Zainab Salbi is a humanitarian, a writer, and a social entrepreneur who has dedicated her life to women’s rights and freedom.  She is the Co-Founder of Daughters for Earth, a fund and a movement of women and girls rising up worldwide with climate solutions to protect and restore Mother Earth.

She has frequently been named one of the women changing the world by leading publications ranging from Newsweek to The Guardian. Oprah Winfrey identified her as one of the women changing the world in People Magazine, and President Bill Clinton identified her as one of the 21st-century heroes of Harper’s Bazaar. Most recently, Zainab received the Times100 Impact Awards in 2023.

At the age of 23, Zainab founded Women for Women International, a humanitarian organization dedicated to women survivors of wars. Under her leadership (1993–2011), Women for Women International grew from helping 30 women upon its inception to helping more than 420,000 women and distributing more than 146 million dollars in aid.

Zainab is the author of several books, including the best seller Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny; Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam (with Laurie Buckland); The Other Side of War; Women’s Stories of Survival and Hope; If You Knew Me You Would Care,(with photographs by Rennio Maifredi); and her latest Freedom is an Inside Job; Owning our Darkness and Our Light to Change Ourselves and the World.

She is also the Executive Editor and Host of several shows, including Through Her Eyes with Yahoo News, #MeToo, Now What? with PBS, The Zainab Salbi Project with Huffington Post, and The Nida’a Show with TLC Arabia.

She is a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum and serves on the Boards of Vital Voices, International Refugee Assistance Program (IRAP), and Synergos International.

Peggy Dulany is Chair of Synergos, a global organization helping solve complex issues around the world by advancing bridging leadership, which builds trust and collective action. Drawing from her experience living and working in Rio de Janeiro as a young woman, she realized that the people most affected by adverse living conditions also have the greatest energy and motivation to solve their problems. The resources they lack are connections to the economic and political realms where necessary changes can affect whole communities. Peggy founded Synergos in 1986 to promote trust and collaboration among grassroots groups and government or business leaders and organizations, people who otherwise would not have access to each other so that they can develop long-term relationships and forge new paths in overcoming poverty. In 2001, she co-founded Synergos’ Global Philanthropists Circle with her father, David Rockefeller, to support philanthropic families in using this approach.

Jessica Sweidan is a creative, natural connector. She draws on her personal experience in philanthropy to encourage others to reimagine how they can more effectively support those on the frontlines of environmental defence. Her deep understanding of the importance of bio-cultural conservation and its crucial role in ensuring a healthy future has guided her philanthropic work. As a strategic convenor, she organises fora to ensure that the key voices needed to inform important discussions on our collective futures are present together and in productive dialogues.

Her philanthropic journey began over 25 years ago when she formed a partnership with Adam Sweidan. With the creation of The Synchronicity Foundation, she oversaw donations to a range of projects that addressed social and economic justice; education, children’s welfare, and the arts; healthcare, poverty alleviation, and the refugee crisis; and conservation.  Synchronicity Earth, a UK-based charity, launched in November 2009 as their focus shifted to global biodiversity, creating an organisation to leverage their support to address urgent, overlooked, and underfunded conservation. More recently, she helped birth Flourishing Diversity, a network initiative and engagement approach centred on uplifting, aligning with, and evidencing the interrelation between cultural and biological diversity.

Jessica has been an International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Patron of Nature since 2012, helping to raise the visibility of global conservation needs worldwide, while championing inclusive, rights-based practice. She is also Chair of Synchronicity Earth USA (501c3), an Honorary Conservation Fellow at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), on the Board of Trustees of Wildscreen, and a Strategic Advisor for the Environmental Funders Network (EFN), Action for Conservation and Conservation Optimism.

Jessica holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from Northwestern University.

Driven by a passion for nature, Justin Winters is committed to democratizing climate philanthropy in order to create an inclusive and impactful movement to address the climate crisis from the ground up. She is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of One Earth, a philanthropic organization working to galvanize science, advocacy and philanthropy to drive collective action on climate change. Through One Earth, she is focused on creating a vision for the world that is possible by 2050 – one in which humanity and nature coexist and thrive together. This vision is based on three pillars of action: 100% renewable energy, protection and restoration of 50% of the world’s lands and oceans, and a transition to regenerative, carbon-negative agriculture. Prior to One Earth, Justin served as Executive Director of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation for 13 years, where she built the organization’s grant-making program, which awarded over $100 million in grants across 60 countries and created a series of innovative philanthropic funds, including Oceans 5, Shark Conservation Fund, The Solutions Funds, Lion Recovery Fund, Elephant Crisis Fund, and Quick Response Fund for Nature.