Hazel Gurland-Pooler is a Colombian-born, NYC-based director/producer and documentary filmmaker. She directed 10 episodes of PBS's Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and co-produced the 6-hour The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, also with Gates Jr., which won Emmy, Peabody, duPont-Columbia, and NAACP Image awards. Storming Caesars Palace, her first feature-length documentary, won film festival awards, broadcast on Independent Lens in March 2023 and is now streaming via the PBS App.

Sondra Phillips-Gilbert is the daughter of Ruby Duncan and a Social Services Representative at the Department of Human Services in Washington DC. She is also a former elected Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner who represented her community for 10 years. She was instrumental in organizing to obtain 16.9 million dollars from the District Government to rebuild a new recreation center and library in her Ward and continues the work of fighting for equity and improving the quality of life for our neighbors and community members.

Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. They are also co-host of the award-winning 'Still Processing,' and author of the anthology 'Black Futures.' They are currently working on a book about the body and dissociation for Penguin Press.

Maya Wiley is the president and CEO[a] of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund. A nationally respected civil rights attorney, Wiley has been a litigator at the ACLU, NAACP

Legal Defense Fund, Inc., and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. She has been a program creator in philanthropy, non-profits, government, and higher education. She helped create a criminal justice program for a major foundation in South Africa. Wiley co-founded and led a national policy advocacy organization, the Center for Social Inclusion, now a part of Race Forward, a national policy strategy organization working to end structural racism. She became the first Black woman to be Counsel to a New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio, where she worked to protect and expand civil rights, Minority and Women-Owned Business contracts and broadband access. Wiley became a Senior Vice President for Social Justice at the New School University, where she also founded the Digital Equity Laboratory. While there, she chaired the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). As chair, she led the release of the “hold” on proceedings against Daniel Pantaleo whose illegal chokehold killed Eric Garner, and Co-Chaired the Mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group that authored two major reports on integrating New York City public schools. Wiley has received numerous awards, and has been a public voice for rights, justice, and democracy, through written opinion editorials and as a former legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.