XcellentU

An Alternative and Complementary Education and Entertainment Network

Advisory Board

Bob Ezrin

Bio Here

Doug Trumbull

Bio Here

Roger Corman

Bio here

Ritch Esra
Bio Here

John Storm

Bio Here

Marilyn Bruno

Bio Here

Rick Ulfik, We the World and We.net, New York City

Rick Ulfik is the Founder and Director of We, The World, a non-profit organization that develops global networks of collaboration and organizes large public gatherings to build mass involvement in the work of creating a peaceful, caring, sustainable world. Advisors and supporters include Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dr. Jane Goodall, Daniel Ellsberg, Dr. Riane Eisler, Robert Thurman, William Schulz (Amnesty International USA Executive Director 1994-2006), Celeste Holm, Patch Adams, Hazel Henderson, and about 70 others.

Rick is a principal organizer of 11 Days of Global Unity Sept. 11-21, an annual convergence of more than 200 events in over 60 countries around the world coordinated by We, The World as part of a strategy for building mass public awareness and involvement in the vitally important work of peace and
sustainability.

Rick is also Co-Chair of The Foundation For Ethics and Meaning, a non-profit organization that is challenging our prevailing cultural emphasis on material self-interest while encouraging a spirit of caring and a process of mutual recognition that will nourish inclusive, sustainable, just
communities.

Rick also co-produces Visual Voices a TV Series of The Foundation for Ethics and Meaning Co-Sponsored by We, The World. Visual Voices presents voices in media, the arts and beyond who are shaping our culture and our world. He has also written, produced and directed two short films.

SOCIAL CHANGE ORGANIZING BACKGROUND

For many years Rick has had a strong interest in being involved with groups that promote peaceful and fulfilling interactions. He was a co-leader and coordinator of the 1993 United Nations event "Celebration For the Children of The World" endorsed by Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

He was one of several principal organizers of Michael Lerner's historicNational Summit On Ethics And Meaning in Washington, D.C. in April of 1996 which was attended by 1,800 people and included David Korten, Corinne McLaughlin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Pete Seeger, Marianne Williamson, Daniel Ellsberg, Cornel West and many others.

He also was an organizer for the 1998 United Nations Gandhi/King Season For Nonviolence honoring the 50th and 30th memorial anniversaries of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed by the Dalai Lama and Kofi Annan with participation by close to 2,000 people including Jesse Jackson, Arun Gandhi, over 500 organizations, and events taking place in 115 cities.

As Co-Chair of the National Board of The Foundation for Ethics and Meaning, he was one of three principal organizers of Re-Imagining Politics and Society at the Millennium, a conference in May of 2000 which featured Wei Jingsheng, Cornel West, Michael Lerner, David Korten, Naomi Klein, Arianna Huffington, Mark Green, Patricia Ireland, Cora Weiss, Marianne Williamson,
and over 200 other speakers from around the world.

Rick is the principal organizer of We, The World's Videoconference Series Building Peace and Security in the 21st Century started in 2003 which connects schools with the United Nations and featured speakers from around the world. Interacting with inspiring speakers like Dr. Jane Goodall and Congressman and Presidential CandidateDennis Kucinich, students and others are supported and encouraged to create a dream and vision of peace, and then put their dream into action. The Videoconference Series utilizes various media to disseminate information to students and the public about the many important non-military programs and practices that are preventing conflict, terrorism and oppression around the world.

Jack Healey, Human Rights Action Center

The head of the Human Rights Action Center is Jack Healey, the world-renowned human rights activist and pioneer. An effective and innovative leader in the human rights movement for over 25 years, Jack helped move the topic of human rights from closed-door diplomatic negotiations to widespread awareness, public debate, and direct citizen action. Colleagues credit him with making human rights a major focus of governments, advocacy organization, and individuals around the world.
Called ‘Mr. Human Rights‘ by U.S. News and World Report, Jack brought human rights to the global stage by his creative use of media and enlistment of world-class musical talent as advocates and spokespersons as Executive Director of Amnesty International USA for 12 years.

Gustav Grob, International Clean Energy Consortium Geneva

Gustav R. Grob is expert on renewable and unfinite energy. He is the
President of the International Clean Energy Consortium ICEC, which he
co-founded. He is also Vice-President of Hymobil AG for the clean vehicles,
Board Chairman of the Investment Fund, Inc. Blue Planet, and he advises
Investment companies regarding these questions.

In 2002, as Executive-Secretary and initiator, he founded the International
Sustainable Energy Organization (ISEO), which coordinates global efforts
towards clean and renewable energies. ISEO combines the work of many UN and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and is a driving force towards a global energy legislation and standardization. He is presently President of CMDC.

Grob is the author of numerous publications on energy, sustainable development, standardization and business ethics and has participated in numerous environmental conferences, including the historic UN climate Conference in Rio de Janeiro (1992) and the International Conference for Renewable Energies in Bonn (2004).

Heiko Martens-Sholz, Munich, Germany

Born in Ulm, the birthplace of Albert Einstein, Heiko Martens-Scholz learned that creative thinking follows a pattern: Imagination. Earning his degree in Motivational Psychology at International College of Realities, Berlin/Los Angeles, Heiko commited his career to developing a scientifically proven method, to easily and safely manifest personal goals.

Over a decade of research and development during the 1990ies lead to what is today reknown as "the leading motivational sound system in Europe, HTM Hi-Tec-Motivation.

Rated "Outstanding" by McKinsey and Co. Heiko`s company HMS Consulting proceeded to develop a computer and web-based platform to deliver the HTM technology as an e-learning-tool.

Heiko is an inspiring entrepreneurial speaker, personal coach, lecturer, author of the book "Smart Success" and father of three boys. His vision of a sustainable global society and economy was honored at the International Schumpeter Award. He currently lives and works in Munich, Europe. His development and training network is Europe based but has a global approach. His partners are Speakers Excellence, German Speakers Association, bestseller author Prof. Lothar Seiwert, Technical University Munich.

MARK McGUFFIE, Enterprise Honolulu, The Blue Economy Alliance

Mark McGuffie serves as Managing Director, Enterprise Honolulu, the O‘ahu
Economic Development Board. Responsible for promoting and assisting business development from local, national and international sources in the areas of astronomy, aerospace, environmental system design (Blue Economy models), renewable energy, food security, education and workforce development. Mark is very active in the community. He is a Founding member of The Blue Economy Alliance, and he serves as a Board member for several organizations, including the Economic Development Alliance Hawai'i, Hawaii Aerospace Advisory Committee (Governor appointed), and Hawai'i Science and Technology Institute (HSTI).

Previous experience includes serving as Executive Director of the Hawai'i Island Economic Development Board; Chair of the Workforce Investment Board-County of Hawai'i; and Treasurer/Chair Finance Committee for Preferred Hotels and Resorts Worldwide.

Howard Bloom, Celebrated Author and Celebrity Publicist

Howard Bloom, a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who's Who in Science and Engineering since the publication's inception.

Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. He started out normally enough, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department of The State University of New York, Buffalo, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world's largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education.

Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls "society's myth-making machinery"--the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into "the dark underbelly of mass emotion" he edited a magazine which won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled the publication's sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones' Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre--the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity's mass mind, Bloom formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he'd invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members achieve their goals…a skill which gave him an inside role in the rise of rap, disco, and punk rock.

The pinnacles of fame provided surprising scientific revelations. "When you're at the center of the sort of attention-storm which hits when you're working with a superstar," Bloom says, "it's as if the laws of physics change. Hormones charge you up in ways you never imagined. Time perception alters. You resolve crisis in minutes, seeing solutions instantly which previously would have taken you weeks.

"More important is the impact of a communal ritual like a rock concert. The star onstage is taken over by a self he doesn't know, one that seems to surge through him as if he were a length of empty pipe. The force of this strange passion welds the audience in an almost transcendent bond." Bloom's task was to first experience the exaltation, then to dissect it. "The model for this work," he says, "came from William James, who attempted to feel the ecstatic experience of mystics, then to probe it scientifically, a process which led to his 1902 book The Varieties of the Religious Experience."

Bloom's forays into power and its manipulations were also intense. "In the music and film industry everyone knew that money and career advancement were on the line. But few realized how deeply what they did affected the lives of millions, and even fewer felt the responsibility that demands. It was an amazing privilege to work as an equal with the entertainment industry's elite, many of whom I either had to woo or thwart to help my clients reach their audience with a message of genuine value. Some executives were master strategists but used their intelligence to increase their own stature, often at a brutal cost to others. Others were far more ethical. Yet even the best-intentioned employed boardroom and backroom tactics handed down from the politics of chimpanzees. Without knowing it, they used tricks of leadership we share with social animals from lizards and lobsters to baboons and mountain apes."
The subculture of Washington politics was, to Bloom, the most disturbing of them all. Bloom founded Music in Action, a national anti-censorship organization. This brought him into head-on combat with Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President and eventual presidential candidate Al Gore. Says Bloom, "Tipper and the right wing religionists who used her for their ends were masters of perceptual manipulation. They perpetrated hoaxes of outrageous transparency, yet still managed to convince the press and public that their falsifications were true."

Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity are devoted to Bloom and the antidote he invented, "perceptual engineering," which he defines as "a way of finding a valid truth which the herd refuses to see, then turning the herd around and making that truth self-evident. It's what we do in much of science--seeing the ordinary from a new perspective, then revealing what makes it tick and in the process altering society's views."

In 1981, Bloom organized the material he'd unearthed and began the formal research for a new theoretical structure that would first reveal itself in The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History. However he continued pursuing scientific truths in unconventional ways. In 1995 Bloom headed an insurgent academic circle called "The Group Selection Squad" whose efforts precipitated radical re-evaluations of neo-Darwinist dogma within the scientific community. In 1997, he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants included physicists, psychologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, invertebrate zoologists, and systems theorists. Paleopsychology's mandate is to "map out the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present."
Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written that with his unusual insights Bloom has "raced ahead of the timid scientific herd" often "vaulting over their heads" with a "grand vision" that "we do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand." In The Lucifer Principle and his new book Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, Howard Bloom brings those understandings from dimness into the light

Danny "News Dissector" Schechter, Documentary Filmmaker, Producer, Editor of MediaChannel.org

Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, television producer and an independent filmmaker who also writes and speaks about economic and media issues.

He is the executive editor of MediaChannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues online network, and recipient of many awards including the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2001 Award for Excellence in Documentary Journalism.

His latest films are PLUNDER: The Crime of Our Time [2010], “Barack Obama , People’s President [2009], an examination of how Obama won and “IN DEBT WE TRUST: America Before The Bubble Bursts,” [2007] an investigation of the impact of credit and debt on American society.

In Debt We Trust was one of the first films or media coverage to expose subprime lending and warn of an economic crisis. He was a director on “Viva Madiba,” a feature-length biopic tribute to Nelson Mandela on his 90th Birthday. (2008).

He is the author of 11 books.Schechter is co-founder and executive producer of Globalvision, a New York-based television and film production company now in its 21st year. He founded and executive-produced the TV series “South Africa Now” and co-produced the series “Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television.”

Schechter has specialized in investigative reporting and producing programming about the interface between human rights, journalism, popular music and society. His career began as the “News Dissector” at Boston’s leading rock station, WBCN. Later, he moved into television as an on-camera reporter for WGBH (Channel 2) in Boston and then as a producer for WLVI (Channel 56) and WCVB (Channel 5).

Schechter then joined the start-up team of CNN and later became a producer for ABC News 20/20. He produced 50 segments for ABC News, winning two national Emmys and nominated for two others.

He has produced and directed many TV specials and documentary films. He has spoken at scores of universities – from Harvard to Hamline, from Minnesota to MIT, NYU to Georgia State, Santa Monica to the University of Hawaii, Princeton to Cornell.

A Cornell University graduate, he received his Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and an honorary doctorate from Fitchburg College. He was a Neiman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, where he also taught in 1969. After college, he was a full time civil rights worker and then communications director of the Northern Student Movement, and worked as a community organizer in a Saul Alinsky-style War on Poverty program. Then, moving from the streets to the suites, Schechter served as an assistant to the Mayor of Detroit in 1966 on a Ford Foundation grant.

Schechter has reported from 61 countries. He was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and taught investigative reporting at the New School. Schechter’s writing has appeared in leading newspapers and magazines including the Newsday, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, Media Studies Journal, Detroit Free Press, Village Voice, Z, Mediahannel.org, OpedNews.com, ZNET, Creative1, Global Research, Alternet and many others.

Ezra Drissman, Green Careers Guide

Ezra Drissman is the Manager for EcoGreen Ventures, Inc. Started in 2007, the company now runs three informational green sites:GreenCareersGuide.com, Eco20-20.com and GreatGreenIdea.com, which is linked from over 500 universities, colleges and public libraries across the United States. His articles have been on the cover of Yahoo, National Geographic online, and featured on Fox Business Online. He has also been interviewed as a solar jobs expert on Voice of Russia and other media outlets. Ezra attained his bachelor’s in Public Affairs from Wayne State University.

Demian Lichtenstein, Filmmaker, Los Angeles

Demian has amassed a vast body of work in the music video industry since receiving his BFA from New York University in 1988, leading to his current status as a major up-and-comer in Feature Film Direction. Some past projects include directing Music Videos for Sting & Eric Clapton, Grandmaster Caz, Shabba Ranks, Queen Latifah, West of Eden (Best Independent Video/MTV 1987), Cypress Hill, Gloria Estefan, Sony, Warner Bros, Columbia Pictures, MCA, Epic, Island, Atlantic, Tommy Boy, IRS Records, World Hunger Project, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Demian was Chairman of the New York Independent Film Coalition for two years, and has directed, produced, written, photographed, taped and/or recorded audio on over 225 features, short films, music videos, commercials and concerts.

STEVEN KING, BARACK OBAMA GREEN CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL, PLAINFIELD, NJ

Bio coming soon!

EDWARD SUMMER, FILMMAKER, NEW YORK CITY

As an artist, Summer drew the historic first installment of a nearly forgotten comic strip called "SUNY Daze," a satirical feature for "The Spectrum," the official newspaper of the State University of New York at Buffalo. It was written by Jeremy Taylor, now a well-known writer of best-selling books on dreams and myth. Because Summer was called away, the second installment was drawn by the then unknown Manny Rodriguez, a friend of Summer's and member of a local motor cycle gang called "The Road Vultures." Under the name "Spain," Rodriguez went on to become on of the leading artists of the 1960's -70's Underground Comix movement. He is also the original writer and Producer for the motion picture, "Conan the Barbarian."

Edward Summer graduated from the first official year (1970) of the New York University School of the Arts. Among class members were Oliver Stone, Jonathan Kaplan, Dan Opatoshu, Alan Arkush, Jon Davison, Roy Frumkes, John Byrum, Ken Friedman, Linda Feferman, Jamie Anderson.

HARRY KLOOR, PHYSICIST, FILMMAKER, LOS ANGELES

Bio coming soon!

Dr. John Phalen
EXECUTIVE MANAGEMENT: as President, developed Pacific Gateway College as a refugee English language and vocational training school, serving 600 to 800 refugees per year; as the Executive Director, developed the International Institute of Los Angeles into the largest immigrant/refugee direct service organization in the country with a multimillion dollar/multiple funding base and 300 employees providing services to 35,000 clients per year in children and senior services, family/immigration counseling and refugee resettlement; United Way Director of Agency Relations and Budgeting, South Los Angeles County managing a multimillion dollar budgeting/monitoring process involving some 75 agencies, USO Director/Executive Director, developing and managing social/recreational programs for thousands of young adults in the military monthly; reorganized USO operations Seattle-Tacoma into an area organization.

COMMUNITY RELATIONS, EDUCATIONAL AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT:: served twelve years on the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations; extensive experience in working with elected and administrative leadership at federal, state and local government levels; tens of millions of dollars raised
through public and private sector grant writing; including the principal development consultant for Compton Community College, part time, raising $5 million plus for the college. Sixfold expansion of funding for International Institute as it’s Executive Director; started Pacific Gateway College, developing it into a multimillion dollar per annum technical college; development/fundraising consultant to multiple faith and community based agencies; Los Angeles City listed development consultant for community and faith based organizations.

INTERIM MANAGEMENT: Urban priest, Air Force Chaplain, most recently interim priest for 5 parishes in the Diocese, addressing transitional issues in management and operational organizations, as well is serious conflict
resolution issues in two situations.

Marc Ross, Rock the Earth

Dave Gardner, Hooked on Growth

Dr. Marilyn Bruno, Aecquor. Inc.

Dave Street

George Dassinger

And many more! Add your name to this list by contacting us here!