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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.