Speakers
Rev. Joel Edwards
Co-Chair
The Micah Challenge International Council
Rev. Joel Edwards serves as a co-chair of the Micah Challenge International Council. He also is the general director of the Evangelical Alliance UK.
Edwards is an ordained minister in one of the United Kingdom's major Caribbean denominations and an honorary canon of St. Paul's Cathedral. Crossing cultural divides and coping with "daily culture shock" since he arrived in the UK from Kingston, Jamaica, at the age of eight, Joel has become one of the foremost protagonists within the Christian church scene. He serves on a number of faith, government and public agency advisory groups. While he respects diversity, he is also passionate about unity within the church and seeks real change for real lives and real communities.
Edwards was a probation officer for 14 years and the senior pastor of a local church for 10 years before becoming the first African American general director of the Evangelical Alliance in 1997.
Dr. William J. Shaw
President
National Baptist Convention, USA
On September 9, 1999, Dr. William J. Shaw was elected the 16th president of the National Baptist Convention, USA. Dr. Shaw has served as pastor of the White Rock Baptist Church in Philadelphia since 1956.
He graduated summa cum laude from Bishop College at age nineteen. Dr. Shaw received his Bachelor of Divinity (now known as the Master of Divinity) from Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1957 and a Doctor of Ministry from Colgate Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, NY, in 1975 with an emphasis on Biblical Interpretation from the Black Perspective.
Dr. Shaw is a recognized leader in Pennsylvania and across the nation. He has served as president of the Pennsylvania Baptist State Convention, Inc., the Baptist Ministers' Conference of Philadelphia and Vicinity, the Metropolitan Christian Council of Philadelphia, and Union Theological Seminary National Alumni Association. From 1981 through 1994, Dr. Shaw was director of the Ministers' Division of the National Congress of Christian Education.
He has received numerous awards, including the Unitas Award from the Alumni Association of Union Theological Seminary, and the T. B. Maston Foundation Christian Ethics Award from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Jared Bernstein
Director
Living Standards program
Dr. Jared Bernstein joined the Economic Policy Institute in 1992. He is the author of the new book, All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy, which explores how modern-day hyper-individualism has trumped a sense of collaboration and joint responsibility and thus, distorted America's current political and economic debate.
His areas of research include income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, low-wage labor markets and poverty, international comparisons, and the analysis of federal and state economic policies. Between 1995 and 1996, he held the post of deputy chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. He is the co-author of eight editions of the book The State of Working America and has published extensively in popular and academic venues, including The New York Times, Washington Post, American Prospect, and Research in Economics and Statistics. He holds a Ph.D. in social welfare from Columbia University.
Mr. Salil Shetty
Director
Millennium Campaign
Salil Shetty joined the United Nations in October 2003 as director of the Millennium Campaign after two decades as a recognized civil society leader. In the last three years, Shetty has played a pivotal role in building up the global advocacy campaign for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in more than 50 countries. This powerful anti-poverty campaign is a unique global partnership of the United Nations with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), trade unions, faith groups, local authorities and the media, calling for greater accountability from governments in the fight against hunger, disease and illiteracy.
Prior to joining the United Nations, Shetty was the chief executive of ActionAid, a leading international development NGO. There he worked in field programs in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and in the fundraising and advocacy programs in Europe and the United States. Shetty serves on the boards of The Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, and The Overseas Development Institute in London, and is a member of the Advisory Council of the American-Indian Foundation in New York.
Rev. Delores H. Carpenter, Ed.D.
Professor, Religious Education
Howard University School of Divinity
Rev. Dr. Delores Carpenter is professor of religious education at Howard University School of Divinity. She has also served as the first woman senior pastor of Michigan Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Washington, DC, for 21 years. She is the general editor of the African American Heritage Hymnal.
Carpenter was the first recipient of the Samuel Proctor Award from Rutgers University. In 1962, she was the first woman ordained by the Progressive Freewill Baptist Conference of Baltimore, MD. In 1996, she earned the Mother of the Year for the District of Columbia American Mothers, Inc. Award.
Carpenter was the first woman dean at Essex County College in Newark, NJ. Before beginning a career in higher education, she worked for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Washington, DC, and Fellowship Center in St. Louis.
In 1994, she was among the first seven women ever listed in Ebony's honor roll of the greatest black preachers in America. Dr. Carpenter served as the president of the National Convocation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) from 2004-2006.
Rev. Cheryl J. Sanders, Th.D.
Professor, Christian Ethics
Howard University School of Divinity
Dr. Cheryl J. Sanders is senior pastor of the Third Street Church of God in Washington, DC, since 1997, and professor of Christian ethics at the Howard University School of Divinity since 1984.
She is the author of more than 50 articles and several books, including Ministry at the Margins (InterVarsity Press, 1997); Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture (Oxford, 1996); Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People (Fortress, 1995); and is the editor of Living the Intersection (Fortress, 1995). She is a graduate of the Sidwell Friends School, Swarthmore College (B.A. in Mathematics) and Harvard Divinity School (M.Div., cum laude and Th.D. in the field of Applied Theology). In 2002, she was awarded the honorary Doctor of Divinity degree by Asbury College in Wilmore, KY.
David Beckmann
President
Bread for the World/Bread for the World Institute & Alliance to End Hunger
David Beckmann has been president of Bread for the World for 15 years, leading large-scale and successful campaigning to strengthen U.S. political commitment to overcoming hunger and poverty. Before that, he served at the World Bank for 15 years, overseeing large projects and driving innovations to make the Bank more effective in reducing poverty.
Bread for the World has an impressive record of achievement under Beckmann's leadership. Bread for the World led the U.S. legislative coalition of the Jubilee movement to reduce the debts of low-income countries. Since 2000, the organization has helped to double U.S. funding for poverty-focused development assistance. Bread for the World has also helped to win increases in nutrition assistance for food-insecure people in the United States since the late 1990s – to a total that now exceeds $50 billion a year.
Beckmann is also president of Bread for the World Institute, which conducts research and education on hunger-related issues, including agriculture and trade policy. He founded and serves as president of the Alliance to End Hunger, which engages diverse U.S. institutions – Muslim and Jewish groups, corporations, unions and universities – in building political will to end hunger. In 2005, Beckmann delivered the prestigious McDougall Lecture at the biannual meeting of the FAO Conference in Rome.
Beckmann earned degrees from Yale, Christ Seminary, and the London School of Economics, and five universities have awarded him honorary doctorates. He is a clergyman as well as an economist. He has written many books and articles, including Transforming the Politics of Hunger and Grace at the Table: Ending Hunger in God’s World. Beckmann speaks fluent Spanish. He has lived in Bangladesh and Ghana, overseen projects in Bolivia and Ecuador, and visited more than 70 countries.
Lucas Benitez
Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Lucas Benitez is co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). The CIW has collaborated with the U.S. Justice Department to investigate six major trafficking operations in the past six years. Benitez and his organization's efforts have led to the liberation of over 1,000 workers from forced labor in Florida. On the heels of an historic agreement reached with Taco Bell in 2005, the CIW's most recent achievement is their victory in pressuring McDonald's to follow Taco Bell's lead by increasing Florida tomato pickers' wages and working conditions.
In November 2003 Mr. Benitez won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for his work on combating modern day slavery and his leadership of the Taco Bell boycott. In March 2006, the CIW won the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Award its anti-trafficking work.
