Speakers

Join us for fun and fellowship. Brush up on those board games and card games to play with friends, the kids and grandkids over the holidays. 

Angie Simon is past President of Western Allied Mechanical.  She was and is actively involved in SMACNA (Sheet Metal and Contractors National Association) as Local and National President of that organization.

Angie has led the Heavy Metal Experience, which is a  successful effort to attract teens and young adults (especially disadvantaged) to the sheet metal trade.  The program has grown from 3 Contractors holding the multi week summer HME, to 22 throughout the US, during this summer.  Next year, 50 locations are going to be involved, with over 900 kids learning about the sheet metal trade

Duffy Jennings, a prize-winning former crime
reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle during violent 1970s and 1980s, will share key
details about the cases, the criminals, and the mood of the city in those days of serial killers, counterculture extremists, and fractured politics.

Our primary philanthropic contribution to the local community is our Scholarship program. Did you know that each of our scholars is assigned a mentor to help them navigate college? Come hear all about the behind the scenes work, the various annual events, the challenges and incredible successes of this program. 

Vic Schachter is the founder and president of FSRI.  He has served extensively as a mediator, and as an advocate representing clients in numerous mediations and arbitrations over his fifty year career.  He has led and participated in rule of law initiatives promoting judicial reform and alternative dispute resolution and judicial case management in India, Brazil, Turkey, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Republic of Georgia and Malaysia, among other countries

The Altruist Relief Kitchen in Ukraine (ARK-Ukraine) is a wood fired off-grid industrial field kitchen, made out of locally sourced recycled materials, that is administered and operated by Ukrainian women. ARK-Ukraine has served over 100,000 meals for the women, children, elderly and disabled people fleeing the war. At a cost of $0.33 per meal, ARK-Ukraine is serving dozens of times more food per dollar than even the largest aid organizations.

Isaac Blacksin is a media anthropologist and an ethnographer of military conflict, His research examines journalism in conditions of violence. Isaac’s book project, Conflicted: Representation from the Warzone, is based on two years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and analyzes journalists’ struggles with wartime media labor. He has conducted fieldwork with journalists from Afghanistan to Ukraine, with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American University of Beirut, and the Institute for Humanities Research at the University of California.

Introduced by Steven Weiner

Pamela Weiss is An award-winning screenwriter, editor, producer and journalist, Pamela collaborates with industry mentors and professionals to shepherd heart-felt, funny and transcendent human stories. Media experience includes Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Knight-Ridder New Media and Capital-Gazette Publishing. 

President Gerald Ford suffered two attempts on his life during his term in office: one by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme of the Manson Family, and the other by a far less likely candidate—an average middle-aged mother of five—Sara Jane Moore. After thirty years of communication with Moore in prison, journalist Geri Spieler provides a riveting account of her path from childhood in smalltown West Virginia to that fateful moment when she tried to assassinate the president.

Throughout Moore’s dodgy life she hid her identity and misled those around her. Through the turbulent 60s and 70s, she married five times, abandoned children, faked amnesia, befriended Patty Hearst’s father, became a revolutionary, and worked as an FBI informant turned double agent feeding information to the underground radicals.

From Spieler’s insider correspondence and independent research, including interviews with President Ford himself, she dissects the popular narrative—confirming some details and debunks others—and delivers a compelling profile of a society lady turned elusive assassin.