George Khaldun

Co-Founder of Harlem Children's Zone & Founder of Institute For Urban Leadership

With unprecedented success disrupting the cycle of poverty and achieving landmark results in education, health, and social development, founder of the Institute For Urban Leadership (IFUL), George Khaldun has for twenty years implemented strategic innovations developing leaders and an education pipeline from pre-natal through college in distressed communities.

Currently consulting on comprehensive solutions for businesses, organizations, and States looking to confront and combat cyclical poverty on all fronts, George is a management and leadership specialist speaking regularly before national and international audiences including at the Aspen Institute, the United Nations and U.S. Department of State. George is also the co-founder of the heralded Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a sprawling social experiment with widely documented success in developmental outcomes replicated by the Obama administration in communities across the country. As co-founder, deputy to the president, chief operating officer and chief administrative officer at HCZ, he spearheaded an organization that employed over 1,000 people, many from the surrounding community, while serving over 20,000 young people and adults annually, deploying education, health, early childhood, and violence prevention programs and developing a leadership development curriculum. George sits on a number of advisory boards including New York University’s Leadership Initiative and is senior faculty at the Institute for Personal Leadership - an affiliate of Columbia University Business School’s Executive Education Program. Current clients include the Miami Children's Initiative where George consults on organizational strategy.

George was previously an economic development specialist for the national NAACP and adjunct professor at Bermuda College. George holds an AB in Government from Bowdoin College, where he currently serves on the Board of Trustees. He has a Master’s Degree in Educational Policy from Teacher’s College, Columbia University and has also studied at the London School of Economics and Columbia Business School. 

Dr. camea davis

National Director of the Urban Word Nation Youth Poet Laureate Program

Dr. Camea Davis is a critical qualitative researcher, poet, and educator with a heart for urban youth and communities. She earned her doctorate in educational policy studies with minors in curriculum and instruction and educational technology from Ball State University. She currently works as an assistant research faculty at Georgia State University in the department of middle and secondary education. Davis also serves as the National Director of the Youth Poet Laureate program, an initiative of urban word, an award-winning youth literary arts and youth development organization. Her research interests include poetic inquiry, critical ethnography, culturally responsive teacher education, and youth activism.

As an artist-activist and arts based qualitative researcher, Davis’s expertise is in critical poetic inquiry, a creative, analytic methodology capable of amplifying the voices of minoritized populations while aiding the researcher in being an active witness of participants’ struggle for justice, inclusion, and visibility. Having performed as a member of the nationally acclaimed first wave hip hop arts learning community and theatre ensemble at the University of Wisconsin Madison, she toured nationally and internationally performing dynamic spoken word poetry and leading workshops on community activism and art. In 2014, the Lilly Endowment of the Arts sponsored Davis’ tour of Europe during which she wrote travel poems about the nation’s iconic art for inclusion in an English Language Arts curriculum for middle level learners. She continues to use spoken word poetry as an analytic tool for research and public discourse on crucial issues that impact the lives and learning of minoritized persons.​ 

 As a long-standing public spoken word artist and host, Davis has been featured at numerous performance venues including the Hi-Arts Hip Hop Theatre Festival, Brave New Voices, Line Breaks Hip Hop Theatre Festival, TEDx Evansville, and many other venues. ​

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