Keynote Speakers
Marian Wright Edelman, Founder and President of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. Under her leadership, CDF has become the nation’s strongest voice for children and families. The Leave No Child Behind® mission of the Children's Defense Fund is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
Mrs. Edelman, a graduate of Spelman College and Yale Law School, began her career in the mid-60s when, as the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. In l968, she moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel for the Poor People's Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began organizing before his death. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and the parent body of the Children's Defense Fund. For two years she served as the Director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University and in l973 began CDF.
Mrs. Edelman served on the Board of Trustees of Spelman College which she chaired from 1976 to 1987 and was the first woman elected by alumni as a member of the Yale University Corporation on which she served from 1971 to 1977. She has received many honorary degrees and awards including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings, which include eight books: Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change; The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours; Guide My Feet: Meditations and Prayers on Loving and Working for Children; Stand for Children; Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors; Hold My Hand: Prayers for Building a Movement to Leave No Child Behind; I'm Your Child, God: Prayers for Our Children; and I Can Make a Difference: A Treasury to Inspire Our Children. Her latest book, The Sea is So Wide and My Boat is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation, was released in bookstores on September 23, 2008.
She is a board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, the Association to Benefit Children, and City Lights School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
Marian Wright Edelman is married to Peter Edelman, a Professor at Georgetown Law School. They have three sons, Joshua, Jonah, and Ezra; two granddaughters, Ellika and Zoe; and two grandsons, Elijah and Levi.
• • • • • •
Atul Gawande is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He is also Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. His research has concentrated on strategies to improve medical performance and public health. He became director of the World Health Organization's global campaign to reduce surgical deaths in 2007.
Dr. Gawande served as a senior health policy advisor in the Clinton presidential campaign and White House from 1992 to 1993. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 1998. In 2006, Dr. Gawande received a MacArthur Award for his research and writing. His nonfiction writing has been selected to appear in the annual Best American Essays collection three times and in Best American Science Writing seven of the last eight years. His book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002 and is published in more than twenty languages. His most recent book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, was a New York Times bestseller and selected as one of the ten best books of 2007 by Amazon.com and the Sunday Times of London.
• • • • • •
