Keynote Speakers
As expected, Paul Saginaw and Marian Wright Edelman knocked our socks off. Both of them were passionate, articulate and engaging, leaving us all feeling informed, empowered and inspired.
Thursday, May 13
Paul Saginaw
Co-Owner & Founding Partner of Zingerman’s
Paul Saginaw inadvertently began his career in the food service industry when he left a graduate program in public health in 1975 to work at a seafood restaurant in Ann Arbor, Mich. By 1979, he and a long-time friend became the owners and operators of a seafood retail/wholesale business that thrives to this day.
In 1982, Saginaw and a former co-worker, Ari Weinzweig, opened Zingerman’s Delicatessen across the street from the fish market. Zingerman’s started as 1,300 square feet of combined restaurant and specialty food retail space. The business venture flourished and is now known as Zingerman’s Community of Businesses: catering, mail order, a bakehouse, a creamery, a roadhouse, training, a coffee company and a wholesale candy maker. The businesses are all based in Ann Arbor, employ more than 590 people and generate annual sales in excess of $35 million.
Saginaw is a visionary and consensus builder. He encourages creative thinking and strives to bring out the best in every employee. He characteristically works in the trenches, shoulder-to-shoulder with his staff as a powerful leader and teacher.
In 1988, Saginaw founded the nonprofit Food Gatherers, a perishable food rescue program. Each day, the program delivers more than 2,000 pounds of food to community agencies that feed women, children and men in need. Saginaw was Food Gatherers’ founding Board President and remains on the Board as Vice President.
In April of 1995, Saginaw and Weinzweig received the first Humanitarian Award from the Jewish Federation of Washtenaw County, Mich. This recognition is a reflection of Saginaw’s personal measure of success in business – that a business become a vehicle for positive social change and that it be known not for what it has gained or accomplished for itself, but rather for the degree to which it has contributed to its community and benefited both its customers and its employees.
Friday, May 14
Marian Wright Edelman
Founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF)
Marian Wright Edelman has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. Under her leadership, CDF has become the nation’s strongest voice for children and families. CDF’s Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
After graduating from Spelman College and Yale Law School, Edelman began her career in the mid-60s. As the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1968, she moved to Washington, D.C., as counsel for the Poor People's Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began organizing before his death. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and the parent body of the Children's Defense Fund. For two years she served as the director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University and in 1973 began CDF.
She has received 100+ honorary degrees and many awards, including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize, the Heinz Award and a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. In 2000, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings: Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change; The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours; Guide My Feet: Meditations and Prayers on Loving and Working for Children; Stand for Children; Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors; Hold My Hand: Prayers for Building a Movement to Leave No Child Behind; I'm Your Child, God: Prayers for Our Children; I Can Make a Difference: A Treasury to Inspire Our Children; and The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation.
Edelman served on the Board of Trustees of Spelman College, which she chaired from 1976 to 1987. She was the first woman elected by alumni as a member of the Yale University Corporation; she served from 1971 to 1977. She is currently a board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Association to Benefit Children, and is a member of the Selection Committee of the Profiles in Courage Award of the John F. Kennedy Library, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
Edelman is married to Peter Edelman, a Professor at Georgetown Law School. They have three sons, two granddaughters and two grandsons.
