Elana Kirshenbaum, New Leaf
As a young child, Elana Kirshenbaum relished any chance to connect with animals, fed her school lunch daily to a stray dog, and wrote about wanting to grow up and teach people how to protect animals at a beautiful rescue with rolling, green hills. When she learned about the horrific suffering other beings endured for human food, entertainment, science etc, this awakening fueled her lifelong passion to protect them, align her daily choices with her values, and invite others to connect to the truth and advance a more compassionate world. Elana has a degree in creative writing and an extensive background in program development and management, teaching, humane education, and social work. As a vegan for over two decades, she is the co-founder of Rhode Island Vegan Awareness, a non-profit all volunteer run vegan advocacy organization, which she led for a decade. In 2013, Elana realized her childhood dream when she joined the staff of Catskill Animal Sanctuary. It is there that envisioned, developed and currently oversees New Leaf, an innovative and unique vegan mentor program that has quickly spread to 30 countries around the world.
 
New Leaf, a fast spreading innovative mentor program, makes becoming vegan easier, delicious, and joyful for anyone through personalized, one on one support from experienced vegan mentors. As a vegan advocate for over 20 years and the developer of New Leaf, Elana Kirshenbaum recognizes the importance of having someone by your side in this important and positive journey. Using powerful technology designed for personalized matching and a convenient cell phone app, our free, innovative program will give you answers to burning questions, abundant resources, quick tips to ease into long term success, guidance to navigate bumps in the road, and encouragement all the way.
 
Early results show phenomenal success, with the program spreading to 30 countries worldwide, and participants already reporting a successful commitment to veganism.

Part I: Ben Wurgaft, Meat Planet
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft is a writer and historian, and currently a Visiting Scholar in Anthropology at MIT. He was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the New School for Social Research. His essays on food and other topics appear regularly in publications from Gastronomica to the Los Angeles Review of Books to the Hedgehog Review. He is @benwurgaft on Twitter.
 
 
Part II: Ilene Godofsky Moreno, The Colorful Family Table: Seasonal Plant-Based Recipes for the Whole Family
Ilene Godofsky Moreno, author of The Colorful Kitchen and The Colorful Family Table, is a health coach, recipe developer, and food photographer. She shares plant-based recipes that are “colorful, not complicated” on her blog The Colorful Kitchen. Ilene can be found cooking in Maplewood, NJ with her husband and two young daughters.

Part I: Lana Dee Povitz, Stirrings, How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, government cutbacks, stagnating wages, AIDS, and gentrification pushed ever more people into poverty, and hunger reached levels unseen since the Depression. In response, New Yorkers set the stage for a nationwide food justice movement. Whether organizing school lunch campaigns, establishing food co-ops, or lobbying city officials, citizen-activists made food a political issue, uniting communities across lines of difference. The charismatic, usually female leaders of these efforts were often products of earlier movements: American communism, civil rights activism, feminism, even Eastern mysticism. Situating food justice within these rich lineages, Lana Dee Povitz demonstrates how grassroots activism continued to thrive, even as it was transformed by unrelenting erosion of the country’s already fragile social safety net. Using dozens of new oral histories and archives, Povitz reveals the colorful characters who worked behind the scenes to build and sustain the movement, and illuminates how people worked together to overturn hierarchies rooted in class and race, reorienting the history of food activism as a community-based response to austerity. The first book-length history of food activism in a major American city, Stirrings highlights the emotional, intimate, and interpersonal aspects of social movement culture. Lana Dee Povitz is visiting assistant professor of history at Middlebury College.

Part II: Bettina Elias Siegel, Kid Food, The Challenge of Feeding Children in a Highly Processed World
Bettina Elias Siegel is a nationally recognized writer and advocate on issues relating to children and food policy. Her reporting and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Houston Chronicle, and Civil Eats, as well as her own widely read blog, The Lunch Tray. She frequently appears or is quoted in national media, including Today, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, NPR, The Doctors, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Parents. In 2015, Family Circle named Siegel one of the country’s “20 Most Influential Moms,” and she is one of the most successful petitioners in Change.org’s history. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, Siegel lives in Houston with her husband and two children.