Speaker Database / 1,371 Speakers
The Personal Democracy Forum was a conference that ran for over 15 years and took place in NYC, Europe and Central America.
Celia Viggo Wexler is vice president for advocacy at Common Cause, a nonprofit nonpartisan citizens group with 300,000 members and supporters that works to make government at all levels more open, honest and accountable. She plays a key role in Common Cause’s work on media issues and campaign finance issues.
Ms. Wexler, who joined Common Cause’s national office in 1996, had served for five years as legislative director of New York Common Cause.
Ms. Wexler, who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Toronto, worked for 15 years as a journalist before joining the staff of Common Cause, and earned awards for consumer and labor reporting. She also taught journalism at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, where she earned a graduate degree in communications.
Chellie Pingree has been the president and CEO of Common Cause since March 2003. As leader of Common Cause, she oversees a 35-year-old public interest organization with 300,000 members and supporters whose goal is to engage people in their democracy, and to make government at all levels more open, honest and accountable. Pingree was instrumental in expanding Common Cause’s agenda to include media reform, arguing that access to information and news is crucial to citizens’ participation in their government. She has commented on issues as diverse as the ethics of Tom Delay, the problems with the 2004 elections, the corruption of no-bid contracts for Iraq, and the need to preserve the filibuster for major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Lehrer News Hour, NBC Nightly News, and All things Considered. Her leadership in the fight against media concentration earned her a profile in Broadcasting and Cable Magazine.
Prior to leading Common Cause, Pingree served for eight years in the Maine Senate, with the last four years as majority leader. She also was a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in 2002. In the Maine Legislature, Pingree was known for successful legislative battles regarding health care, economic development and the environment. She authored legislation that created a landmark program known as Maine Rx, which lowered the cost of prescription drug prices for seniors. In 2001, she was named the Consumer Health Advocate of the Year by Families USA.
Chris Gates is president of the Sunlight Foundation, an international organization based in Washington, DC that uses the tools of open data, civic tech, policy analysis and original reporting to promote transparency and accountability in both government and politics. Gates previously served as the executive director of PACE, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, an affinity group of the Council on Foundations that serves as a learning collaborative for funders doing work in the fields of civic engagement and democratic practice. Prior to his role at PACE Gates served for over a decade as the president of the National Civic League, the nation’s oldest good government organization, founded by Teddy Roosevelt in 1894. Gates sits on the board of Public Agenda, a New York based research organization, and is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. He received his Master of Public Administration degree from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Chris Hughes is the co-founder of the Economic Security Project, a network of leaders exploring how a guaranteed income can work in the United States. Hughes makes the case in his 2018 book Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn that we can be the generation to eradicate poverty and restore opportunity to the middle class by creating an income floor below which no American can fall. Before his work at the Economic Security Project, he co-founded Facebook in 2004, working on the communications, marketing, and product development teams until he left to lead digital organizing for President Obama’s 2008 campaign. He was the owner and publisher of the digital and print magazine The New Republic from 2012 to 2016. Hughes graduated from Harvard magna cum laude with a degree in History and Literature. He lives in New York City with his husband and son.
Chris is a rising junior at Harvard and a co-founder of Coding it Forward, a nonprofit organization that inspires and empowers young people with technology skills to create social impact. He helps lead the Civic Digital Fellowship—the first of its kind data science and technology internship program partnered with federal agencies—by creating partnerships with civic tech leaders. This summer, Chris will welcome 38 fully-funded Civic Digital Fellows to Washington, D.C. to work at six federal agencies. He comes into the civic tech space with a background in public policy and civic engagement and is passionate about inspiring a new generation of digital leaders to create social and civic change through technology.
Stand-alone journalist Chris Nolan runs “Politics From Left to Right,” a San Francisco-based political site that focuses on the intersection of politics and technology and the differences between East Coast insiders and West Coast influencers.
Christopher Rabb is a freelance writer, blogger, web activist, speaker and consultant. A former Capitol Hill staffer, he is the founder and chief evangelist of Afro-Netizen, a Black online community established in 1999. A serial entrepreneur, Rabb also founded Stono Technologies, LLC, the Yale Black Alumni Network (YBAN) and most recently, the Progressive Civic Fund (PCF), a national, web-based political network dedicated to empowering African-American constituencies through strategic and innovative civic action. Christopher is a principal at Visceral Ventures LLC, an organizational dynamics consultancy that focuses on interactive communications and business development strategy. A native of Chicago, Rabb currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Prof. Imani Perry, and their son, Freeman Diallo.
[2006] A native of Chicago, Chris Rabb is a consultant, social entrepreneur, and progressive commentator on the confluence of race, politics and technology.In 1999, Rabb founded Afro-Netizen, an e-newsletter that grew from 100 to 10,000 subscribers in 18 months. By late 2003, Rabb entered the blogosphere and less than a year later, he became one of the 37 “credentialed” bloggers at the Democratic Convention — the only one of whom whose readership was majority people of color.
Rabb, is a Yale graduate, has earned an M.S. in Organizational Dynamics from University of Pennsylvania, co-founded an intellectual property-based product design firm, was a stand-up comedian, and soon to be elected as a Democratic committeeperson in his ward.
Rabb has served as a legislative staffer in the U.S. Senate and White House Conference on Small Business, as well as the vice president of entrepreneurial programs at a nationally-recognized, urban business incubator.
Rabb established and currently manages the Yale Black Alumni Network and is a 2001 recipient of the German Marshall Fund’s American Marshall Memorial Fellowship. He is a long-time director and executive committee member of the Afro-American Newspaper Company of Baltimore, Inc., one of the oldest, continuously family-owned and -operated newspapers in the country. He lives in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of northwest Philadelphia with his wife, Prof. Imani Perry, and their sons, Freeman Diallo and Issa.
