Advocates of Human Rights

What It Takes is a podcast series featuring intimate, revealing conversations with towering figures in almost every field: music, science, sports, politics, film, technology, literature, the military and social justice. These rare interviews have been recorded over the past 25 years by The Academy of Achievement. They offer the life stories and reflections of people who have had a huge impact on the world, and insights you can apply to your own life. Subscribe to the What It Takes podcast series at iTunes.com/WhatItTakes

Anthony Romero had led the American Civil Liberties Union for only four days when the attacks of September 11, 2001 presented civil libertarians with their greatest challenge in decades. Since then, Romero and the ACLU have waged a continuous struggle in the nation's courts to ensure that the Constitution does not become a casualty of the war on terror. A son of Puerto Rican parents, and the first member of his family to graduate from high school, Romero earned law and public policy degrees at Stanford and Princeton. He is the sixth director to lead the ACLU since it was first founded, to combat the abuses of civil liberties that arose during the First World War. Anthony Romero has presided over the most explosive growth in the group's history, doubling its national staff and tripling its budget, enabling it to win significant court victories in defense of personal liberties, and restraining the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He tells the story of this campaign in his book In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror. This podcast was recorded at the Auberge du Soleil in California�Ŵs Napa Valley during the 2014 International Achievement Summit.

Anthony Romero had led the American Civil Liberties Union for only four days when the attacks of September 11, 2001 presented civil libertarians with their greatest challenge in decades. Since then, Romero and the ACLU have waged a continuous struggle in the nation's courts to ensure that the Constitution does not become a casualty of the war on terror. A son of Puerto Rican parents, and the first member of his family to graduate from high school, Romero earned law and public policy degrees at Stanford and Princeton. He is the sixth director to lead the ACLU since it was first founded, to combat the abuses of civil liberties that arose during the First World War. Anthony Romero has presided over the most explosive growth in the group's history, doubling its national staff and tripling its budget, enabling it to win significant court victories in defense of personal liberties, and restraining the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He tells the story of this campaign in his book In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror. This podcast was recorded at the Auberge du Soleil in California�Ŵs Napa Valley during the 2014 International Achievement Summit.

Barry Scheck has been honored as the most outstanding criminal defense lawyer in America. A pioneer of the use of DNA evidence, he co-founded the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York City. In the past decade, the Project has helped secure the exoneration of more than 200 men previously convicted of crimes they did not commit, many of whom would have faced execution but for the intervention of Scheck and his associates. He describes many of these cases in his book, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted. Scheck may be best known to the American public as the DNA expert on the O.J. Simpson defense team, an occasion he saw as an opportunity to promote higher standards in the handling of DNA evidence. He has frequently served as an expert advisor to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and has assisted in the investigation of unsolved crimes such as the JonBenet Ramsey murder. He has served as counsel in numerous civil and criminal actions involving the rights of battered women and incidents of police brutality, including the Abner Louima police assault incident in New York. He co-founded the Innocence Project after six years of litigation to establish standards for the use of DNA evidence in U.S. courts. In this two-part podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, he discusses his work as founder of the Innocence project, his long campaign to inject DNA evidence into the legal system, and the resulting exoneration of innocent men and women wrongly convicted of violent crimes.

Josh Nesbit founded the nonprofit company Medic Mobile, which uses low-cost, mobile technology to create more efficient health care delivery systems in underdeveloped areas of the world. Nesbit also founded Hope Phones, a recycling campaign designed to engage millions of Americans in global health efforts. Nesbit and his team have worked in 16 countries in East and West Africa, South Asia, North America, and South America, using mobile technologies to support a wide range of programs, from infectious disease surveillance and hazardous waste disposal in rural Malawi to emergency response after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. His work has been featured on CNN and the Discovery Channel, as well as in Popular Mechanics, BusinessWeek, The Guardian and The New York Times. He received the Truman Award for Innovation from the Society for International Development and was named by Forbes magazine as one of the world's top 30 social entrepreneurs. A delegate to the 2012 International Achievement Summit, Josh Nesbit described his work in this address to the Academy of Achievement, recorded at the Top of the Hay in Washington D.C.'s Hay-Adams Hotel.

President of the 1.9 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Andy Stern is leading a resurgence of organized labor after decades of decline. With Stern at the helm, the SEIU has unionized some of the lowest-paid, least visible workers in the economy like janitors, security guards, home health care workers, winning them pay increases, health insurance and benefits they had never known before. In the process, he is re-creating the labor movement for a global economy. When Andy Stern joined SEIU in 1973, he was a 21-year-old social worker, fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania. He soon became head of his local, and by age 29, he was the youngest member of the SEIU Executive Board. Unlike other union officers, he spent most of his career in the field, organizing workers. In 1996, he won the International Presidency of SEIU in a hotly contested struggle. Over the last 50 years, organized labor in the United States devoted much of its resources to lobbying and electioneering while union membership fell from over a third of the workforce to less than ten percent. When he could not persuade the AFL-CIO to abandon the failed policies of the past, Stern withdrew SEIU from the national labor federation. He founded Change to Win, a new alliance of seven major unions with six million members, including the Teamsters, Laborers, Carpenters, Farm Workers, United Food and Commercial Workers, and Unite Here, which represents workers in the garment and textile industries, as well as those employed in hotels and restaurants. In his book, A Country That Works, Stern lays out an expansive vision for the future. He believes that the model of local union organizations, created in the 1930s, is at odds with the reality of the modern economy. Multiple unions with overlapping jurisdictions in the same industry should be replaced, he suggests, with fewer, larger unions that can organize entire industries, rather than targeting individual companies. He proposes that unions assume a larger responsibility for training, health insurance and pensions, relieving American business of major obstacle to international competitiveness and creating a more prosperous and equitable society for all. At a time when the power of organized labor in the United States was declining rapidly, one union bucked the trend. Under the leadership of President Andy Stern, it has become the fastest-growing union in the country and a force to reckon with in national politics.

President of the 1.9 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Andy Stern is leading a resurgence of organized labor after decades of decline. With Stern at the helm, the SEIU has unionized some of the lowest-paid, least visible workers in the economy like janitors, security guards, home health care workers, winning them pay increases, health insurance and benefits they had never known before. In the process, he is re-creating the labor movement for a global economy. When Andy Stern joined SEIU in 1973, he was a 21-year-old social worker, fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania. He soon became head of his local, and by age 29, he was the youngest member of the SEIU Executive Board. Unlike other union officers, he spent most of his career in the field, organizing workers. In 1996, he won the International Presidency of SEIU in a hotly contested struggle. Over the last 50 years, organized labor in the United States devoted much of its resources to lobbying and electioneering while union membership fell from over a third of the workforce to less than ten percent. When he could not persuade the AFL-CIO to abandon the failed policies of the past, Stern withdrew SEIU from the national labor federation. He founded Change to Win, a new alliance of seven major unions with six million members, including the Teamsters, Laborers, Carpenters, Farm Workers, United Food and Commercial Workers, and Unite Here, which represents workers in the garment and textile industries, as well as those employed in hotels and restaurants. In his book, A Country That Works, Stern lays out an expansive vision for the future. He believes that the model of local union organizations, created in the 1930s, is at odds with the reality of the modern economy. Multiple unions with overlapping jurisdictions in the same industry should be replaced, he suggests, with fewer, larger unions that can organize entire industries, rather than targeting individual companies. He proposes that unions assume a larger responsibility for training, health insurance and pensions, relieving American business of major obstacle to international competitiveness and creating a more prosperous and equitable society for all. At a time when the power of organized labor in the United States was declining rapidly, one union bucked the trend. Under the leadership of President Andy Stern, it has become the fastest-growing union in the country and a force to reckon with in national politics.

Anthony Romero had led the ACLU for only four days when the attacks of September 11, 2001 presented civil libertarians with their greatest challenge in decades. Since then, Romero and the ACLU have waged a continuous struggle in the nation's courts to ensure that the Constitution does not become a casualty of the war on terror. A son of Puerto Rican parents, and the first member of his family to graduate from high school, Romero earned law and public policy degrees at Stanford and Princeton. He is the sixth director to lead the ACLU since it was first founded, to combat the abuses of civil liberties that arose during the First World War. Romero has presided over the most explosive growth in the group's history, doubling its national staff and tripling its budget, enabling it to win significant court victories in defense of personal liberties, and restraining the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He tells the story of this campaign in his book In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror.

Anthony Romero had led the ACLU for only four days when the attacks of September 11, 2001 presented civil libertarians with their greatest challenge in decades. Since then, Romero and the ACLU have waged a continuous struggle in the nation's courts to ensure that the Constitution does not become a casualty of the war on terror. A son of Puerto Rican parents, and the first member of his family to graduate from high school, Romero earned law and public policy degrees at Stanford and Princeton. He is the sixth director to lead the ACLU since it was first founded, to combat the abuses of civil liberties that arose during the First World War. Romero has presided over the most explosive growth in the group's history, doubling its national staff and tripling its budget, enabling it to win significant court victories in defense of personal liberties, and restraining the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He tells the story of this campaign in his book In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror.

Anthony Romero had led the ACLU for only four days when the attacks of September 11, 2001 presented civil libertarians with their greatest challenge in decades. Since then, Romero and the ACLU have waged a continuous struggle in the nation's courts to ensure that the Constitution does not become a casualty of the war on terror. A son of Puerto Rican parents, and the first member of his family to graduate from high school, Romero earned law and public policy degrees at Stanford and Princeton. He is the sixth director to lead the ACLU since it was first founded, to combat the abuses of civil liberties that arose during the First World War. Romero has presided over the most explosive growth in the group's history, doubling its national staff and tripling its budget, enabling it to win significant court victories in defense of personal liberties, and restraining the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He tells the story of this campaign in his book In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror.

A graduate of the University of Virginia and Stanford Business School, Jacqueline Novogratz began her career in international banking with Chase Manhattan Bank before founding Duterimbere, a micro-finance institution in Rwanda. She initiated and led The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2001, Novogratz founded the Acumen Fund to finance small-scale businesses that supply life-changing goods and services to underserved communities in the developing world. By 2009 Acumen Fund had invested $40 million in over 35 enterprises. Today, locally controlled businesses with Acumen financing are providing energy, health care, housing and running water to 25 million people in Pakistan, India, Kenya and Tanzania. She related her experiences in the bestselling memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.

A graduate of the University of Virginia and Stanford Business School, Jacqueline Novogratz began her career in international banking with Chase Manhattan Bank before founding Duterimbere, a micro-finance institution in Rwanda. She initiated and led The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2001, Novogratz founded the Acumen Fund to finance small-scale businesses that supply life-changing goods and services to underserved communities in the developing world. By 2009 Acumen Fund had invested $40 million in over 35 enterprises. Today, locally controlled businesses with Acumen financing are providing energy, health care, housing and running water to 25 million people in Pakistan, India, Kenya and Tanzania. She related her experiences in the bestselling memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.

Anthony Romero had led the ACLU for only four days when the attacks of September 11, 2001 presented civil libertarians with their greatest challenge in decades. Since then, Romero and the ACLU have waged a continuous struggle in the nation's courts to ensure that the Constitution does not become a casualty of the war on terror. A son of Puerto Rican parents, and the first member of his family to graduate from high school, Romero earned law and public policy degrees at Stanford and Princeton. He is the sixth director to lead the ACLU since it was first founded, to combat the abuses of civil liberties that arose during the First World War. Romero has presided over the most explosive growth in the group's history, doubling its national staff and tripling its budget, enabling it to win significant court victories in defense of personal liberties, and restraining the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He tells the story of this campaign in his book In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror. He is heard here in discussion with MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews.

Anthony Romero had led the ACLU for only four days when the attacks of September 11, 2001 presented civil libertarians with their greatest challenge in decades. Since then, Romero and the ACLU have waged a continuous struggle in the nation's courts to ensure that the Constitution does not become a casualty of the war on terror. A son of Puerto Rican parents, and the first member of his family to graduate from high school, Romero earned law and public policy degrees at Stanford and Princeton. He is the sixth director to lead the ACLU since it was first founded, to combat the abuses of civil liberties that arose during the First World War. Romero has presided over the most explosive growth in the group's history, doubling its national staff and tripling its budget, enabling it to win significant court victories in defense of personal liberties, and restraining the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He tells the story of this campaign in his book In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror. He is heard here in discussion with MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews.

Born and raised in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer published her first short story in a children's magazine in 1937 at the age of 16. She left college without a degree and continued publishing short fiction in South African journals. She drew attention outside her country in 1951, when her stories began appearing in The New Yorker magazine. She published her first novel, The Lying Days in 1953. In her short stories and novels such as Burger's Daughter and July's People, she explored the distortions imposed on ordinary human relationships by oppressive social systems like that of apartheid in South Africa. The infamous Sharpeville massacre of 1960 drove the author into political activism. She joined the African National Congress while it was still listed as an illegal organization by the government. While her fiction was repeatedly banned by the South African government it received the highest acclaim abroad. She won Britain's most distinguished literary award the Booker Prize for her 1974 novel The Conservationist. In 1991 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature, in recognition of her "magnificent epic writing�Ķ of very great benefit to humanity." While she has traveled widely to lecture and teach she continues to make her home in South Africa. In this podcast, recorded at the 2009 International Achievement Summit in Cape Town, Nadine Gordimer discusses the relationship between the image and the word in a multimedia age, the challenges of achieving universal literacy in the developing nations, and the enduring power of the written word.

Albie Sachs began a lifetime of human rights activism as a 17-year-old law student at the University of Cape Town, when he first took part in a civil disobedience campaign against apartheid. As a young attorney, he defended others charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. After two spells of solitary confinement without trial, he fled the country. He spent the next 22 years in exile in the United Kingdom and Mozambique. In 1988, a car bomb planted by South African agents cost him an arm and the sight in one eye. He devoted the next years to preparing a new democratic constitution for South Africa. After South Africa's democratic elections of 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed Sachs to serve as a Justice on the newly established Constitutional Court. Justice Sachs wrote the court's unanimous opinion in the landmark 2005 decision legalizing same-sex marriage in South Africa. Now retired form the Court, he travels the world, sharing the South African experience of healing a divided society. In this podcast, recorded at the 2009 International Achievement Summit in Cape Town, South Africa, Justice Sachs gives a moving account of his lifelong struggle for the freedom of his country.

The poet and playwright Wole Soyinka is a towering figure in world literature. He has won international acclaim for his verse, as well as for novels such as The Interpreters. His work in the theater ranges from the early comedy The Lion and the Jewel to the poetic tragedy Death and the King's Horseman. Born in Nigeria, he returned from graduate studies in England just as his country attained its independence from Britain. Many of his plays, including Kongi's Harvest and Madmen and Specialists, are bitter satires on the dictatorships of post-colonial Africa. In the late '60s, his opposition to a repressive regime in his own country led to his imprisonment in solitary confinement for nearly two years, an experience he reflects on in the memoir The Man Died and the verse collection A Shuttle in the Crypt. His works in all genres deploy a rich poetic language, steeped in European mythology and the Yoruba spiritual traditions of West Africa, interests he fused in his masterful study Myth, Literature and the African World. In 1986, he became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Barry Scheck has been honored as the most outstanding criminal defense lawyer in America. A pioneer of the use of DNA evidence, he co-founded the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York City. In the past decade, the Project has helped secure the exoneration of more than 200 men previously convicted of crimes they did not commit, many of whom would have faced execution but for the intervention of Scheck and his associates. He describes many of these cases in his book, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted. Born and raised in New York City, Scheck became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements while still in his teens. He became interested in civil rights law as an undergraduate at Yale University and paid his way through law school at Berkeley with money he won playing poker. Right out of law school, he published an influential book on the legal issues raised by electronic surveillance. Returning to New York City, he served as a public defender in the South Bronx at the height of its mid-'70s crime wave. He worked for the Legal Aid Society of New York City for three years before joining the faculty of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, where he has now taught for over 27 years. Scheck may be best known to the American public as the DNA expert on the O.J. Simpson defense team, an occasion he saw as an opportunity to promote higher standards in the handling of DNA evidence. He was also part of the defense team for Louise Woodward, the British au pair accused of murdering her infant charge in Massachusetts. He has frequently served as an expert advisor to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and has assisted in the investigation of unsolved crimes such as the JonBenet Ramsey murder. He has also reported on high-profile cases, including the Oklahoma City bombing, as a legal analyst for NBC News. He has served as counsel in numerous civil and criminal actions involving the rights of battered women and incidents of police brutality, including the Abner Louima police assault incident in New York. He co-founded the Innocence Project after six years of litigation to establish standards for the use of DNA evidence in U.S. courts.

Three panelists bring unique points of view to a discussion of 21st century Africa. The President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is the first woman to serve as the elected leader of an African nation. The Harvard-trained economist survived death threats, exile and imprisonment in her 25-year struggle to bring peace and democracy to her country. Since her election in 2005, President Johnson Sirleaf has moved decisively to repair the damage done by decades of dictatorship and civil conflict. Her courage and tenacity have won her the nickname, the Iron Lady of Africa. Desmond Tutu received the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the cause of racial equality in South Africa. As the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, his spiritual authority dealt a death blow to the system of white supremacy. As Chairman of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he enabled his country to bind up its wounds, and choose forgiveness over revenge. One of the world's most beloved religious leaders, he continues to raise his voice for peace and justice all over the world. Author and journalist Nicholas Kristof has covered African affairs for over 20 years. He has reported on civil wars in Ghana and Congo and focused the world's attention on the continent's epidemics of AIDS and malaria. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 2006 for his columns exposing the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. The discussion, recorded at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii, is led by David Gergen, Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Three panelists bring unique points of view to a discussion of 21st century Africa. The President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is the first woman to serve as the elected leader of an African nation. The Harvard-trained economist survived death threats, exile and imprisonment in her 25-year struggle to bring peace and democracy to her country. Since her election in 2005, President Johnson Sirleaf has moved decisively to repair the damage done by decades of dictatorship and civil conflict. Her courage and tenacity have won her the nickname, the Iron Lady of Africa. Desmond Tutu received the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the cause of racial equality in South Africa. As the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, his spiritual authority dealt a death blow to the system of white supremacy. As Chairman of the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he enabled his country to bind up its wounds, and choose forgiveness over revenge. One of the world's most beloved religious leaders, he continues to raise his voice for peace and justice all over the world. Author and journalist Nicholas Kristof has covered African affairs for over 20 years. He has reported on civil wars in Ghana and Congo and focused the world's attention on the continent's epidemics of AIDS and malaria. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 2006 for his columns exposing the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. The discussion, recorded at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii, is led by David Gergen, Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.