Ira Fishman is the managing director of the NFL Players Association and formerly a partner and chief operating officer at Patton Boggs LLP. He previously served as special counsel and director of the Task Force on Education at the Federal Communications Commission and was named the founding CEO of the Schools and Libraries Corporation, a nonprofit that provides $2.25 billion annually to Kindergarten through grade 12 schools and public libraries.
In his distinguished career, Fishman has also served as deputy assistant to the president for legislative affairs at the White House during the Clinton administration, vice president for congressional and external affairs at the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and founding CEO of HiFusion, an innovative education and consumer media company. Fishman is currently on the Board of The National Council on Teacher Quality.
Mary Beth Maxwell is the executive director of Workshop, a start-up catalyzing change for workers. She previously worked for several years as special advisor for Worker Power and Economic Justice at the Open Society Foundations. Before that, she served in the U.S. Department of Labor in the Obama administration, where she held a number of roles, including principal deputy assistant secretary for policy, deputy chief of staff, and acting deputy administrator of the Wage and Hour Division.
Maxwell has spent nearly two decades in nonprofit advocacy. She was the founder and executive director of American Rights at Work, a policy think tank advocating for labor law reform; national field director at Jobs with Justice; and deputy field director for NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Sameera Fazili is an economic policy expert with more than 20 years of experience in policy development, program execution, and crisis management across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. She served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council from 2021–2022. In that role, she led the Biden-Harris administration’s work on industrial policy, supply chains, and regional economic development, and the administration’s response to numerous supply chain crises. She also played a leading role in the passage and implementation of the “CHIPS and Science Act,” the “Inflation Reduction Act,” and the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.”
Her expertise spans multiple industries including financial services, manufacturing, clean energy, housing, small business, transportation, and logistics. Fazili served in domestic and international economic policymaking roles in the Obama White House, the U.S. Treasury Department, and in the Federal Reserve System. Prior to serving in the Biden-Harris administration, she worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta as a senior researcher and as director of engagement for community economic development, served in research roles at the Urban Institute, taught development finance at Yale Law School, and worked at Shorebank, the nation’s first community development bank. Fazili is a graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard College. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and three children.
Byron Auguste is a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee and is the CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit organization that seeks to expand access to career opportunities so that all Americans can work, learn, and earn to their full potential in a dynamic economy.
Prior to co-founding Opportunity@Work, Auguste served for 2 years in the White House as deputy assistant to President Barack Obama for economic policy and deputy director of the National Economic Council, where his policy portfolio included job creation and labor markets, skills and workforce policies, innovation, investment, infrastructure, transportation, and goods movement.
Until 2013, Auguste was a senior partner at McKinsey & Company in Washington, DC, and in Los Angeles, where he was elected principal in 1999 and director in 2005. He also served as a member of the boards of trustees of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Yale University.
He is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and he serves on the boards of Hope Street Group and Opportunity@Work.
Auguste earned a B.A. summa cum laude in economics and political science from Yale University, where he was awarded a Truman Scholarship and the James Gordon Bennet Prize, and he holds an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in economics from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar.
