Laura Beck

For the past ten years, Laura Beck has worked with numerous non-profits, including In Defense of Animals, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Home at Last Animal Rescue, and Rocket Dog Rescue, where she currently serves as Vice-President.

As the San Francisco coordinator for California’s Proposition 2 (the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act), Laura worked with The Humane Society of the United States and Farm Sanctuary to ensure the successful passage of the proposition.

Laura loves all things animals and food, but never together! She is a co-founding editor of Vegansaurus.com, the Editor-at-Large for VegNews Magazine, and a regular foster mom to pit bulls.

Livia Stone

Livia’s lifelong passion for learning and love for any and all animals are perhaps her most defining characteristics. Her first career was in publishing, and while she loved working on children’s, arts, and craft books, it wasn’t until heading out West that she found her true calling.

After extensive volunteer efforts at several Bay Area wildlife and conservation organizations, Livia interned at WildCare, a wildlife hospital and education center in San Rafael, California. The experience would be life-changing; in helping to heal and return wild animals to their homes, Livia truly feels like she has become the person she was meant to be.

After five years on staff, Livia now volunteers her time to help wildlife, particularly critical care patients. Her home often has wild guests ranging from owls to skunks.

Most recently, her work with The Biz and Livia Stone Foundation allows her to make a larger impact on the conservation of wild spaces and also to share her love of learning with underserved Bay Area children by opening up new opportunities for them to experience the world.

Biz Stone

GQ once named him Nerd of the Year, TIME put him on their list of most influential persons in the world, and Valleywag dubbed him Most Useless. Biz Stone means different things to different people but the main thrust of his work over the past decade plus has been developing collaborative web systems freely accessed by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

As a progenitor of the early social web, Biz became an Internet entrepreneur in 1999 and went on to work for Google. Later, Stone co-founded Twitter which launched in 2006. In June of 2011 with his long time collaborators Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, Stone co-founded The Obvious Corporation to focus on building systems that help people work together to improve the world.

An adamant believer that when we help others, we also help ourselves, Stone supports a new way of doing business with a higher level of ambition, and a better, more altruistic way to measure success. Beyond immediate needs, Stone advocates selflessness; insisting we follow this path in order to deliver deeper meaning in our work and in so doing, place value before profit.

Along with his wife, Livia, Stone was named a Huffington Post Game Changer for their work and impact in the field of public service. Together, the couple operate The Biz and Livia Stone Foundation supporting education and conservation in California. Stone is an advisor to several companies and organizations and a visiting scholar at various universities.

Biz lives in Marin County, California with his wife Livia.