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Biosketches of Speakers, Moderators, and Planning Committee Members¹

Ella Auchincloss, M.T.S., is The Rippel Foundation’s director of enterprise innovation and a key contributor to Rippel’s ReThink Health initiative’s Hospital Systems in Transition and Portfolio Design for Healthier Regions projects. Auchincloss has spearheaded many resident engagement efforts for Rippel’s ReThink Health initiative, coaching a wide variety of partner organizations and teams in change leadership and developing Community Activation for System Stewardship, in which she and her team advised the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service’s Quality Improvement Organization Leadership, Organizing in Action program. She also directed a research project exploring tax credits’ potential as a source of sustainable financing for population health.

Before joining Rippel, Auchincloss founded the Leadership Development Initiative, a faith-based teaching and coaching program for resident outreach. In 2015, she was awarded the Barbara C. Harris Award for Social Justice by the Episcopal City Mission in Boston, Massachusetts, for her founding of the Leadership Development Initiative. She is also a fellow of the Leading Change Network at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Prior to her work in resident engagement, Auchincloss worked in the financial services sector. Auchincloss received an M.T.S. from the Harvard Divinity School and a B.S. from Babson College.

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¹ * denotes planning committee member; † denotes roundtable member.

LaTosha Brown is an organizer, philanthropic consultant, activist, singer/songwriter, and co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, a powerbuilding, Southern-based civic engagement organization, and the Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute. She is the principal owner of TruthSpeaks Consulting, LLC, a philanthropy advisory consulting firm in Atlanta, Georgia, and the project director of Grantmakers for Southern Progress. She also works to eliminate human suffering through her vision of the Southern Black Girls & Women’s Consortium. As a catalyst for change and social strategist, her national and global efforts have been known to organize, inspire, and catapult people into action—enabling them to build power and wealth for themselves and their community. She is most known for her philanthropic efforts as an effective fundraiser and resource person having raised millions of dollars to support social justice causes and created projects that bring more investments into marginalized communities. Brown’s global thoughts toward people, ideas, and money have opened doors for her to maximize her voice in the United States and more than 30 countries abroad. She is currently leading several international efforts to provide training, support, and funding for women-led institutions based in Guyana, Senegal, Belize, and Tanzania.

Brown works to shift the narrative of African Americans through media, campaigns, and nonprofit projects. Featured on CNN, HBO, MSNBC, and Fox, among others, she also proudly serves as the founder of Saving OurSelves Coalition, a community-led disaster relief organization that helped hundreds of families in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Currently, she serves on the board of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, the Southern Documentary Fund, the U.S. Human Rights Network, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center. Brown has received a number of awards, including the 2010 White House Champion of Change Award, the 2006 Spirit of Democracy Award, the Louis Burnham Award for Human Rights, and the Liberty Bell Award. Brown received a B.A. in political science and government from Auburn University at Montgomery in Alabama.

Michelle Carrillo is the director of programs and community solutions at the Humboldt Area Foundation (HAF), a community foundation working to promote and encourage generosity, leadership, and inclusion in a four-county rural region in northern California and the southern Oregon coast. In Carrillo’s new role, she is part of a team dedicated to tackling long-term systemic change to foster a thriving, just, healthy, and equitable region. Prior to this new leadership role, Carrillo served as the director for Del Norte and Tribal Land’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative, a 10-year, place-based health initiative funded by The California Endowment and housed at the Wild Rivers Community Foundation (WRCF), an

affiliate of HAF. In 2019, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recognized Del Norte County as one of the 12 finalists for the nation’s Culture of Health Prize.

Carrillo joined HAF/WRCF in 2015 after graduating from Southern Oregon University and working for 5 years at the Oregon State University School of Public Health through the Extension Service. The first grant Carrillo ever wrote was to HAF/WRCF, which enabled her to co-found an award winning 4-H Surfing and Outdoor Stewardship Program at the age of 22. Carrillo’s role in large-scale regional health equity initiatives has allowed her to work alongside young leaders, community members, sovereign nations, and system leaders tackling intractable systemic problems, applying empathy research, social innovation, and entrepreneurial thinking in the field. She has supported a variety of community-led projects using the human-centered design and systems transformation for equity approach to address a broad set of issues ranging from children’s literacy to the health of the nonprofit sector.

Teresa Cutts, Ph.D., is the research assistant professor at the Wake Forest School of Medicine’s (WFSOM’s) Public Health Sciences Division, where she serves as a researcher, program developer, and more for the FaithHealth Division. She also holds appointments in the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity. Since 2017, she has served as the principal investigator (PI) for the Empowerment Project’s homeless outreach and case management at WFSOM. Prior to her time at WFSOM, Cutts served as the director of research for innovation at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare’s Interfaith Health Program Center of Excellence in Faith and Health. She worked explicitly in the area of evaluation and program development for Methodist’s Memphis Model Congregational Health Network, Religious Health Assets mapping, and Integrated Health for congregations, community, and clergy. She is the academic liaison to the Stakeholder Health learning collaborative. Cutts has also served as the PI or the co-PI on dozens of grants, including those funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Komen Foundation, and the Avon Foundation, working often on projects to improve health equity and the lives of the underserved and most vulnerable.

From 2001 to 2005, Cutts was the director of program development at the Church Health Center, a comprehensive, faith-based health program for the underserved. She held a joint clinical appointment in preventive medicine and psychiatry at The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Memphis School of Public Health, and still holds an appointment at the Memphis Theological Seminary. She is a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town School of Family Medicine and Public Health

and has co-authored or published numerous book chapters and articles. She was the co-editor and helped co-author many chapters in the book Stakeholder Health: Insights from New Systems of Health. Cutts has also worked as a staff psychologist at Baptist Memorial Hospital, as a private practitioner at the Memphis Center for Women and Families, and she served as a consultant to the National Institutes of Health gastroparesis multisite consortium. She completed her Ph.D. and M.A. at the University of Mississippi.

Rashida Ferdinand, M.F.A., is the founder and the executive director of Sankofa. A fifth-generation homeowner and visual artist in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana, Ferdinand comes from a family of community health practitioners and social justice leaders. She founded Sankofa with a team of community stakeholders in 2008 to create a local environment that promotes positive health and environmental sustainability. Sankofa’s food access programs focus on building a healthy food system in vulnerable communities of New Orleans. These efforts are designed to ensure resilience, community empowerment, and equity. Ferdinand completed her B.F.A. at Howard University and her M.F.A. at Syracuse University. She is a graduate of the fourth cohort of Goldman Sach’s 10,000 Small Businesses program and currently represents Sankofa on the Xavier University LaCats New Orleans Community Advisory Board, the Louisiana State University and the Southern University Ag Center Orleans Parish Advisory Leadership Council, the Mid South Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center on Health Disparities, the Greater New Orleans Water Collaborative, and the New Orleans Food Policy Advisory Committee.

Julie Fernandes, J.D., is an associate director for institutional accountability and individual liberty at the Rockefeller Family Fund in New York. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Family Fund, she served as the Open Society Foundation’s director for voting rights and democracy. She also worked as a deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division in the Obama administration and as the special assistant for domestic policy to President Clinton. In addition, Fernandes served as the senior counsel and the senior policy analyst at the Leadership Conference for Civil & Human Rights, one of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations. She has testified before Congress on voting rights issues and has authored several research reports and magazine pieces primarily in the areas of voting rights and criminal justice reform. Regarding her education, Fernandes received both her J.D. and B.A. from the University of Chicago and clerked for the Honorable Diane P. Wood at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Ethan Frey is a program officer of the Ford Foundation’s Cities and States team. In this role, he works in collaboration with programs across the foundation to develop and implement tailored grantmaking strategies in six states—Texas, Florida, Louisiana, New York, Michigan, and Minnesota—where the foundation will focus its work to build the capacity of people-centered ecosystems seeking long-term, statewide change over the next 5 years. Frey joined the Ford Foundation in 2013 as a program associate on the Civic Engagement and Government team. During his tenure, he has worked primarily on the foundation’s organizing, voting rights, census, and voter engagement programs. Previously, Frey served as a regional field director in Columbus, Ohio, for the 2012 presidential campaign and before that as a field organizer in Toledo during the 2008 general election campaign. He also worked to unionize low-wage workers in Miami, Florida, as an organizer for the international trade union Unite Here, which represents food service, hotel, and gaming employees. At Project Renewal, a nonprofit social service provider, he worked to protect public benefits for low-income New Yorkers as a non-attorney civil legal advocate. Frey is a 2010 graduate of Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.

Roxanne Carrillo Garza, M.S.W., is the senior director of Healthy Richmond, a 10-year initiative funded by The California Endowment. She currently works with resident leaders, community-based organizations, base builders, and systems leaders to develop collective policy advocacy strategies to improve health, safety, school and neighborhood environments, and economic development opportunities in California. Garza works for RCF Connects (formerly the Richmond Community Foundation), which partners with the community to inspire leadership and to share the vision for work in five areas: community growth, health, restoring neighborhoods, education, and public safety. Prior to joining Healthy Richmond in 2013, Garza was a public health program manager for Contra Costa Health Services where she worked on environmental justice, alcohol policy, neighborhood improvements, and violence prevention efforts across Contra Costa County. Garza was the allocations and planning director for the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, Service Planning Area 1, and the program manager for El Nido Family Services, a social service nonprofit agency providing counseling and family support services to disadvantaged communities in Los Angeles County. Garza received her bachelor’s degree in political science from California State University, Northridge, and her M.S.W. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gary Gunderson, D.Min., D.Div., M.Div.,*† oversees spiritual care services for patients, families, and medical center staff at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. In his position, Gunderson supervises six departments: CareNet Counseling, Chaplaincy and Clinical Ministries, FaithHealth Education, Community Engagement, the Center for Congregational Health, and FaithHealthNC. He also nurtures the relationship with more than 4,300 Baptist congregations throughout North Carolina and other large networks of patients’ faith groups. A recognized expert in congregations and health, Gunderson has previously served as the senior vice president of the Faith and Health Division of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis, Tennessee. In his 7 years there, he developed a new model of congregational health that became widely known as the Memphis Model. Gunderson became involved in public health through his work with former President Jimmy Carter in Atlanta when he directed the Interfaith Health Program at the Carter Center for a decade. The Interfaith Health Program moved from the Carter Center to the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, where Gunderson became a research assistant professor in international health. He also served as a visiting professor in family medicine and community health at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Gunderson has worked extensively with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He serves as the secretary for Stakeholder Health, a group of 39 health systems committed to more effective engagement with the poor in their communities. He brought the Leading Causes of Life Initiative to Wake Forest Baptist, an international and interdisciplinary group of fellows working to build an intellectual foundation beyond the purely medical paradigm. He was the lead author for a 2015 paper based on this work and published by the National Academy of Medicine, The Health of Complex Human Populations. In addition to his role in faith and health ministries, Gunderson holds faculty appointments at the Wake Forest School of Divinity and in public health sciences. A Wake Forest University alumnus, Gunderson holds an M.Div. from Emory University in Atlanta, a D.Min. from the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, and an honorary D.Div. from the Chicago Theological Seminary.

Hahrie Han, Ph.D., is the inaugural director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute, a professor of political science, and the faculty director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Han specializes in the study of civic and political participation, collective action, and organizing. She focuses particularly on the role that civic associations play in mobilizing participation in politics and building power for social and political change. Prior to her position at the institute, she served as

the Anton Vonk Professor of Political Science and Environmental Politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 2005 to 2015, she was an associate professor of political science at Wellesley College and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Harvard University from 2009 to 2011.

Han’s work on participation, movement building, civic associations, primary elections, and congressional polarization has been published in outlets including the American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Perspectives on Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and elsewhere. Her work was awarded the 2013 Outstanding Academic Publication on Membership Organizations Award by the Institute for Nonprofit Research, Education, and Engagement. Han has also been involved in numerous efforts to make academic work relevant to the world of practice, including participating in the Social Science Research Council Anxieties of Democracy Participation Working Group; co-chairing the Research Council of the PICO National Network, serving on the advisory board of organizations like research4impact, the Climate Advocacy Lab, the Citizens Climate Lobby, and the DEMOS Integrated Race and Class Narrative Project; serving as the co-chair of the Civic Engagement Working Group at the Scholars Strategy Network; co-founding and co-directing the Project on Public Leadership and Action at Wellesley College, and participating on the steering committee of the Gettysburg Project. Through her research, she partners with a wide range of civic and political organizations in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. She also acted as the co-convenor of a Policy Advisory Committee for the 2008 Obama campaign and served as the chair of the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission agency review team on the Obama-Biden transition team. She received her Ph.D. in American politics from Stanford University and her B.A. in American history and literature from Harvard University in 1997.

Richard Healey, Ph.D., M.P.H., M.A., is the senior advisor to the Grassroots Policy Project (GPP), which he founded in 1994. GPP is focused on long-term strategies for transformative change, in particular on power, ideology, and movement infrastructure. He is also the chair of the board of the Commonwealth Foundation. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Healey was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements. From 1970 to 1982, he helped found and lead the New American Movement, a socialist-feminist organization that merged into the Democratic Socialists of America. Healey also became involved in community environmental health organizing. During the 1980s he was involved in disarmament and anti-intervention activities. He was the director of the Coalition for a New

Foreign and Military Policy and Nuclear Times magazine. He also served as the director of the Institute for Policy Studies. Healey received a B.A. in mathematics from Reed College, an M.A. and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an M.P.H. from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Jonathan Heller, Ph.D., recently joined the Population Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin as a senior health equity fellow. He is the co-founder and until 2020 was the co-director of Human Impact Partners (HIP), a national nonprofit organization focused on bringing the power of public health to campaigns and social movements for a just society. Under Heller’s leadership for 14 years, HIP became a national public health leader focused on changing policies related to the social determinants of health by supporting community-organizing groups and campaigns with research and advocacy; conducting leadership development, capacity building, and political education with public health agencies; organizing the public health community; and supporting narrative change initiatives. HIP is credited for advancing a focus on equity and community power building within public health. Heller is also a co-founder and the past president of the Society of Practitioners of Health Impact Assessment and serves on the board of Community Change. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and he served in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea.

Mimi Ho is the executive director at Movement Strategy Center (MSC) in Oakland, California. At MSC, Ho has supported the alliance-building work of core partners including the Climate Justice Alliance, the HEAL (Health Environment, Agriculture Labor) Food Alliance, and the United Workers Congress. As part of MSC’s Leadership Team, Ho helped launch the Transitions Initiative, MSC’s multimovement initiative to bring movement leaders and emerging leaders together to build multisystems social change grounded in relationships and personal transformation.

Ho has served as a trainer and a consultant with racial justice and immigrant rights groups on community and electoral organizing strategy, grassroots leadership development, organizational development, and fundraising. Her clients have included the Western States Center and the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco. Ho was the statewide field director and the co-director of Californians for Justice (CFJ) during electoral fights against several racist ballot initiatives in the 1990s—attacks on affirmative action, bilingual education, youth, labor, and gay marriage. During the No on 209 (anti-affirmative action) campaign Ho oversaw fieldwork in 13 field offices and 1,350 precincts across California. She led CFJ in introducing public jobs legislation in the California legislature. Ho

was a coordinator for national health care campaign work at the Northwest Federation of Community Organizations (now the Alliance for a Just Society and People’s Action), and provided organizing, legislative, and communications training; campaign strategy consultation; and in-the-field capacity building for statewide affiliates in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Ho later worked with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) where she directed campaigns to build green, affordable housing in Oakland, to organize electronic workers in China, and to keep Chevron from expanding to dirtier crude in Richmond, California. She helped grow APEN’s cutting-edge Asian Pacific American electoral operation and supported APEN’s shift into statewide climate policy and organizing work.

Tony Iton, M.D., J.D., M.P.H., is the senior vice president for Healthy Communities at The California Endowment. In 2009, he began to oversee the organization’s 10-year, multimillion-dollar statewide commitment to advance policies and forge partnerships to build healthy communities and a healthy California. He is also a lecturer of health policy and management at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, School of Public Health, and serves on the board of directors of the Public Health Institute, the Public Health Trust, the Prevention Institute and Jobs for the Future. In the past, Iton has served as both the director and the county health officer for the Alameda County Public Health Department. In that role, he oversaw the creation of an innovative public health practice designed to eliminate health disparities by tackling the root causes of poor health that limit the quality of life and life span in many of California’s low-income communities. He has worked as an HIV disability rights attorney at the Berkeley Community Law Center, a health care policy analyst with the Consumers Union West Coast Regional Office, and as a physician and an advocate for the homeless at the San Francisco Public Health Department. Iton’s primary focus includes the health of disadvantaged populations and the contributions of race, class, wealth, education, geography, and employment to health status. In February 2010, he was recognized by the California Legislative Black Caucus with the Black History Month Legends Award; on the floor of the California State Assembly he was presented with a resolution memorializing his life’s work and achievements. Iton completed his B.S. at McGill University in Montreal, his J.D. and M.P.H. at UC Berkely, and his M.D. at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Taj James is the co-founder, former executive director, and current board member of Movement Strategy Center (MSC) in Oakland, California. As part of MSC’s transitions incubator, James recently cofounded Full

Spectrum Capital Partners, housed in the Innovation Center of MSC. Since 2001, James and MSC have served as a consistent source of social change innovation and leadership. At MSC, he helped launch and support new alliances such as Strong Families and the Climate Justice Alignment. James has also played a key role in building new funding collaboratives and strategies to increase investment in grassroots organizing and alliance building. These initiatives include the California Fund for Youth Organizing, the Move to End Violence Initiative, the California Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, and Building Healthy Communities.

Before launching MSC, James served as the director of youth policy and development at Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, where he organized youth and community members around issues facing children, youth, and families. James’s network and leadership building experience began in his role as the Western regional field organizer for the Black Student Leadership Network, a project of the Children’s Defense Fund. He served on the steering committee for the PAC to defeat Proposition 21, a California ballot initiative that would spend billions to incarcerate thousands of youth with adults. James has provided board leadership for many nonprofits and philanthropic institutions such the Praxis Project, Youth United for Community Action, the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing, and the California Fund for Youth Organizing. A graduate of Stanford University, he was a recipient of a Next Generation Leadership fellowship from The Rockefeller Foundation.

Carmen Llanes Pulido is the executive director of Go Austin/Vamos Austin and a second-generation community organizer working with neighborhoods and organizations in Austin’s Eastern Crescent for the past 15 years. After receiving an interdisciplinary B.A. at the University of Chicago in environmental studies with a focus on the North American Free Trade Agreement and its effect on Mexican communities and international food systems, she returned to Austin to work at home as an environmental justice researcher and organizer for People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources in East Austin. She later ran a program at the nonprofit organization Marathon Kids called the Wellness Team Initiative, which engaged parents and teachers at 18 elementary schools in Austin’s Eastern Crescent to increase fitness and nutrition opportunities in their communities. Llanes Pulido cares deeply about community relationships and intergenerational organizing and participates in public health, antiracist, and antidisplacement networks in Central Texas and across the country. She chaired the City of Austin’s Hispanic/Latino Quality of Life Commission until July 2019 when she joined the city’s Planning Commission during a once-in-a-generation Land Development Code rewrite, and is an inaugural member of Austin’s first Independent Citizens Redistricting

Commission, which created single-member city council districts in 2014. Llanes Pulido was also part of the inaugural Community Strategy Team at the Department of Population Health at The University of Texas Dell Medical School, and is a 2019–2020 Fulcrum Fellow with the Center for Community Investment at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Tia Martinez, J.D., M.P.P., is the chief executive officer of ForwardChange and an independent consultant doing work on dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline and transforming life chances for boys and men of color. She has more than 25 years of experience creating social change in low-income communities and communities of color in the United States. Over the decades her work has spanned education reform, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the war on drugs, homelessness, affordable housing, disconnected youth, and immigration. Prior to consulting, she was the chief equity officer at the Stupski Foundation where she designed a research and development effort focused on applying knowledge from psychology and neuroscience to help low-income students and students of color own and drive their learning and increase academic achievement. Martinez came to the foundation from the Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the acting director of education, leading a policy unit focused on issues related to education reform, teacher effectiveness, and racial justice. Before joining the Warren Institute, she served as the strategic consultant to the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, leading its strategic planning process and supporting rollout and implementation of the new strategy across 12 regional offices. Prior to working with the department, Martinez was a senior manager with the Bridgespan Group where she led engagements with large, national foundations and major civil rights groups. She has also been a senior fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, a policy analyst for the Corporation for Supportive Housing and the San Francisco Mayor’s HIV Health Services Planning Council, and a street outreach worker. Martinez has B.A. in history from Harvard University, an M.P.P. from the University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Bobby Milstein, Ph.D., M.P.H.,† directs The Rippel Foundation’s work on system strategy, is a member of Rippel’s strategy and management team, and is a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. Milstein is a principal contributor to the ReThink Health initiative’s Portfolio Design for Healthier Regions and Amplifying Stewardship Together projects. He also leads a suite of nationwide influence activities and coordinates ongoing development of the ReThink Health Dynamics Model, the Well-Being Portfolio Design

Calculator, and other simulation tools that let leaders play out the consequences of their scenarios for change. In 2018, Milstein and four coauthors wrote the official brief that defines “health and well-being” as the central focus for the Healthy People 2030 Framework for the United States. Before joining Rippel, Milstein spent 20 years planning and evaluating system-oriented initiatives at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where he was the principal architect of CDC’s framework for program evaluation. He received CDC’s Honor Award for Excellence in Innovation, the Applications Award from the System Dynamics Society, and Article of the Year awards for papers published in Health Affairs and Health Promotion Practice. Milstein was once a documentary filmmaker whose work was used by PBS to spotlight challenges of racism on college campuses. He also contributed storylines for The West Wing on how to get beyond zero-sum thinking when setting health priorities. Milstein received his B.A. from the University of Michigan, his M.P.H. from Emory University, and his Ph.D. at Union Institute and University.

Laura Parajón, M.D., M.P.H., is the executive director of the Office of Community Health and an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico (UNM). She is the co-founder of the AMOS Health and Hope, a nonprofit organization that works with community health workers (CHWs) in remote areas of Nicaragua to improve health equity through health systems integration. As a family physician and a public health professional, Parajón is part of a team of CHWs, health professionals, and educators that uses community-based participatory research, a community empowerment approach, to work alongside communities, reducing child mortality up to 80 percent in remote rural areas of Nicaragua. Parajón received her M.P.H. from the UNM School of Public Health, her M.D. from the UNM School of Medicine, and her B.A. from Brown University.

Christine Petit, Ph.D., is an active leader in the Long Beach community and is the founding executive director of Long Beach Forward, whose purpose is to create a healthy Long Beach with low-income communities of color by building community knowledge, leadership, and power. She is also a co-founder of Long Beach Time Exchange—a time-banking community based on the premise that everyone has something to contribute to society. Petit serves on the Memorial Hospital Community Benefits Oversight Board and spent 2 years as the chair of the City of Long Beach’s Board of Health and Human Services during her term on the board. With nearly 20 years of impact in nonprofits and community and labor organizing, Petit is an organizational founder and leader; a consultant

to nonprofits, philanthropy, and government; and a certified life and leadership coach. She is also an advocate for children and families and is trained in trauma-informed nonviolent parenting, supporting children and families in the child welfare system, and mental health first aid. Petit earned her Ph.D. in sociology with emphasis in race and class inequality and social change. She taught sociology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and was awarded Most Inspirational Professor by the CSULB Alumni Association in 2014.

Ai-jen Poo is the co-founder and the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), a nonprofit organization working to bring quality work, dignity, and fairness to the growing number of workers who care and clean in homes, the majority of whom are immigrants and women of color. In 12 short years, with the help of more than 70 local affiliate organizations and chapters and more than 200,000 members, NDWA passed a Domestic Worker Bills of Rights in 9 states and the city of Seattle, and brought more than 2 million home care workers under minimum wage protections. In 2011, Poo launched Caring Across Generations to unite American families in a campaign to achieve bold solutions to the nation’s crumbling care infrastructure. The campaign has catalyzed groundbreaking policy change in states, including the nation’s first family caregiver benefit in Hawaii, and the first long-term care social insurance fund in Washington state. Poo is also a leading voice in the women’s movement. In 2019, Poo co-founded SuperMajority, a new home for women’s activism, training and mobilizing a multiracial, intergenerational community who will fight for gender equity together. She serves as a senior advisor to Care in Action, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to fighting for a civic voice for millions of women of color, particularly domestic workers in the United States.

Poo has been recognized among Fortune’s 50 World’s Greatest Leaders and TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, and she has been the recipient of countless awards. She has made television appearances on Nightline, MSNBC, and Morning Joe, and her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Marie Claire, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and cnn.com among others. She has also been an influential voice in the #MeToo movement and attended the 2018 Golden Globe Awards with Meryl Streep as part of the launch of #TimesUp. Poo served as a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation–sponsored Partnership for Mobility from Poverty, and currently serves as a trustee of the Ford Foundation and a member of the Democratic National Committee. She has a B.A. from Columbia University and honorary doctorates from Smith College, the New School, and the City University of New York.

Lourdes Rodríguez, P.H., M.P.H.,*† is the senior program officer of St. David’s Foundation. Prior to joining the foundation in 2020, Rodríguez served as an associate professor and the director of community-driven initiatives at the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin. Rodríguez also worked as a program officer at the New York State Health Foundation, and from 2004 to 2012, she co-directed the Urban-ism and the Built Environment track in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. As a public health practitioner, and in both academic and philanthropic roles, she collaborates, develops, and evaluates initiatives to improve health with people most affected by health inequities. Rodríguez has a P.H. from Columbia University, an M.P.H. from the University of Connecticut, and a B.S. in industrial biotechnology from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She currently holds an appointment as an adjunct faculty with the UTHealth School of Public Health Austin Regional Campus.

Arvind Singhal, Ph.D., M.A.,* is the Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor of Communication and the director of the Social Justice Initiative at The University of Texas at El Paso. He is also appointed, since 2010, as the William J. Clinton Distinguished Fellow at the Clinton School of Public Service, Little Rock, Arkansas, and since 2015, Distinguished Professor 2, Faculty of Business Administration, Inland University of Applied Sciences, Norway. Singhal teaches and conducts research on the diffusion of innovations, the positive deviance approach, organizing for social change, the entertainment-education strategy, and liberating interactional structures. His outreach spans public health, education, human rights, poverty alleviation, sustainable development, civic participation, democracy and governance, and corporate citizenship. He is a co-author or editor of 14 books and has authored some 180 peer-reviewed essays.

Singhal’s recent academic honors and appointments include Presidential Scholar, Mudra Institute of Communication Arts, India; President-Appointed Visiting Professor, Kumamoto (National) University, Japan; Fulbright Hays Scholar, Slovakia; Schomburg Distinguished Scholar, Ramapo College, New Jersey; Commerzbank Foundation Professor, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany; Berkitt Williams Distinguished Lecturer, Ouachita Baptist University, Arkansas; and Raushni Memorial Deshpande Distinguished Lecturer, Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi, India. Singhal has served as an advisor to the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United Nations Development Programme, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS, the United Nations Population Fund, the U.S. Department of State, the

U.S. Agency for International Development, Family Health International, PATH, Save the Children, the BBC World Service Trust, the International Rice Research Institute, Voice for Humanity, and others. He has taught previously at The Ohio University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has visited and lectured in more than 90 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia, Europe, and North America.

Daniel Sostaita, M.Th., is the pastor and the founder of Iglesia Cristiana Sin Fronteras (Without Frontiers Church) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In addition to pastoring his church, Sostaita also serves as a community connector for FaithHealth Ministries at the Wake Forest Baptist Hospital. Sostaita is deeply committed to the spiritual and physical wellness of his congregants and the local Latinx community. He has developed a Healthy Living Ministry at his church and provides a weekly free mobile health clinic in partnership with Wake Forest in the church’s parking lot. Sostaita sits on the boards of the North Carolina Congress of Latino Organizations, the Hispanic League, and the Latino Network of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. In 2019, he obtained his life coaching license from METODOCC Christian Coaching and graduated as a prediabetes coach from the Diabetes Training and Technical Assistance Center at Emory University. Sostaita has a bachelor’s degree in pastoral studies from Grace Seminary and an M.Th. from the International Baptist Theological Seminary of Cali, Colombia.

Paul Speer, Ph.D., is a professor and the chair of the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. Speer teaches community development theory, which examines the intersection of economics, politics, demographics, technology, and other forces shaping the urban form and the quality of interactions in these spaces. He also teaches community organizing, which explores expressions of agency by local actors on more macro-level processes, and the tools and methods for developing power to enhance action. Speer is currently involved in several community-based studies that draw on action research and participatory engagement with residents. He is working with a National Institute of Justice–funded study of youth safety and well-being and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention–funded study of using media to alter community norms to reduce youth violence. Speer is studying community-organizing processes in a statewide effort with People Improving Communities through Organizing California and is working on a study of community-organizing efforts that are working to prevent the opioid crisis in Detroit, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. Speer currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Affairs and

the American Journal of Community Psychology. Speer completed his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and his B.S. in psychology at Baker University.

Meme Styles, M.P.A., is the founder and the president of MEASURE, a nonprofit social enterprise that provides free data support to Black- and Brown-led organizations, while charging white-led organizations the full rate of MEASURE’s services to contribute to this anti-racist revenue model. Despite the odds and recognizing the need for increased information and data activism, MEASURE’s accomplishments include the launch of the Travis County Girl Squad mentorship program; starting a data-activism course at Huston-Tillotson University; establishing an equity law in Pflugerville, Texas; advocating for the release of juveniles in response to COVID-19; led a study to help diversify philanthropy at the Austin Community Foundation; and advocated for the redistribution of funding from ineffective policing programs in exchange for evidence-based solutions. So far the organization has provided more than 1,300 free data support hours to Black- and Brown-led organizations. It is also responsible for strategic partnerships with The University of Texas, Texas Southern University, and more, with a goal of disrupting traditional research in exchange for Black- and Brown-led lived-experience protocols. Styles is not only the visionary behind MEASURE, but she is also an Austin Area Research Organization fellow; the past chair of Miss Juneteenth; the past chair of African TV5; the Austin 40 under 40 winner in 2019; and the recipient of the Austin Police Chief’s Award of Excellence and the Austin Black Chamber’s 2017 Community Leader of the Year award. Styles holds a B.S. in communications, an M.P.A., and is certified in performance measurement through The George Washington University College of Professional Studies.

Aditi Vaidya, M.P.H.,* is a senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Previously, Vaidya was a senior program officer for three sister foundations: the Solidago Foundation, the See Forward Fund, and the Frances Fund. Among her many initiatives with Solidago, Vaidya created Project Phoenix: Connecting Democracy, Economy, and Sustainability, a year-long cohort collective learning program for 40 participating foundations across health, democracy, economy, and environmental stability. Her prior work included serving as the campaign director for the East Bay Alliance for Sustainable Economy (EBASE), in Oakland, California. A community-based organization, EBASE unifies community, faith, and labor groups to stand with low-income workers and families. She also served as the program director for the Silicon Valley Toxics

Coalition, where she organized the first health and safety trainings for electronics workers. In this role, Vaidya coordinated campaigns to push California’s high-tech industry to provide environmental and occupational health protections for communities and workers affected by the global supply chain. She has held other positions with the Jennifer Altman Foundation; the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice; the Center for Environmental Citizenship; and the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund. She was the board chair for the Asian Pacific Environmental Network; a former public health commissioner in Alameda County, California; a former member of the advisory boards of CorpWatch and the Labor Occupational Health Program of the University of California; a former steering committee member of the Labor Innovations for the 21st Century Fund; and a past co-chair of the Saguaro Fund of the Funding Exchange. Vaidya holds an M.P.H. in environmental and occupational health from Emory University and she earned her B.S. in environmental science and policy management from Bates College.

Bill J. Wright, Ph.D., is the director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Education at Providence Health and Services, Oregon and southwest Washington. Wright is a sociologist with a principal focus on survey design, and specializes in longitudinal research with low-income and vulnerable populations. His research focuses on the intersection of health policy, health systems design, and the social determinants of health. Wright has led numerous studies of low-income Oregonians, and he is a principal investigator on the Oregon Health Study, the first-ever randomized trial on the effects of health insurance. His other research has examined cost-sharing structures in Medicaid, the effect of continuity and churning in Medicaid, the effects of accountable care health reform on outcomes for people served by Medicaid, and the role of built and social environments as drivers of population health. Wright received his Ph.D. in sociology from South Dakota State University.

Hanh Cao Yu, Ph.D.,*† is the chief learning officer at The California Endowment (TCE) where she is responsible for learning, evaluation, and impact activities, and she ensures that local and state grantees, board, and staff understand the results and lessons of the foundation’s investments in its 10-year Building Healthy Communities initiative. Yu led the effort to establish and implement the ongoing evaluation of the Move to End Violence. Prior to joining TCE, Yu served as the vice president; the director of the Youth, Education, and Philanthropy Division; and a member of the corporate senior management team at Social Policy Research Associates (SPR), where she oversaw much of the company’s research and evaluation

work in philanthropy. Yu has expertise in qualitative and quantitative research in the areas of women’s philanthropy, leadership development, organizational effectiveness, policy evaluation, community organizing, and vulnerable populations. She has a wealth of experience in working with foundations to assess funding priorities, institutional change, program performance, and effective outcome measures. At SPR, Yu played a lead role in number of other projects, including the evaluation of TCE’s Diversity in Health Evaluation Project, the evaluation of TCE’s Health Exchange Academy, the TCE Diversity Audit, and the evaluation of the Kellogg Foundation’s Capitalizing on Diversity Cross-Cutting Theme. Yu is the author of numerous publications and is a contributing author to The Handbook on Leadership Development Evaluation. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and B.S. from the University of Southern California.