The Human Trafficking Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that fights modern slavery by going after the people who profit from it. Founded in 2015 by two former U.S. Department of Justice trafficking prosecutors, HTI embeds veteran experts inside criminal justice systems - training police and prosecutors, building specialized anti-trafficking units, and supplying the investigative tools and data needed to convict traffickers. It runs field programs in Uganda and Belize and publishes the annual Federal Human Trafficking Report, the only dataset compiling every U.S. federal trafficking case since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.
Emily Stone is the founder and CEO of Uncommon Cacao, the first specialty cacao trader to publish verifiable prices for every transaction along its supply chain. From a base that started in the jungles of Belize and Guatemala, she built a Transparent Trade model that sources from more than 10,000 smallholder farmers across 15+ countries and supplies hundreds of craft chocolate makers worldwide. An Ashoka Fellow and Georgetown-trained sociologist, she is trying to decommoditize cacao by making farmers the protagonists of the chain rather than its afterthought.
Victor Boutros is the CEO and co-founder of the Human Trafficking Institute, a Dallas- and Washington-based nonprofit that embeds investigators and lawyers inside the criminal justice systems of developing countries to help them dismantle trafficking networks at the source. A former U.S. Department of Justice federal prosecutor who tried human trafficking cases of national significance, he co-wrote the Washington Post bestseller The Locust Effect with Gary Haugen, work that earned the 2016 Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Improving World Order. He left a stable government career with no safety net in 2016 to build an organization that has helped Uganda prosecute traffickers at nearly ten times the global average.

Mandy Cabot co-founded Dansko in 1990 from the back of a station wagon and built it into a $140M comfort footwear empire - then gave the whole company to her employees. Now she's running Silk Grass Farms in Belize, a vertically integrated agribusiness sitting atop 24,500 acres of protected rainforest. Chapter three of an already remarkable life.

Elvis Saravia is the co-founder and lead AI researcher at DAIR.AI, a mission-driven organization democratizing AI research and education worldwide. Based in Belize, he is the author of the Prompt Engineering Guide - one of the most widely read AI resources on the internet with 73,000+ GitHub stars and over 3 million learners - and publishes the AI Agents Weekly newsletter. A PhD graduate from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, he has contributed to landmark AI projects including the Galactica large language model at Meta AI, and is known for bridging rigorous research with accessible, production-minded education for the next generation of AI builders.