Uplifting Impact

Today I have a long-time friend Joseline Hardick on the show. She is a professor at WMU-Cooley Law School and has used her years of experience and knowledge as a federal judicial law clerk to create Journey to Esquire, where she is currently the director. This non-profit creates a pipeline for students to help them commit to a law career and gain the skills of leadership and professionalism, all while promoting diversity and inclusion and creating access for law students in the Tampa area.

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Journey to Esquire: https://www.journeytoesquire.com/

I hope that today you heard some ways that you can mentor someone to a position of power. I want to thank Joseline for everything she’s doing for people who are trying to navigate a very difficult and complicated system, and by creating something we can replicate in other areas. Thank you for taking the time and for caring and being intentional about trying to learn about how to incorporate these ideas of leadership, diversity, equity, and inclusion into your own practices. If we are working together to incorporate these ideas, that we really can change the world.

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I’m super excited because I have my friend Gladys Manzanet here with us today. In addition to being an amazing community leader, she uses her wealth of experience and knowledge within her role at Northwestern Mutual to coach, consult, and support field leadership in their diversity and inclusion efforts. In our conversation, she shares all about what it feels like to have diversity, equity, and inclusion really help move your ideas around sales and help your thinking about how you can bring this into the marketing spaces of your business.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gladys-manzanet-0801336

I want to thank Gladys for her time and for sharing her knowledge so we can strengthen our teams and empower team members. To all of you who are listening, thank you for participating. We want to make sure that you’re able to use this content to really help grow and strengthen your leadership because we believe that if you are living in this space and really putting diversity, equity, and inclusion at the forefront of how you’re doing business, we can make a difference in this world.

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Today we have Tyler Whipple from American Family Insurance with us. Tyler is the Vice President of Inclusive Excellence at American Family Insurance. He’s responsible for leading the company’s efforts to develop and implement strategies to advance inclusive excellence as a core value, resulting in a strong culture and great business results across the American Family enterprise.

Tyler and I first connected because I was really curious about his role and what he was doing, particularly because American Family Insurance is showing up in the news all the time for doing amazing things in our community and pushing for this idea of being equitable. In our conversation, he shares his experience with building a team for a large enterprise, how to get started, and his mindset of a million, plus one.

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I want to say thank you so much to Tyler for sharing some of his wisdom today. It was such a delight to hear about the work that American Family Insurance is doing and how open he is with the learning that he and his team is doing. The community they are helping to build is quite amazing!

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We have an amazing guest with us, Ms. Chantell M. Garrett. Chantell is responsible for the diversity and inclusion work at the Federal Reserve bank in Kansas City. In her role, she works to lead and execute the strategic priorities and the robust programming of the office of diversity and inclusion throughout the bank’s seven-state district. She’s also the founder of R.U.B.I.E.S., a non-profit she supported for 10 years that provides mentoring and scholarship for female, first-generation, college students.

In our conversation, she demonstrates that the road to being a DEI practitioner doesn’t follow a single path to get to that role. She has a passion for working with communities and bringing together collaborative partnerships and ensuring that these partnerships are mutually beneficial, and creating relationships that extend throughout organizations.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chantellgarrett

I’m so grateful to have Chantell here. Be sure that you share this, and share these ideas, because the more of us that are thinking about this and really pushing into these ideas like collaborative partnerships, the more we’re going to be able to move the needle in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space.

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I am so happy to have Becky Kekula on this episode. She serves as the disability equality index director for Disability:IN. She’s responsible for managing the overall DEI program. She’s very passionate about making sure disability and inclusion conversations are happening in schools and in the workplace. She’s worked in a number of industries, and she’s also a prolific public speaker. In our conversation, she shares the importance of being intentional with disability inclusion as an organization, how to create open communication with candidates for a position that may need accommodation, and overcoming the assumption that accommodation costs too much money for an organization.

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I want to say thank you to Becky for all of the work she has done and continues to do really elevate the conversation. A lot of the fear goes away when people have someone they feel like they can connect to. I am deeply grateful for Becky coming on Uplifting Impact and being that person here, and also for all the spaces she is in. There is a lot that people can contribute to the world if they escape the thing that they are fearful of and learn all about richness with others, and how we can relate more.

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I am talking with one of my favorite people, Sundeep Morrison, a queer, nonbinary, Punjabi, Sikh writer, actor, director, author, and activist. Her work focuses on social justice, cultural friction, inter-ethnic family dynamics, and feminism. She’s also the writer and star of Rag Head, an amazing production that explores Sikhs in America.

She’s also the host of Deep Talks radio show, a platform to dialogue with socially conscious artists and innovators, where art and activism intersect. In our conversation, she shares the process she goes through in order to create an impact with her art and storytelling. She discusses the importance of humanity really being able to see each other, and some of the work she has done with corporate teams to facilitate connection.

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I want to thank Sundeep for coming on this episode, for the great conversation we had, for bringing her talents to bear and to help us connect storytelling to art to this idea of humanity. She does it in such a masterful way. We know that if we’re working together, we really can create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive world. All we have to do is go out and do it.

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Keesha Gill has over 17 years of experience, serving youth and families. She joined Good Shepherd Services back in 2015 as the program director at a community in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and she’s currently the co-chair of the Equity Council. She has a passion for helping to create change in communities in need, and I am glad to share our conversation with you.

In this episode, we discuss the need to not only make sure that all voices at all tables are recognized, but to go the extra step and to request a seat at someone else’s table to really build relationships and to hear from these communities what they need, and then how we can come together to help provide that.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keeshagill/

I was so delighted to have Keesha on as a guest, and after this episode I know we’re going to be thinking about how we share our best practices and how we can think about power in a different kind of way. There are a lot of opportunities for this work right now, and we are seeing networks of providers coming together, and seeing agencies create space for change, which are practices that can benefit everyone, making this such an exciting time to do DEI work.

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I am so glad I get to spend this afternoon talking to my friend, Meralis Hood. If you want to talk about education and showing up in a way that really supports an inclusive environment, she is the person to talk to. She is a thought leader with the mission to change the way we invest in professionals who work with our young citizens every day. Meralis is the Vice President and Executive Director of City Year Milwaukee, which helps young people develop into leaders, problem solvers, and more active citizens.

In our conversation, she shares the importance of creating a culture of transparency, naming the values that you want to implement within an organization, and best practices for supporting young people to see their own potential. I know that there’s no way you can walk away from this without being inspired and I’m honored to share this with you today.

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Website: https://www.meralishood.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/meralishood

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meralis-hood-101001aa

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Today we have Michelle Kedem on with us. The minute I thought about doing this podcast I knew that I wanted to have her own the show because of the incredible work does. She is the founding partner at On-Ramps, an executive search and research organization that incorporates diversity, equity, and inclusion into every step of their process. She is responsible for supporting the firm’s strategy, development, external relations, and finance of the organization. In our conversation, we discuss the aspects of recruiting that need to be assessed by an organization to ensure they are prioritizing DEI and why an internal audit is a great first step an organization can take.

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The greatest leaders are the ones who are elevating this conversation to the top. One of the things that we can do with this information is to apply it. Take a look at your own organizations and the things that you’re doing in your own process. Maybe you’re doing a search for candidates right now. What language is used in your job description that may be pushing people off? Can you do an audit of your process and the practices? These are all questions we have to own as leaders and work to answer.

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Warren Scherer is the Assistant Dean of Students, and the Director of Gender and Sexuality Campus Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He leads an array of campus-wide services that focus on the ideas of equity and intercultural campus initiatives for minoritized students. In our conversation today, he shares the perspective of what it means to do diversity, equity, and inclusion work at the university level. We talk about some of the various student populations that should be considered when creating policy, questions one should ask themselves when thinking about policy implementation, and why this work is so important in higher education.

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Thank you for participating in Uplighting Impact. I was so delighted to have Warren on as a guest and as a friend to look up to. I’m so glad that we have so many young people and young professionals who are going to be able to learn from this work as they grow into the wonderful leaders that they’re going to be. If we continue to be transparent and use our social capital to ask questions and to show up with this perspective, we can completely change the way we are including other people in the world, and make it better.

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