Alex Sanchez, is an internationally recognized peacemaker and co-founder of Homies Unidos in Los Angeles where he has developed and implemented innovative violence prevention and intervention programs since 1998 and has also led the organization as Executive Director since 2006. An outspoken community leader, Alex’s commitment to disenfranchised youth and their families in the Latino and largely Central American communities of the Pico Union, Westlake and Korea town areas of Los Angeles, is rooted in his own personal journey that includes having been a gang-involved youth, target of the INS, LAPD and Salvadoran national police and death squads. Alex’s family migrated to Los Angeles, California at the end of the 1970s, during the height of military repression in El Salvador. After being involved in gangs and serving time in state prison, he was deported in 1994 to El Salvador where he met the founder of Homies Unidos, Magdaleno Rose Avila, and others striving for social change. This turning point marked Alex’s commitment to improve his life and to help other youth do the same. He brought back that message of hope and redemption to California and helped found Homies Unidos in Los Angeles in 1998.

Alex is a hands-on prevention and intervention professional that has made a positive impact in the lives of thousands of at-risk youth and their families. As a well-respected violence prevention pioneer and expert on gang culture and youth criminalization, Alex has advocated for comprehensive intervention strategies, immigration reform and Black-Brown unity – promoting racial tolerance and cultural understanding as a form of violence prevention. Alex adeptly connects these issues to a deeper analysis of local, national and transnational politics, systems and policies. He is a proud husband and father and symbol of peace, compassion and courage to his family, friends and community.

William Wheeler

William Wheeler is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker. He’s interviewed Honduran hitmen about the murder of Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres; covered the Arab Spring migration crisis and the rise of Europe’s far right; and traveled from Himalayan Nepal though Pakistan to the Bay of Bengal to document the impacts of climate change on a quarter of the world’s population.

Wheeler was a part of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting team that won a National Press Club award for coverage of the failed international rebuilding effort in Haiti, and reporting on tensions between nuclear rivals over the Indus River won the Earth Journalism Award at the Copenhagen climate summit. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, USA Today, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and other outlets.

As a documentary producer, he led Chinese artist Ai Weiwei through the Middle East for Human Flow, his feature film about the global refugee crisis; originated and developed stories and did on-the-ground investigations that powered Netflix’s Emmy-winning music series Remastered, as well as Showtime’s Emmy-winning migration series The Trade, National Geographic Film’s International Documentary Award- and Emmy-winning feature documentary The First Wave, and Meltdown, Netflix’s International Documentary Award-winning investigative series about the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.

Wheeler is also the author of the book State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of Violence, which took him into the realm of spies, sicarios, dirty cops, and gang members to expose how failed American policies and corruption at the highest levels of the Salvadoran state contributed to Central America’s migration crisis. Wheeler has a BA in English from UC Berkeley and master’s degrees in journalism and international affairs from Columbia University.

Conor Friedersdorf

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the “Up for Debate” newsletter. Before joining The Atlantic in 2010, he was the features editor at Culture11 and a reporter for the Los Angeles News Group. He is the founding editor of “The Best of Journalism,” a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.