Desirée Cormier Smith is a co-founder and co-president of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice. She is also an inaugural Senior Fellow in the newly launched Human Rights & US Foreign Policy Fellowship at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School and an inaugural Alcee L. Hastings Global Futures Fellow at Howard University’s Ralph Bunche International Affairs Center. From 2022 until 2025, she served as the US Department of State’s inaugural Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice. Previously, she served as the Senior Advisor in the Department of State’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, and worked at the Open Society Foundations as the Senior Policy Advisor for Africa, Europe, and Eurasia. Before that she was the Senior Director with Albright Stonebridge Group’s Africa Practice, where she advised and assisted private and social sector clients on growth strategies across the African continent. She began her career as a State Department Foreign Service Officer with assignments in Mexico, South Africa, and Washington, DC.

Jessica Stern is also Co-Founder and Co-President of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice and an expert in gender, sexuality and human rights with more than two decades of leadership across government, civil society, multilateral institutions, philanthropy, and academia. She also serves as an inaugural Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, where she is pioneering new fellowships on global LGBTQI+ equality and inclusive foreign policy. She is the first LGBTQI+ rights expert to hold a senior fellowship at the Kennedy School. From 2021 to 2025, she served as US Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons, where she directed US foreign policy to combat discrimination and violence worldwide. As Special Envoy, she represented the United States bilaterally, mobilized government coalitions, and oversaw policies and programs disbursing millions in foreign assistance. Previously, she served as Executive Director of Outright International, one of the world’s largest global LGBTQI+ rights NGOs. At Columbia University, she teaches the first and only course on LGBTQI+ rights and public policy at the School of International and Public Affairs; and she lectures at Leiden University’s Summer School on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in International Law, the premier academic intensive for students and practitioners in the field.

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