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.