Monique W. Morris

Monique Morris has more than 20 years of experience as a researcher and an advocate in the areas of racial justice, gender equity, education, health and wellness, juvenile justice, and social justice reform. She is the CEO of MWM Consulting Group, LLC, which conducts research and provides technical assistance to organizations seeking to advance concepts of fairness, diversity and inclusion.

Monique was awarded the 2012 Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations to develop a framework with the African American Policy Forum to address the education-system factors that contribute to the over-representation of black girls in confinement.

Monique was formerly the Vice President for Advocacy and Research of the NAACP. She was a Senior Research Associate at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and the Director of Research & Senior Research Fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice.

Monique is the author of the acclaimed novel, Too Beautiful for Words, and sole or lead author of more than 50 publications and articles on race, gender, juvenile and social justice issues.

Monique earned a BA in Political Science and African American Studies from Columbia University and a Masters in Urban Planning from Columbia.

Jason Ziedenberg

Jason Ziedenberg is a national juvenile and criminal justice policy expert. Jason is the former Executive Director of the Justice Policy Institute. He was the lead communications and policy director in Multnomah County, Oregon. Jason was also the Policy and Communications Director at the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, Washington, DC’s juvenile justice system.

Robert E. Pierre

Robert E. Pierre is an award-winning journalist with more than two decades of experience as a reporter and editor, primarily at the Washington Post. In 2011, he oversaw the formation of The Root DC, an online extension of The Root and the Post’s local staff. He was responsible for hiring, budgeting, mobile strategy and potential revenue streams as part of an effort to lure and retain more African American readers. The Root DC is a vibrant space for community voices and, in the first six months, attracted 600,000 unique visitors.

Pierre was part of the team of metro reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of the shooting massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007.

Pierre proposed, and was a key participant in, the groundbreaking 2006 series Being a Black Man: At the Corner of Progress and Peril. The series became a book of the same name.

Pierre co-authored (with Jon Jeter)A Day Late and a Dollar Short: High Hopes and Deferred Dreams in Obama’s “Post Racial” America. He has taught journalism at Dillard University in New Orleans and Howard University in Washington D.C. He is a board member of the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism, a non-partisan program that trains the next generation of political reporters. He is a longtime member of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Robert has a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Louisiana State University and studied African Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Robert Pierre provides communications and public relations consulting for Solutions Inc.