Speakers

Hear what is new this year for the now-famous Winnetka Music Festival! Marcia is a key organizer and Val is the founder of Valslist. 

Ward Wilson is a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. He is widely
acknowledged as the leading source of pragmatic arguments against nuclear weapons in the
world today.

His book, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, was endorsed by two Pulitzer-Prize-winning
historians of nuclear weapons, recommended by four star generals, praised by a former head of
state and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and described as “brilliant, original, and important.”
He is an award-winning writer, who has been published in anti-nuclear journals like The Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists and Nonproliferation Review, military journals like Joint Force Quarterly and
Revue de Défense Nationale, foreign policy journals like Survival, Foreign Policy, and Harvard’s
International Security, as well as in The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal, and others.

He has spoken in 23 countries on six continents, at the Pentagon, the French National Assembly,
the United Nations, the Scottish National Parliament, the U.S. State Department, Harvard, Stanford,
Princeton, Georgetown, the Sorbonne, the U.S. Naval War College, King’s College London,
Hamburg University, Nagasaki University, University of Pretoria, and others.
He is currently working on a new book, titled The Realist Case for Eliminating Nuclear Weapons.

 

For nearly 30 years, Tish Rudnicki has dedicated her professional life to helping seniors throughout Chicagoland and Illinois live healthy and fulfilling lives.

 

Tish joined North Shore Senior Center as Executive Director in mid-January of this year. In her two short months as Executive Director, Tish has been busy getting to know the ins and outs of North Shore Senior Center’s vast scope of programs and services—from its classes and clubs, to the work its social workers do with struggling seniors and people living with memory loss.

 

Prior to joining North Shore Senior Center, Tish worked for 29 years at the Kenneth Young Center, a provider of comprehensive behavioral health services to individuals of all ages and community-based social services to older adults throughout the northwest suburbs of Chicago. She completed her tenure there as the Chief Program Officer overseeing all of the behavioral health, medical and older adult programming.

 

Tish has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Miami University and a master’s in social work from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has served on Illinois’ Coordinated Care Alliance since 2013, for two years as its board president. In her free time, Tish cherishes being with family and friends, hiking, biking, playing golf and gardening.

 

Ravi Rade, an executive leadership coach, and mindfulness teacher will speak to us about how mindfulness can help us to reduce stress from our busy, demanding life and how to achieve a focused concentration that leads to greater performance and success. In the corporate world,  from the last 10 years, mindfulness is becoming more and more sought after technique for outstanding leadership, stellar performance, and well-being of employees. Ravi will be introducing mindfulness. You will also get an experience of how just a few minutes of mindfulness meditation can make our mind calm, reduce stress and build focus.

An MBA from Booth school, Ravi has 25 years of corporate experience. Latest was as director of trading systems performance at Chicago Board Options Exchange. There he led a team of highly specialized engineers and managers. Trading systems are extremely demanding, a couple of seconds glitch causes government investigation and more than 12 milliseconds of response brings a flood of client complaints. To deal with such a stressful environment Ravi found mindfulness as an effective technique. And when he came across Search Inside Yourself, (a Google-developed mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program), he found a science-based, practical and results-producing way to incorporate mindfulness into work and personal life. He helped his team at Cboe to do the same. The results motivated him to start his year-long journey to become Search Inside Yourself Teacher and now he conducts this 2-Day experiential course at various corporate offices.

Last year, Ravi’s hired a Co-Active coach who helped him to find the path ahead in his life. Because of that coaching, Ravi could transform his career from computer performance to people performance. He realized the tremendous power of self-exploration that Co-Active coaching brings out. So, he also did another journey of becoming Co-Active (executive leadership) coach. And now he works with growth-hungry professionals to maximize their success and reduce stress from their life. He conducts one on one coaching sessions with directors, managers from global corporations all over the world. His clients explore their inner strengths and magnify them. During coaching sessions, clients do deep thinking about what’s important for them. As a result, they start taking actions which they had been postponing for a long time, with a strong commitment to follow-through.

Summary of the program: Kraig will share some interesting photos and stories behind the creation of The Furnace Girl. The book has been featured on WGN TV’s Backstory with Larry Potash, and New York radio Mornin’ with Bill Schulz.  Several local magazines including Sheridan Rd, Forest & Bluff Magazine, and Modern Luxury have covered the book and it has been the top selling book in 2018 at Lake Forest Bookstore.

 

Biography: Kraig has lived in Lake Bluff, Illinois his entire life. After working 10 years in advertising and marketing, he founded New Vision Athletics, Inc. in 1996, a privately-held sports league on the north shore of Chicago. Kraig and his wife Jennifer have raised their four children in Lake Bluff.  They co-founded the Margo Moreland Charitable Foundation in 1999, which supports children afflicted with Cerebral Palsy.

 

Kraig has a great passion for film and local history.  Over the last 15 years, he has helped write and co-produce the Lake Bluff Ghost Walk.  In 2011, Kraig wrote, filmed, and produced a two-hour documentary "A Childhood Lost & Found - A Journey back to The Lake Bluff Children's Home," a heart-felt story of the Lake Bluff Orphanage, the children who lived there and the people who cared for them. The film was awarded a "Superior Award" from the Illinois Association of Museums in 2012.

He is the recipient of the 2012 I Care Award, and also an honorary Paul Harris Fellow Rotary award. Kraig was a featured speaker at Rosalind Franklin University Medical School in 2014 for the TedMed Live talk.
 

 

When asked whether they could envision a circumstance under which they might confess to a crime they didn't commit, most people respond with a confident and resounding "no." The prospect is difficult to fathom, which is why juries often consider confessions to be among the paramount pieces of inculpatory evidence leading to guilty verdicts. However, the Innocence Project finds that more than 1 out of 4 wrongfully convicted persons ultimately exonerated by DNA evidence falsely confessed to the crime for which they were charged. We will explore this phenomena using the 1992 Waukegan murder of Holly Staker and the false confession of Juan Rivera. Juan's false confession led to three separate juries rendering a guilty verdict for him, resulting in Juan spending 19 years in the Department of Corrections before finally being exonerated. 

 

Stephanie Caparelli is a Lecturer in Politics at Lake Forest College. She earned her BA in Politics and Communication summa cum laude from Lake Forest College, and then graduated from the Chicago-Kent College of Law, where she interned at the Lake County Juvenile Justice Division of the Lake County Public Defender as well as the Felony Trials Division of the Cook County Public Defender. She practiced law as a trial lawyer in the Lake County Public Defender's Office before joining the faculty at Lake Forest College, where she teaches courses on trial law, criminal procedure, Chicago criminal cases, and argument and rhetoric in law.

NOTE THAT THIS MEETING WILL BE HELD AT HADLEY, 700 ELM ST., DUE TO RUMMAGE AT THE COMMUNITY HOUSE.