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Robert Patrick Cooper is Senior Counsel for OneUnited Bank. He is responsible for raising capital, negotiating acquisitions and directing all legal, regulatory and external affairs for the bank. As a corporate attorney for over seventeen years, he honed his practice skills with the law firm of Hale and Dorr and acquired international merger and acquisition experience as Associate General Counsel for Battenfeld GmbH in Germany. Admitted to practice in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, Mr. Cooper holds a Bachelor's degree in economics from Yale College and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School. Mr. Cooper is a member of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association and serves as Secretary of the National Bankers Association. Mr. Cooper also serves on the steering committee for Black and White Boston Coming Together, Inc. He is a Boston Fellow with the Partnership, Inc. and a member of the NAACP and the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts.

For more than 30 years Kathleen McDermott has popularized History and Culture. As a Consulting Historian from 1986 to 1998, she authored illustrated histories of large American fashion, beauty, and consumer product companies including Max Factor, Butterick Patterns, Kinney Shoe, Timex, Buxton Wallet, Sherwin-Williams, and Price Waterhouse (Harvard Business School Press). As Fashion History Instructor from 1998 to present at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and concurrently for five years at Rhode Island School of Design (2005-2011), she has presented slideshows and lectures on 500 years of Western fashion, culture, and art history to hundreds of students. Her classes are designed to create informed and activist adults, passionate about women’s history, fashion history, and art museums. She wrote, illustrated, and published in 2010 an accessible fashion history handbook Style for All: Why Fashion, Invented by Kings, Now Belongs to All of Us. See her online resume for fashion history public lectures and museum gallery talks as well as TV, radio, and print commentary. Since 2001, Kathleen has created and sold fashion-history-inspired handmade hats and accessories for private clients and Boston Lyric Opera as donor gifts.

Meira Levinson is a normative political philosopher who writes about civic education, multiculturalism, youth empowerment, and educational ethics. In doing so, she draws upon scholarship from multiple disciplines as well as her eight years of experience teaching in the Atlanta and Boston Public Schools.Levinson has been awarded a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship to support her newest project, on "Justice in Schools." In this work, she combines philosophical analysis and school-based case studies to illuminate the complex dimensions of evaluating, achieving, and teaching justice in schools. The project is intended to give educators tools for making just decisions in their own practice, and also to push political theorists to develop theories of justice that are robust enough to address complex school-based dilemmas

Janie Victoria Ward is Associate Professor of Education and Human Services and Chair of Simmons's Africana Studies department. In addition to teaching, she works with youth counselors, secondary school educators, and other practitioners in a variety of settings. Her research focuses on adolescent development, particularly the racial identity and moral development of African American girls and boys. Ward has written and edited numerous books, chapters, and articles, and has made many media guest appearances. She is author of *The Skin We're In: Teaching our Children to be Emotionally Strong, Socially Smart and Spiritually Connected* (2000) and *Gender and Teaching*, with Francis Maher (2001). With her thesis advisor, Carol Gilligan, she co-edited *Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education*. She also edited *Souls Looking Back: Life Stories of Growing Up Black*, a compilation of autobiographical statements written by African American, Caribbean, and black Canadian college students. Ward is a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she co-directs with Wendy Luttrell, Project ASSERT (Accessing Strengths and Supporting Effective Resistance in Teaching), a five-year, school-based research study and curriculum development project designed to guide and support urban teachers around gender, race, and class dynamics that impact their work with youth. Currently Ward is the site coordinator for the Boston Girls Sports and Physical Activity Project, funded by the Women's Sports Foundation, and she is a member of the project's evaluation and research team.

Marcus Rediker was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1951, to Buford and Faye Rediker, the first of their two sons. He comes from a working class family, with roots in the mines and factories of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia; he grew up in Nashville and Richmond. Rediker attended Vanderbilt University, dropped out of school and worked in a factory for three years, and graduated with a B.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976. He later went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning an M.A. and Ph.D. in history. Rediker taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994, lived in Moscow for a year (1984-5), and is currently Professor and Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has, over the years, been active in a variety of social justice and peace movements, most recently in the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty. Rediker have written (or co-written) five books: *Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea* (1987), *Who Built America?* (1989), volume one; *The Many-Headed Hydra* (2000), *Villains of All Nations* (2004) and *The Slave Ship: A Human History* (2007). He has lectured throughout the United States and abroad, in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan, Moscow, Sydney, and Tokyo; as well as had his writings translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish; and to hold fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Andrew P. Mellon Foundation.

Marsha Green is OMI's president and founder. Dr. Green holds a doctorate from Temple University in animal behavior and physiological psychology. She is a licensed psychologist and professor at Albright College in Reading Pennsylvania. Here she served as chair of the Psychology Department until 1993 and founded the Psychobiology and Environmental Psychobiology programs. Since 1986, Dr. Green has been conducting research on the impact of human behavior on humpback whales and spinner dolphins in Hawaii. She has gained international recognition for her ground breaking studies linking human compassion with scientific field research to benefit whales, dolphins and their environment.

Norman Lear has enjoyed a long career in television and film, and as a political and social activist and philanthropist. Mr. Lear began his television writing career in 1950 when he and his partner, Ed Simmons, were signed to write for "The Ford Star Revue" starring Jack Haley. After only four shows, they were hired away by Jerry Lewis to write for the Martin and Lewis Colgate Comedy Hour, which they continued to write until 1953. Mr. Lear then began writing on his own for comedy shows including T*he Martha Raye Show, The George Gobel Show, and The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show.*In 1958, Mr. Lear teamed with director Bud Yorkin to form Tandem Productions. Together they produced several feature film; with Mr. Lear taking on roles as executive producer, writer, and director. Concerned about the growing influence of radical religious evangelists, Mr. Lear decided to leave television in 1980 and formed People For the American Way, a non-profit organization designed to speak out for Bill of Rights guarantees and to monitor violations of constitutional freedoms. People For remains an influential and effective voice for freedom. In 1982, he produced a two-hour television special "I Love Liberty," with a cast of stars and an audience filling the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Mr. Lear's business career continued in 1984 when he and his business partners created T.A.T. Communications, later known as Embassy Communications, which was sold in 1985. Mr. Lear then created and is currently chairman of Act III Communications, a multimedia holding company with interests in the recording, motion picture, broadcasting, publishing, and licensing industries, including Concord Music Group and Village Roadshow Pictures Group. In addition to People for the American Way, Mr. Lear has founded other nonprofit organizations, including the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication (2000-present), a multidisciplinary research and public policy center dedicated to exploring the convergence of entertainment, commerce and society; the Business Enterprise Trust (1989-2000) to spotlight exemplary social innovations in American business; and with his wife, Lyn, co-founded the Environmental Media Association (1989-present), to mobilize the entertainment industry to become more environmentally responsible. In 1999, President Clinton bestowed the National Medal of Arts on Mr. Lear, noting that Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it. He has the distinction of being among the first seven television pioneers inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame (1984). In 2001, Lyn and Norman Lear created the Declaration of Independence Road Trip, a four-year educational initiative and national multimedia tour of one of the surviving original copies of the Declaration, which they own. As part of the project, Mr. Lear launched Declare Yourself, a nonpartisan youth voter initiative that registered well over 1.2 million new young voters in the 2004 and 2006 elections.

Barney Frank is the United States House Representative for Massachusetts's 4th congressional district since 1981 and a member of the Democratic Party. In 1982 he won his first full term and has been re-elected ever since by wide margins. In 1987 he became the second openly gay member of the House of Representatives, and has become one of the most prominent openly gay politicians in the United States. In 2007 Frank became the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee when the Democratic Party won a majority in the House of Representatives. The committee oversees the housing and banking industries.

Robert Carlyle Byrd is the senior United States Senator from West Virginia, and a member and former Senate Leader of the Democratic Party. Byrd has been a Senator since January 3, 1959 and is the longest-serving member in the Senate's history. He is also the oldest current member of the United States Congress, and is the first politician in US history to serve as a US senator uninterrupted for half a century. Byrd is President pro tempore of the United States Senate, a position that puts him third in the line of presidential succession, behind Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He also held this post previously from 1989 to 1995, briefly in January 2001, and from June 2001 to January 2003. In this role, Sen. Byrd signs bills passed by Congress before they are sent to the president to be signed into law or vetoed. Byrd holds a wide variation of both liberal and conservative political views. A lifelong Democrat, Byrd did not leave the party as its views shifted from social conservatism to social liberalism, as his views on race changed over time as well. He has also held many leadership positions: Senate Conference Secretary, Majority Whip and twice Majority Leader. He is the only former party leader currently in the Senate.