About the Participants

Martha Baker is an independent consultant providing program design, advocacy and training to improve education and employment opportunities for women and girls. She continues to work with women and girls on the international, national and local levels - in government, nonprofits, the private sector and the political arena. Martha was Executive Director/CEO of Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW), a nonprofit that promotes women's economic self-sufficiency through training, placement and advocacy for women in construction and other skilled blue collar trades. She revived a failing organization, enhanced and enlarged its budget and influence. After creating a report entitled Vocational Education: Opportunities for Young Women, she was appointed to the NYC Deptartment of Education Steering Committee to Restructure Career Technical Education. Prior to leading NEW, Martha was Executive Director of the NYC Commission on the Status of Women under Mayor David Dinkins and Commission Chair Bella Abzug. Martha coordinated a yearlong citywide study of sexual harassment, culminating in the publication of The Prevention of Sexual Harassment in the Municipal Workplace and establishing a new procedure for reporting, investigating and resolving complaints. The Commission produced numerous documents, including What Can Be Done About Sexual Assault on College Campuses. Thereafter, Martha became Deputy Director of Operations for the NYS Workers' Compensation Board where she developed Safety in the Workplace, a program and procedures guide to enable the staff and public to interact in a hostile-free work environment. For most of her adult life, Martha worked with Bella Abzug to expand the role of women in society. As a workshop leader and facilitator, Martha has spoken before numerous women's and labor organizations and has received many awards for her efforts. The thread that permeates all her work is Martha's active involvement in political organizing to give greater voice to women and girls and build a society that is responsive to their full participation and their needs.

Dina Bakst is a co-founder and board member of A Better Balance. Prior to co-founding a A Better Balance, she was a consulting project attorney to NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (now Legal Momentum) and Child Care, Inc., where she advocated for improving early care and education services in New York City. She also worked with NOW Legal Defense as a visiting staff attorney, where she engaged in litigation and conducted public policy advocacy in the areas of reproductive rights, economic justice, and child care. In 2002-2003, Dina served as the Deputy Issues Director for the Andrew Cuomo Campaign for the Governor of New York, where she developed policy on a wide range of issues affecting women and families. Prior to that, she worked as a litigation/employment associate with Kaye, Scholer, LLP. Dina is the mother of three daughters and a graduate of The University of Michigan Law School and the University of Michigan.

Lisa Belkin writes the column "Life's Work" for The New York Times.

Stephanie Bornstein is an employment attorney and Faculty Fellow at the Center for WorkLife Law, at U.C. Hastings College of the Law (www.worklifelaw.org), a research and advocacy organization that works to identify and eliminate family responsibilities discrimination. Prior to joining the Center, she was awarded a two-year New Voices Fellowship to expand the work and family program of Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), a public interest law center focusing on women's economic equality. After her fellowship, she stayed on as a staff attorney at ERA, where she represented low-income women in employment matters, specializing in pregnancy discrimination and family and medical leave. She was also among a small group of advocates to help author and enact California's Paid Family Leave insurance program, the nation's first comprehensive paid leave law. In addition, she worked as a legal editor of employment law products at Nolo Press, a leading publisher of self-help legal books for nonlawyers. She received her bachelor's degree magna cum laude from Harvard University and her law degree from U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.

Heather Boushey is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). As a labor economist, Dr. Boushey studies current trends in the U.S. labor market and how social policies help or harm workers and their families. She has recently written reports on the minimum wage, student debt, child care usage and mothers' labor force participation. She has testified before Congress and authored numerous reports and commentaries on issues affecting working families, including the implications of the 1996 welfare reform. Dr. Boushey's research has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, as well as many regional papers. Before joining CEPR, Dr. Boushey worked at the Economic Policy Institute where she co-authored The State of Working America 2002-3 and Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families. Dr. Boushey is a Research Affiliate with the National Poverty Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and on the editorial review board of WorkingUSA and the Journal of Poverty and on the Voice professional women advisory committee. Her work has appeared in Dollars & Sense, In These Times, and New Labor Forum, and peer-reviewed journals, including Review of Political Economy and National Women's Studies Association Journal. Previously, she was at the Economic Policy Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research and her B.A. from Hampshire College.

Ellen Bravo, former director of 9to5, now teaches Women's Studies at UW-Milwaukee, including a graduate course on Family-Friendly Workplaces, and coordinates the Multi-State Working Families Consortium. Her publications include Taking on the Big Boys, or Why Feminism is Good for Families, Business and the Nation (Feminist Press, 2007), as well as The Job Family Challenge: A 9to5 Guide (Not for Women Only). Ellen served on the bi-partisan Commission on Leave appointed by Congress to study the impact of the Family and Medical Leave Act. She is frequently interviewed by the media and is a leading spokeswoman on working women's issues.

Kathleen E. Christensen is a foundation officer and an author. Dr. Christensen founded and continues to direct the program on The Workplace, Work Force and Working Families at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Under her leadership, the Workplace, Work Force and Working Families program has played a vital role in developing a new field of work-family scholarship and in supporting effective workplaces that meet the needs of working parents and older workers. To that end, in 2003, the Foundation launched the National Initiative on Workplace Flexibility, a partnership with business and government, designed to make workplace flexibility a standard of the American workplace. As an author, Dr. Christensen has published extensively on the changing nature of work. Her books include Contingent Work: American Employment Relations in Transition (Cornell University Press); Turbulence in the American Workplace (Oxford University Press); Women and Home-based Work: The Unspoken Contract (Henry Holt) and The New Era of Home-based Work: Directions and Policies (Westview Press). Her current book examines the global push for flexibility. Her editorials have appeared on the national Op Ed pages of The Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Atlanta Constitution. Prior to joining the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Dr. Christensen was a Professor of Psychology at the Graduate School and University Center of City University of New York and before that served as a policy analyst at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. Dr. Christensen is a member of The Conference Board's Work-Life Leadership Council and has served on a number of national work-life advisory boards. She received her doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University, where she was a Danforth Fellow, as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. She has also been a Mellon Fellow and Rockefeller Fellow at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. In 2004, she was awarded the Work-Life Legacy Award by the Families and Work Institute for her role in founding the field of work-life.

Ann Crittenden is an award-winning journalist, author, and lecturer. Her latest book, If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything, received critical praise and was featured in People magazine. Her previous book, The Price of Motherhood, garnered widespread media attention and was named one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year in 2001. The book is already being called a classic. A women's magazine editor wrote recently, "If The Feminine Mystique was the book that laid the seeds for the women's movement of the 1960's, The Price of Motherhood may someday be regarded as the one that did the same for the mothers' movement." Crittenden was a reporter for The New York Times for eight years, writing on a broad range of economic topics. She initiated numerous investigative reports and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also been a financial writer and foreign correspondent for Newsweek, a reporter for Fortune magazine, a visiting lecturer for MIT and Yale, an economics commentator for CBS News, and executive director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Her previous books include Sanctuary: A Story of American Conscience and the Law in Collision, one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year in 1988, and Killing the Sacred Cows: Bold Ideas for a New Economy (1993). Her articles have appeared in every national newspaper and numerous magazines, including Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Barron's, and Working Woman. Crittenden, a native of Dallas, Texas, is a graduate of Southern Methodist University and the Columbia University School of International Affairs. She completed all of the work except for the dissertation for a PhD in modern European history from Columbia. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served on the board of the International Center for Research on Women. She is married, has one son, and lives in Washington, D.C.

Martha Davis teaches Women's Rights; Immigration; and Professional Responsibility. Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty in 2002, she was vice president and legal director for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. As a women's rights practitioner, she was counsel in a number of cases before the US Supreme Court, including Nguyen v. INS, a challenge to sex-based citizenship laws that Professor Davis argued before the court. In 2003, Professor Davis received a Soros Reproductive Rights Fellowship; her project addressed the potential for subnational activism using international human rights norms. Professor Davis's research interests focus on women's poverty, human rights and U.S. law, and her article on state courts and international human rights law, "The Spirit of Our Times," was recently published in The N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change. She is co-director of Northeastern Law School's Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy and serves as chair of the Board of Directors of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative.

Lisa Dodson teaches and conducts field research about everyday knowledge and survival strategies of low-income people particularly those who are raising families. Current areas of research include the creative care strategies that mothers devise while employed in the low-wage labor market, discussed in the article Wage Poor Mothers and Moral Economy (2007) and field research into lives of careworkers in the expanding care labor force. Dodson is currently working on book that examines American wage poverty and acts of resistance in a "moral underground." Coursework includes: Poor Law to the Working Poor, Care and Inequality, and Research at the Margins. Dodson conducted extensive research during the years before, during and after welfare reform resulting in the book, Don't Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America (1999).

Donna Dolan is an International Union Representative for the Communications Workers of America. She has been the CWA District One's Director of Work/Family Issues for the past 16 years. She represented the Union in the joint labor/management partnership on Work/Family that CWA negotiated with Verizon in the late 1980's. She was jointly responsible for development and implementation of all work/family programs through the bargained for Dependent Care Fund. Ms. Dolan chairs the NYS Paid Family Leave Coalition and is a steering committee member of the Multi-State Consortium on Paid Leave. She also chairs the NYS AFL-CIO Task Force on Paid Family Leave. She is a founding Board member of the Alliance for Work/Life Progress and the New York City Child Care Coalition. She has spoken at numerous national work/family, labor/management, corporate and academic conferences on labor's involvement in work/family issues. She has been a panelist for PBS and Cable TV shows. She has been interviewed by National Public Radio and has been quoted in national magazines and books on Work/Family. She co-authored a chapter on Special Work/Life Initiatives in the book "Work/Life Effectiveness." She contributed to the Coalition of Labor Union Women / AFL-CIO publications "Bargaining for Families" and "Bargaining for Child Care." Ms. Dolan is a graduate of Boston College and holds a Master's Degree from Bowling Green State University.

Lisa Donner graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Social Studies. She worked as an organizer for the Service Employees International Union for four years, most of that time on the innovative Justice for Janitors campaign in Washington DC. Lisa subsequently worked for ACORN for 11 years, first as a Legislative Representative and then in turn as Legislative Director, National Campaign Director, Director of ACORN's Financial Justice Center, and as ACORN's National Director of Public Policy. In these varied roles she provided guidance and support to the managers of ACORN's state and local chapters on policy, strategy and campaign planning; ran and supervised others in running advocacy campaigns which won legislative and regulatory change at the state and local level; and played a key role in developing ACORN's legislative and policy agenda and in formulating and managing plans to implement it, and developed and ran issue campaigns which combined grass roots mobilization and direct action with legislative, regulatory, legal, and communications strategies. In November of 2006 she began work as Co Director of the Center for Working Families.

Emily Drucker is Assistant General Counsel to the 1199SEIU Family of Funds, a group of tax-exempt funds providing comprehensive health, pension and quality of life benefits to hospital, nursing home and home care workers represented by 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East. Her practice focuses on the Employee Benefits Income Security Act of 1974, the law of employee benefit plans and the laws governing tax-exempt organizations. Prior to her employment as Assistant General Counsel to these funds, Ms. Drucker was a Senior Consultant to William M. Mercer Consulting, providing employee benefits consulting services to corporate and tax-exempt clients. Ms. Drucker has worked with the New York State Paid Family Leave Coalition since 2000, providing technical expertise relating to the cost and structure of paid leave benefits, she currently serves as the Coalition's Director. She coordinated an actuarial cost-study of a paid leave benefit in New York, completed by Milliman USA, has worked with legislators and coalition partners on legislative language as well as helped organize community groups into the Coalition. Ms. Drucker is a graduate of Cornell University and Fordham University's School of Law.

Tricia Dwyer-Morgan is Director of Programs at the Business and Professional Women's Foundation. Currently, she is overseeing a new employer initiative designed to provide research, information and support to workingwomen and employers that facilitates the creation of successful workplaces that model work-life effectiveness, diversity and workplace equity. Ms. Dwyer-Morgan has over 14 years of professional experience in the nonprofit sector and worked as a reporter early in her career covering local and state politics. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Texas and a Master's Degree in Public Policy from Georgetown University.

Chai R. Feldblum is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., the Director of Georgetown's Federal Legislation Clinic, and Co-Director of Workplace Flexibility 2010. Professor Feldblum graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Frank M. Coffin on the First Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. While serving as a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, Feldblum was one of the lead lawyers crafting and negotiating the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. She is a nationally known scholar and advocate on disability rights and social welfare policy. As Director of the Federal Legislation Clinic, Professor Feldblum has represented (among other groups) Catholic Charities USA, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Health Privacy Project, the Family Violence Prevention Center, and the Epilepsy Foundation of America. In 2003, she launched and now co-directs Workplace Flexibility 2010. This initiative, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is engaged in a multi-year research, outreach and consensus-building effort designed to advance a national policy on workplace flexibility. The structure of Workplace Flexibility 2010 is based on Professor Feldblum's theory of advocacy, set forth in The Art of Legislative Lawyering and the Six Circles Theory of Advocacy, 34 MCGEORGE LAW REVIEW 785 (2003).

Cindy Fithian joined Legal Momentum's Washington, D.C. office last January. As Vice President of Legal Momentum's Family Initiative, her mission is clear: educating, engaging and mobilizing the public to speak out in support of quality early education, childcare, preschool and afterschool. "Quality early care and education should be available to every family that wants it," she says. "I've been a single parent for 17 years, juggling childcare for my two sons while working full time. This can be a daunting task. "The major goal for the Family Initiative, long term is to get federal legislation passed that will allow every individual or family to have access to affordable, quality early education and child care. Short term we need to build a grass-roots mobilization campaign so women and their families know their voices have to be heard to make a difference. Workforce development is a critical component to the formula for success. Most recently, Cindy served as Director of the Office of Labor Participation with the American Red Cross. Prior to that she was Political Director and Director of Legislative Action for the National Council of Senior Citizens.

Ester R. Fuchs is a Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science at Columbia University. After receiving her BA from Queens College, C.U.N.Y., she went on to receive her MA from Brown University, followed by a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She served as Special Advisor to the Mayor for Governance and Strategic Planning under New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. While at City Hall, Dr. Fuchs coordinated three significant mayoral initiatives: the restructuring the City's delivery of Out-of-School Time (OST) programs to children, youth, and families; the Integrated Human Services System Project (Access New York) to streamline the screening and eligibility determination processes, case management, and policy development and planning functions within and across the 13 human services agencies through the use of technology; and the merger of the Department of Employment with the Department of Small Business Services to align the City's workforce development programs with the needs of the business community. Dr. Fuchs was also appointed by Mayor Bloomberg to serve as Chair of the Charter Revision Commission. She was the first woman to serve in this capacity. Before going on a public service leave to join the Bloomberg Administration, Dr. Fuchs was Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Chair of the Urban Studies Program at Barnard and Columbia Colleges, and founding Director of the Columbia University Center for Urban Research and Policy. She continues to serve on the NYC Economic Opportunity Commission, the Workforce Investment Board and the Mayor's Sustainability Advisory Board. She has recently been the recipient of a grant from the Wallace Foundation Learning in Communities Initiative; the Guggenheim Foundation for summer public service internships; the Ford Foundation on Political Participation and the Civic Culture of Moslem Communities in NYC; the Greater London Enterprise to compare governance in London and New York; US Department of Justice on Implementation of the National Voter Registration Act; the National Health and Human Service Employees Union AFL-CIO project on Political Participation in NYC and NYS; a Ford Foundation grant on New Voices in State Fiscal Policy; the US Department of Housing and Urban Development evaluation of the federal homeless policy, the Continuum of Care; and Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Technical Assistance Project. She is the author of Mayor's and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago and a frequent political commentator on TV and radio. Dr. Fuchs lives in Manhattan with her husband, Daniel Victor, and their three children.

Deborah Glick, a lifelong resident of New York City, has lived in Greenwich Village for over thirty years. She graduated from Queens College of the City University of New York and received a Master of Business Administration degree from Fordham University. Deborah's political activism began in college and she is still strongly involved in grassroots organizing. As an elected official, she has focused on civil rights, reproductive freedom, health care, lesbian and gay rights, the environment, housing, higher education, social justice, and funding for the arts. Before her election to the Assembly, she served on Community Board 2 in Manhattan and worked with the National Organization for Women, the Women's Political Caucus, and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. Deborah is the first openly lesbian or gay member of the New York State legislature. Her legislative priorities include passage of the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), which was finally signed into law in December of 2002, and most recently, Assemblymember Glick's Hospital Visitation Bill became law in 2004, providing domestic partners the same rights that spouses and next-of-kin have when caring for a loved one in a hospital or nursing facility. She has worked on issues of concern to women for thirty years, including advocating for reproductive freedom, a change in the rape statutes, and women's health concerns. The Women's Health and Wellness Act, a bill that promotes early detection and prevention of certain medical conditions affecting women, including breast cancer and osteoporosis and provides coverage for contraceptives, became law on January 1, 2003. Deborah has always been a strong proponent of the arts and has consistently advocated for increases in funding statewide because of her conviction that the arts play a crucial role in the economic and cultural life of New York City and New York State. In January 2001, Deborah was made Chair of the Assembly Social Services Committee. This committee works to protect the interests of New York's most vulnerable individuals who are receiving government assistance or participating in government assistance programs.

Janet Gornick, a Political Economist (Harvard Ph.D. 1994), is on the faculty at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Professor of Political Science at Baruch College. She is also Director of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), a cross-national research institute and data archive based in Luxembourg. Most of her research is comparative, across the industrialized countries, and concerns social welfare policies and their impact on family well-being and gender equality. Her core interest is in public programs that affect parents' capacity to combine employment with caregiving, such as child care, paid family leave, the regulation of working time, and income supports targeted on families with children. More recently, she is studying older workers in comparative perspective. Professor Gornick has published articles on the subject of work-family policies in several academic journals, including the American Sociological Review; The Annual Review of Sociology; The Journal of European Social Policy; Social Science Quarterly; the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis; and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Her book -- Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Work and Family -- co-authored by Marcia Meyers, was published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2003, and released in paperback in 2005. She is currently serving as Guest Editor for "Work-Family Reconciliation Policies in High-Employment Economies: Policy Designs and their Consequences," a Special Double Issue of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice. She has also published her work in popular venues, including The American Prospect, Dissent, and Challenge Magazine. Her research has been supported by several sponsors, including the Russell Sage Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Governors' Association, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. She serves on several advisory boards, including the Council on Contemporary Families; A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center; and the Journal of European Social Policy.

Ariane Hegewisch is international fellow at the Center for WorkLife Law UC Hastings and scholar- in- residence at the Institute for Women's Policy Research, Washington DC. She is an expert on international research on work family reconciliation Before coming to the U.S. she was a lecturer on comparative European Human Resource Management at Cranfield University School of Management in the UK, after working as a policy advisor in UK local government on gender and employment issues. She was a co-founder of the UK Pay Equity Campaign. She holds a degree in economics from the London School of Economics and an MPhil in Development Studies from the IDS, University of Sussex.

Jody Heymann holds a Canada Research Chair in Global Health and Social Policy and is founding director of the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy. Dr. Heymann is a professor in the Faculties of Medicine and Arts at McGill University, Adjunct Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, as well as founding director of the Project on Global Working Families at Harvard University and founding chair of the Initiative on Work, Family, and Democracy. For a decade and a half, Dr. Heymann has led research on working families and their children globally. She has served in an advisory capacity to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other organizations. Dr. Heymann has authored more than a hundred academic and policy publications, including, among others, Forgotten Families: Ending the Growing Crisis Confronting Children and Working Parents in the Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006), Healthier Societies: From Analysis to Action (Oxford University Press, 2006), Unfinished Work: Building Democracy and Equality in an Era of Working Families (New Press, 2005), and The Widening Gap: Why America's Working Families Are in Jeopardy and What Can Be Done about It (Basic Books, 2001). Her work has been featured on CNN Headline News, Good Morning America, and National Public Radio, and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. Dr. Heymann received her PhD. in Public Policy from Harvard University, where she was selected in a university-wide competition as a merit scholar, and her MD with honors from Harvard Medical School. She trained in Pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Boston.

Betty Holcomb is recognized as a leading authority on working women, parenting and early education issues. Author of two books on work and family issues, she also served for more than a decade as deputy editor of Working Mother Magazine where she oversaw the development of the magazine's list of "best companies" for working moms. She also created a benchmark annual survey of child care at the state level, which was widely used by state governors and advocates to measure progress on early care and education. An award-winning journalist, her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Columbia Journalism Review, Ms., New York, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and Glamour. She currently works as policy director for Child Care, Inc. in New York City, focusing on early care and education issues at the city, state and national level and serves as a member of the advisory committee for the National Campaign for Family Leave Benefits, and as a consulting editor to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

Lilly W. Icikson earned her BA at Barnard College and a master's degree in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government where she studied housing and community economic development. She worked for five years in Price Waterhouse's Office of Government Services management consulting practice in Washington DC. She worked with federal, state and local agencies on a wide range of policy and management issues, providing on site technical assistance and management and policy studies for housing and economic development entities. Working with Barnard's Office of Alumnae Affairs, she currently serves as the chair of Alma Maters, an alumnae group committed to fostering open, thoughtful discussion and programs about motherhood at all life stages. She is the mother of 2 school-age boys.

Janet R. Jakobsen is Director of the Center for Research on Women and a Professor of Women's Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Indiana University Press, 1998), co-author (with Ann Pellegrini) of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York University Press, 2002), and co-editor (with Elizabeth A. Castelli) of Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence (Palgrave 2004) She is currently working on a book project, Sex, Secularism and Social Movements: The Value of Ethics in a Global Economy. Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst and lobbyist in Washington, DC.

Letitia "Tish" James, Council Member from the 35th District, was lucky enough to be born in Brooklyn, and except for her law school education at Howard University in Washington, D.C., she has lived in Brooklyn all her life. She loves her community, in all its diversity, and has devoted her life to helping it thrive. As Counsel and Chief of Staff to state assembly members, she saw, up close, that government could be made to work in the public's interest. For example, James worked on a law that gave grandparents rights in family court, and negotiated a bill that allocated money for reconstruction of the Franklin Avenue Shuttle and Atlantic Terminal Station. She also negotiated legislation pertaining to childcare, health care and the protection of transit workers. In Albany, she worked with the Black, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caucus, and other progressive Democrats. During her law career, James served as a public defender for the Legal Aid Society and represented countless young individuals in the criminal justice system. In the administration of NYS Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, she was appointed the first Assistant Attorney General in Charge of the Brooklyn Regional Office. In that capacity, she resolved hundreds of consumer complaints and investigated predatory lenders who prey on first-time homebuyers. She assisted the Civil Rights Bureau's investigation of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy and cracked down on firms engaged in deceptive business practices including violations of human rights, environmental laws and immigration scams. James founded the Urban Network, a coalition of minority professional organizations that raises money and distributes college scholarships to inner city youth. She attended New York City public schools and CUNY's Lehman College prior to Howard University Law School. In 2003, she completed her Master's in Public Administration at Columbia University's Graduate School of International and Public Affairs.

Kate Kahan is the Director of Work and Family Programs at the National Partnership for Women & Families. In this role, Ms. Kahan is a key leader in the formulation and implementation of long- and short-term legislative and policy strategies to advance work and family issues, particularly paid leave initiatives, at the federal and state levels. Before joining the National Partnership, Ms. Kahan served Senator Baucus, the Finance Committee, and the Senate for two years as the "go-to person" on federal welfare, childcare, child support, and unemployment policy. In that role, Ms. Kahan helped forge landmark bipartisan welfare legislation in the Finance Committee that provides the blueprint for the future of the federal welfare system. Prior to joining the Senate Finance Committee, Ms. Kahan was the Executive Director of Working for Equality and Economic Liberation (WEEL) for five years, a grassroots economic and social justice organization whose staff and membership is comprised of people experiencing poverty. She brings with her both personal and professional experience with low-income issues. Ms. Kahan received her Bachelors of Science in Women's Studies at the University of Montana. She is also mom to 13 year old Elliot, an adventure runner and avid reader.

Jodi Kantor is a reporter for The New York Times.

Rhonda Kave is a professional women's advocate, co-chair of the Board of Trustees of the National Association of Mothers' Centers and a founding member of its MOTHERS initiative [www.MothersOughtToHaveEqualRightS.org], a national grassroots advocacy effort seeking economic rights for family caregivers. Ms. Kave is Transitional Housing Project Coordinator for the Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence [NCCADV] where she has done direct client work in addition to program and administrative supervision since March of 2001. Prior to that Ms. Kave served as a volunteer at SHAF, the Coalition's Safe Home for Abused Families as well as being an active fundraiser, chairing the Spring Gala and the Journal committee. As part of her current role, Ms. Kave also serves on several local human services committees including; the Family and Children's Committee of the Advisory Council to the Nassau County Department of Social Services, the Nassau County Section 8 Family Self-Sufficiency Program Coordinating Committee and the Nassau Continuum of Care Committee. Ms. Kave is also a Dean's List student at NYU studying for her BA as a returning learnerÑshe will graduate in May 2007.

Deborah King is currently the Executive Director of the 1199SEIU Training and Employment Funds. Deborah joined the 1199SEIU Training and Employment Funds as Executive Director in 1995 and in ten years has helped develop this organization from a staff of 65 to a staff of 270 talented professionalsÑtraining over 30,000 health care workers per year. Ms. King has been involved in quality health care and labor relations for over 40 years. She started her career as an organizer for District 65, RWDSU in 1964. She has held leadership positions as Vice President and Executive Vice President at 1199 SEIU in New York City during which time 1199 SEIU became the leading union in the country. In this position she played a key role in developing innovative training, employment security, and labor-management initiatives. Ms. King is a national proponent for better jobs for workers as a way to achieve quality health care and increase the economic viability of health care institutions. Over the last 10 years, she has initiated projects that have brought millions of dollars of state and federal grants to support health care workers and the health care industry in New York. She is an international leader in joint partnership work in health care and is currently directing the International Action Research Project (IARP), a collaborative initiative which brings together international leaders in health care to compare best practices in delivery of quality care. She is also the Project Director of the Health Careers Advancement Program (HCAP), a national project to develop innovative career ladders for health care workers. Ms. King has been an adjunct professor at the New York State School of Industrial Relations, Cornell University in labor-management and work and family issues for 10 years. Ms. King lived and worked in Ireland for five years, during which time she worked for the Irish Transport & General Workers Union (now SIPTU) and was a faculty member at the College of Industrial Relations in Dublin. Ms. King has a B.S. from Cornell University in Industrial and Labor Relations. She is a member of the New York City Workforce Investment Board and Chairperson of the New York Union Child Care Coalition. She is a board member of Child Care, Inc., and the New York City Employment and Training Coalition.

Donna Klein is the President and CEO of Corporate Voices for Working Families, a 501(c)(3) non-profit coalition of leading corporations committed to building bipartisan public and private-sector support for federal and state public policies that strengthen working families. Previously, as Vice President of Workplace Effectiveness at Marriott International, Inc., Washington, DC, Donna guided the strategic formation, planning, development, implementation and management of corporate-wide diversity and work-life initiatives for Marriott for 15 years. Donna is past Chair of The Conference Board's WorkLife Leadership Council, and a member of the Conference Board's Diversity Council. She is an Advisory Council member of Boston College's Work and Family Roundtable, an Advisory Board member of The Berger Institute for Work, Family & Children, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA, and a member of the Family & Children Committee of the National Academy of Science, Washington, DC. She also serves on the Advisory Board of Bright Horizons Family Solutions, Boston, MA, the Advisory Council of the Southern Institute on Children and Families, and the After School Alliance. Donna and Marriott were recognized for her work by being selected to receive the Optimus Award for Corporate Courage, from the Personnel Journal, in l996. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Metropolitan Washington Work Life Coalition in December 1998. Also in l998, Donna was profiled in the National Association of Female Executives magazine, and in 1999 Donna was honored to receive the Pacesetter's Award from the National Restaurant Association's Women's Forum for her work on women's leadership. In 2004, Donna was awarded the Work-Life Legacy Award from the Family and Work Institute.

Tovah Klein is Director of the Barnard Center for Toddler Development and adjunct Assistant Professor in Psychology. The Toddler Center is a research, education/training and community program focused on the developmental needs of toddlers and their families. Her research focuses on the roles parents play in the early socialization and development of their children. Her most recent research is on parenting young children- a study involving 220 interviews with mothers and fathers about being parents of young children, including how parents manage work and family decisions, juggling and balance. She co-leads an NIMH funded study of the impact of the World Trade Center disaster on children under 5 and their parents. Dr. Klein is on the advisory board of Room to Grow, an organization serving mothers with children ages 0-3 living in poverty and is a Developmental Advisor to Sesame Street. She has written on children's peer relationships, the play of young children, and trauma in young children.

Karen Kornbluh is Policy Director for U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL). Previously, she was director and founder of the New America Foundation's Work and Family Program. Her articles on economic and family policy have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Democracy, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Washington Monthly; and she has been a guest on public radio and on CNN. Her recent article "Families Valued" was cited by NY Times columnist David Brooks as one of the best magazine articles of the year. Kornbluh served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the US Treasury Department to Secretary Robert Rubin and as Director of Legislative Affairs at the Federal Communications Commission. Before her government service, she was a management consultant advising Fortune 500 companies on business strategy. Kornbluh received a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a BA in Economic and English from Bryn Mawr College.

Maureen Lane is Welfare Policy and Higher Education Fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy and Co-Director of the Welfare Rights Initiative at Hunter College, CUNY. She was in the first graduating class of the Community Leadership Seminar of Welfare Rights Initiative (WRI) at Hunter College in 1995. As a student, she was supported by public assistance. Today, she is the Co-Director of WRI and a DMI Fellow, focusing on issues of welfare policy and higher education. WRI is a grassroots student activist and leadership training organization located at Hunter College, which seeks to mobilize, empower and support women directly affected by welfare policy. As Co- Director, Maureen spearheaded WRI's broad campaign to successfully pass New York State legislation in 2000, expanding access to education as a route out of poverty. Maureen has been instrumental in fostering sustainable relationships with policy makers, advocates, activists, academics, service providers, business and civic leaders to support WRI's mission. From 1996-2002, Maureen chaired the Client Empowerment Committee for the Welfare Reform Network (WRN) of the Federation for Protestant Welfare Agencies. She also serves on the Steering Committee of WRN, and the Advisory Board of Make the Road by Walking and Solutions for Economic Justice, Empowerment and Dignity (SEED). As a Human Rights Fellow, Maureen was the Asylum Project intern for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1995Ñ1996. As an honor student in the Thomas Hunter Honors Program at Hunter, Maureen graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in June 2000. She is currently enrolled in the Master of Social Work program at Hunter College School of Social Work.

Sherry Leiwant is a co-founder and board member of A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center. She is an Adjunct Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law teaching upper level classes on civil rights. From 1996 until 2005, Sherry was a senior staff attorney at NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund running the State Advocacy Project, working on issues intersecting women's rights and poverty, including reproductive health, violence and child care. Prior to joining NOW Legal Defense Fund, she spent 12 years as a senior staff attorney at the Welfare Law Center, a national legal organization doing litigation and public advocacy on a variety of income support issues around the country. Prior to that, she was a staff attorney at the Department of Health Education and Welfare and an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Sherry graduated from Princeton University and from Columbia University School of Law School. She has three children and has served on the Boards of Bank Street College of Education and Basic Trust Infant and Toddler Center.

Carolyn Lerner is a founding partner of Heller, Huron, Chertkof, Lerner, Simon & Salzman, a Washington, D.C. civil rights and employment law firm. Ms. Lerner represents individuals and advises non-profits in civil rights and employment cases with an emphasis on sex discrimination, including sexual harassment and family responsibility discrimination. From 2003-2005, Ms. Lerner was the federal court-appointed Special Inspector for Sexual Harassment for the D.C. Department of Corrections, pursuant to a consent decree in Neal v. D.C. Department of Corrections. In that capacity, she directed the Office of Special Inspector, developed and implemented new sexual harassment policies and training; supervised a team of attorneys in complaint investigation; and ruled on the merits of complaints. Ms. Lerner Chairs the Board of the Center for Work Life Law and serves on the Center's attorney network. She is a frequent lecturer and trainer on issues involving family responsibilities and sex discrimination. Ms. Lerner received her J.D. from NYU School of Law, where she was Root-Tilden-Snow public interest scholar, and clerked for the Hon. Julian A. Cook, Jr., Chief U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Michigan.

Sharon Lerner is a journalist who has covered a wide range of issues of concern to women for more than a decade. She is currently working on a book about the struggle of low-income parents to balance work and family and is a senior fellow at The Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. She has worked as a reporter for The Village Voice, where she wrote two columns and covered women's issues and health. She has also worked as a producer of the public radio show The Infinite Mind, and reporter of a radio documentary about HIV-infected teens. Her written work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The American Prospect and Ms. magazine among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2005 Front Page Award for News Coverage, the 2005 Jane Cunningham Croly/GFWC Print Journalism Award for excellence in covering issues of concern to women; a special EMMA award from the Women and Politics Institute for coverage of women's issues post 9/11; the Ray Brunner Science Writing Award from the American Public Health Association; and a National Headliner Award for her radio feature reporting. She lives in Brooklyn.

Carin Mirowitz is a Senior Policy Analyst in the office of New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

Ed Ott is the Executive Director of the New York City Central Labor Council/AFL-CIO, representing over 1.5 million working men and women from 400 affiliated labor organizations throughout New York City. Ed is best known for being able to bring together unions from every sector of the labor movement for a common goal. Dedicating himself for over 37 years in the "fight for fairness" within the labor movement, Ed believes "as long as we have economic inequality, we have work to do." As Executive Director, Ed has put greater emphasis on the standards that workers face every day on the job and issues in the city that face working people in general. In furthering a social agenda, Ed has consistently broadened out the scope of standard labor issues to include affordable housing, transportation, tenant advocacy, immigrant rights and women's issues. Ed strongly believes the civil rights questions have not been finished until immigrants have full rights.

Laurie Pettine is the Chair of The National Organization for Women's Mothers' and Caregivers' Economic Rights advisory committee (NOW-MCER) ; NOW-MCER is a regionally representative ad hoc committee comprised of chapter, state and national activists and experts that work with the National NOW Board and the national officers to develop chapter resources and action items. Ms. Pettine is also Chair of NOW New Jersey's MCER Task force. The task force works with grassroots coalitions to forward a NJ Family Leave Insurance program and as well as other legislative initiatives. The NOW-NJ MCER Task force provides materials and action items to NOW NJ local chapters.

Sandra Pinnavaia is Senior Vice President of the Business Talent Group, a young and quickly growing firm that connects high-level independent business professionals with high-impact project-based work - both for consultants and for operating leaders - in corporate, nonprofit, and private equity organizations. She is a management consultant, experienced board director, and active community leader whose work has focused on global health care businesses, educational institutions, and entrepreneurial nonprofit organizations. Ms. Pinnavaia was educated as a biochemist and joined McKinsey & Company as part of the first wave of non-traditional hires at this global consulting firm. She consulted for eight years with McKinsey, emphasizing strategy and new business development in the health care industry with payers, providers, and manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and other health care products. Ms. Pinnavaia has consulted independently for 10 years, building a practice that focused on the strategic growth of founder-led nonprofit organizations and on the effectiveness of senior management teams and boards. Ms. Pinnavaia was a Marshall Scholar. She holds an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, Trinity College, where she also founded U.K. Student Pugwash. She is a summa cum laude graduate of the Honors College at Michigan State University. She lives in New York with her husband and three children.

Ai-jen Poo is the Lead Organizer for Domestic Workers United, an organization of domestic workers in NY organizing for power, respect, fair labor standards and to help end exploitation and oppression for all. She is also Associate Director of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, a grassroots organization of low-income Asian immigrant communities in NY working to build power and help build a movement for racial and economic justice in NY. She has been organizing immigrant women workers since 1997, and is a recipient of Open Society Institute Community Fellowship, the Union Square Award and the Leadership for a Changing World Award.

Nancy A. Rankin is Director of Policy Research at Community Service Society, a nonprofit advocacy organization working to advance economic opportunities for low-income New Yorkers. Five years ago she inaugurated The Unheard Third, an annual survey that tracks the hardships and views of low-income New Yorkers. This research has drawn extensive media attention, and been cited by Newsweek, The New York Times, the ethnic press, and in two New York Daily News editorials. She is the author of recent articles and reports including The Other Mothers, a New York Times op-ed (with Betsy Gotbaum), Shortchanging Security: How Poor Training, Low Pay and Lack of Job Protection for Security Guards Undermine Public Safety in NYC (with Mark Levitian), Making the Grade: An Analysis of Factors That Predict Student Achievement on Regents Exams in New York City Public High Schools, and Help or Hurdles? Experiences of Welfare Leavers in the South Bronx Accessing Subsidized Child Care. Prior to joining CSS, Ms. Rankin served as executive director of the National Parenting Association, a nonprofit working to make parenting a higher priority on the public agenda. She coined the term "on ramps" to call attention to the need to create mechanisms to help parents, who have taken time out of the workplace, get back up to speed and re-enter the career highway. She is co-editor, with Sylvia A. Hewlett and Cornel West, of Taking Parenting Public: The Case for a New Social Movement, published in 2002. Previously, Ms. Rankin was vice-president of Ukeles Associates, a management consulting firm to nonprofit and city agencies. Her planning and community organizing work in the Bronx resulted in the creation of Neighborhood Initiatives Development Corporation. This LDC brought major institutions and community groups together as partners to successfully raise funds for apartment rehabilitation and neighborhood revitalization. She has held positions in New York City and State government, where she was responsible for creating the statewide Enriched Housing program as an alternative to institutional care for the elderly. Ms. Rankin serves on the board of DOROT, an agency that mobilizes volunteers to help homebound and homeless elders. She is a Trustee of Central Synagogue. She received her Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton University and holds a diploma in Social Services from Stockholm University, Sweden. She graduated with honors from Cornell.

Carolyn Sévos is President of IntraCommunities, Inc. (ICI). Specializing in secure ecommerce and interactive community websites, ICI is an innovative full-service internet technology solutions company providing server provisioning, hosting, website development and ongoing maintenance services. Ms. Sévos consults with a wide variety of businesses and organizations with the goal of bringing greater understanding and access of online technology to the workplace. After 9/11 under the aegis of the District 1 office, ICI launched an emergency database and website for displaced residents. She was the IT manager and co-author of the CWE/NYFA/DowntownNYC survey on the economic impact of 9/11 upon New York artists and art organizations. Previously, she taught social studies at Murry Bergtraum High School in NYC. Ms. Sévos currently serves as VP of Public Policy for the National Association of Women Business Owners- New York City Chapter.

Jael Silliman is the Program Officer for Women's Rights & Gender Equity in the Human Rights unit under the Peace and Social Justice program of the Ford Foundation. Her grant making initiatives includes achieving substantive economic and social justice for women and affirming women's rights and gender equity through 1) reconstructing the law to advance women's rights, 2) re-visioning and actualizing the economic and social rights of women, and 3) strengthening emergent feminist organizations of underrepresented groups. Immediately before that, she was the Program Officer for Sexual & Reproductive Health. Prior to joining the Ford Foundation, Jael had been a tenured Associate Professor in the Women's Studies Department at the University of Iowa. Jael served as a Program Officer at the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation where she developed that foundation's Population and Reproductive Rights program in the U.S. and abroad. Jael has spoken widely in the US and internationally on issues of transnational feminist movements, population and reproductive rights, women of color organizing, and environmental justice concerns. She is active in several foundation-related affinity groups including Committee on Indigenous People, Sexual and Reproductive Health, and Affirmative Action Committee. Jael is the recipient of the Iowa City Human Rights Commission International Human Rights Award and an Open Society Fellow. She is the author of numerous books and articles. Her most recent co-authored book, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, received a 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award in the area of bigotry and human rights. She is also the author of Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from A Diaspora of Hope, and co-editor of Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and Development and Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization.

Sarah Solon began her job as a Policy and Communications Associate at the Drum Major Institute in June of 2006. Aside for her duties as a managing editor of TortDeform.com: The Civil Justice Defense Blog, Sarah organizes DMI's Fellows program, which provides research and communications support to grassroots issue activists and attempts to insert their on-the-ground expertise into public policy conversations too often dominated by pundits in ivory towers. Sarah is a frequent contributor to DMIBlog.com, and authored DMI's Year in Review, a report analyzing 2006 trends in public policy. Before DMI, Sarah served as the President of Publications at Colorado College and as a contributing editor of the CiPher, her school's award-winning news and arts magazine. She's also worked as an intern at BUST magazine, as a Public Affairs intern at Planned Parenthood, and as a research and writing intern at an economic consulting firm. As a Women and Public Policy major at Colorado College, Sarah wrote a senior thesis on gendered recruitment and training tactics, as well as sexual assault policy and sex-specific combat assignments in the United States military.

Judith Stadtman Tucker is a writer and activist. She is the founder and editor of The Mothers Movement Online, a non-commercial web site providing resources and reporting on women, work, family and public policy. She is currently an active member of the national NOW Mothers' and Caregivers' Economic Rights Committee and was formerly the Senior Manager of National Advocacy for Mothers & More. Other recent projects include co-coordination of the Association for Research on Mothering Conference on Caregiving and Carework (York University, May 2006), contributing a chapter on advocacy for pregnant and parenting women's workplace rights to the forthcoming Our Bodies, Ourselves Pregnancy and Childbirth guide, and organizing a panel presentation on trends in media coverage of gender, work and family (with Caryl Rivers and Boston Globe reporter Patricia Wen) for the 2006 Women, Action and Media Conference. Her writing on caregiving, social policy and maternal activism has also appeared in the Huffington Post, Off Our Backs, and in several recent and forthcoming anthologies, including Socializing Care: Feminist Ethics and Public Issues (2006). She lives in New Hampshire.

Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President, brings an ambitious and substantive agenda to the office. In his inaugural address he said he would focus on smart community development; creating and promoting more affordable housing; working to combat domestic violence; and developing after school programs to help the more than 60,000 Manhattan school-age kids in need of supervised activities but without access to them. Scott has made reforming Manhattan's Community Boards a major priority of his administration. In his first speech as Borough President Scott pledged to "work in every corner of the borough to make planning sensible, housing affordable and Manhattan livable for working families."

Susannah Vickers serves as Director of Budget and Grants for Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. Prior this position, Susannah served as then Assemblymember Stringer's Chief of Staff for 5 years. She has a Masters of Public Administration from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at NYU. The Manhattan Borough President's office has direct control over a portion of the city's capital and expense budget. For fiscal year Ô07 that total was $30 million. This money is to be spent on projects in Manhattan--and grants the Borough President a significant opportunity to use that resource to better the lives of all Manhattan residents. Susannah oversees the office's three different grant programs: Capital, Borough Needs and Cultural Tourism.

Anna Wadia has 20 years experience in domestic and international philanthropy, economic development and women's political participation. She has supported and documented strategies to improve low-wage jobs and increase opportunities for low-income women and their families, as well as efforts to encourage voter engagement and bring women's voices into policy debates. Most recently, Ms. Wadia has been consulting with the Ford Foundation, National Council for Research on Women and the Ms. Foundation on projects ranging from expanding funder interest in work/family issues to designing and analyzing of a poll on women's priorities and perspectives leading up to the 2006 mid-term elections. Prior to launching her own consulting business, Ms. Wadia managed community and economic development programming for the Ms. Foundation for Women in the United States, and for the Ford Foundation and Catholic Relief Services in Africa. Ms. Wadia co-authored Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs: How Eleven Women Escaped Poverty and Became Their Own Bosses, published by Westview Press, as well as several reports on best practice in women's economic empowerment. She earned her BA from Yale University in 1984 and holds a Master's Degree in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

Yolanda Wu is a co-founder and current Board Chair of A Better Balance. Since 2003, she has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, where she teaches an upper level seminar on sex discrimination law. She is also a consulting project attorney to the National Judicial Education Program, developing a curriculum on understanding sexual violence for judges in four states. From 1994 to 2003, Yolanda was an attorney at NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (now Legal Momentum), where she litigated impact cases in the areas of employment discrimination, educational equity, access to reproductive health care and equal protection, and conducted legislative and public policy advocacy on a wide range of women's rights issues. She is grateful that her current part-time workload enables her to spend more time with her two children, ages 6 and 4. Yolanda is a graduate of the UCLA School of Law and Princeton University.

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