John Coleman
John Coleman is Managing Director and Chief Administrative Officer, Alternatives and Institutional for Invesco, Ltd., a diversified asset manager based in Atlanta, GA. His writing has been featured in Forbes, Businessweek, and the Harvard Business Review. His second book, Passion & Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders, has appeared in numerous publications including the Financial Times, the Washington Post, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
His professional experience includes positions in energy arbitrage, consulting, asset management, and housing and community development. In 2013, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal appointed him to the DeKalb County Board of Education. Gov. Deal later appointed him to the Board of Commissioners for the Georgia Student Finance Commission. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Monuments Foundation and the Board of Visitors for Berry College; and he is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2013, Coleman was named one of Georgia Trend magazine’s “40 under 40.”
He holds a Master’s degree of Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he was a Zuckerman Fellow and a George Leadership Fellow. Coleman graduated with a Master’s degree in Business Administration with High Distinction from the Harvard Business School and Summa Cum Laude from Berry College with a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Government.
Benita M. Dodd
Benita Dodd is a journalism graduate of Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, who immigrated to the United States in 1986. The Cobb County resident was an editorial writer and columnist for The Atlanta Journal Editorial Board and an editorial writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editorial Board. In March of 2003, she joined the Georgia Public Policy Foundation as vice president.
A member of the 2007 class of Leadership Georgia and a faculty member of the Leadership Institute of Virginia, she leads the Foundation’s Environmental Initiative and is responsible for the Foundation’s communications. She serves on the Political Science Advisory Board at Kennesaw State University and on the Board of Advisors for America’s Future Foundation Georgia and is a Policy Advisor for the Heartland Institute. She also served on the Board of Common Cause Georgia.
Dodd addresses civic and leadership groups across Georgia on current issues and free-market solutions. She is a frequent contributor to newspapers and radio programs around the state and spent seven years providing free-market perspectives as a commentator on a weekly Atlanta Radio Korea program.
Mike Dudgeon
Mike Dudgeon is a former Georgia Representative and the Chief Technology Officer at Hi-Rez Studios, an Alpharetta-based video game startup. He served as a Georgia legislator for six years for District 25, which covers the southern part of Forsyth County and the northern parts of Johns Creek in Fulton. While in the Georgia General Assembly, he served as Vice Chair of the Education Committee, Secretary of the Energy, Utilities, & Telecommunications Committee, and a member of the Appropriations, Science & Technology, and Small Business committees.
Prior to taking state office, he served on the Forsyth County Board of Education. Dudgeon has bachelors and masters degrees in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, holds five U.S. patents, and has been in the technology business his entire career. He helped build the Alpharetta based startup Radiant Systems in the 1990s and was part of the group that took the company public. In 2001 he founded Tier One, an engineering consulting business in Forsyth County. After selling his interest in Tier One, Representative Dudgeon and partners in 2007 founded Qualia Labs to perform research into new computer architectures and artificial intelligence. In 2009 he joined Hi-Rez Studios.
Dudgeon has been an ardent supporter of charter schools and offering parents options within public K-12 education. He was instrumental in the passage of Amendment 1, a Georgia constitutional amendment allowing the state to authorize charter schools. Dudgeon also played a crucial role in annual legislative efforts to make needed edits and revisions to Title 20 education law.
