Jade is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and digital and communications strategist. Jade’s work explores Indigenous futurism, inclusion, and representation in the media landscape. Jade has partnered with organizations like Resource Media, United Nations Universal Access Project, 350.org, Indigenous Environmental Network, Sierra Club Magazine, Bioneers, Indigenous Climate Action, the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, Allied Media Projects, and Tribal Nations from the Arctic to the Amazon to develop strategies, digital storytelling campaigns, and original content to mobilize and create more engagement around the most urgent issues of our time.

Currently, Jade is the Creative Director at NDN Collective and is developing a VR/AR series in partnership with Google VR and is producing and directing films independently.

Layel (pgp: they, them, theirs) is an indigenous descendant of the Yaqui and Mayo tribes from the Sonoran Desert born and raised on a border town in San Diego,CA. Layel a transgender & non binary person, graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2010 and is a former organizer of six years for Transformative Justice. They are The Center for Cultural Power’s Ecological Arts & Culture Manager. Layel has been involved with performance art in both theater and video since 2008, and have recently expanded to video production.

Their most recent artistic work was through their participation in a bay area based artist-in-residency ‘Las Hociconas Lab’ & Soundwave SF ‘biennial’. They are currently the Ecological Arts and Culture Manager at The Center for Cultural Power, staff at Movement Generation & Impact Producer for ‘The North Pole Show’ Season Two. They support Climate Justice Alliance by being on their advisory committee for a story telling digital platform project. Currently Layel is an honoree of the 2019 YBCA 100 list for their work with Climate Woke alongside honoree’s Greta Thunberg and Shonda Rhimes.

Most of all, they are very passionate in the ecological restoration of the human species, zero waste living and plant based diets. They love working with artists as well as with frontline communities in story telling amplification.

Samantha is a writer, new mother and organizer of progressive philanthropy in support of grassroots movements. Most recently, she has worked with EDGE Funders Alliance in support of a global cohort of funders and movement partners building strategies toward systemic alternatives to the extractive economy. She also works with the Climate Justice Alliance on network-wide narrative development, and is a contractor with Center for Diversity and the Environment.

Until 2016, Samantha was a Program Officer with The Overbrook Foundation, where she supported and developed the Foundation’s Environment and Movement Building programs. She was also a founding participant of Building Equity and Alignment for Impact, a grassroots-led initiative with the goals of shifting resources and supporting equitable partnerships between grassroots, mainstream green groups and philanthropy. She is a graduate of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, and her writing can be found in Earth Island Journal, Grist, Truthout, Alternet, The Dark Mountain Project and more.

Samantha’s first career was in modern dance, and she has performed and taught with dance companies internationally and throughout the New York area.

Tony Heriza is a writer, teacher and documentary filmmaker with a lifetime commitment to the power of media to spark social change. His documentaries are distributed through the New Day Films cooperative, where he is currently serving on the steering committee. Until 2017, he was the Director of Media Production at the American Friends Service Committee, where he facilitated national and international communication projects, including digital storytelling workshops on a range of social issues. Continuing that work, he recently led a storytelling project with Iraq war vets and Iraqi refugees exploring their recovery from the trauma of war. He is currently working on a new documentary about art as a healing intervention in opioid addiction. Tony has taught media production at Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania and has twice been chosen as a filmmaker envoy for the State Department’s American Film Showcase.

Ellen is the founding director of Active Voice/Lab, which helps funders, media makers, advocates, and other leaders use story skillfully to advance social change. For 20 years Active Voice has leveraged story-based media to engage audiences “beyond the choir” around complex social and policy issues, such as immigrant rights and juvenile justice. Many of her strategies were developed at P.O.V., where, with Marc Weiss, she introduced models that measurably increased the influence of independent film in public life. She speaks widely about “strategy, story, and sustained impact” with groups ranging from Netroots Nation to the National Endowment for the Arts; from the Council on Foundations to BIoneers.

Ellen is currently focused on improving creative cross-sector partnerships and has shared this expertise with media-savvy clients like Sundance, Ford Foundation, and Participant Media.

This project brings together Marc’s 40+ year career in media with his work as a climate organizer and activist over the last decade.

Marc put his media career on hold to become a full-time climate activist in 2011, a few years after his then-14 year-old daughter took him and his wife to a demonstration. He felt it was part of his responsibility as a father to protect his two children from the alarming consequences of a rapidly changing climate.
Marc has played many roles as an activist, including being part of a small group that organized NY Renews, a multi-sector climate / jobs / justice coalition that successfully campaigned for passage of the 2019 NY State Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, described by the NY Times as “One of the World’s Most Ambitious Climate Plans.”

Marc has worked in film, TV, digital media and occasionally in print. In 1988, he created POV, the award-winning public TV showcase for independent documentaries now in its 32nd season. At POV, he began experimenting with using the Internet to engage viewers more deeply on issues explored by films broadcast on POV. Inspired by the impact of crowd-sourced story projects in 1995 and 1996, Marc founded Web Lab / Digital Innovations Group, Inc. as a think-and-do tank to expand the potential of digital media. In 2010-11, he collaborated with filmmaker Robert Kenner to produce the Emmy-nominated film, “When Strangers Click” for HBO, based on 5 crowdsourced stories.