Chief Strategist and Founding Board Member, KaBOOM!
Tony Deifell has spent nearly two decades as a social entrepreneur. He was a founding board member of KaBOOM!, the national market leader for community-built playgrounds and skate parks. KaBOOM! generates 91% of its $20 million annual budget through earned-income activities with clients such as The Home Depot, Sprint, and Computer Associates. He was most recently the organization’s Chief Strategist and architect of its growth strategy and performance-measurement system.
Prior to his work at KaBOOM!, Tony founded and headed for eight years a national media-education nonprofit that used storytelling to build youth leadership and to fight racism, sexism and other “isms,” reaching 10,000 college students, partnering with 25 colleges and universities, and receiving recognition by the White House as a national model of diversity education. Tony has served on local and national boards including the Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance and the Social Enterprise Alliance where he co-chairs the public policy initiative. He studied Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill, earned an MBA from Harvard Business School where he started the Möbius Forum on Leadership and Spirituality, and was a fellow in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s National Leadership Program. For five years, he taught photography to blind teenagers in Raleigh, NC and has published a new book of their work called SEEING BEYOND SIGHT (Chronicle Books 2007), a surprising source from which he draws inspiration for what it means to lead.
Jonathan Greenblatt
Co-founder, Ethos Water
Jonathan Greenblatt is the co-founder of Ethos Water, a former vice president of Starbucks Coffee Company, and an acknowledged thought leader on ethical branding and social entrepreneurship. He teaches social entrepreneurship at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA and advises corporations and non-governmental organizations on the intersection between business and sustainability.
A former staffer in the Clinton White House, Greenblatt currently serves as a senior advisor to the United Nations Foundation where he has assisted with the creation and launch of the Global Water Challenge , a coalition of Fortune 500 businesses, foundations and non-governmental organizations developing a global action plan to alleviate the world water crisis. He also serves as Senior Advisor to the X-PRIZE Foundation, leading the design of a $10 million prize competition focused on breaking the cycle of global poverty.
Greenblatt founded Ethos Water in 2002 with his longtime friend, Peter Thum, to achieve a specific mission: create a brand of bottled water to help children around the world get clean water. Ethos was launched in the bedroom of Greenblatt’s son and soon became one of the fastest growing bottled water brands in the U.S. In 2005, Starbucks acquired Ethos Water. Today, Ethos Water is sold in premium retail locations across the country, including more than 5,000 Starbucks stores where the brand has achieved record performance in bottled water sales. As a result of a strategic partnership with Pepsico announced in 2006, Ethos is expected to increase its distribution to more than 100,000 locations by the end of the decade.
Frances Hesselbein
Chairman of the Board of Governors, Leader to Leader Institute
Frances Hesselbein is the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Leader to Leader Institute, was the Founding President of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation and was CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, 1976-1990. Mrs. Hesselbein was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America’s highest civilian honor, in 1998 by President Clinton “as a pioneer for women, diversity and inclusion.” In 2002, Mrs. Hesselbein was the first recipient of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National Security Series Award for her service “to national security and the nation.”
She is the author of Hesselbein on Leadership, and introduces Be, Know, Do: Leadership the Army Way with General Eric K. Shinseki. She is the co-editor of 21 books in 28 languages, and is Editor-In-chief of the award-winning Leader to Leader journal. Mrs. Hesselbein is the recipient of 18 honorary doctoral degrees and has spoken on leadership, ethics and transformation in 67 countries as well as to leaders in all three sectors across the United States.
Carl J. Schramm
President and Chief Executive Officer,
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Carl J. Schramm is president and chief executive officer of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, America’s largest foundation dedicated to advancing entrepreneurial success. Trained as an economist and lawyer, Mr. Schramm began his career on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Schramm has founded several companies, including Greenspring Advisors, Inc., a Baltimore merchant-banking firm that supports business development in health care and insurance; and HCIA, Inc., once the nation’s largest provider of data to the health care industry. He is the author of The Entrepreneurial Imperative (HarperCollins, October 2006). His next book, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism (Yale), with Will Baumol and Robert Litan, will be released in early 2007.
Maria Reyes and Sharaud Moore
featured in Paramount Pictures Freedom Writers
Freedom Writers Maria Reyes and Sharaud Moore are two of the 150 students who, under the guidance of their teacher Erin Gruwell, embarked on a life-changing journey to change themselves and the world around them through writing. First published as the book The Freedom Writers Diary in 1999, their story was released as a major motion picture starring Hillary Swank in 2006. A special movie screening will follow their presentation.
