Congressman Alan Grayson was born and grew up in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City. He graduated with high honors from Harvard College. Congressman Grayson worked as an economist after college, but returned to Harvard. In four years, Alan earned a J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School, and a master’s degree from the Harvard School of Government, and Alan finished all of the course work and passed the general exams for a Ph.D. in Government. His master’s thesis focuses on gerontology. He went on to be a founding member of the Alliance for Aging Research.

In the early 1990s, Alan took leave from the practice of law, and started a business. Alan was the first President of IDT Corp., a telecom/internet company, which is now a Fortune 1000 company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Congressman Grayson was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2008.

Alan Grayson lives in Orlando with his wife, Lolita, and their five children, Skye, Star, Sage, Stone and Storm.

Adam Green is co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (BoldProgressives.org), a 400,000-member grassroots online organization that helps elect bold progressive members of Congress and advocate on progressive policy issues.

For four years, he worked as Director of Strategic Campaigns and Civic Communications Director for MoveOn.org. He also blogs on sites such as HuffingtonPost.com, DailyKos.com, and OpenLeft.com -- where he has written repeatedly about good online organizing having a "theory of change."

Previously, Adam served as the Democratic National Committee’s press secretary in Oregon for the 2004 presidential campaign and communications director for the New Jersey Democratic Party in 2003 and 2004. Adam is a graduate of GWU’s political communication program -- where he now teaches a course on Internet & Politics -- and received his law degree from the University of Virginia.

Over the past 40 years, Raúl has built an exceptional record of public service. He began his public career when he joined with other advocates to encourage local governments to invest in older and minority neighborhoods in Southern Arizona. Raúl served on the Tucson Unified School District Board from 1974 to 1986 and the Pima County Board of Supervisors from 1989 to 2002. While on the Board of Supervisors, he worked to improve domestic partner benefits, labor rights, and transparency in government. His environmental leadership led to the creation of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, one of the most successful and innovative conservation systems in the country.

Since his election to Congress in 2002, education, employee rights and the environment have been among Raúl’s top policy concerns. He has played an active role in oil drilling oversight since before the Deepwater Horizon disaster and led the progressive effort to improve the Affordable Care Act. His tenure as co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus has seen major successes for the progressive movement, including the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and many of the provisions in the recently enacted Wall Street reform law. Raúl has a long history of both grassroots action and effective Congressional leadership, and he looks forward to continuing his work with outside groups to achieve the best policy outcomes and make government responsive to the people once again.

Ryan Grim covers Congress for the Huffington Post. A former reporter for Politico and Washington City Paper, he has written for The Nation, Mother Jones, Harper's and Rolling Stone and is the author of This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America. While interviewing Elizabeth Warren last year, he got a text message saying that his apartment had been foreclosed on. But that's another story.

Joshua Grossman is a social entrepreneur who has created many political and business projects. He’s the founder of the web’s most encompassing searchable database of Congressional voting records, ProgressivePunch.org which provides expert analysis of Congressional votes and algorithm based scoring of how progressive members of Congress are. Joshua also runs a feisty 527, Progressive Kick, which informs citizens of how they’re being damaged by right-wing members of Congress, Republicans & Democrats alike. He’s memorized/tracked the names, voting records & political state/district demography of all 535 members of Congress since he was thirteen years old and is an occasional expert commentator on Air America Radio andFiveThirtyEight.com blogger. Joshua’s also co-founded America’s largest eco-friendly paper company, New Leaf Paper.

Joaquin Guerra is a New Media Campaign Manger for Service Employees International Union where he leads SEIU’s online campaign for immigration reform and member to member political engagement. He previously served as the Deputy New Media Director for the Richardson for President Campaign and Director of New Media for Governor Richardson's successful 2006 re-election. He has over 11 years of field and political experience at the local, state and national levels, as well as working in the Texas Legislature and doing community organizing.

Stephen Gutwillig is California Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation's leading organization advocating alternatives to the war on drugs. He oversees DPA’s statewide legislative agenda, “model city” initiative in San Francisco, and other projects across California. Based in Los Angeles, Stephen primarily focuses on marijuana reform, including advocacy on behalf of Proposition 19 on the November ballot. He recently supervised the production of “Targeting Blacks for Marijuana,” a report on racist enforcement of possession laws throughout the state. He has appeared on CNN, NBC Nightly News, Telemundo, and Fox as well as in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, and dozens of other media outlets.

Stephen has worked for cultural and social change organizations in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. Prior to joining DPA, Stephen served for eight years as executive director of Outfest, the L.A.-based nonprofit devoted to nurturing, exhibiting and preserving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) media. At Outfest, Stephen oversaw the launch of the only LGBT people of color film festival and the only LGBT film preservation program in the world. Stephen also previously served as director of development and communications for the Labor/Community Strategy Center, the L.A.-based social and environmental justice organization best known for organizing low-income, transit-dependent bus riders. Stephen’s experience includes work as a nonprofit organizational development consultant. He currently serves on the Community Funding Board of the Liberty Hill Foundation, the leading social change grantmaker in Los Angeles County.

Katherine Haenschen is an activist and blogger in Austin, TX. Currently, Katherine is managing the Travis County Democratic Party's coordinated campaign, working to elect Democrats at all levels of the ballot and turn Texas blue! She is also a staff writer for Burnt Orange Report. A native of New Jersey, Katherine got her start in politics in 2004 while living on the South Side of Chicago. Her then-State Senator Barack Obama ran for Senate, and she thought he was cool enough to get involved. She has been a dedicated field rat ever since.

Katie Halper is a comedian, writer, blogger, and filmmaker born, raised and based in New York. She is a founder of and comedian in the political comedy collective, Laughing Liberally. Katie has performed throughout the country, and at all four Netroots Nation Conferences. Her writing and videos can be found on Comedy Central, Huffington Post, Alternet, Daily Kos, Open Left, Working Life, Culture Kitchen. She has appeared on MSNBC, Air America, The Sam Seder Show, The Mark Maron Show, Laura Flanders' GritTV, WBAI, Sirius Radio, XM Radio POTUS, and The Alan Colmes Show and in The New York Times, New York Magazine, the LA Times, In These Times, Jezebel, Gawker. Katie headlined the Nation Magazine's Cruise. Katie's award-winning documentary about historical memory in Spain, La memoria es vaga, has been screened throughout Spain and the U.S. Katie was the co-producer of Tim Robbins and DCTV's Embedded Live, Associate Producer of Estela Bravo's Free to Fly: the U.S. Cuba Link, and outreach director of Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein's documentary The Take (La toma). She is currently editing her documentary on the social justice summer camp she (along with her mother and grandmother) attended, and their "Peace Olympics," the camp's non-violent and socially conscious alternative to color wars called Another Camp is Possible. Al Giordano of Narco News said "Every blacklisted comic is finally getting justice and its name is Katie Halper. I feel a great wave of pity for anyone who has never seen Katie perform." Victor Navasky of The Nation called katie "original, improvisational, witty and wise." And The National Review (believe it or not) called Katie "cute" and "a little brainy."

As Arkansas’ 14th Lieutenant Governor, Bill Halter is focused on education and jobs.

The Lieutenant Governor led the successful campaign to establish a state lottery with all net proceeds devoted to college scholarships for Arkansas students. Tens of thousands of graduating high school seniors and nontraditional adult students in Arkansas will now have an opportunity for a higher education.

Bill Halter previously served as an economic adviser to President Clinton and to the U.S. Senate, led the Social Security Administration, advised Fortune 500 companies, and served on the boards of information technology and life sciences companies. He is a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Stanford University.

Bill, his wife, Shanti, and daughters, Lauren and Julia, live in North Little Rock, where they attend Immaculate Conception Catholic Church.

Jill Harris is managing director of public policy for the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation's leading organization promoting alternatives to the war on drugs. Based in New York, Harris oversees the program efforts of the Drug Policy Alliance’s state-based offices around the country, as well as the offices of Legal and National Affairs.

Before joining DPA, Harris worked as a political campaign manager in New York, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio; she was the Ohio Field Director for America Coming Together in 2004 and the Ohio Early Vote Director for Barack Obama in 2008. She also spent 13 years as a public defender with the Legal Aid Society in New York City, including two years as the attorney in charge of the Manhattan Criminal Defense Division, the country’s largest public defender office.

Harris is originally from Eugene, Oregon.

Laura Heaton is a writer and editor at the Enough Project, a campaign of the Center for American Progress. As the editor-in-chief of Enough’s blog, Enough Said, Laura covers many of Africa’s hotspots, including Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, the roving Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, and Somalia, focusing her writing on politics, humanitarian conditions, human rights, U.S. foreign policy, and prevention of genocide and mass atrocities.

She is based in Washington, D.C., but regularly travels to central and east Africa. Before joining the Enough team, Laura worked on media-related projects in Rwanda and as a journalist, photographer, and health consultant in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Laura has also held editing and reporting positions at Agence France-Presse and United Press International in Washington, D.C. Laura serves on the board of the Akilah Institute for Women in Kigali, Rwanda.

Beginning in the fall of 2010, Laura will be based in Nairobi, Kenya to facilitate more frequent on-the-ground reporting from the conflict zones where the Enough Project’s work is focused.

Martha Heinemann Bixby is the Director of Campaigns & Outreach for the Save Darfur Coalition. Martha has also served as the Coalition's Campaign Manager and Outreach Coordinator. Leading up to the 2008 Olympics, Martha was the Executive Director of Team Darfur, a coalition of over 400 Olympic and professional athletes from around the world committed to raising awareness about and bringing an end to the genocide in Darfur. While at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Martha co-founded STAND, a student anti-genocide coalition, which has grown to include hundreds of chapters across the globe. Martha has also worked as a vocational ESOL teacher at the local immigration services agency Newcomers Community Service Center and studied at Georgetown University's Institute for International Law and Politics. Martha is a recipient of the Jewish Council on Public Affair's Tikkun Olam award, and is a Truman National Security Project Partner and an Alliance of Youth Movements 2010 Fellow. In her free time, Martha volunteers with the Sudanese-led organization Voices for Sudan, consults with tech startup EarthAid.net on social media, and takes photos of flowers around Washington, DC.

Jamie Henn is the Communications and East Asia Director for the international climate campaign 350.org. In 2009, he coordinated media for over 5,200 simultaneous events in more than 180 countries, landing 350.org on front pages and newscasts around the world. CNN called the events "the most widespread day of political action in history." As East Asia director for 350.org, Jamie coordinated nearly 500 events across East Asia, including over 300 rallies across China. He is co-author of the book Fight Global Warming Now.

Erin Hill is the Executive Director of ActBlue, the nation's largest source of funds for Democrats. Since 2004, ActBlue has sent over $138,000,000 to 6,000 distinct Democratic candidates and committees at every level of politics from local to federal. Hill joined ActBlue in 2005 and served as Political Director during the 2007-2008 cycle where she helped expand to all 50 states and nurtured thousands of grassroots fundraisers. Since becoming Executive Director in 2009 Prior to joining ActBlue, Hill worked on the finance staffs of the Kerry-Edwards campaign and the Democratic National Committee. She has also worked as a member of finance and strategic staffs for races up and down the ballot in both DC and her home state of Massachusetts.