Rebuilding America: A Weekend Conference for College Students

Pastor Corey Brooks is the founder and senior pastor of New Beginnings Church of Chicago. He is also founder and CEO of Project H.O.O.D Communities Development Corporation, which empowers people with the guidance, information, and tools necessary to become peacemakers, problem solvers, leaders, and entrepreneurs in their communities. Pastor Brooks’s efforts received national acclaim when he spent 94 days living on the roof of a rundown motel located across the street from his church. It had become a center of drugs, prostitution, and violence. Within three months he raised enough money to buy the building and tear it down. The land is now earmarked to be the location of a $23 million state-of-the-art community center to help make the neighborhood a safer place.

Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, which was a finalist for ISI’s Conservative Book of the Year award. Carney has written for The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

Michael Matheson Miller is research fellow and director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute. He lectures internationally on moral philosophy, economic development, social theory, and entrepreneurship. Miller leads the PovertyCure initiative, which promotes entrepreneurial solutions to poverty in the developing world. He is the director and host of the PovertyCure DVD Series.

Gracy Olmstead is a writer and journalist located outside Washington, D.C. She has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the American Conservative, The Week, National Review, The Federalist, the Washington Times, and the Intercollegiate Review, among other publications. A native of rural Idaho, she is the author of the new book Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind, which Kirkus Reviews calls “a superior exploration of the consequences of the hollowing out of our agricultural heartlands.”