Meet The Sentry Co-Founders

George Clooney

George Clooney is the co-founder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, as well as the Co-Founder of the Sentry. George has been deeply involved in creating accountability for genocide and other atrocity crimes in Africa and beyond for nearly two decades. He has testified at the UN Security Council as well as before the US Senate on multiple occasions about the need for accountability for atrocities committed in Darfur.

George has advocated for peace in African conflicts directly with numerous heads of state and legislators around the world. He also co-founded two other human rights initiatives, Not On Our Watch and The Satellite Sentinel Project, which joined together with the Enough Project to become The Sentry.

He has traveled to active war zones in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His first trip was with his father, Nick, after which they spoke at the rally for Darfur on the Washington Mall, which attracted 100,000 participants. The pair, along with John Prendergast, were also arrested in 2012 when they were part of the delegation that peacefully demonstrated in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., calling worldwide attention to the human rights violations being committed in Sudan.

In 2019 he led a successful boycott of nine hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei following the country’s attempts to enforce the death penalty for homosexuality. He has a unique position and ability to galvanize people around human rights issues, and over the years, he has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars for causes such as the Haiti earthquake victims, Indonesian tsunami and 9/11 victims. He also helped organize the March for Our Lives in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting.

John Prendergast

John Prendergast is a human rights and anti-corruption activist as well as a New York Times best-selling author, and is the Co-Founder of the Sentry. John has worked for the White House, the State Department, two members of Congress, the National Intelligence Council, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.  He has been a big brother in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program for over 35 years to ten different boys, as well as a youth counselor and basketball coach. John is the author or co-author of eleven books.

During his time in government, John was part of the facilitation team behind the successful two-year mediation led by Anthony Lake which ended the 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the deadliest war in the world at the time. He was also part of peace processes for Burundi (led by President Nelson Mandela), Sudan (led by Lazaro Sumbeiywo) and DR Congo.

John has been awarded seven honorary doctorates. He is or has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Yale Law School, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Claremont McKenna College, Kean University, American University, American University in Cairo, the University of San Diego, the University of Pittsburgh, Temple University, Albright College, St. Mary’s College, the University of Massachusetts, and Eckerd College.

John has appeared in five episodes of 60 Minutes, for which the team won an Emmy Award, and helped create African characters and stories for two episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, one focusing on the recruitment of child soldiers and the other on rape as a war strategy. John has also traveled to Africa with NBC’s Dateline, ABC’s Nightline, The PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Inside Africa, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, and The New York Times Magazine.

He has appeared in several documentaries including Merci Congo, When Elephants Fight, Blood in the Mobile, Sand and Sorrow, Darfur Now, 3 Points, Son of South Sudan, and War Child. John appears in the Warner Brothers’ motion picture The Good Lie, starring Reese Witherspoon. He is a primary subject of the book by Jane Bussman, “A Journey to the Dark Heart of Nameless Unspeakable Evil.” He has been profiled in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Men’s Vogue, Time, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, Oprah Magazine, The Hill, Capitol File, Arrive, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Spectator Life, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.