Keynote Speaker: Jitu Brown

Jitu Brown is the national director for the Journey for Justice Alliance, a network of 37 grassroots community-based organizations in 25 cities organizing for community-driven school improvement; he was formerly the education organizer for the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO). He has organized in the Kenwood Oakland neighborhood in Chicago for over 22 years, bringing community voices to the table on school issues; they have together successfully organized to stop several school closings in the area and secured resources for neglected neighborhood schools. KOCO now serves as a resource for organizations nationwide dealing with school closings and the elimination of community voice from the decision-making process. In 2015, Jitu was the organizer of the historic Dyett High School Hunger Strike, which lasted for 34 grueling days and resulted in the reopening of Dyett as an open-enrollment neighborhood school with over $16 million in new investments. A believer in working locally and thinking globally, Jitu has taken youth leaders from KOCO to the United Nations, the Passamaquoddy Native American reservation in Maine, and the UN Conference on Racism in South Africa. He has been widely published and has appeared on several talk shows, including MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry and The Ed Show.