I Too Am America

Shawn Dove has more than three decades of cross-sector leadership in youth development, community-building, philanthropy, arts education, leadership development, and media literacy. He is the founder of the Corporation for Black Male Achievement. This consulting and publishing firm produces community-building engagements and multi-media stories of loving, learning, and leading by and for Black men and boys.

From 2008 to 2021, Dove led the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, a national intermediary membership organization committed to ensuring the growth, impact and sustainability of leaders and organizations committed to improving the life outcomes for Black men and boys.

He launched CBMA in 2008 at the Open Society Foundations, spinning off into an independent entity in 2015. Under Dove’s leadership, CBMA leveraged more than $212 million in national and local funds to help catalyze a movement, connecting thousands of leaders and organizations working with and on behalf of Black men and boys.

During his career journey, he has served in leadership roles with the Harlem Children’s Zone; The DOME Project; First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, NJ; the National Guild for Community Schools of the Arts; and MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership. Shawn lives in New Jersey with his wife Desere and their four children, Nia, Maya, Cameron, and Caleb.

Nick Chiles is a bestselling author and an award-winning journalist. He has authored or co-authored twenty books, including three New York Times bestsellers with R&B icon Bobby Brown, civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton, and gospel legend Kirk Franklin. He also co-authored with Academy Award-winning actor Jamie Foxx the parenting memoir Act Like You Got Some Sense, and with Atlanta attorney Robbin Shipp the book Justice While Black: Helping African American Families Navigate and Survive the Criminal Justice System, a finalist for a 2015 NAACP Image Award.

Chiles served as a newspaper reporter (mainly covering education), magazine writer, and magazine and website editor-in-chief during his more than three decades in journalism, winning nearly twenty major awards—including a 1992 Pulitzer Prize as part of a New York Newsday team. He has served as a professor at Columbia Journalism School and Princeton University and a consultant for the William Julius Wilson Institute at the Harlem Children’s Zone. He currently teaches journalism at the University of Georgia. Chiles, a graduate of Yale, lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife Sadiqa Chiles.

Cary Hite has performed in several theaters across the country as a cast member in the longest-running African American play in history, The Diary of Black Men. He also appeared in Edward II, Fences, Macbeth, Good Boys, Side Effects May Vary, and the indie feature The City Is Mine. He has voiced several projects for AudibleKids, including Souls Look Back in Wonder, From Slave Ship to Freedom Road, and Papa, Do You Love Me?