Annenberg Conversations: Joe Kennedy III and Marjorie Margolies

Annenberg Conversations: Joe Kennedy III and Marjorie Margolies

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About the Talk

This finale of this year's Annenberg Conversations event series will be a discussion between Joe Kennedy III and Marjorie Margolies.
 
Kennedy and Margolies will discuss the Annenberg Conversations theme -- Public Service in a Time of Polarization -- with Kennedy sharing insights from the Groundwork Project, a nonprofit he founded to create sustainable and long-term progressive change through community organizing.

Schedule
Lecture: 3:15pm-4:15pm
Reception: 4:15-5:15pm 

About the Speakers

Joseph P. Kennedy III 

Over four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, Joseph Kennedy built an impressive legislative record around economic policy, health care, and civil rights. Representing a district that spanned from the suburbs of Boston to the proud post-industrial communities along Massachusetts' South Coast, Mr. Kennedy sat on the House Energy & Commerce committee and spearheaded bipartisan efforts to extend mental health coverage, support the domestic manufacturing industry, protect consumer voices online, make hearing aids more affordable, and defend access to legal assistance for struggling families. 

Today, Mr. Kennedy serves as Managing Director at Citizens Energy, a non-profit energy company founded to help low-income families meet their basic energy needs. Through innovative programming, Citizens has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to benefit millions of families across the United States.  He is the founder of Groundwork Project, an advocacy organization dedicated to supporting local community organizing efforts in under-resourced and historically disenfranchised communities. He also currently serves as the United States Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs. 

Mr. Kennedy serves on the boards of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Massachusetts Association for Mental Health, and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School and spent two years in the United States Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic.  He is married to Lauren Birchfield Kennedy and they have two young children, Eleanor and James, and a rescue dog, Banjo.

Marjorie Margolies

Marjorie Margolies is the founding President of Women’s Campaign International (WCI), a group that provides advocacy training for women throughout the world. During the past several years, WCI has conducted several successful trainings in the countries of Tanzania, Venezuela, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Namibia, Malawi, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Ethiopia among others. WCI’s work in these countries has yielded phenomenal successes, including doubling the number of women in parliaments and inspiring the creation of various women’s caucuses on local levels.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a CBS News Foundation Fellow at Columbia University, Margolies began her career as a television journalist at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia. Margolies was a journalist with NBC and its owned and operated stations both in New York and Washington, DC. She was a contributing correspondent to the Today Show, Sunday Today, A Closer Look, CNBC, and Real Life with Jane Pauley. Margolies’s reporting has won numerous awards including five Emmys.

In 1992, Margolies was the first woman ever elected to Congress from Pennsylvania in her own right. She was also the first Democrat since 1916 elected from Pennsylvania’s 13th district. Margolies was appointed to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, with subcommittee assignments on Oversight and Investigations and Telecommunications and Finance. In addition, she was a member of the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Government Operations.

In 1995, Margolies served as the Director of the United States delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. Margolies is currently at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to ASC, she taught at the Fels Institute where she taught “Women Leaders in Emerging Democracies” based on her work with WCI and “Dealing with the Media,” a course which analyzes the ways in which politics and the media interact. In 2015, she was given the Outstanding Teacher Award by the students and faculty of Fels. Margolies has been a senior fellow at ASC as part of its Institute for Public Service. There she has co-taught two classes, one studying political conventions, another focusing on the first 100 days of new presidential administrations. In addition, as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Margolies lectures at universities throughout the country. Margolies was a presidential appointee to the Vietnam Education Fund, which focused on scientific education and exchange between the United States and Vietnam. In addition, she was appointed to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad.

Margolies became the first unmarried U.S. citizen to adopt a foreign child. Lee Heh arrived from Korea in 1970 and was joined four years later by Holly from Vietnam. Margolies chronicled their experiences in the 1976 best-seller, They Came to Stay (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1976), the first of five books she has authored. Her most recent book is entitled And How Are the Children?, which won two National Indie awards. The book chronicles her life as the mother of adopted, homegrown, step, and sponsored children.