What is the future of community?

Speakers

Joan Blades is a co-founder of Living Room Conversations, an open-source effort to rebuild respectful discourse across ideological, cultural, and party lines while embracing our core-shared values. When we care about each other, we work to find ways to meet each other’s core needs. Joan is also a co-founder of MomsRising.org and MoveOn.org. She is a co-author of The Custom-Fit Workplace, winner of a Nautilus book award in 2011, and The Motherhood Manifesto, which won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize in 2007. An attorney mediator by training and inclination, Joan is a nature lover, artist, and true believer in the power of citizens and our need to rebuild respectful civil discourse while embracing our core shared values.

Paul Fromberg is the rector of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Paul is a painter, specifically an iconographer. He is an adjunct instructor in practical theology and leadership at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. He teaches liturgics for the Diocese of Minnesota in their nonresidential Master of Divinity program. Besides preparing students for ministry, Paul is a consultant with congregations, retreat leader, mentor, and an active participant in emergent church conversation groups nationwide. In 2014 he was a keynote speaker and worship leader for the National Worship Conference of the Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Church in Canada. Paul also contributes liturgical materials for the Episcopal Church.

Adam S. Juratovac is a corporate attorney at Juratovac Law in Palo Alto, CA. In addition to representing start-up companies and entrepreneurs, he advises professional athletes on how to use their platforms for social good. Adam worked in the social media industry, helping more than 100 professional athletes build their brands online that led to successful brand partnerships. His book, Student-Athletes and Social Media, teaches student athletes how to leverage social media for post-collegiate success. Adam is a dynamic and nationally sought-after speaker who uses his real-life experience working in social media to teach his audiences how to use it to create change within their community.

Moderator

Channing Smith has been the rector of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church and School in Saratoga, CA for the past nine years. Prior to that, he was rector of Transfiguration Episcopal Church in San Mateo. Channing created the Faith and Innovation Conference to explore the impact of innovation on human flourishing and to bring self-awareness and direction to innovation in our lives. He believes that the more purposeful we are with the gift of innovation, the more it will serve humanity and the greater global issues we face. Channing lives in Los Gatos with his wife Mary Richards and four-year-old daughter Olivia.