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Derrick Z. Jackson was a 2001 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary. A *Globe* columnist since 1988, he is a two-time winner and three-time finalist for commentary awards from the National Education Writers Association and a 5-time winner and 12-time finalist for political and sports commentary from the National Association of Black Journalists. He was the 2003 recipient of Columbia University's "Let's Do It Better," commentary awards and a 2004 winner for commentary from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. Jackson is also a three-time winner of the Sword of Hope commentary award from the New England Division of the American Cancer Society and a five-time winner of Unity journalism awards from Lincoln University in Missouri. Prior to *the Globe*, Jackson also won several awards at *Newsday*, including the 1985 Columbia University Meyer Berger Award for coverage of New York City and the 1979 award for feature writing from the Professional Basketball Writers Association. Jackson, born in 1955, is a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is a 1976 graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Jackson was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University in 1984. He holds honorary degrees from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Salem State College, the human rights award from Curry College.

Kristina Egan serves as the director of the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance, a new coalition between housing, community development, planning, environment, and transportation interests. Before joining the Alliance, she was the founding director of Odyssey, a statewide transportation choices coalition in California that forged an ongoing alliance between business, labor, community advocates and transit agencies promoting sustainable transportation choices through state policy reform and "on-the-ground" transit service improvements. Kristina also spent three years as an energy policy analyst for the International Institute of Energy Conservation in Thailand where her work resulted in new energy efficiency standards adopted by the Thai government and the formation of an independent international organization to harmonize energy efficiency testing procedures in the Asia Pacific region. Ms. Egan has published in the *Far Eastern Economic Review*, *World Transport Policy and Practice* and the *SAIS Review*. Ms. Egan holds a M.A. in International Economics and International Relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a B.A from Wesleyan University.

Rev. Dr. White-Hammond has been the co-pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston since 1997 and a pediatrician at the South End Community Health Center since 1981. She has a long history of involvement in community service. Rev. Dr. White-Hammond is the founder of and consultant to the church-based creative writing/mentoring ministry called "Do The Write Thing" for high-risk black adolescent females. In 2003, she became the co-convener of The Red Tent Group with Rabbi Elaine Zecher of Temple Israel, which brings together Christian women and Jewish women for small group Torah/Bible study. Rev. Dr. White-Hammond's work as a humanitarian has achieved global impact. She has worked as a medical missionary in several African countries including Botswana, Cote D'Ivoire and South Africa. Since 2001, she has made seven trips into war-torn southern Sudan where she has been involved in obtaining the freedom of 10,000 women and children who were enslaved during the two decades long civil war. In 2002 she co-founded My Sister's Keeper, a humanitarian women's group that partners with women of Sudan in their efforts toward reconciliation and reconstruction of their communities. My Sister's Keeper has developed two grinding mill projects and supports the Akon School for Girls in Gogrial County. In February 2005, Rev. Dr. White-Hammond traveled into Darfur, western Sudan to listen and learn from female victims of genocide in Internally Displaced Persons camps. She served as the National Chairperson of the Million Voices for Darfur campaign and is co-chair of the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur. She was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Boston University, a Doctorate of Medicine from Tufts Medical School and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School.

Minister Donald Muhammad is the Local Representative of the Nation of Islam in St. Louis, Missouri. As the Minister of Muhammad Mosque #28, he is responsible for a wide variety of activities both in the Mosque and across the City of St. Louis and surrounding area. Minister Donald has dedicated his life to helping the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan in the important work of the resurrection and upliftment of the Black Man and Woman in America. He is particularly gifted with delivering the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad in a manner that is easy to understand and exciting to experience in person. He is the featured speaker at Muhammad Mosques main lecture, every Sunday at 10:00 a.m. Minister Donald has been blessed to be married for more than 30 years, and is the proud father of two daughters who have recently graduated from college.

Roland S. Martin worked as a reporter for black-owned and white-owned newspapers; his voice was heard on radio news programs; he held editorial positions at a major magazine and a high-traffic black-oriented Web site; his syndicated column ran in newspapers nationwide; he was a frequent guest on radio and television talk shows of all political stripes; he ran a multimedia company of his own; and he wrote books. In 2004, Martin took on perhaps his greatest challenge: the revitalization of the *Chicago Defender*. Born around 1969 in Houston, Texas, Martin was inspired to follow a career in journalism by his father, an avid newspaper reader and fan of television news. In 1987 Martin graduated from Houston's Jack Yates High School in a magnet program devoted to communications. He went on to study journalism at Texas A&M University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1991. Martin landed a job at the Austin American-Statesman and started his journalism career at a basic level, covering county government and neighborhood news. In 1992 he covered the Republican National Convention for the paper and was sent to Louisiana to file reports from the area devastated by Hurricane Andrew.

Ernest Darkoh is the chairman and founding partner of BroadReach and former operations manager of Botswana's Treatment Program for HIV/AIDS. Ernest Darkoh has been at the forefront of what has been called the most important public health experiment on the African continent today, leading the charge to fight AIDS in the African nation of Botswana and building a nationwide health system from the ground up in the process. Born in the USA, Darkoh grew up in Kenya and Tanzania. There, pervasive poverty and the absence of effective government services made a deep impression on him. Encouraged by his parents, he returned to America as a young adult, first to triple-major in chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology, then to attend Harvard Medical School. He added a master's degree in public health followed by an MBA, after which he took a job at McKinsey & Co., one of America's leading management consulting firms. Darkoh signed on to set up Masa, Africa's first national antiretroviral (ARV) Program. Through BroadReach, Darkoh is already deeply involved in expanding public access to antiretroviral drugs in South Africa, the nation with the world's highest number of HIV-positive citizens. Darkoh is working to tap excess capacity in this private system to treat public patients too. That means devising a medically sound yet affordable way to manage the treatment of individuals far beyond the direct reach of these specialists. Working with private treatment partners like South African-based Aid for AIDS, and Netcare, and with financing from the USA's PEPFAR fund and the UN's Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Darkoh's team has set up a network of private physicians who are willing to take on public patients. They have also trained groups of non-expert activists who can go into remote communities to identify uninsured people who appear to be HIV-positive and need treatment. Once these individuals are identified, BroadReach then sends in frontline health-care workers to supply the missing link.

Larry Klein was a teaching assistant in American history at the University of Maryland and the theater supervisor of The American Film Institute at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts before beginning his career as a documentary filmmaker. Over the past two decades, Klein has produced scores of programs for commercial and cable television broadcast as well as several award-winning PBS specials including: *Lewis Mumford: Toward Human Architecture* and the critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning series *Building Big with David Macaulay*. Klein has written and produced a variety of nationally-broadcast programs for WGBH TV in Boston including *Bridges in the Building Big* series and the NOVA presentations: *Mind of a Serial Killer*, *What's Killing the Children* and the Emmy Award-winning, *Why the Towers Fell*. He has produced individual programs for two WGBH mini-series: *A Natural History of the Senses* and *A Science Odyssey*, and he has also produced and directed a series of successful PBS family specials based on highly popular books by award-winning author-illustrator, David Macaulay. One of those specials, *Roman City*, also won a national, Prime-Time Emmy Award in 1994.