John Calhoun (special commentator)

John Calhoun served as Commissioner for the Department of Youth Services in Massachusetts; the U.S. Commissioner of the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, overseeing Headstart and other child care programs; Vice President of the Child Welfare League of America, and President of the National Crime Prevention Council, where he helped to revolutionize crime prevention by focusing on building vital communities. Throughout his career he created employment, court diversion, and restitution programs to reduce youth incarceration. In his retirement, he designed and now manages the thirteen-California-city Gang Prevention Network. He is author of Hope Matters: The Untold Story of How Faith Works in America.

Alexie Torres-Fleming (panelist) 

Alexie Torres-Fleming is the founder and executive director of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, an urban ministry located in The Bronx. Its faith-based community organizing mobilizes the talents and dedication of young people and from there organizing public housing tenants, homeowners for neighborhood renewal, cooperation with policing efforts, developing youth services and summer employment, and addressing environmental concerns like the pollution of the Bronx River and high community asthma rates.

Charles Hynes (panelist)

Charles Hynes is District Attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn). He served as a state special prosecutor investigating nursing home fraud, and later as the prosecutor for the racially charged murder of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens. As District Attorney, he pioneered criminal justice strategies addressing domestic violence, drug treatment, alternatives to prison for nonviolent addicts, child abuse cases, and violence and truancy in schools. With Brooklyn churches, mosques, and synagogues, he created a faith-based mentoring program for court-involved youth. He is the author of one published novel, Triple Homicide, and serves as an Adjunct Professor of Legal Advocacy at Fordham University Law School as well as at St. John’s and Brooklyn Law Schools.

Robin Bernstein (panelist) 

Robin Bernstein is the President and CEO of The Educational Alliance, founded in 1889 as a settlement house on the Lower East Side to help Eastern European Jews assimilate. The Alliance is now a network of community centers offering eighty social, educational, cultural, and recreational programs at thirty-two sites to 40,000 people. It pioneered Headstart for young children, activities to curb teen-age delinquency, and programs for the area’s aging population. Ms. Bernstein holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Chicago’s School of Social Services Administration.

Abdel Hafid Djemil (panelist)

Abdel Hafid Djemil, President of the Brooklyn-Staten Island Subchapter of the Muslim-American Society was born in Algeria and studied engineering in the United States. He worked with the Algerian Oil Company and taught in the Institute of Aeronautics at Blida University. Returning to the United States, he began work in New York faith-based organizations; he is a member of the city-wide clergy group that dealt with the Diallo case and a member of the Council of Imams of New York City. He joined the Youth and Congregations in Partnership, founded by District Attorney Hynes, and has ties with a variety of agencies, food and clothing banks, soup kitchens, shelters, foster care, and immigration services. He teaches at Du Bois High School.