Giulio Boccaletti is the Chief Strategy Officer and Global Managing Director for Water at The Nature Conservancy. Trained as a physicist and atmospheric scientist, Giulio is an expert on environmental and economic sustainability. In his role as Chief Strategy Officer, Giulio works to develop the organization’s strategy and apply economic and scientific practice to its conservation agenda. Immediately prior to joining the Conservancy, Giulio was a partner at McKinsey and Company, where he founded the firm’s Global Water Resource initiative and was one of the leaders of its Sustainability and Resource Productivity Practice. He co- authored the “Charting Our Water Security” report, one of the first to address the question of global water scarcity through multilateral, private-public collaboration defining a cost-curve for investment in water infrastructure. He is a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader” and sits on WEF’s Global Futures Council, and has served on the OECD-WWC High-Level Panel on Infrastructure Financing for a Water-Secure World.

Nathaniel Smith serves as Founder and Chief Equity Officer (CEqO)/CEO) of the Partnership for Southern Equity. Empowered by the unified vision and voices realized through its regional engagement efforts, PSE pushes for policies and actions that promote balanced growth and inclusive prosperity in metropolitan Atlanta and beyond. Among PSE’s notable accomplishments were creating the American South’s first equity mapping and framing tool, the Metro Atlanta Equity Atlas (MAEA); The Atlanta Regional Commission’s Equitable Target Areas (ETA) mapping index to promote and measure equitable land-use planning efforts; supporting the creation of the nation’s first “Equitable Development Plan” for a large-scale neighborhood transformation project—The Atlanta Beltline; and convening the inaugural Equity Atlanta Forum on the equitable utilization of Federal Stimulus Funding in metro Atlanta as well as its supporting document, co-written by PolicyLink, “Recovering Stronger: Building an Inclusive Metro Atlanta Economy.” Mr. Smith is also the co-author of PSE’s 2016 report, “Growing the Future: The Case for Economic Inclusion in Metropolitan Atlanta,” as well as “Opportunity Deferred: Race, Transportation, and the Future of Metropolitan Atlanta.” In 2014 PSE led a coalition of diverse stakeholders and organizations to support the initiation and passage of a $13 million transit referendum that expands Atlanta’s metropolitan transit system (MARTA) into a new county (Clayton) for the first time in 45 years.

Xavier de Souza Briggs is Vice President of the Ford Foundation’s Economic Opportunity and Markets program. He leads the foundation’s work promoting economic fairness, advancing sustainable development, and building just and inclusive cities. He oversees regional programming in China, Indonesia, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Xav is a former professor of sociology and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and former head of MIT’s Housing, Community, and Economic Development Group. Xav holds an engineering degree from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in sociology and education from Columbia University.