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Zach

ZACH EDWARDS

Zach Edwards is the co-founder and CEO of Phonebank.org and aims to organize everyone with a phone and an opinion.

Before launching Phonebank.org, he co-founded and led the product development for My Digital Manager, a digital asset management platform used by dozens of high profile political campaigns in the 2012 cycle.

Before catching the entrepreneur bug, he directed digital campaigns for political and corporate clients, and worked to find the perfect mix of online/offline collaboration.

If you want to engage him in conversation, recommended topics are open data API’s (from folks like the Sunlight Foundation), Facebook ad buying strategies, campaign best practices, all-things Reddit, startups in the Midwest, international cellular carriers, and of course politics. He thinks you can judge any Chinese restaurant by their Moo shu and hopes that someday rollerblading will be cool again.

 

VirginiaVIRGINIA DAVIES

Virginia Davies is the co-founder of Phonebank.org, a mother of two, lawyer, businesswoman and activist working to ensure that entrenched elites don’t co-opt our governments and political parties.

Davies started her career as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice in Canada, has held several positions advising the United Nations Foundation on public/private partnerships, sat on the board of Pro Mujer International, a NGO microcredit organization aiming to support women-operated enterprises in Latin America, was an executive officer at the Bank of Montreal and served as Vice President at Goldman Sachs. Davies was also a past board member of Common Cause, a graduate of Harvard Business School, and currently serves on the board of SolarOne.

Davies gave a lecture several years ago to professionals with the Attorney General of Ontario titled “My life as Mary Poppins” exploring her career of identifying and implementing initiatives to improve underperforming organizations.

“Democracy is just like many underperforming institutions. In the United States and abroad, democracy is being co-opted by lobbyists and special interests and it’s my belief that with more direct contact with elected officials and people in power, we’ll make government more transparent and accountable.”  – Virginia Davies

Davies is an avid sprinter and swimmer and lives in New York with her husband Willard B. Taylor.