Fania Davis is a leading national voice on restorative justice, a quickly emerging field which invites a fundamental shift in the way we think about and do justice. Restorative Justice is based on a desired set of principles and practices to mediate conflict, strengthen community and repair harm. She is a long-time social justice activist, Civil Rights trial attorney, restorative justice practitioner, writer, and scholar with a PhD in Indigenous Knowledge.
Coming of age in Birmingham, Alabama during the social ferment of the civil rights era, the murder of two close childhood friends in the 1963 Sunday School bombing crystallized within Fania a passionate commitment to social transformation. For the next decades, she was active in the Civil Rights, Black liberation, women’s, prisoners’, peace, anti-racial violence and anti-apartheid movements. After receiving her law degree from University of California , Berkeley in 1979, Fania practiced some 27 years as a Civil Rights trial lawyer.

After leaving the white-supremacist skinhead movement he helped build in America during the 1980s and 90s, Christian Picciolini earned a degree in international relations from DePaul University. He launched Goldmill Group, a global digital media and counter-extremism consulting firm. In 2016, he won an Emmy Award for his role in producing an anti-hate advertising campaign aimed at helping people disengage from extremist groups. His life since leaving the white-supremacist movement over two decades ago has been dedicated to helping others counter racism and violent extremism by co-founding the organization Life After Hate. Christian now leads the Free Radicals Project, the world’s first global extremism disengagement platform. Christian has spoken on the TEDx stage and to audiences all over the world, sharing his unique and extensive knowledge, teaching all who are willing to learn about building greater peace and acceptance through empathy and compassion. He has helped over 100 people disengage from hate groups. Christian’s involvement in the early American skinhead movement is chronicled in his memoir WHITE AMERICAN YOUTH: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—and How I Got Out (Hachette, 2018). Christian is co-developing a television documentary series based on his work helping people disengage from violent ideologies.