EPIC Impact Society

As the 2019 LA Lakers Business Woman and the 2015 CA Charter Teacher of the Year, Genein Letford is a national thought leader and creator of the concept of ‘Prismatic Leadership’, ‘Intercultural Creativity® and NeuroSomatic Creativity®’.  She is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of CAFFE Strategies, LLC which is a consulting, coaching and training company that trains C-Suite executives and employees to create sustainable organizational equity and inclusion strategies, based on neuroscience, while unleashing their innovative thinking for themselves and in their businesses.

Genein Letford Social Media:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/genein/
https://www.facebook.com/GeneinSpeaks/
https://twitter.com/GeneinLetford
www.instagram.com/geneinletford/

Niclas Gillis is an award-winning screenwriter and film director from Stockholm, Sweden, currently in pre-production on The Nix, a scandinavian folklore drama film starring Academy Award-winning actor Liv Ullmann. The film is produced by Patrik Andersson (Midsommar), with distribution by Nordisk Film.

Gillis first garnered attention for his drama short film Hold Me Down, which depicted a day in the life of a 19-year-old single mother and sex worker in The Bronx, New York, where Gillis lived for 11 years. The film was based on true events and featured a cast consisting entirely of real life survivors of sexual exploitation and domestic abuse. Through a partnership with the NGO, Project Rousseau, the women involved were able to escape the clutches of prostitution, gain access to safe housing and higher education. Hold Me Down received universal praise by critics, including CNN, and won the award for Best Short Film at the Harlem International Film Festival.

His fashion film for Native Son was compared to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema by New York Magazine, and he has been championed as “the premiere talent to watch” by Nike. He is currently represented by XYZ Films in the US.

Dorte Nielsen is the founder of Creative Thinker and Center for Creative Thinking. 

Dorte is a creativity expert, author and keynote speaker. Born in Denmark, she studied at The Graphic Arts Institute of Denmark and later at The School of Communication Arts in London. Dorte Nielsen holds a Master of Science degree in Creativity from the International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo, New York, where she was awarded the Firestein Family Creative Achievement Award for her graduate work.

 For most of the 90’s Dorte Nielsen worked in advertising in London. Her creative work won her recognition at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, D&AD, the British Television Awards, Epica, London International Advertising Awards, Campaign Poster Awards among others.

 Since moving back to Denmark, Dorte Nielsen has been teaching and researching creative thinking at the Danish School of Media and Journalism, where she founded the Creative Communication education, a bachelor degree programme for art directors and conceptual thinkers. Under her leadership Creative Communication became one of the most award-winning advertising bachelor programmes in the world.

 After her success training creativity at university level, Dorte Nielsen took her uniquely effective creativity curriculum to primary schools. Dorte Nielsen is the author of eight books and numerous articles on creativity and creative thinking.

 Dorte Nielsen is the founder of FourSight Denmark and holds the position of Chairman of Creative Circle, the Danish society for the creative industries, which holds the biggest creative award show in Scandinavia, celebrating creative excellence.

James Haven is a social innovator, director, and founder of Safe Haven protecting the rights and laws that safeguard children. He is dedicated to youth-related causes around the world, developing comprehensive solutions to this incalculable systemic problem. His mission is to ensure that children are guaranteed their fundamental human rights to a safe childhood.

Meshach Weber applies behavioral science, applied anthropology, and cognitive empathy to create more human-centric and impactful digital spaces, marketing, and content.

Recognizing that marketing often lacked rigor and specificity, Meshach created science-based frameworks to illuminate a repeatable path to success. Harnessing the irrational yet predictable science of human behavior, his unique, evidence-based approaches create humane experiences that nurture deeper engagement and enduring affinity—driving sustainable growth for social impact organizations, startups, and Fortune 200s.

His mentorship on growth mindset and the science of behavior change has also driven positive company culture change for both fledgling startups and global enterprise businesses.

Sarah Thurber is a creativity evangelist.

She’s an author, speaker, and researcher on the subjects of creative thinking and collaborative problem solving. In 2010, when she started her Master of Science degree in Creativity and Change Leadership at Buffalo State University, she made a personal pact to spread the science of creativity more widely through the world. That year, she took over as Managing Partner of FourSight, publisher of the FourSight ThinkingProfile assessment. Working with researchers, consultants, and the FourSight team, Sarah grew the FourSight business six-fold and built up a database of more than six million data points on cognitive diversity.

Now serving corporations including Disney, Nike, Intel, Mars, and GrubHub as well as teams in government, special forces and military intelligence, FourSight has become a premier purveyor of science-based training in creativity.

Sarah is a coauthor of The Secret of the Highly Creative Thinker, Creativity Unbound, and Facilitation: A Door to Creative Leadership all of which have been translated into multiple languages.

Donna Brodie joined The Writers Room in 1994 as executive director and continues to lead what has become the nation’s oldest and largest urban writers’ colony. A native New Yorker, she studied English Literature and Theater at the City College of New York in Harlem. She was a founding member of P.F. FLIERS – Poetry Fiction Free Liquor in  Evening Reading Series and  co-founded INDIGO, a downtown theater company that pioneered non-traditional casting in repertory theater. Prior to leading The Writers Room, she worked in development for the International Center of Photography and the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Chelsea, NYC’s largest free-lunch program. She is a painter and studies French, Spanish and Latin Ballroom dance. She is writing a first novel called HAVING A COKE WITH YOU.

Monica H. Kang is the Founder & CEO of InnovatorsBox® and the Author of Rethink Creativity. An  internationally recognized expert in workplace creativity, she facilitates culture transformation,  leadership development, and team building in a way that is fun, actionable, and relatable. Monica  works with clients worldwide including Fortune 500 companies, higher education, government, and  nonprofits. Her work has been recognized by The White House, Ashoka Changemakers, National  Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC), and Women’s Business Enterprise National  Council (WBENC). Prior to InnovatorsBox®, Monica was a nuclear nonproliferation policy expert. She  holds an M.A. from SAIS Johns Hopkins University in Strategic Studies and International Economics  and a B.A. from Boston University. 

Harry van der Schans (BA, MEd, MA) is a creativity expert, author of the book iDNA (about the inventiveDNA,  the innovationDNA or the idea(D)NA), creator of the ICE-Model (the Model for Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship) and, since 2019, he has been the director of the School for Construction, Architecture & Furniture Design at King William I College for the Future in the Netherlands. The college embraces the teaching and learning of creative thinking skills and competencies for students, faculty, and staff as part of the 21st century skills. 

Harry lives in the Netherlands with his wife and has three adult children. He started his professional career as a teacher. He taught English at a Business School for seven years and in that period he wrote A Basis for Business, an English textbook for business students. After that he worked as director of various educational departments for 15 years. 

After he was invited to take a certification course in Six Hats in Dublin in 2004 he got hooked on creativity. A year later he went back to get certified in Lateral Thinking (Dublin 2005). Harry became an expert in De Bono techniques and in 2012 he was appointed de Bono Master Trainer in Six Hats. Until 2019 he was director of the De Bono Center of Expertise. This was the center for creativity and innovation at King William I College / School for the Future.

He is also a FourSight Certified Facilitator (2017) and LEGO Serious Play Facilitator (2017) and next to that he has been trained and certified in various other thinking techniques and approaches like Creative Problem Solving, Design Thinking, Scenario thinking, Polarity Thinking, Time Management and Memory training which he incorporates in his daily (working) life and which he uses when facilitating groups both in business and education. 

He graduated from Radboud University in Applied Linguistics and, since 2004, he has trained and facilitated thousands of people in the field of creative and critical thinking at national and international conferences and at companies and schools in the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, Canada, Ireland and Italy.

In his new position Harry is now very much inspired by the so-called 5P model. The 5P model is based on the work of Mel Rhodes (Person, Process, Press, Product)  and Bob Eckert (Policy) and is used as a framework for innovation in his school.