Matt Halvorson

Matt Halvorson is a songwriter, writer, and community-builder working at the intersection of music, storytelling, and lived experience. He founded Rise Up for Students as a space that advocates for racial equity and radical empathy in schools—and everywhere else those values are needed.

For more than twenty years, Matt has built projects rooted in artistic expression and community-driven follow-through, working largely outside traditional institutions as a journalist, founder, organizer, and independent artist. He releases music as Cousin Wolf, exploring themes of family, grief, joy, baseball, and the ongoing search for meaning. (Imagine the back of a baseball card that makes you cry a little. It’s like that.)

He is also the founder of the Rise Up Music Project, a daily podcast and growing artist community created to encourage and celebrate human-made art in an increasingly automated world. Through annual cohorts, the project has helped generate hundreds of original songs and has supported dozens of independent artists through shared release and collective accountability.

Across music, writing, baseball, and community work, Matt is drawn to projects that value honesty, depth, meaningful impact and human connection over scale for its own sake. He lives with his family off-grid (with good internet) in a Pacific Northwest forest.

Marcus Harden

Marcus Harden is an educator, mentor, advocate, and love dealer who has served in K–12 education as a teacher, counselor, dean, assistant principal, principal, chief academic officer, state and federal policy advocate, professional developer, keynote speaker, senior director of academics, and school founder for 23 years.

Currently the executive director of the Washington State Charter School Commission, Marcus is a proud product of South Seattle and a University of Washington Husky (Danforth School of Education and UW Distinguished Alumni winner).

Marcus created the ongoing Black History Today series, which has been exhibited since 2025 as History Lives Here at the Northwest African American Museum, extending the work beyond community journalism and into shared art and civic spaces.

Marcus is the co-founder of the Academy for Creating Excellence in Atlanta, an organization committed to cultivating the innate brilliance in young men of color through authentic and intentional love and dignity. He is also one of the founding staff members of WA Charters, and a founding team member of Overtime Elite, a one-of-a-kind professional basketball league in which Marcus co-founded and led the educational program and youth development.

A proud father of six sons, Marcus believes in the innate greatness in all students, families, and those committed to educating and loving young people and their families.