In 2008, Gail Chang Bohr was elected Ramsey County’s first Asian American judge and the first Jamaican-born judge in Minnesota. As a district court judge, she presided over criminal, family, juvenile, and housing cases, among other matters. She retired in 2014 and became a Senior Judge for the District Court of Minnesota. She also served as an international consultant with the National Center for State Courts’ Trinidad and Tobago Juvenile Court Project helping to establish Trinidad’s first juvenile court.

Gail had a 19+ year career as clinical social worker serving children and families in the U.S. and in Hong Kong before entering law school at the age of 43. She graduated magna cum laude from William Mitchell College of Law, clerked for A.M. “Sandy” Keith, Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court and was an associate at Faegre & Benson.

As founding executive director of Children’s Law Center of Minnesota, she trained 270+ volunteer lawyers to represent children in foster care, initiated award-winning programs and systemic reform for children in foster care. 

She is the 2021 President of The Infinity Project whose mission is to increase gender equity and diversity on the Eighth Circuit and Minnesota courts. She is a Fellow of the ABA Foundation, member of NAPABA and the Judicial Council. 

Gail has received numerous awards, among them the ABA Child Advocacy Award and the Daniel K. Inouye Trailblazer Award.

Hope Flanagan (Seneca) is from the Turtle Clan. She is an elder who teaches about plants and wild plant gathering. She is also a storyteller, whose stories were passed to her from Ona KingBird from Red Lake reservation. She has taught and worked in the Twin Cities Native Community since the late 70s. Most recently, Hope taught in an Ojibwe immersion classroom for ten years, and prior to that as a storyteller for Minneapolis Public Schools in drug and alcohol prevention for six years. She has worked at DWH since 2009 and transitioned to a year round position in 2018.

Beth Parkhill is a serial innovator, with four decades of innovating in business and social enterprise.

Most recently, she was the Chief Innovation Officer for Mobility 4 All, a social enterprise that provides a personalized ride service for older Americans. 

Now, at 69, she is reinventing herself again. She’s taking a sabbatical, after the death of her husband, to explore opportunities in the “longevity economy” and setting up a type of “Age Lab” in Minnesota to provide more opportunities for people who are living longer. 

She founded Parkhill Marketing in 1992; her clients included JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and US Bank. Instead of retiring at 46, she shifted her focus to social enterprise. In 2009, she founded Mentor Planet, an online mentor-matching service. She worked with innovative social enterprises and nonprofits to solve complex social problems, from start-ups to large workforce development organizations.    

Beth was a founding board member of the Impact Hub MSP and president of the Social Enterprise Alliance Twin Cities. She served on several boards, including Project for Pride in Living, Tasks Unlimited, the Fringe Festival, and Outsiders and Others Gallery. She lives part-time, in the Loire Valley of France, in the 19th century home she and her husband restored.

When Diana Pierce, KARE 11 anchor, retired after more than 30 years of delivering the news, people kept asking her “What’s next?” While the answer wasn’t clear at first, it is now—and that’s to amplify the voices of people 50+, a demographic mostly ignored by traditional media. She hosts “What’s Next with Diana Pierce,” a Facebook live stream focused on helping people reinvent themselves when it comes to work, health, money, and retirement. Diana’s warmth and compassion combined with her straightforward style ensures respectful yet engaging stories. Now 67, the Plymouth resident and her partner also share their artistic talents as gifted adventure-travel and nature photographers on Facebook and Instagram. Both pursuits are disrupting the notion that creativity diminishes with age. Diana is embodying the idea of living your passion at any age, and encouraging others 50+ to do so as well.

Marcie Rendon is a citizen of the White Earth Nation. She was listed on Oprah Magazine’s 2020 list of 31 Native American Author’s to read and received the 2020 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award. Marcie’s novel Girl Gone Missing, is the second Cash Blackbear novel and was nominated for the Putnam’s Son’s Sue Grafton Memorial Award at the Edgars, 2020. Murder on the Red River received the Pinckley Women’s Debut Crime Novel Award 2018. Both novels are available from SoHo Press. Marcie has non-fiction children’s books and four plays published. Her script, Sweet Revenge, had a staged reading at the Playwright Center, with support from the Guthrie Theater Native Stakeholders group, 2021. The creative mind of Raving Native Theater, she curated TwinCities Public Television’s Art Is…CreativeNativeResilience 2019. Diego Vázquez and Marcie received the Loft’s 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for work with incarcerated women.

Diego Vázquez Jr has never met an illegal human. In 2012, Diego established The Women’s Writing Program for incarcerated women in county jails. He is the editor of more than 40 anthologies of poems written by women in the jails, and the author of Growing Through the Ugly,(W.W. Norton, New York, NY).