welfare reform to public housing to transportation to immigration reform. He has been quoted widely on issues of poverty and social justice and has written on these issues for a range of publications, including The Washington Post, The Nation, and The American Prospect.

Bhargava currently serves on the boards of the Center on Law and Social Policy, the Applied Research Center, the New American Opportunity Campaign, the League of Education Voters and the Discount Foundation.

Robert L. Borosage is the president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future. The organizations were launched by 100 prominent Americans to challenge the rightward drift in US politics, and to develop the policies, message and issue campaigns to help forge an enduring majority for progressive change in America. Borosage writes widely on political, economic and national security issues for a range of publications including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, and a regular contributor to The American Prospect. He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including Fox Morning News, RadioNation, National Public Radio, C-Span and Pacifica Radio.

Rosa Brooks is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. She is currently on leave from Georgetown to serve as Special Counsel at the Open Society Institute in New York.

From 2001-2006, Brooks was an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Before that, she was a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, a consultant for the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch, a fellow at the Carr Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a board member of Amnesty International USA, and a lecturer at Yale Law School. She is a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and the Policy Committee of the National Security Network. Her government and NGO work has involved field research on issues ranging from transitional justice in Iraq, Indonesia and Kosovo to child soldiers in Uganda and Sierra Leone.

In addition to her popular writing, Brooks has written numerous scholarly articles on international law, failed states, post-conflict reconstruction and the rule of law, human rights, terrorism and the law of war. Her book, Can Might Make Rights? The Rule of Law After Military Interventions (with Jane Stromseth and David Wippman) was published in 2006.

Anna Burger is the highest-ranking woman in the U.S. labor movement as chair of the Change to Win Coalition, an innovative new alliance of major unions representing six million workers devoted to creating large scale and joint strategic organizing campaigns.

A longtime political strategist and campaign coordinator, Burger also directs Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) political and field operations, including its unprecedented 2004 election program—the largest mobilization by any single organization in the history of U.S. politics. She also played a major role in bringing about the historic 1998 merger with District 1199 New York—an affiliation that solidified SEIU as the leading union of health care workers in North America.

Throughout her career, she has worked to ensure that SEIU’s commitment to helping women, immigrants, and people of color move into leadership positions is a reality. SEIU today is the most diverse union in America, with a leadership that reflects the strength of that diversity—over half of SEIU members are represented by local unions led by women or people of color.

Burger began her career in 1972 as a Pennsylvania state caseworker and union activist in SEIU Local 668. She rose through the ranks to become its first female full-time president before moving on to run the state’s political field operations and to become SEIU’s national director of field operations. In May 2006 Burger was named one of Washingtonian Magazine’s 100 Most Powerful Women, and was honored by Women’s eNews as one of their 2006 21 Leaders for the 21st Century. She has been an active delegate to the Democratic National Convention since 1984 and has worked on the party’s platform.

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is one of the country's most prominent historians. He received his doctoral degree at Columbia under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter. He is only the second person to serve as president of the three major professional organizations: the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians.

Foner's publications have concentrated on the intersections of intellectual, political and social history, and the history of American race relations. His best-known books are: Emancipation and Its Legacy; Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877; The Story of American Freedom; and Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Portugese.

Foner has also been the co-curator, with Olivia Mahoney, of two prize-winning exhibitions on American history: A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln, which opened at the Chicago Historical Society in 1990, and America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War, which opened at the Virginia Historical Society in 1995 and traveled to several other locations.

Foner is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, and holds an honorary doctorate from Iona College. He has taught at Cambridge University and Oxford University, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Moscow State University. He serves on the editorial boards of Past and Present and The Nation, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, London Review of Books, and many other publications.

Michel Gelobter became Redefining Progress’s (RP) executive director in July 2001 and has served on RP’s board of directors since 1995. Gelobter has experience as an academic, an activist, and an administrator. Prior to joining the staff at Redefining Progress, he was a professor in the Graduate Department of Public Administration at Rutgers University. During the same period, he founded and ran CAPE, or Community/Academic Partnership for the Environment, a regional research entity spanning New Jersey, New York, and Puerto Rico. Prior to that, Gelobter started the Environmental Policy Program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

From 1990 to 1992, Gelobter was Director of Environmental Quality for the City of New York, and an Assistant Commissioner for its Department of Environmental Protection. He also served as the environmental and health issues director during David Dinkins’ successful mayoral campaign in 1989. Gelobter was a Congressional Black Caucus Fellow and served with the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee from 1988-89. Gelobter has written broadly about environmental justice, lead poisoning, global warming, sustainability, commons management, and the relationship between environmental protection and tourism in developing countries.

Gelobter was the founding chair of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council Subcommittee on Air and Water and served there for six years. He presently serves on the boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council; the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment; Ceres; the Telluride Association; Next Generation, Redefining Progress, and the Advisory Council of the Environmental Leadership Program.

Hendrik Hertzberg is the senior editor for The New Yorker, where he is the main contributor to “Comment,” the weekly essay on politics and society in “The Talk of the Town.” He has won four National Magazine Awards, most recently in 2006 for columns and commentary.

He served as an officer in the U.S. Navy from 1966 to 1969. Upon his discharge he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer for “The Talk of the Town.” In 1977 he joined the White House speechwriting staff and was Carter’s chief speechwriter for the final two years of his term.

Hertzberg was twice editor of The New Republic, from 1981 to 1985 and then from 1989 to 1992. In between this time period, he was a fellow at two institutes at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government: The Institute of Politics and The Shorenstein Institute for the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. In 1992, Hertzberg rejoined The New Yorker initially as executive editor and later senior editor and staff writer.

Hertzberg is the author of the book Politics: Observations and Arguments, 1966-2004, a collection of essays and reports providing a guide through four decades of American political debates, campaigns, and ideological clashes.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. She is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on ABC, CNN, and PBS and is the co-editor (with Robert Borosage) of Taking Back America—And Taking Down The Radical Right. She is also co-editor (with Stephen F. Cohen) of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers and editor of The Nation: 1865-1990, and the collection A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy and September 11, 2001.  Her recent book is A Dictionary of Republicanisms (An Indispensable Guide to Their Doublespeak) published in November 2005. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. 

She is a recipient of Planned Parenthood's Maggie Award for her article "Right-to-Lifers Hit Russia." The special issue she conceived and edited, "Gorbachev's Soviet Union," was awarded New York University's 1988 Olive Branch Award. Vanden Heuvel was also co-editor of Vyi i Myi, a Russian-language feminist newsletter. 

She has received awards for public service from numerous groups, including The Liberty Hill Foundation, The Correctional Association and The Association for American-Russian Women. In 2003, she received the New York Civil Liberties Union's Callaway Prize for the Defense of the Right of Privacy. She is also the recipient of the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee's 2003 "Voices of Peace" award, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s 2006 “Justice in Action” award. Vanden Heuvel is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she also serves on the boards of the Institute for Policy Studies, the Correctional Association of New York and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

Alan Jenkins is executive director of The Opportunity Agenda, a communications, research, and advocacy organization with the mission of building the national will to expand opportunity in America. Before joining The Opportunity Agenda, Jenkins was Director of Human Rights at the Ford Foundation. Previously, he served as assistant to the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he represented the United States government in constitutional and other litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court.  Prior to that, he was associate counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where he defended the rights of low-income communities suffering from exploitation and discrimination. 

His other positions have included assistant adjunct professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Carter, and coordinator of the Access to Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Jenkins serves on the Board of Governors of the New School and the Board of Trustees of the Center for Community Change and the Legal Action Center, and is a Co-Chair of the American Constitution Society’s Project on the Constitution in the Twenty-First Century. 

Jal Mehta is co-founder and co-director of New Vision: An Institute for Policy and Progress, which links a growing group of both young and established university-based scholars to Washington policymakers in service of charting the next generation of progressive public policy. Started by a group of social science doctoral students at Harvard and MIT, New Vision focuses on setting the agenda rather than reacting to it, and provides politically relevant products without compromising analytical rigor.

Mehta recently received his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University, where he is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Education. He is a co-author of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. Drawing on his dissertation research, Mehta is currently at work on a book on American education reform from the Progressive Era to the present. He has published a number of academic articles and book chapters on topics related to public policy, but also writes for general interest outlets and is a contributing blogger to the front page of Tpmcafe.

In addition to his hands-on work in connecting ideas to action through New Vision, Mehta is also part of an emerging group of scholars who are seeking to understand the relationship between the changing climate of ideas and politics and public policy. The work of this group (including a chapter by Mehta) will be collected in a forthcoming book, Ideas and Social Science.

David Moss, founder of the Tobin Project, is the John G. McLean Professor at Harvard Business School. A student of history and public policy, he is an authority on government efforts to manage risk, including public policies ranging from Social Security to bankruptcy to federal deposit insurance. Moss is the author of two books on the subject: Socializing Security and When All Else Fails, as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and case studies.

Moss earned his PhD from Yale University, where he studied under Professor James Tobin. He joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School in 1993, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy unit. Moss is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Robert F. Greenhill Award, the Editors’ Prize from the American Bankruptcy Law Journal, the Student Association Faculty Award for outstanding teaching at the Harvard Business School, and the American Risk and Insurance Association's Kulp-Wright Book Award for “the most influential text published on the economics of risk management and insurance.”

During his three decades in broadcasting, Moyers has pursued a broad spectrum of journalism. In presenting Moyers with the prestigious Gold Baton, the highest honor of the Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Award, Columbia University President Michael Sovern called him “a unique voice, still seeking new frontiers in television, daring to assume that viewing audiences are willing to think and learn.” The International Conference on Thinking, an annual gathering of scholars and researchers dedicated to improving critical and creative thinking, honored Moyers as a broadcaster “whose contributions to public awareness of the value and processes of thinking span multiple areas: helping the American public understand how we think, the influences that impact our thinking, and the joy and contributions that result from thinking effectively.” In 2005, Moyers received the PEN USA Courageous Advocacy Award for his passionate, outspoken commitment to freedom of speech and his dedication to journalistic integrity.

A survey of television critics by Television Quarterly, the official journal of The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, placed Moyers among the ten journalists who have had the most significant influence on television news. The Academy has also recognized his work with more than 30 Emmy Awards for excellence. In the first year it was awarded, he received the prestigious Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts by the American Film Institute. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has also received the Career Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association and has been honored by the Television Critics Association for outstanding career achievement. He was elected to the Television Hall of Fame in 1995 and a year later received the Charles Frankel Prize (now the National Humanities Medal) from the National Endowment for the Humanities “for outstanding contributions to American cultural life.”

Before establishing Public Affairs Television in 1986, he served as executive editor of Bill Moyers' Journal on public television, senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News, and chief correspondent for the acclaimed documentary series, CBS Reports. Two of his public television series, Creativity (1982) and A Walk Through the 20th Century (1984), were named Outstanding Informational Series by the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

With his wife and partner, Judith Davidson Moyers, who is president of Public Affairs Television, he has produced hundreds of hours of programming for public television including: Facing Evil, In Search of the Constitution, The Secret Government...The Constitution in Crisis, God and Politics, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, A World of Ideas, The Public Mind, A Gathering of Men with Robert Bly, Amazing Grace, The Songs are Free with Bernice Johnson Reagon, Project Censored, Sports for Sale, The Arab World, All Our Children, The Power of the Word, Beyond Hate, The Home Front, Spirit and Nature, Special Report: After the War, 20 Years of Listening to America, Circle of Recovery, Facing Hate with Elie Wiesel, Minimum Wages, Hate on Trial, Families First, Listening to America (an election-year series), The Great Health Care Debate, What Can We Do About Violence?, The Language of Life, The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith, Genesis, Close to Home: Moyers on Addiction, Facing the Truth, Free Speech for Sale, Fooling with Words, The Sounds of Poetry, On Our Own Terms, Trade Secrets, Earth on Edge, Kids & Chemicals, Trading Democracy, America’s First River: Moyers on the Hudson, and Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.

For three years beginning in January 2002, Public Affairs Television also produced the acclaimed weekly newsmagazine NOW with Bill Moyers. And, most recently, he hosted a seven-part interview series Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, and a three-part series investigative documentary series Moyers on America, which included the films “Capitol Crimes,” “Is God Green?” and “The Net at Risk.”

In addition to his 1971 best-selling book, Listening to America, four of Moyers’ books based on his television series have also become bestsellers. His body of work includes the titles: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, A World of Ideas l and ll, Healing and the Mind, Report from Philadelphia (celebrating the Bicentennial of the Constitution), The Secret Government, Genesis, and Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft. His most recent work is Moyers on America, a collection of speeches published in 2004.

Before entering broadcasting, Moyers was Deputy Director of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy Administration and Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1963-1967, including two years as White House press secretary (a recent survey of readers of American Journalism Review named Moyers “the best White House press secretary of all time.”) He left the White House in January 1967 to become publisher of Newsday, was for 12 years a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and now serves as president of The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Organization of American Historians.

Born in Oklahoma and raised in Texas, Moyers began his varied career as a cub reporter on the Marshall News Messenger at age 16. He is a graduate of the University of Texas, which has presented him with its Distinguished Alumnus Award, and holds the Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Iara D. Peng is the director of Young People For, a project of People For the American Way Foundation (PFAWF) that is committed to identifying, engaging and empowering the next generation of young progressive leaders and activists across the country. Before joining PFAWF, she was the executive director of the Youth Justice Funding Collaborative (YJFC), a nonprofit that supports communications strategies that contribute to real change throughout the country’s juvenile justice systems. She is the president of the board of YJFC and a board member of the League of Independent Voters.

Peng worked for two years as the vice president of Doble Research Associates, a public interest consulting firm. Peng was also vice president of Marga, Inc., a consulting firm to nonprofit organizations specializing in strategic planning, board development, fundraising and communications. Peng was a contributing author to A Global Agenda: Issues Before the 57th General Assembly of the United Nations and Education for Civic Engagement in Democracy. She has co-authored several publications including Our Nation’s Kids: Is Something Wrong, and Protecting Our Rights: What Goes on the Internet. Peng most recently managed the book production for Why Freedom Matters, with PFAWF founder Norman Lear, PFAWF board member and book editor Daniel R. Katz, and former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

John Podesta is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and visiting professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Podesta served as chief of staff to President William J. Clinton from October 1998 until January 2001, where he was responsible for directing, managing, and overseeing all policy development, daily operations, Congressional relations, and staff activities of the White House. He coordinated the work of cabinet agencies with a particular emphasis on the development of federal budget and tax policy, and served in the President’s Cabinet and as a principal on the National Security Council.

From 1997 to 1998 he served as both an assistant to the President and deputy chief of staff. Earlier, from January 1993 to 1995, he was assistant to the President, staff secretary and a senior policy adviser on government information, privacy, telecommunications security and regulatory policy.

Podesta previously held a number of positions on Capitol Hill including: counselor to Democratic Leader Senator Thomas A. Daschle; chief counsel for the Senate Agriculture Committee; chief minority counsel for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittees on Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks; Security and Terrorism; and Regulatory Reform; and counsel on the Majority Staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Stephanie Robinson is the founding president and CEO of the Jamestown Project at Yale, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to creating, articulating, promoting, and implementing new ideas for enriching American democracy. Jamestown is the only dynamic think/action tank in the country founded and operated primarily by young people of color and women. Robinson is also a senior research scholar at the Yale Law School and senior associate faculty at the Yale Center for Child Development and Social Policy.

Previously, Robinson was chief counsel and national director for public policy at the Center for Community Change (CCC), one of the nation’s leading grassroots organizational voices for traditionally disenfranchised communities. Prior to joining CCC, Robinson served as majority chief counsel for Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Robinson also worked as an associate in the litigation department at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson, L.L.P.  In 1994, Robinson spent a year in Nairobi, Kenya as a visiting attorney to the Law Society of Kenya. During this time, she served as a member of the Committee for Constitutional reform and assisted in drafting and editing Kenya’s Model Constitution.

Robinson was featured as one of the 30 Young Leaders of the Future in Ebony magazine, and was profiled in the book As I Am: Young African American Women in a Critical Age, by Julian Okwu.

Joel Rogers is a scholar/activist. He is professor of law, political science, and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; founder and director of COWS and the Commons Project; and a contributing editor of The Nation and Boston Review. Rogers’ scholarly work has focused on democratic theory, American elections and party politics, comparative labor law and social policy, and democratic politics under globalization. His books include On Democracy, The Hidden Election, Right Turn, Associations and Democracy, Metro Futures, Working Capital, The Forgotten Majority, and What Workers Want.

Rogers’ activism has focused on strengthening democracy in the U.S.—in the civil rights, peace, and labor movements and in areas as diverse as campaign finance and election law, union organizing, regional development, pension strategy, energy policy, and progressive federalism. He has founded a number of organizations other than COWS and Commons (Center for a New Democracy, New Party, Sustainable Milwaukee, Sustainable America, EARN, Progressive America, ALICE, New Cities Project, Apollo Alliance); conceived the “fusion” strategy for minor parties and litigated it up to the U.S. Supreme Court; originated the popular “high road vs. low road” frame for firm and regional competitiveness strategy; and has advised a wide range of local, state, and federal candidates and officeholders. Rogers has worked especially closely with the American labor movement. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Rogers was named by Newsweek as one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape US politics and culture in the 21st century.

Since 2002, Andrea Batista Schlesinger has led the effort to turn the Drum Major Institute, originally founded by an advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights movement, into a progressive policy institute with national impact. Under her leadership as Executive Director, DMI has released several important policy papers to national audiences including: Congress at the Midterm: Their Middle-Class Record and Principles for an Immigration Policy to Strengthen and Expand the American Middle Class. Batista Schlesinger’s achievements at DMI include launching a national program to connect college students from under-represented populations to careers in policy, producing the only progressive analysis of the immigration debate addressing the concerns of the squeezed middle-class, expanding the Marketplace of Ideas series, which highlights successful progressive policymakers from across the country, and launching a policy blog that reaches several thousand readers each day.

Batista Schlesinger has been profiled in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Latina Magazine and in "Hear Us Now," an award-winning documentary about her tenure as the student member of the New York City Board of Education. She has appeared on the Lou Dobbs Show on CNN and has been published in New York Newsday, Crain’s New York Business, The Mississippi Sun Herald, New York Daily News, Alternet.com, TomPaine.com, New York Sun, Colorlines Magazine, The Chief-Leader and City Limits. She authors a bi-monthly column for the New York Daily News and is a contributor to The Huffington Post. She was named one of “35 under 40 Rising Stars, The Next Generation of Political Leaders in New York” by City Hall Newspaper and was a recipient of the 2006 LatinaPAC’s Dolores Huerta Award for “making great strides in promoting progress in our community.”

Michael Waldman is a nationally prominent public interest lawyer, government official, teacher and writer. He became executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law in October 2005. The Brennan Center is a policy institute and advocacy group that works on democracy and justice, through research, litigation, legislative advocacy and public education.

Waldman was director of speechwriting for President Bill Clinton from 1995-1999, serving as assistant to the President. Previously, he was special assistant to the President for Policy Coordination (1993-1995). Waldman was the top administration policy aide working on campaign finance reform.

He is the author of several books, including My Fellow Americans: The Most Important Speeches of American Presidents; POTUS Speaks: Finding the Words that Defined the Clinton Presidency; and Who Robbed America? A Citizens' Guide to the Savings and Loan Scandal.

Prior to his government service, Waldman was the director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch, then the capital's largest consumer lobbying office. After leaving the White House, he was a lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government (2001-2003), teaching courses on political reform, public leadership and communications. More recently he was a litigator in private practice in New York. Waldman appears frequently on television and radio to discuss public policy, the presidency and the law.

Matthew Yglesias is a staff writer at The American Prospect. He is on leave working on a book about progressive foreign policy to be published next year by John Wiley and Sons. His eponymous weblog on American politics and culture has appeared continuously at various locations since 2002 and can currently be found at MatthewYglesias.com. He has been a commentator on radio programs around the nation and cable news programs. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Moment, The San Francisco Chronicleand other publications.