Barbara Becnel
Chief Financial Officer
Global social justice activist, leader and change agent, Barbara Becnel currently holds three executive roles: President of CommunityOneWorld Enterprises LLC and President of Motherland Enterprises LLC—both are international social entrepreneurial organizations—and Executive Director of a northern California grassroots social service agency, Neighborhood House of North Richmond.
As the President of CommunityOneWorld LLC and Motherland Enterprises LLC, Ms. Becnel oversees two social entrepreneurial companies that started in early 2010 with the idea of developing an International Institute for Social Justice to be established in Africa for diplomats, activists, policymakers and other change agents to learn from each other and to strategize on how to end all manner of injustices throughout the world.
Since then, that initial idea has expanded to include over 16 additional multi-scale land development projects—Museum of the Lost Tribes, Motherland World Sports Complex, Renaissance Golf Course, Ultimate Africa Theme Park, among other projects—built on over 2,000 oceanfront acres in Dakar, Senegal, located in West Africa. In Ms. Becnel’s role as Executive Director of the Neighborhood House of North Richmond, she is responsible for an annual budget of $1.75 million. She has 42 employees who report to her and 20 programs that she oversees, including a senior citizens center, 80-bed residential drug treatment facility, HIV/AIDS prevention and education project, 30-room residential hotel, as well as youth mentoring and gang prevention programs.
In addition, Ms. Becnel, along with internationally renowned San Quentin death-row prisoner and reformed street gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams—executed in 2005 by the State of California—coauthored nine award-winning anti-gang and anti-violence books for youth. These extraordinary accomplishments garnered Mr. Williams 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize nominations and a television movie, Redemption, made about the work of Mr. Williams and Ms. Becnel.
Ms. Becnel was a producer of the highly acclaimed Redemption movie, starring Jamie Foxx as Mr. Williams and Emmy award-winning actress Lynn Whitfield as Ms. Becnel. Redemption went on to be screened at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival in France and won the highest award at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles. Also, the Redemption movie was nominated for several prestigious awards, including a Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild as well as an Independent Spirit Award for Jamie Foxx’s performance as Mr. Williams in Redemption, and won a Satellite Award, issued by the International Press Academy, for the Redemption movie as Best Motion Picture Made for Television, won two NAACP Image Awards and won a Christian Film and Television Commission’s Movie Guide Award prevention and education project, 30-room residential hotel, as well as youth mentoring and gang prevention programs.
Ms. Becnel has written over 100 feature stories for newspapers and magazines, as well as 12 nonfiction books on a variety of subjects, including drug addiction and treatment, parenting practices, youth violence prevention and the culture of adolescent street gangs. Ms. Becnel’s book on parenting has been translated into German and Spanish for overseas audiences. In addition, the American Library Association honored one of the books—Life in Prison—that Ms. Becnel co-authored with Mr. Williams. Mr. Williams’ Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir, which was edited and published by Ms. Becnel, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Most Outstanding Non-Fiction Literature during 2005, and the Stanley Tookie Williams Street Peace Series for elementary students, reprinted in 2008 by Ms. Becnel, recently won a national book award—Prevention for a Safer Society Award for Literature from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
In only two and one-half years, Ms. Becnel earned a four-year Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics, graduating summa cum laude with a 3.926 out of 4.0 grade point average from Adelphi University. She accomplished this while supporting herself and her infant son, as a divorced parent with no outside financial help. During that period, she also won a summer school scholarship to study International Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Ms. Becnel continued her studies in a doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an emphasis on Labor Economics, Mathematical Economics and Demography. She also won a post-graduate fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities to study Philosophy at the University of Chicago.
