Abigail Disney - Abigail Disney is founder and president of the Daphne Foundation, a progressive organization that makes grants to grassroots community-based groups working with low-income communities in New York City.
Fred P. Hochberg - Fred P. Hochberg is the dean of Milano at The New School for Management and Urban Policy.
Hochberg has more than twenty-five years of experience in business, government, civil rights activities, and philanthropy. From 1998 through 2000, he served as deputy and then acting administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA), an agency elevated to cabinet rank by President Bill Clinton, with more than 4,000 employees and 100 offices across the country.
At the SBA, he directed the delivery of a comprehensive set of financial and business development programs for entrepreneurs, with particular outreach to women and minorities. He also served on President Clinton's Management Council.
Peter G. Peterson - Peter G. Peterson is the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also senior chairman and cofounder of The Blackstone Group, a private investment banking firm. Mr. Peterson is founding president of The Concord Coalition, a bipartisan citizens group dedicated to fiscal responsibility, chairman of the Institute for International Economics, and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
In government, he served as assistant to the president for International Economic Affairs, secretary of commerce, and headed several commissions concerned with U.S. productivity and U.S.-Soviet economic relations.
Mr. Peterson has had extensive experience in the private sector, including as chairman and chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers and its successor company from 1973 to 1984, and chief executive officer of Bell and Howell from 1963 to 1971.
He is the author of several books, including Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It and Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America and the World.
Andrea Soros Colombel - Andrea Soros Colombel is the founder and president of Trace Foundation, established in 1993 to promote the cultural continuity and sustainable development of Tibetan communities within China. The foundation implements projects in the fields of education, culture, and rural development. In New York, the foundation has also opened the Latse contemporary Tibetan cultural library.
In 2000, Andrea co-founded Tsadra foundation with her husband, Eric Colombel, to support the activities of advanced students of Tibetan Buddhism in the West and preserve rare Tibetan Buddhist resources. Andrea was born in New York in 1965.
She received her B.A. from University of Chicago in literature and holds a graduate certificate from the Bard Center for Environmental Policy. She participated in The Philanthropy Workshop at Rockefeller Foundation in 1995.
Milano at The New School hosts the fourth Big Ideas, Big Gifts, Big Impact: A Conversation with Today's Philanthropists featuring speakers Andrea Soros Colombel, president of Trace Foundation; Abigail E. Disney, president of the Daphne Foundation; and Peter G. Peterson, senior chairman and co-founder of The Blackstone Group.
