Debra Gwartney and her daughter, Amanda Woodruff

Debra Gwartney is the author of Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, a profoundly moving memoir of the author’s agony and perseverance as she lost her two teenage daughters to the streets, and of the slow, painful reconciliation they eventually found. Debra is on the nonfiction faculty at Portland State University and is the recipient of the Oregon Arts Commission literary fellowship, the American Antiquarian artist's fellowship, and is a former Wurlitzer Foundation fellow and BreadLoaf scholar. She has published articles and essays in many magazines, journals, and newspapers, including The New York Times, Salon, Newsweek, Poets & Writers, Modern Bride, and many others. Debra will share her perspective as a parent of daughters who ran away and struggles they overcame to put their family back together again.

Amanda Woodruff lives on a farm in Southern Oregon with her husband and two young children where she raises dairy goats and operates a small fiber arts business.

Jerry Tello

Jerry Tello comes from a family of Mexican, Texan roots and was raised in the Compton/Watts area of Los Angeles. He is co-founder of the National Compadres Network (a national effort whose focus is the reinforcement of the positive involvement of Latino males in the lives of their families, communities, and society), founding member of The National Latino Alliance Towards the Elimination of Domestic Violence and founder of National Latino Fatherhood and Family Institute. He is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of family strengthening, community mobilization, and culturally based violence prevention/intervention issues. He has extensive experience in the treatment of victims and perpetrators of abuse and in addictive behaviors, with a specialization in working with multi-ethnic populations. Through Mr. Tello's work over the last 30 years, he has dedicated his efforts to preventing and healing the pain of relationship/community violence, teen pregnancy, fatherlessness and internalized oppression by speaking on these issues to over 500,000 people.

In addition, Mr. Tello is the author of various curriculums including a Male "Rites of Passage", violence prevention curriculum, a Teen Fatherhood Curriculum, a Pregnancy Prevention curriculum, a bilingual Family Strengthening curriculum, a bilingual Fatherhood Literacy Curriculum and served as a principal consultant for Scholastic Books on an International Bilingual Literacy curriculum focused at reaching low income Latino families.

Mr. Tello is presently the Director of the Sacred Circles Healing Center in Whittier, California and a member of the Sacred Circles performance group, a group dedicated to family/community peace and healing.

Tom Sparough

Tom Sparough is a juggler, storyteller, writer, and facilitator. He is known to hundreds of thousands of people as the Space Painter, which comes from a description of juggling that Tom received from a two-year-old child. He has performed across North America and in Europe for corporations, churches, conferences, schools, parks, festivals and special events. As a facilitator and workshop leader, this 25-year veteran juggler has taught hundreds of thousands of people the arts of juggling and balancing. He currently teaches juggling skills to youth once a week at Lighthouse Youth Service's runaway shelter in Cincinnati, OH.

With a master's degree in psychology, Tom weaves important life-skill messages into his presentations. He also holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and is a former newspaper reporter and editor. He has been a featured presenter at social service, independent living, health care, and education conferences from California to New York. Mr. Sparough lives in Cincinnati with his wife, two children, and most of the other children in the neighborhood.