Chris Pierce: Fighting Partial Deafness, Touring with Neil Young and the Unifying Power of Music.

Joe Ferullo is CEO & Publisher of the National Catholic Reporter, an independent non-profit news organization founded in 1964. NCR leads the field in reporting on one of the world's most influential institutions, and its impact on US laws, society and culture.Prior to NCR, Joe was an Executive Vice President of Programming at CBS, where he oversaw several long-running programs - including Entertainment Tonight and Judge Judy - and helped guide his division's transition into digital & streaming media.Joe worked for several years as a producer for NBC; he was on the management group that oversaw NBC’s merger with Universal. As a Dateline NBC producer, he received an Emmy award as part of the team that covered the events of 9/11; an Emmy nomination for his story on Vietnamese war orphans; and an Education Writers’ Award with Maria Shriver for their look at inner city schools.His special hour celebrating the series “Friends” scored NBC’s highest Wednesday prime time ratings in five years. Joe spent a month at sea at the Titanic wreck site in the North Atlantic, producing a series of specials for NBC and Discovery. He’s also developed and produced pilots for public television.Joe began his career in print journalism: he was a staff writer at Rolling Stone magazine and a reporter for Hearst newspapers. He’s written for the New York Times op-ed page and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.As a screenwriter, Joe has written for Universal, USA Network, and Michael Douglas’ Stonebridge production company. His script “Gridlock” became an NBC movie special. He also performed narration for programs on NBC, MSNBC and Discovery.Joe was on the dean’s advisory board at Hofstra University’s Lawrence Herbert School of Communication, and served on the governing board of MEND, an advocacy group for low-income families in the San Fernando Valley. He has been a frequent guest lecturer at Syracuse University’s L.A.-based media program.Joe is a graduate of Columbia University; he was editor-in-chief of the university’s independent daily newspaper. Joe was born and raised in The Bronx, where his family ran a small Italian bakery.

If you're involved in corporate law or corporate governance, or just care about business and society, Charles needs no introduction.He is seemingly ubiquitous and has been for four decades. He is the Executive Editor of Directors & Boards. He's the retired Edgar S. Woolard Chair in Corporate Governance and the founding director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.His other academic credentials include more than a decade as a law professor at Stetson, visiting professorships at the law schools of the University of Illinois, Cordell and Maryland. He was also a Herbert Smith Freehills Fellow at Cambridge University in the UK. He has written extensively on boards of directors, served on advisory boards for both the National Association of Corporate Directors and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.He is and has been a director at myriad of companies. His hard work and thought leadership has been recognized with honors from Directorship, Treasury and Risk Management, Global Proxy Watch and Ethisphere, Charles is also public spirited, having served as a trustee for such non profit organizations as the Big Apple Circus, Tampa Museum of Art, Delaware Museum of Natural History, Museum of American Finance and the Brandywine Conservancy.

Chris is an American singer songwriter who has opened for Neil Young, BB King, Seal, and a host of others. He recently gained additional worldwide prominence with “We Can Always Come Back to This”. His hit song aired on 3 episodes of the #1 NBC primetime series ‘THIS IS US,' then went on to #1 on the Billboard Blues Chart.Other recent highlights include: a solo concert at The Kennedy Center, a duet with Sara Bareilles, a sold-out concert with Allison Russell, and performance/interviews on NPR’s WORLD CAFÉ, MOUNTAIN STAGE, AMERICAN FOLK SHOW, SoCAL SOUND, and more.His 2021 album, 'AMERICAN SILENCE' garnered critical acclaim from NPR, Rolling Stone, NoDepression, SiriusXM, The Bluegrass Situation, AmericanaUK, Acoustic Guitar and others. PopMatters named ‘AMERICAN SILENCE ’THE #1 Best Folk Album of 2021 and FolkAlley named "Residential School" from AMERICAN SILENCE one of the 100 Essential Folk Songs.His highly anticipated album titled ‘LET ALL WHO WILL’ was released on September 1, 2023, with critical acclaim from NPR, NoDepression, American Songwriter, Hi Times and more.

Chris Pinney, is President and CEO of High Meadows Institute. Chris analyzes and writes about the role of business in today's world and in tomorrow's. While most of us accept our daily interactions with companies like Google and JPMorgan Chase, Chris thinks about the fact that these firms and many others have more impact on our day to day lives than government. He then analyzes the implications both for those businesses and for society.Prior to High Meadows, Chris held a string of positions where he also looked at business and business leadership from a variety of angles. He was president of the Boston-based Alliance for Business Leadership, a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program, Director of Research and Policy and Executive Education at the Boston College Carroll School of Management's Center for Corporate Citizenship, and Director of the Imagine Program, a Canadian initiative focused on business leadership.

Monique Aiken is the Managing Director at The Investment Integration Project, an applied research and consulting firm with a recently launched SaaS platform called SAIL, the Systems Aware Investing Launchpad. Monique is co-founder of Make Justice Normal, a nonprofit collective focused on narrative change, and host of their podcast, “Into the Record”. She is also cofounder of the ReStarter Fund, an economic and climate justice initiative aiming to be a small business lifeline in these unique times. She is also a Contributing Editor at ImpactAlpha where she is a biweekly host of the “Briefing” podcast and past host of ‘The Reconstruction’, a 24-episode long form interview podcast series.Monique has been guiding investors in aligning their social impact and investment objectives for over a decade, after nearly 15 years in financial services with Bank of America, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank. In addition to TIIP, her +10 years of impact experience includes time as Vice President of Programs, at Mission Investors Exchange, a 250+ member network for outcomes focused practitioners in impact investing; Director at Tideline, a boutique strategy consultant in impact investing; and Project Manager for No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project at the Clinton Foundation. Monique serves on the Investment Committee for the NYU Impact Investment Fund, the Steering Committee for the Intentional Endowments Network and the Board of Responsible Alpha. She also serves as a Board Member of the Institute for Nonprofit Practice and on the Advisory Board for the Global Bio Fund, a gendersmart biotech and wellness ecosystem and venture fund.A proud Toigo, CGSM, SEO, and INROADS alum, Monique earned her MBA from NYU Stern School of Business where she specialized in Financial Instruments and Markets, and a B.Sc. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Monique is a first-generation Jamaican-American, plays the tenor saxophone (badly), loves coffee, tea and travel (pre-covid at least) and is conversant in Spanish, Portuguese, and un petit peu of French. Monique is also a newly minted children’s book author and lives in +100yr old fixer-upper in New Jersey with her husband and their delightful preschool aged son, who is her inspiration.

If you want to understand, learn about, or even rationally criticize impact investing, Fran Seegull is the person to know in the United States. Fran is president of the U. S. Impact Investing Alliance. She helped incubate the Alliance at the Ford Foundation in partnership with Darren Walker. In 2023, John Palfrey, President of the MacArthur Foundation succeeded Walker as Alliance Advisory Board Chair.Fran is also executive director of the Tipping Point Fund on Impact Investing, a donor collaborative in the field. She was previously Chief Investment Officer at ImpactAssets. which includes The Giving Fund, now a $3 billion impact investing donor-advised fund. She served on the G7 Working Group on Asset Allocation, worked for PwC, and taught at the USC Business School, where her course was named the best graduate level elective course at the school.Fran has an MBA from Harvard, but somehow she's managed to stay grounded and be a problem solver in the real world. Fran is smart, funny, realistic, high powered, and the person to know if you want to know anything about impact investing.

Matt Moscardi is one half of the podcast, Business Pants, which makes business and investing news suck less for real people and the investor-curious. His day job is as the founder of Free Float, which provides an incredibly complete data set and analysis of the directors at public companies. Matt knows whereof he speaks. He spent almost a decade at MSCI helping to develop that financial service behemoth's ESG ratings model. He chaired the MSCI ESG Research Editorial Committee, sat on the MSCI Research Editorial Board, and wrote more than 100 investor papers, industry reports and profiles while there. Prior to that, he worked at the sustainability NGO Series where he was part of a team providing resources, thought leadership and data to pension funds with cumulative assets of some $10 trillion.

Greg is the Founder and Executive Director of Start.coop. Greg brings a powerful background of financial strategy, tech, and entrepreneurship to growing the cooperative landscape. Greg's work has ranged from business development to strategic planning for multiple cooperatives.Prior to launching Start.coop, Greg founded and led the Bike Cooperative, a division of CCA Global Partners, and also helped to launch the nation's only purchasing co-op for craft breweries. Greg also previously served on the board of the Cooperative Development Institute for 10 years and was board chair for 3 years.Greg also convenes the Equitable Economy Fund, a $2 million pilot fund convening angel investors to scale shared ownership. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

If you're an investor or just interested in a smooth functioning economy, Sandy Peters is an unsung hero. She heads CFA Institute's advocacy and regulatory affairs efforts globally relating to the information needs of investors for investment decision making. This includes corporate disclosures, financial reporting, accounting, ESG/sustainability disclosures, and how the information is assured and audited. She also looks at how technology creates new forms of information and how that information is integrated into the capital markets.Sandy began her career at a “Big Four” accounting firm, KPMG, then went to MetLife where she was the corporate controller. So she has the perfect background to be the watchdog over information for one of the most influential professional investor organizations in the world, having worked as an investor, a corporate preparer, and an auditor.

As a producer and senior editor of NPRs "All Things Considered" for more than a decade, Alison helped shepherd that show's coverage of one financial crisis, two wars and three presidential elections. She then became NPR's storytelling guru which meant she guided some of the best radio and podcast talents in the world to become better at narrative storytelling. Today she is a sought after freelance audio editor whose work could be heard on such in-depth journalistic podcast series as "The 13th Step", which tells of how women seeking to overcome drug addiction routinely became victims of sexual abuse by the very residential treatment staff that were supposed to help them, and the podcast, "544 Days" about journalist Jason Rezaian's imprisonment in an Iranian jail while international real politics swirled around his life or death situation.Alison works behind the scenes, she's rarely on mic but that hasn't stopped her talent from shining through. She was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard and "Believed", the podcast she worked on about Larry Nassar, the former Olympics and college gymnastic coach who abused hundreds of young women, won the Peabody, duPont-Columbia, Scripps-Howard, and Dart awards.