Featured in the Film
Jan Williams
Jan Williams is a Los Angeles native, a mother, a school bus driver with the L.A. Unified School District and a longtime member of the transit union, and an active member of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. Waking the Sleeping Giant follows Jan as she builds bridges between the labor and racial justice movements in the fight against systemic police brutality and institutional racism.
Sabrina shrader
Sabrina Shrader is a sixth- generation West Virginian, and Waking the Sleeping Giant follows her as she works to escape her own generational poverty, help her coal country family and community navigate the enormous challenges of a failing rural economy, and secure a seat in her state legislature.
Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders represents Vermont in the U.S. Senate and ran for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Waking the Sleeping Giant follows Mr. Sanders from his early days of exploring a run through the 2016 election.
Kai Newkirk & Elise Whitaker
Kai Newkirk and Elise Whitaker are millennial organizers leading peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins with the group Democracy Spring in an effort to confront the corrupting influence of money in politics. Waking the Sleeping Giant follows Kai and Elise as they lead a protest march from Philadelphia to the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. Kai is also a Democracy Spring co-founder (first known as 99Rise) and was the architect of the largest American civil disobedience action of this century.
Medea Benjamin
Medea Benjamin is a longtime peace activist, the co-founder of the woman-led peace group Code Pink, and the co-founder of the human rights advocacy group Global Exchange.
Becky Bond
Becky Bond was a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and an architect of the campaign’s distributed organizing program. She is a Senior Fellow at CREDO Mobile.
Jamelle Bouie
Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for the New York Times and political analyst for CBS News. Prior to the Times, Jamelle was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine.
Clayola Brown
Clayola Brown has been President of the A. Philip Randolph Institute in Washington, D.C. since 2004, the first female to serve in the role. Ms. Brown has worked in the labor and civil rights movements throughout her life.
Zack Exley
Zack Exley was the senior advisor to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign for grassroots organizing and is an early pioneer in online organizing and fundraising, including serving as MoveOn.org’s first Organizing Director and advisor to the Howard Dean campaign.
Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host and Executive Producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.
Bob Herbert
Bob Herbert is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a research and policy center, in New York. He is the author of Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America and a New York Times op-ed columnist from 1993 until 2011.
Taj James
Taj James is the co-founder, former Executive Director, and current board member of Movement Strategy Center. As part of MSC’s Transitions incubator, Taj recently founded Full Spectrum Capital Partners, housed in the Innovation Center.
Van Jones
Van is a CNN political contributor, the host of the Van Jones Show and The Redemption Project. He appears regularly across the network’s programming and political coverage. Van also founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, ColorOfChange.org, GreenForAll.org, Rebuild The Dream and the Dream Corps.
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Mr. Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society.
Ai-jen Poo
Ai-jen Poo has been the Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance since 2010 and is also the Co-Director of Caring Across Generations, a national coalition of 200 advocacy organizations working to transform the long-term care system in the US, with a focus on the needs of aging Americans, people with disabilities, and their caregivers.
Robert Reich
Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books and co-created the award-winning documentary Inequality for All.
Linda Sarsour
Linda Sarsour is a racial justice and civil rights activist. She is the former Executive Director of the Arab American Association of New York and co-founder of the first Muslim online organizing platform, MPOWER Change. Linda is a Palestinian Muslim American and a self-proclaimed “pure New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn!”
Micah Sifry
Micah L. Sifry is Co-Founder and President of Civic Hall, curator of the annual Personal Democracy Forum, and editor of Civicist, Civic Hall’s news site. From 2006-16 he was a senior adviser to the Sunlight Foundation, which he helped found, and he currently serves on the boards of Consumer Reports and the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science.
Cenk Uygur
Cenk Uygur is the host and founder of The Young Turks, the largest online news show in the world, and CEO of TYT Network. With a verified global audience of more than 170 million views a month and 6 billion total video views, TYT Network is considered one of the most watched online news networks in the world.
WInnie Wong
Winnie Wong is cofounder of People for Bernie, a former senior political adviser to the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, and an adviser to Once Again. She was also a founding organizer of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy.