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Alise Alousi has over 25 years of experience in non-profit program development and training. Her poetry and essays have appeared in several anthologies including, We are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Alousi is a two-time recipient of Knight Arts Chal-lenge Detroit awards and is the Interim Executive Director of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project.

Tomás Alvarez III is a nationally recognized figure in the field of adolescent mental health known for his trailblazing work using Hip Hop Therapy to address trauma and other mental health disparities among boys and young men of color. As a clinically trained social worker he founded Beats Rhymes and Life, Inc., the world’s first nonprofit organization dedicated to the provision of Hip Hop Therapy, which today has served over 1,000 youth in six U.S. cities. His efforts using Hip Hop Therapy in Oakland was the fo-cus of an award-winning documentary film entitled A Lovely Day (2012). As a published author and public speaker, Tomás enjoys sharing his vision for a new mental health paradigm that centers youth in their own healing process and empowers them to become change makers in their community and beyond. Most recently Tomás was featured as a 2015 CNN Hero.

Paula Smith Arrigoni is Youth Speaks’ Chief Operating Officer, overseeing financial management, proj-ect planning, and operations. She first began working with Youth Speaks while a loan officer at Non-profit Finance Fund (NFF) over a decade ago. She previously served as lead consultant and Associate Director for NFF’s Northern California Program, directing large initiatives funded by The California Well-ness Foundation, Bank of America and Blue Shield of California Foundation. In addition to her positions with NFF, Paula has served as an independent consultant to small and mid-size nonprofits in financial and strategic areas, as Grants Manager for Women’s Community Clinic, and as a Financial and Programs Analyst for the US Department of the Treasury, Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. Paula is a zen warrior with a balance sheet and enjoys coaching nonprofit professionals about business planning and management issues. She currently serves on the Board of Camp Reel Stories, a camp for girls who want to learn how to make movies in the new digital media era.

Patrick Camangian, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco and has been a High School English teacher since 1999. Camangian honors the tradition of teacher-research, applying critical pedagogies in urban schools. His areas of expertise include: critical pedagogy, critical literacy, culturally empowering education, and socially transformative teacher devel-opment. Currently, he is turning to models that are challenging the colonial condition and research in the health sciences to inform his findings on complex traumas and urban education.

Nínive Calegari is a veteran teacher with almost ten years’ experience in the classroom, including experience in both charter schools and large comprehensive high schools. She is the Co-Founder and former Executive Director of 826 Valencia, and served as the CEO of 826 National, a literacy nonprofit that galvanizes volunteers in eight cities to support teachers and help students improve their writing

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skills. Nínive is a co-author (along with Dave Eggers) of The New York Times bestselling book Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers and co-producer of Amer-ican Teacher, an award-winning film that documents the struggles excellent teachers make to ends meet. Currently she is the CEO for The Teacher Salary Project, an organization dedicated to addressing the urgent need for a complete cultural shift in the way our society values and supports teachers. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education in Teaching and Curriculum from the Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Nínive is represented by the Premiere Agency.

Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. His first book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, (www.cantstopwonstop.com) garnered many honors, including the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. He edited the book, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. (www.totalchaoshiphop.com) His new book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, (whowebe.net) was released on St. Martin’s Press in October 2014. He is cur-rently at work on two other book projects: Youth (Picador Big Ideas/Small Books series), and a biogra-phy of Bruce Lee (Little, Brown). Jeff has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and a winner of the North Star News Prize. He was named by The Utne Reader as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World”. With H. Samy Alim, he was the 2014 winner of the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award at Stanford University. Jeff co-founded CultureStr/ke (www.culturestrike.net) and ColorLines. (www.colorlines.com) He has written for The Nation, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, Foreign Policy, N+1, Mother Jones, Salon, Slate, Buzzfeed, and Medium, among many others. Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai’i, he is a graduate of ‘Iolani School, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Los Angeles. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.

Shannon David is the Development Director at McSweeney’s, a nonprofit literary publisher based in San Francisco. Last year, she lead a Kickstarter campaign for McSweeney’s that raised $257,000 and became one of the most funded publishing projects ever on the platform. Prior to joining McSweeney’s, Shannon worked in nonprofit capacity building at VolunteerMatch, helping nonprofits effectively engage volunteers. She is a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, where she teaches a journalism workshop for kids and serves in a leadership capacity on the Volunteer Engagement & Support Team. Shannon holds a BA in English from Chapman University and enjoys combining her love of literature and writing with her passion for community involvement and youth development. She lives in Oakland.

Carsten Fichte is the Senior Director of Program Management at Salesforce Industries. With over 20 years of global experience in the IT industry, which includes roles as program manager, product man-ager, project manager and solution architect, Carsten is passionate about helping to empower global nonprofit companies. He has been working with Youth Speaks to help customize their Salesforce experi-ence since 2015.

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Paul S. Flores, a poet, performance artist, playwright, and spoken word artist, explores the intersection of urban culture, Hip-Hop, and transnational identity rooted in his growing up in both Chula Vista, CA and Tijuana, Mexico. His theater works include the play PLACAS: The Most Dangerous Tattoo (2012), a bilingual tale of fathers and sons, transformation and redemption; the solo performance You’re Gonna Cry (2011); and the two-hander REPRESENTA! (2007). He is a 2015 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award winner, 2014 KQED Hispanic Heritage Local Hero, and 2011 San Francisco Weekly Best Politically Active Hip-Hop Performance Artist. Support for his work also includes the 2016 Gerbode, Hewlett Foundation Theater Commission Award, National Performance Network Forth Fund Award (2014) and NPN Creation Fund (2012), an NEA Theater grant (2013), and a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Fund for the Arts Individual Artist Award (2009). Paul is director of the Latino Men and Boys Program at The Unity Council in Oakland and a leader in the movement to improve outcomes for Boys and Men or Color. As a co-founder of Youth Speaks, he has introduced spoken word to hundreds of thousands of youth all over the country, and has developed a national platform for young people through the Brave New Voices: National Teen Poetry Slam, seen on HBO. He teaches Hip-Hop Theatre and Spoken Word at University of San Francisco.

George Galvis is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ). Born and raised in the Bay Area, he has promoted restorative justice and healing to address the violence plaguing local communities for more than two decades. Galvis draws upon his experience and indigenous roots to help young people, particularly those involved in the criminal justice system, become future community leaders. To that end, he has been a leader in statewide advocacy to transform punitive school discipline and juvenile justice policies that disparately impact youth of color. He developed traditional rites of passage programs as healthy alternatives to gang violence using culturally and spiritually based approaches to supporting and strengthening individuals, families and communities. As a board member of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, Galvis helped create All of Us or None, a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated activists fighting for the rights of those formerly and currently incarcerated and their families. Fundamentally opposed to gang injunctions as both ineffective and destabilizing, Galvis was a leader of the Stop the Injunctions Coalition, which successfully prevented Oakland’s 2010 gang injunction from being fully implemented. George has been honored by the Bay Area News Group and Comcast as a “Hometown Hero” and is a 2013 recipient of the California Peace Prize from The California Wellness Foundation. However, his greatest life achievement are his two beautiful daughters and wombyn warriors-in-the-making, Mikaela and Ayacaxtli, who inspire him to be a better man each and every day!

Nanya-Akuki Goodrich is a NYC based Arts-in-Education Administrator ~ Performing Artist ~ Creative Writer ~ Teaching Artist. A graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy’s Musical The-ater program she strives to “edutain” audiences by giving voice to the voiceless and long forgotten. Each portrayal is a desire to connect deeply with humanity, to uplift, provoke thought and inspire. She co-founded Re-write(s) of Passage Ensemble Theatre Company which creates original multidisciplinary

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performance works by and for women of African descent, gives voice to Black women’s stories in ways that honor performance traditions of the African Diaspora while catalyzing a dialogue about the social, cultural, and political realities of Black women globally. While touring with NYC’s Interborough Reper-tory Theater’s Theatre for Young Audiences production of The Roots of Rap: Poetry, bringing to life the works of significant African-American poets such as Hughes, Giovanni, and Dunbar, Nanya-Akuki be-came keenly aware of the vast disparities in the quality of public education and was inspired to use her artistry to help bridge the gap. Thereby, she embarked on a second career as a Teaching Artist, teaching theater and poetry for various organizations in the Tri-State area including The DreamYard Project’s Global Writes social justice-focused Slam Poetry program. This ultimately blossomed into Nanya-Akuki’s current role as a Schools Program Coordinator at DreamYard.

Matthew Cuban Hernandez is the Coach of the Get Lit Players and the Los Angeles Brave New Voices Slam team in Los Angeles. He is a 3-time Southern Fried Poetry slam champion. From 2007-11, Matthew founded and coached the Jacksonville youth poetry slam team, “Shattered Thought.” Through “S.T,” he facilitated writing and performance workshops in schools and juvenile detention centers all over the country, and in 2009 was the youngest coach to ever take a team to the BNV Finals stage. In the sum-mer of 2012, Matthew accepted a residency with the poetry organization, Slam Richmond (Richmond, VA) and coached their youth team to a 3rd place finish at the BNV Festival in San Francisco. Matthew recently finished a writing, teaching and performance residency with Leeds Young Authors in Leeds, England, during which he created the Voices of a New Generation program, leading workshops in over five schools in Leeds, as well as coaching their BNV youth team in August 2013. In 2014, he coached the Get Lit youth poetry team representing LA to a 3rd place finish at BNV. This led to showcases at “The Hollywood Bowl with John Legend” and “The Queen Latifah Show,” amounting to over 9 million views on YouTube and over 50 million views on Facebook for the team’s poem “Somewhere in America”.

Ken Ikeda is a serial entrepreneur and strategist obsessed with building capacity, assets and relevance with those whom are mission driven. In 2001, he launched a youth media program from within Oakland Unified’s McClymonds High School that grew to serve 46 middle and high school programs across the Bay Area, partner with universities for college credits, technical certifications and creative pathways for continued education and professional development. He is a founder of the youth record label, Bay Unity Music Project, and has extensive policy, research and data management expertise through work with the NYC Department of Homeless Services, NYU’s Institute for Education and Social Policy and Stanford University’s John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. Most recently, he was co-architect and originator of the public media news sharing platform, Channelx.org and the music video streaming collective, VuHaus.org. He completed his undergraduate studies at Columbia University and his graduate studies in Education Anthropology at Stanford University.

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David Inocencio a native of San Francisco, graduated from the social work program at San Francisco State University. He worked in the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office Juvenile Division and later helped launch the Detention Diversion Advocacy Project, a nationally-recognized program of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. In 1995, as the education director of Youth Outlook Magazine, a pub-lication produced by Pacific News Service, he continued to work with detained youth and encouraged them to share their stories. David’s commitment to these young people led to him to develop an entire program to expand on the workshops in San Francisco and promote an ongoing dialogue with the community, through the national award-winning program, The Beat Within (TBW), which was founded in 1996. TBW published its first magazine following the murder of rapper, Tupac Shakur. From that point in 1996, TBW has been conducting weekly workshops and printing a weekly publication. Today, the program is not only in San Francisco Juvenile Justice Center (the mother-ship), but in 11 juvenile halls in California, and the work has been replicated in Arizona, New Mexico, Hawaii, Oregon, Florida and Wash-ington DC. David received the 1999 Society of Professional Journalism Award for Distinguished Service. In 2006 David was recipient of the Jefferson Award, a prestigious national recognition system honoring community and public volunteerism in America.

Michelle Yunhi Lee (Mush) is a poet, arts integration specialist and educator living in Oakland, Califor-nia. Mush received her BA in Media Studies from UC Berkeley and her MA in Education from San Francis-co State University. She is the recipient of New York Hip Hop Theater Festival’s Future Aesthetic Artist Grant and a Compasspoint Next Generation Leaders of Color Fellow. Her poetry has been featured in festivals across the country, she has taught at dozens of universities and juvenile correctional cen-ters nationwide, and she recently gave the keynote address at an annual convening for createCA, a statewide arts education coalition dedicated to advancing models of education across California public schools. She currently serves east Oakland public school teachers and administrators as a Professional Coach with Alameda County Office of Education’s Integrated Learning Program, and as a Senior Teach-ing Artist at Youth Speaks, where she also served as Arts-in-Education Program Director. She is also a proud board member of 826 Valencia.

Nicole Lee is the Executive Director of Urban Peace Movement, an organization that builds youth lead-ership in Oakland, CA to transform the culture and social conditions that fuel the cycles of violence and mass incarceration in low-income communities of color. She is a fourth-generation, lifelong Oakland resident and has spent the past 18 years in youth development, labor and community organizing, and policy advocacy work on economic justice and juvenile justice issues. Nicole authored a concept paper entitled “Healing Centered Youth Organizing: A Framework for Youth Leadership in the 21st Century” which can be downloaded at www.urbanpeacemovement.org.

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Brandie Macdonald began work at First Peoples Fund in 2015, where she developed and now manages the youth-track programming, Dances with Words, centrally grounded on the Pine Ridge Indian Reser-vation. Brandie also co-manages FPF’s National Native Artists Professional Development Training and technical assistance programs. Brandie came to First Peoples Fund from The Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School, where she worked as their Museum Educator building the centers’ Education De-partment. She also worked for The Charlotte Museum of History as the Manager of Education, and as an ongoing mentor and community builder within the nonprofit Native Explorers. She received the Smithso-nian Affiliate Internship at the National Museum of the American Indian, the Diversity Fellowship for the American Association of Museums, became a Leadership Fellow for Intermedia Arts, and was named one of Charlotte, North Carolina’s most Prominent Community Leaders under the age of 40 by the Charlotte Building Initiative. Brandie sits on the board of the Rapid City Arts Council and is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation with ancestral ties to the Choctaw Nation, both located in Oklahoma.

Kenneth Morrison is an author, artist, organizer and educator. As a pro-black, same-gender loving activist, Kenneth has been working to create sustainable change in urban communities across the East Coast for the past 10 years. He is the Founder/CEO of Dew More Baltimore, and currently serves as the Director of Programming for the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore, a Professor of Cultur-al Literacy and Critical Thinking at Maryland Institute College of Art, and as Artistic Director of Sons of Baldwin Spoken Word Collective.

Esther Pearl is the founder and Executive Director of Camp Reel Stories. She received her Bachelor’s in Visual Arts from U.C.S.D and her M.B.A. in Sustainable Management from The Presidio Graduate School. She has spent many, MANY years in Production Management in the Entertainment Industry. The major-ity of her career was spent at Pixar Animation Studios where her feature film credits include Academy Award winning films The Incredibles and Wall-e, as well as Monsters, Inc. Her other credits include; Titanic, Starship Troopers, Armageddon and What Dreams May Come. She was also a founding board member and the former President of the Board of Bay Area Girls Rock Camp (BAGRC). Esther believes in the power of great storytelling to create social change. She lives in Oakland with her husband and two children.

Angela Johnson Peters has dedicated her professional and personal career to the support of cultural institutions, artists, community organizations and other agents of social change and worked with more than 360 organizations on countless projects and helped to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars through grants and individual donors. Angela founded ALJ Consulting, a non-profit/public sector man-agement consulting firm, in 1999. Accomplished in the areas of facilitation, strategic planning, develop-ment, special events planning, community outreach, and coaching, Angela’s current projects and clients include the Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI), the Hate Crime and Violence Prevention Partnership Los Angeles (HVPPLA) and Regina Klenjoski Dance Company. Angela is a trained facilitator and has completed programs with the Grassroots Institute of Fundraising Training (GIFT), the National Communi-ty Development Institute’s Community Builders Leadership Program, the Rockwood Leadership Institute

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and is a Wilder Foundation Shannon Leadership Fellow. Angela was born and raised in Los Angeles, spent most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay area and returned to Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband Santosh, their cat Raj, and is step-mother to three college-aged children.

Robin Reagler joined Writers in the Schools as a writer in 1990, and she has worked in every facet of the organization, from teaching to program development to administration. Currently as Executive Di-rector, Robin not only leads WITS in its Houston endeavors; she also heads the WITS Alliance, a national consortium of literary arts education groups. Robin earned an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her poems and essays have been published widely in books and journals such as Ploughshares and HOW(ever), and her chapbook Dear Red Airplane was published in 2011. Robin is Board Vice President for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

Yosi Sergant has worked in community organizing, communications, marketing and business develop-ment for over 15 years - integrating art, music, and culture into his work whenever possible. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Sergant engaged artists from across the globe in a vast viral movement in support of then candidate Senator Barack Obama, the most prominent of which is the now ubiquitous “HOPE” campaign he managed with Shepard Fairey. Following the election, Sergant served in the White House Office of Public Engagement before accepting an appointment to the National Endowment of the Arts as the Director of Communications. In 2009, Sergant launched TaskForce a Los Angeles based independent agency that builds energy, capacity and community for the most influential institutions, not-for-profits, brands and people taking on the most pressing challenges facing our communities, our state, our nation and our world. At the core of his work is the understanding that creative culture shapes public opinion, community sentiment and thus policy.

Lynne Twist, co-founder of Pachamama Alliance and author of “The Soul of Money,” is a social activist, fundraiser, author and consultant, who has dedicated herself to alleviating poverty and hunger, and supporting social justice and environmental sustainability. Most recently, in December of 2015, Lynne Twist received the Goi Peace Award, which honors individuals and organizations in various fields that have made outstanding contributions toward the realization of a peaceful and harmonious world for humanity and all life on earth.

José Vadi is an award-winning writer and film producer based in Oakland, California. A two-time nation-al slam poetry champion and recipient of the Shenson Performing Arts Award, José was the inaugural director of the Off/Page Project, a collaboration between Youth Speaks and The Center for Investigative Reporting, that incorporated investigative journalism and poet’s original work into short films, docu-mentaries and live performances. His work has been featured by the PBS NewsHour, Mashable and The Daily Beast while his writing has appeared in Colorlines, The Huffington Post, Gigantic Mag, JUPITER 88, Specter Magazine, 3AM Magazine and Catapult.