Chef Pearl Thompson is an educator, activist, and food justice advocate, who has fought for wage equity, healthy work environments, and opposed racial and gender oppression in the food service industry. For decades she has used her work training chefs to fight against food insecurity and food apartheid. Chef Pearl's work as an anti-racism trainer has also helped her to expand her work in combating systematic racial oppression that plagues the lives of Black, Brown and Indigenous people in this country.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized and widely published political economist specializing in cooperative economics, community economic development, racial wealth inequality, solidarity economics, Black Political Economy, popular economic literacy, and community-based approaches to justice. She is the author of the renowned book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice as well as an inductee into the U.S. Cooperative Hall of Fame. Dr. Jessica currently serves as a Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development, in the Department of Africana Studies, at John Jay College (CUNY).