Public Advocate is a governmental position similar to an ombudsman. Depending on the jurisdiction it can be an elected or appointed position.

Letitia A. "Tish" James (born 1958) is an American lawyer, activist and politician in the Working Families Party. She is the current New York City Council member for Brooklyn's 35th Council District. Elected in November 2003, she represents the neighborhoods of Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, parts of Crown Heights, Prospect Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. She chairs the Sanitation Committee, and serves on the committees for Economic Development, Parks & Recreation, Small Business, Technology in Government, Veteran Affairs, and Women's Issues.

James has been a life-long resident of Brooklyn. She attended Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. The daughter of Nellie and Robert James, she attended New York City public schools and received her Bachelor of Arts from City University of New York's Lehman College in 1981. James was admitted to the New York State Bar Association in 1988. During her law career, James served as a public defender for the Legal Aid Society. In 2003, James studied for a Master's Degree in Public Administration at Columbia University's Graduate School of International and Public Affairs.

Reshma Saujani is an Indian-American lawyer and politician who lost the 2010 Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York's 14th congressional district against incumbent Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney. She was the first Indian-American woman (and the first South Asian American woman) to run for Congress. Currently, she is the Deputy Advocate for Special Initiatives at the Office of the New York City Public Advocate.

Saujani was born in Illinois. She is of Gujarati descent. Saujani's parents lived in Uganda, prior to being expelled along with other persons of Indian descent in the early 1970s by Idi Amin. The Saujanis settled in Chicago.

Saujani attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she graduated in 1997 with majors in Political Science and Speech Communications. She attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she received a Master of Public Policy in 1999, and Yale Law School, where she received her Juris Doctorate in 2002.

Kalpen Suresh Modi (born April 23, 1977), best known by his stage name Kal Penn, is an American film and television actor, producer, and civil servant.

As an actor, he is known for his roles portraying the character Dr. Lawrence Kutner on the television program House and the character Kumar Patel in the Harold and Kumar comedy films. He is also recognized for his performance in the critically acclaimed film The Namesake. Penn has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania as a visiting lecturer in the Cinema Studies Program.

On April 8, 2009, it was announced that Penn would join the Obama administration as an Associate Director in the White House Office of Public Engagement. This necessitated that his character Lawrence Kutner be written out of the TV series House. Penn resigned his post as Barack Obama's associate director of public engagement on June 1, 2010, for a brief return to his acting career. He filmed the third installment of the Harold and Kumar series, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, then returned to the White House Office of Public Engagement as an Associate Director. In July 2011, he again left the White House, this time for a role in How I Met Your Mother, and then went back to his political duties.

Daniel Squadron is the state senator for the 25th district of the New York State Senate. He is a Democrat. The 25th Senate District covers lower Manhattan and an area of Brooklyn down the East River from part of Greenpoint to Carroll Gardens, and eastward to part of Downtown Brooklyn.

Before his election to the state senate, Squadron attended the Fieldston School in Riverdale, New York. He later served as a top aide to U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, and helped to write Schumer's book, Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time. He ran in the Democratic primary against a 30 year incumbent, Martin Connor, on September 9, 2008. He defeated Connor by winning approximately 54% of the vote.