By JoAnne Wadsworth, Communications Consultant, G20 Interfaith Forum
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The 2026 Annual G20 Interfaith Forum, “Resilient Hope, Shared Future,” takes place October 15 to 17 in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is the second in a short series introducing some of the people taking part. The first featured religious leaders; those still to come will feature practitioners and humanitarian leaders, and voices from academia, media, and business. Please note that the program is still being finalized, and the names below represent only a portion of the government and policy participants expected.
IF20 exists to bring faith-informed perspectives into policy conversations, which means the Forum has always drawn people who work inside government and multilateral institutions alongside those who work outside them. This year’s program includes a sitting governor, a cabinet minister, a trade representative, state regulators and legal officers, officials from the World Bank and the Organization of American States, and advocates who spend their working lives pressing governments on debt, trafficking, and religious freedom. A selection follows.
National and International Officeholders
Gov. Spencer Cox is Governor of Utah and the Forum’s host-state chief executive. During his term as Chair of the National Governors Association he launched the Disagree Better initiative, which focuses on healthy conflict and depolarization in public life. He will join the Thursday afternoon session on peacemaking through disagreeing better at the Historic Tabernacle.
Amb. Jamieson Greer serves as United States Trade Representative, a cabinet-level position overseeing U.S. trade policy and negotiations. He will speak on the Friday morning plenary on unleashing human potential for the common good, which takes up the economic growth priority of the 2026 U.S. G20 presidency.
H.E. Prof. Dr. Abdul Mu’ti has served as Indonesia’s Minister of Primary and Secondary Education since October 2024. He is also Secretary General of Muhammadiyah, one of the world’s largest Islamic organizations, which operates more than five thousand schools across Indonesia, and a professor of Islamic education at UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta. He will speak on the Deadline 2030 plenary and in the session on educational initiatives for social cohesion.
Gov. David Beasley led the United Nations World Food Programme as Executive Director from 2017 to 2023, a period during which the agency received the Nobel Peace Prize. He previously served as Governor of South Carolina. He will join the Thursday afternoon peacemaking session.
Baroness Joanna Shields is a life peer in the UK House of Lords and founder and CEO of Precognition, which advises governments and organizations on AI. She served in the UK government from 2013 to 2018 as the first Minister for Internet Safety and Security, as well as Digital Economy Advisor to the Prime Minister, and she founded the WeProtect Global Alliance on online child protection. Earlier she held senior roles at Google, Facebook, and Bebo, and later led BenevolentAI. She will speak on the Saturday plenary on AI and emerging technologies.
Lord Russell Rook has sat in the UK House of Lords as a Labour life peer since January 2025 and is executive chair of the Good Faith Partnership, which he co-founded in 2017. He advised successive Labour leaders on faith and civil society, and he is an ordained Church of England priest. He chairs the organizing committee for the UK G20 Interfaith Forum and will take part in the handover ceremony at the closing session.
Utah Officials
The Honorable Derek Brown is Utah’s Attorney General. He will take part in the Faith in Action session on human trafficking and modern forms of slavery.
Margaret Busse is Executive Director of the Utah Department of Commerce, the state’s chief business regulatory agency, appointed to Governor Cox’s cabinet in 2021. Working with the Utah legislature, she created the state’s Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy, which combines regulatory relief for qualifying AI companies with a policy learning lab that develops recommendations for lawmakers. She will speak in the session on AI innovation and human dignity.
The Honorable Denise Lindberg serves as a District Court Judge in Utah’s Third Judicial District. She will join the session on AI innovation and human dignity, which considers judicial remedies among the current approaches to addressing AI-related harms.
Federal Faith Engagement
Steve Messeh directs the USDA Center for Faith, one of thirteen federal Centers for Faith that connect government agencies with faith-based and community organizations. Before his appointment he founded and led a Washington-based nonprofit working on food security and youth mentoring, and spent several years as a consultant to federal agencies. He will speak on the Deadline 2030 plenary.
Prof. Melissa Rogers teaches at Wake Forest University and has twice led the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. She has written extensively on religious freedom and on the relationship between government and faith communities in the United States. She will speak on the Deadline 2030 plenary.
Multilateral Institutions
Laura Gil was elected Assistant Secretary General of the Organization of American States in May 2025, becoming the first woman to hold the position in the organization’s history. She previously served as Colombia’s Vice Minister for Multilateral Affairs and as Ambassador to Austria and Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Vienna. She will join the session on preventing and addressing gender based violence.
Dr. Esben Larsen is a Senior One Health Specialist with the Pandemic Fund at the World Bank. He will speak on the Deadline 2030 plenary and moderate the session on faith engagement in pandemic prevention and preparedness, which draws on an extensive consultation process aimed at involving religious communities more directly in the Fund’s operations.
Anne Simmons-Benton represents W20, the women’s engagement group of the G20. She will speak on the Friday morning plenary on economic prosperity and join the session on gender based violence.
Dr. Sylvia Mmamohapi Pheto serves as a Commissioner on South Africa’s CRL Rights Commission, the constitutional body charged with promoting and protecting the rights of cultural, religious, and linguistic communities. She will take part in the session drawing lessons from the G20 Interfaith Forums held in South Africa and Brazil.
Policy Advocacy
Eric LeCompte is Executive Director of Jubilee USA Network, a coalition of religious institutions and development organizations that advocates on debt relief, financial transparency, and reform of the international financial architecture. He will speak on the Friday morning plenary, where unsustainable debt burdens are among the questions on the table.
Kevin Hyland OBE served as the United Kingdom’s first Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner and previously headed the Metropolitan Police’s human trafficking unit. He is now CEO of Praeveni Global. He will speak on the Friday morning plenary.
Michael Swain is Executive Director of Freedom of Religion South Africa, an organization that advocates for religious liberty in South African law and policy. He will speak in the session on promoting freedom of religion or belief and moderate the session on lessons from the South Africa and Brazil Forums.
Tina Ramirez is CEO of Hardwired Global, which works on religious freedom education and training, often in conflict-affected regions. She will speak in the session on promoting freedom of religion or belief.
Eric Baxter is Vice President and Senior Counsel at Becket, a legal organization that litigates religious liberty cases, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. He will speak in the session on promoting freedom of religion or belief.
More to Come
This is a partial list. Additional participants are expected, several sessions are still being finalized, and the full program continues to develop ahead of the forum. Program details are available at g20interfaith.org.
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JoAnne Wadsworth is a Communications Consultant for the G20 Interfaith Forum Association and Editor of the Viewpoints blog, IF20’s platform for commentary at the intersection of faith and global policy. She has covered the work of the Forum across multiple G20 cycles, producing summaries, articles, and editorial content that bring the voices of interfaith leaders and scholars to a broader audience. Her writing engages with topics spanning environmental governance, religious freedom, anti-racism, poverty and inequality, and the role of faith in multilateral policy processes.