Miguel A. Cardona is the 12th U.S. Secretary of Education. Secretary Cardona has dedicated his career to serving students, educators, and families as an elementary school teacher, school principal, district administrator, and, most recently, as commissioner of education for the state of Connecticut. Secretary Cardona’s focus on equity and excellence for all learners has driven his work at all levels of the education sector. Secretary Cardona has led the federal government’s effort to support states in reopening America’s public schools for in-person learning amid the recovery from the pandemic, moving from only 46 percent of schools open when President Biden took office to nearly 100 percent of schools open today. Under Secretary Cardona’s leadership, the U.S. Department of Education also has distributed historic funding through the American Rescue Plan to support K-12 schools and colleges and has granted more than $15 billion in student loan forgiveness. Secretary Cardona earned a bachelor’s degree at Central Connecticut State University as well as a master’s degree and doctorate degree from the University of Connecticut. Secretary Cardona and his wife Marissa are the proud parents of two children who attend public school.

Chris Evans is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors for both big budget and independent features. Chris is internationally renowned for his role of Captain America in the Disney/ Marvel Avengers franchise. Evans recently launched his new civics engagement project called “A Starting Point,” alongside partners Mark Kassen and Joe Kiani. The project launched as a website with the goal being to create informed, responsible and empathetic citizens who are empowered to further their understanding of the world of politics. Through ASP, they aim to demystify politics by providing answers to common questions directly from the people who create the policies that affect them.

As vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, Chelsea Clinton works alongside the Foundation’s leadership and partners to improve lives and inspire emerging leaders across the United States and around the world. This includes the Foundation’s early child initiative Too Small to Fail, which supports families with the resources they need to promote early brain and language development; and the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U), a global program that empowers student leaders to turn their ideas into action. A longtime public health advocate, Chelsea also serves on the boards of the Clinton Health Access Initiative and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and uses her platform to increase awareness around issues such as vaccine hesitancy, childhood obesity, and health equity.

Diego Perez is a meditator and #1 New York Times bestselling author who is widely known on social media through his pen name, Yung Pueblo. He has sold over 1 million books worldwide that have been translated into over 25 languages. Online he has an audience of over 3.8 million people. His writing focuses on the power of self-healing, creating healthy relationships, and the wisdom that comes when we truly work on knowing ourselves. Diego's latest book, The Way Forward, debuted as an instant New York Times Bestseller and Sunday Times bestseller.

Jacqueline Woodson (jacquelinewoodson.com) is the author of more than thirty books for young people and adults including Another Brooklyn, Red At The Bone and The Day You Begin. She received a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2023 E. B. White Award, a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Her books for young readers include Coretta Scott King Award and NAACP Image Award winner Before the Ever After, New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me, Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster, and Each Kindness. In 2018, she founded BALDWIN FOR THE ARTS (https://baldwinforthearts.org), a residency serving writers, composers, interdisciplinary, and visual artists of the Global Majority. Her most recent novel, Remember Us, is set in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

Christopher Jackson is a Tony Award nominated actor as well as a Grammy and Emmy Award winning songwriter/composer best known for starring as George Washington in the critically acclaimed, award-winning musical, Hamilton, on Broadway and Disney+. According to Variety, Disney+ saw a 72% surge in U.S. downloads during the premiere weekend. Christopher was most recently seen starring in the hit CBS drama "Bull” which came to an end after 6 seasons. He can now be seen in season 2 of the HBO Max reboot of “Sex and the City”, “And Just Like That…” Jackson won an Emmy Award for his song with Will.I.Am, “What I Am”. In 2010 he released his first solo album titled, IN THE NAME OF LOVE with Yellow Sound Lab Records and is currently working on his 2nd album. Christopher has performed sold out concerts all over the U.S. including Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Jackson is married to Veronica Jackson and have 2 children; one who is autistic.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, co-founder and executive director of AAPF and bicoastal professor of law at both UCLA and Columbia, is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. Crenshaw’s work has been foundational in critical race theory and in intersectionality, both terms she coined. Crenshaw serves on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science and on the board of the Sundance Institute. Crenshaw has received achievement awards from Planned Parenthood, the National ERA Coalition, and the Outstanding Scholar Award from The Fellows of the American Bar Association (ABF). She was voted one of the ten most important thinkers in the world by Prospect Magazine. She received the 2021 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award by the Women's Section of the Association of American Law Schools. Most recently, Professor Crenshaw was named the recipient of the 2021 AALS Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and to the Legal Profession. She is a senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute, and an inductee to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Political and Social Science.

Geoffrey Canada is the president of Harlem Children’s Zone​ (HCZ), a world-renowned education and poverty-fighting organization based in New York City, and founder of William Julius Wilson Institute (WJWI)​. An innovator in the field of education, author, and leading advocate for children, Canada has made it his life’s mission to help young people from under-resourced communities succeed through education. To realize his vision, Mr. Canada launched HCZ, a comprehensive, cradle-to-career network of programs that The New York Times called “one of the most ambitious social-policy experiments of our time.” Starting as a one-block pilot project in the 1990s, HCZ today serves more than 34,000 students and families living in a 97-block area of Central Harlem in New York City. Under Mr. Canada’s leadership, HCZ became a national model of place-based innovation for organizations across the country and the world. In 2010, President Barack Obama created the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative to replicate the HCZ model in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. Mr. Canada was subsequently named one of the world’s most influential people by Time in 2011 and as one of the 50 greatest leaders by Fortune in 2014. Mr. Canada and HCZ have also received significant national media attention. They were featured in the award-winning documentary Waiting for Superman, as well as on 60 Minutes, The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, and MSNBC, and in articles in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Associated Press. In 2008, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough, a book chronicling the work of Mr. Canada and HCZ. In 2013, Mr. Canada gave a TED Talk, an appearance that has garnered nearly 500,000 views on YouTube (to view more videos featuring Mr. Canada and HCZ, visit HCZ’s YouTube Channel). Mr. Canada has also influenced a new generation of education leaders and reformers through his speeches and writings. Most notably, Mr. Canada authored two critically acclaimed books: Fist Stick Knife Gun (Beacon Press), in which he recounts his experience growing up in a single-parent household in one of the most devastated communities in the United States, the South Bronx; and Reaching Up for Manhood (Beacon Press), in which he draws on his years of work with inner-city youth and his own turbulent boyhood to offer a moving and revelatory look at the little-understood emotional lives of boys. Additionally, he has published essays in Stanford Social Innovation Review, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and The Chronicle of Philanthropy, among others. He also is a regular speaker at conferences focused on place-based work and education reform. After 30 years, Mr. Canada stepped down in 2014 as Chief Executive Officer of HCZ (the current CEO, Kwame Owusu-Kesse, assumed the role in 2020). He continues to serve as president of the HCZ and HCZ Promise Academy Boards. In 2020, Mr. Canada came out of retirement to launch WJWI, a national resource for place-based, people-focused solutions that open pathways to social and economic mobility.

Priya Parker is a facilitator, strategic advisor, acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, and executive producer and host of the New York Times podcast, Together Apart. Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has spent 20 years guiding leaders and groups through complicated conversations about community, identity, and vision at moments of transition. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and two children.