Raised in Lakeview, Long Island, Fred Brewington is a respected lawyer and community advocate with a distinguished legal career. After working at a number of prestigious firms and law offices, including a clerkship at the office of the Legal Counsel of the United States Senate, Fred Brewington began a private practice on Long Island. With his expertise in civil rights litigation, Fred has successfully challenged the 'at large' Voting system in the Town of Hempstead and worked on preventing future unconstitutional and discriminatory purging of voters from the voting role. Through litigation, writing and lecturing, Fred continues to challenge other discriminatory practices throughout Long Island. Fred is an Adjunct Professor at Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, Touro College, has served as President of the Alumni Association of SUNY, Albany and remains a member of the Board. Providing services pro bono, Mr. Brewington has been an advisor to many community groups and organizations. He has also served as a Trustee and as Chairman of the Administrative Board of the Church of the Good Shepard United Methodist; is a Certified lay speaker for the Long Island East District of the New York Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church and currently is an instructor for Local Lay Speakers. He is a volunteer football coach in the Malverne School District. Fred Brewington graduated from State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany with a Bachelor of Arts degree and from Northeastern University School of Law. A tireless advocate, Fred is the recipient of many honors and awards for his community and public service.

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Valerie Cartright is an attorney with the Law Office of Frederick K. Brewington. She concentrates on civil rights, criminal defense and general civil litigation.  She formerly practiced at the Law Office of J. Stewart Moore, P.C. and L'Abbate, Balkan, Colavita and Contini, LLP. Ms. Cartright received a Juris Doctorate from Touro College Jacob D. Fuschberg Law Center where she served a term as President of the Black Law Students Association and earned numerous awards including the National Association of Women Lawyers Outstanding Achievement Award, the CALI Academic Excellence Awards for Contracts I and Racism and American Law, and Touro Law Center Awards for Special Service, Exceptional Contributions to the Growth of the Law Center, and Exceptional Service to the Public and the Community. While a law student at Touro, Ms. Cartright worked with ERASE Racism as a research assistant. She assisted on the Housing Discrimination and Employment Discrimination project researching all of New York and Federal Discrimination laws and how they applied to private, state and federal agencies, drafting questionnaires and surveys to send to New York Agencies concerning the discrimination and affirmative action programs at their agencies. Ms. Cartright gained additional legal experience as a legal assistant and legal intern at law offices on Long Island, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York and in Paris, France. Ms. Cartright is admitted to practice before the Courts of the States of New York and New Jersey and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Ms. Cartright's admission before the State of Florida is pending. Ms. Cartright is a member of the New York State, National Bar and Amistad Suffolk County Black Bar Associations. Ms. Cartright presently serves as the Chairwoman of the Board of Project Hope-The New Direction, a not-for-profit organization which provides educational, social and recreational services for underprivileged children between the ages of 8 and 18.

Professor Howard A. Glickstein started his legal career as an Associate with the New York law firm of Proskauer, Rose, Goetz & Mendelsohn, specializing in labor law. He served as a Staff Attorney with the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Appeals and Research Section, where he helped draft the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was General Counsel, and later Staff Director, of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Professor Glickstein also has served as Director of the Notre Dame Center for Civil Rights; Adjunct Professor, Notre Dame Law School; and Professor and Director of the Equal Employment Litigation Clinic at Howard University School of Law.

He was Dean of the University of Bridgeport School of Law from 1980 to 1985, during which time the school obtained full accreditation from the American Bar Association (ABA) and membership in the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). He was been Dean and Professor of Law at Touro from 1986 to 2004, and obtained full ABA accreditation for the school in 1989 and membership in the AALS in 1994.

Professor Glickstein is an active member in a number of bar associations, and a member of the Board of Directors of numerous organizations concerned with civil rights. He is a Commissioner of the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission; Chair of the Town of Huntington Board of Ethics and Financial Disclosure; a member of the New York State Bar Association Special Committee on Public Trust and Confidence in the Legal System and a member of the New York State Chief Judge's Commission on Fiduciary Appointments. Professor Glickstein is a former Chair of the ABA Affirmative Action Committee and a past president of the Society of American Law Teachers.

Ms. Gross has nearly 30 years of experience in research, program development and evaluation at public and private agencies in the U.S. Throughout her career, Ms. Gross has focused on exploring the systemic causes of social, political, and economic inequities and finding ways to counteract those inequities. While working in Boston , she developed and managed human service delivery systems and tenant advocacy initiatives for the Boston Housing Authority; was Vice President for Programs at the Urban League; and was Community Relations Director of the Lead Free Kids Project at Boston Health and Hospitals. She was Deputy Director of the Boston Housing Partnership, a premier public/private partnership supporting community development and affordable housing in fragile inner-city neighborhoods. She earned her MSW from Boston University , with a focus on policy, planning, and non-profit management. Subsequently, in New York , Ms. Gross served as a Program Officer for the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock and developed a portfolio of grants across the U.S. focused on human rights and economic development. She then served as the founding Executive Director of Sustainable America, a New York-based national NGO that promoted sustainable, equitable development practices and policies. Ms. Gross was hired by the Long Island Community Foundation to launch the ERASE Racism Initiative in June 2001. Ms. Gross has successfully led ERASE Racism, bringing together a cross section of Long Island leaders to discuss and formulate remedies to persistent regional inequities, resulting from imbedded institutional racism in health, education, and housing. In 2004, ERASE Racism became an independent New York State not-for-profit corporation.

Ms. Gross serves on the six-member Long Island Regional Planning Board, appointed by the Nassau County Executive and approved by the Nassau Legislature. She also services on the Executive Committee of Sustainable Long Island board of directors. She serves on the board of the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island, on the Advisory Board of Vital Signs at Adelphi University , and on the Advisory Committee of Long Island Index.

Dr. Jordan is Associate Dean for Student Affairs, Stony Brook University School of Medicine and has over 30 years experience as an administrator, teacher and researcher. He holds faculty appointments in the School of Social Welfare and the Department of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University. Dr. Jordan's career has included planning and implementing collegiate programs aimed at educational opportunity for African-American, Latino, Native American and economically disadvantaged students and lecturing extensively on issues related to institutional racism, especially in the area of higher education. Dr. Jordan is active in both campus and community organizations. He is President of the Black Faculty and Staff Association at Stony Brook, served as President of the University Senate and is Co-Chair of the University's Campus Climate Task Force. Dr. Jordan serves on the Board of the Long Island Community Foundation, is a founding member and Chairman of the Board of ERASE Racism, President of the Board of Directors for Literacy Suffolk, Inc. and has served as Chair of the Suffolk County Youth Board. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards related to his community service and commitment to youth, including the Suffolk Community Council Long Island "Man of the Year" and Networking Magazine's David Award. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Cheyney State College, a Masters of Arts from Adelphi University, and a Doctorate of Education from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

David E. McClean is Principal of David E. McClean & Associates, a consultancy providing advice to investment firms, and the reincarnation of his old consultancy, The DMA Consulting Group (Ltd.). Until January of 2005, Mr. McClean was Director, Chief Compliance Officer and Secretary of Aladdin Capital Management and affiliates. At Aladdin he was responsible for legal compliance, corporate governance and product development. Prior to joining Aladdin, Mr. McClean was President of DMA Consulting Group (Ltd.), which he founded and which he ran for 12 years. At DMA he focused on the needs of financial services firms, particularly in the areas of operations and legal compliance. His consultancy helped dozens of financial services firms from many countries through their start-up process and consulted on a variety of ongoing operational and regulatory issues. Prior to DMA, Mr. McClean served as compliance officer or in similar functions at Van Eck Associates (mutual funds), BV Capital Management and National Securities and Research Corporation. In addition to holding several securities industry licenses, Mr. McClean is a summa cum laude graduate of Hunter College (CUNY) (Philosophy and Religion) and has Masters degrees from both New York University and the New School for Social Research, where he conducted his graduate work in philosophy. He is currently adjunct professor of philosophy at Molloy College, in Rockville Center, New York. He has presented papers at universities across the country on the subjects of social and business ethics. Mr. McClean is a member of (and former president of) The Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy. He writes and speaks frequently on the issues surrounding race and culture. He has presented papers at such universities as the New School, Purdue, University of Southern Maine, University of Oregon at Eugene, University of Colorado at Denver, and Howard University. He is also a member of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, the Society for Business Ethics and the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. His latest published work appears in the anthology Pragmatism and the Problem of Race (Indiana University Press, 2004) and it is entitled "Should We Conserve the Notion of Race?", where he argues for an informed, historically sensitive form of racial eliminitavism (as compared with naïve notions of "color blindness").

Marge Rogatz is a long time community leader advocating for affordable housing and civil rights. She has been President and full-time unpaid CEO of Community Advocates, Inc. since 1986. Community Advocates (CA) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1972 to improve Nassau County's publicly funded services, helping Nassau's most vulnerable residents secure their basic rights and entitlements. CA has established a variety of precedent-setting initiatives, including the development of the first permanent rental housing for homeless families in Nassau County. A respected leader in the Long Island nonprofit community, Ms. Rogatz has helped bring more than $30 million in HUD funding to nonprofit agencies on Long Island. She helped found the Nassau-Suffolk Coalition for the Homeless in 1988 and has been on its executive board ever since. She is founding board member and Vice President of Sustainable Long Island, sits on the board of the Health & Welfare Council of Long Island, and is an organizer and steering committee member of the recently launched LI Campaign for Affordable Rental Housing. Previously, she carried out consulting assignments in fields related to community development for NYC Mayor Lindsey, Nassau County Executive Nickerson and Suffolk County Executives Dennison and Klein. During the civil rights movement, Ms. Rogatz served as Special Assistant to James Farmer and Floyd McKissick, national directors of the Congress of Racial Equality.

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Suzy Dalton Sonenberg has served as Executive Director of the Long Island Community Foundation since March 1988. Prior to joining the Foundation, Ms. Sonenberg was Program Officer at the New York Foundation, a mid-sized private foundation that makes grants in New York City to its most disadvantaged neighborhoods. After receiving a master's degree in Social Work from Adelphi University in 1976, Ms. Sonenberg spent 8 years as a nonprofit administrator in Manhattan before joining the funding community in 1984. She has taught social policy on both the graduate and undergraduate levels at the Adelphi University School of Social Work, and often appears as a guest lecturer on 'fundraising from foundations' at various institutions of higher learning in the New York Metropolitan area. Ms. Sonenberg is the founder of LITAC Nonprofit Solutions, a founder of the Long Island Fund for Women & Girls, and a founding board member of Sustainable Long Island. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Adelphi University School of Social Work, the Advisory Committee of the Nassau Partnership for After School Education, the Executive Board of the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island and the Board of Long Island's United Way. Together with Elaine Gross, she is also a co-founder of ERASE Racism.

Christina Vargas Law is the Director of Diversity and Affirmative Action at Stony Brook University and for the last 11 years, has held progressively responsible positions in the Office of Diversity and Affirmative Action and Human Resources. The Office is responsible for Equal Employment Opportunity policies and practices, Affirmative Action compliance, discrimination complaint resolution, and diversity related strategies and educational programs for Stony Brook's faculty, staff and students in its academic and administrative areas, Health Sciences Center, University Hospital and Long Island State Veteran's Home. Throughout her career, she has displayed a passion for social justice, multiculturalism and diversity and has worked to bring various communities together in partnership with Stony Brook.

In her role, she has responsibility for the University's Affirmative Action Program; coordinating specialized employment outreach activities; and developing and delivering educational, training and orientation programs, workshops and conferences on topics ranging from Diversity Awareness, EEO Law and Discrimination, Cultural Competence and Sexual Harassment Prevention. She serves on many internal diversity committees as well as advisory boards for the President, the Dean of Students, the Social Justice Center; the Equal Opportunity Program; the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center; the Liberty Partnership Program and Hispanic Heritage Month. In 2004, she was appointed as a member of the Suffolk County Hispanic Task Force, serves on the Board of Directors for the Stony Brook Alumni Association, and is a member of the American Association of Affirmative Action. She frequently serves as a facilitator and presenter at local and national conferences and has recently served on the planning committees for "La Vision" Hispanic/Latino youth conference hosted by the National Association for Puerto Rican and Hispanic Social Workers and "Brown vs. Board of Education: The Unfinished Agenda", hosted by ERASE Racism.

Peter Visconti is the retired Associate Director of Five Towns Community Center, Inc working there since 1972. Five Towns is a multi-service center with many children- and youth-focused programs, actively working with and in the community. Peter is a long time neighborhood advocate and an outspoken public school advocate. He is responsible for innovative joint work with African American and white youth; integrating a youth services program, and designing a curriculum and special ethnic studies summer program for youth at risk of dropping out of high school. He has been involved in resolving many serious racial conflicts. Working with the community and the Offices of Education - Civil Rights Division, Peter organized and advocated on behalf of the children around policies and treatment related to institutional racism. At Five Towns Community Center, Peter increased resources for Youth services to $900,000 and restructured the CODA program. He worked with the Nassau County Youth Board coordinating efforts around youth employment issues and developing youth conferences. Peter is skilled in individual and group counseling, mediation training and has designed and conducted training programs county and statewide. Peter received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Adelphi University and his Masters in Public Administration from Long Island University, C. W. Post.

Scott is Managing Director for Changing Our World, Inc. a full service fundraising consulting firm based in New York City. Scott's responsibilities include managing and directing capital campaigns and fundraising initiatives, conducting feasibility studies and development audits, and creating development. Scott gained extensive experience in fundraising, development and alumni relations while serving as the Executive Director of Development and Alumni Relations for the Waldorf School of Garden City. During his tenure, annual fund revenue tripled and the school launched a successful multi-million dollar Capital Campaign under his leadership. At St. John's University, where Scott began his fundraising career, he excelled as a Development Officer with responsibility for all major gift prospects for the university's athletic department.

Prior to his career in fundraising, Scott enjoyed a diverse and varied professional backround. Scott coached both college baseball and football at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and football at St. John's University in Queens, NY. He also served as an officer of the U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division, foreign Missions Branch. At both Trinity University and the U.S. Secret Service, Scott also found opportunities to fight for equality and racial equity. While a student at Trinity University, he was a founding member of the Black Student Union and worked with the Admissions Office to encourage the university to be more proactive in recruiting qualified minority students. During his tenure with the Secret Service, Scott worked on numerous committees to ensure that the Secret Service "Zero Tolerance" policy and fair promotional practices were enforced.

In addition to serving on the ERASE Racism Board of Directors, Scott serves on the Advisory Board of the Long Island Community Foundation, a division of the New York Community Trust, is a member of the Development Committee at the Waldorf School of Garden City, is on the Advisory Committee for Camp Glen Brook in New Hampshire and volunteers as a football coach at Malverne High School on Long Island.

Born in New York City and a resident of Freeport, NY Scott is a graduate of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He holds a BA in Communication and a Minor in Sociology. He is also a graduate of the Waldorf School of Garden City.