Alex is a highly experienced employee engagement consultant, trainer and speaker. For over 15 years she has helped HR and business leaders implement strategies that drive true culture change. Her wealth of knowledge comes from coaching and training thousands of managers from a wide range of industries across the globe. Alex focuses on providing organizations with proven practices that drive results for varied leadership styles and the multiple generations in the modern workforce. Her presentation will leave you motivated and better equipped to lead your organization on a path to a more engaged workforce, making the world a better place to work.

Jessie Stettin is the Director of Culture, Engagement and Relationships at C Space. Fascinated by how we, as 21st century humans, experience daily life, Jessie is currently focused on developing relational intelligence, the skill and practice of being in generative relationship with others, as the driver of culture within organization. His previous work on the topic of human flourishing led him to build a community of 1,000 life-long learners in Boston. Jessie strongly believes in the power of one-to-one relationships outside of work as well, and is on the Board of Advisors of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Mass, in addition to being a mentor (“Big”) for the last four years. Ask him about getting involved in defending the potential of youth in our cities!

Samantha Rafferty is an Operations Consultant on the Global Strategic Operations team at C Space. She’s built her career in the intersection between operational effectiveness, and creativity. Samantha oversees internal communications strategy at C Space and is Operations Manager for their live qualitative research team. She’s also a member of the Sustainability team. Samantha is based in Louisiana and is extremely proud of her heritage and culture. She believes in the importance of bringing our whole selves to work, and having “bon temps” while we’re at it!

Allyson is an experienced People leader with a passion for helping people feel seen and truly cared for so that they can reach their fullest potential. Over the past 12 years, Allyson has helped organizations of all sizes and industries design and implement scalable people strategies and infrastructures that support the evolving needs of their high-growth teams. She's gained experience managing all areas of people ops across the full employee lifecycle. She especially enjoys building cultures that are intentional about amplifying diverse voices, fostering open communication, and building meaningful relationships.

Natasha Wahid is the Head of Content at Blueboard. She’s a natural storyteller who found her niche helping companies connect to their audiences through thoughtful communication. She believes in building spaces—both personal and professional—where people can be their full selves without fear or shame. She’s a seasoned speaker who’s presented at marketing conferences across the U.S. and is an alum of the incredible Shine Bootcamp (google it!)

Steffen Schebesta is the CEO of North America and VP of Corporate Development at Sendinblue. He has over 15 years of experience as a business and digital marketing leader. Prior to joining Sendinblue, Steffen was the founder and co-CEO of Newsletter2Go, the leading email marketing provider in the German market. Under Steffen’s leadership, Newsletter2Go became one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Europe. In 2019, Newsletter2Go was acquired by Sendinblue and Steffen earned the title of co-CEO in Germany. Steffen holds a master's degree in business and electrical engineering from The Technical University of Berlin.

Kristian is the CEO and Founder of Meru Health, an online healthcare provider setting the new standard in mental healthcare. With Meru Health, Kristian is on a mission to empower 10 million people living with mental health challenges by 2027. This mission is more than business, it's personal: Kristian lost his brother Peter to depression, and since then he has been committed to building better solutions to help people with depression, anxiety, burnout, and stress. Prior to founding Meru Health, Kristian co-founded and ran a diabetes technology company, Mendor, which developed glucose monitors and glucose data analytics for improving diabetes care. The glucose monitoring business was acquired by a Korean public company in 2015. Even earlier, Kristian was a Universal Music artist as the lead guitarist & song writer of an internationally known heavy metal band called Norther.

Sarah Sheehan, Co-Founder & President, Bravely Sarah began her career in HR at companies like SiriusXM, Coach, and the Gilt Groupe. At Gilt, she pivoted into a sales executive role at Gilt City, the company's luxury experiences platform, where she led a 65-person team and was responsible for $60M in revenue. It was there that she identified the direct correlation between culture and the bottom line—when employees failed to have a pathway to address issues or work on their individual development colleagues and managers, performance suffered. Sarah’s experience in HR, team management, and tech—combined with an ongoing obsession with helping people, especially women and underrepresented minorities, gain the confidence they need to find meaning in their work—inspired her to co-found Bravely in 2017.

Stacey McKibbin is the CEO of Consilio, a peak performance executioncompany that believes having a strong Middle Management Suite is the secret sauce of success. From their world class coaching, training and state of the art AI sales practice portal, Consilio has a proven system that works. Stacey leads her team of zealots by her example of passion and enthusiasm that guides leaders to accelerated success. As a Master Practitioner of NLP and student of The Art of Negotiation, Stacey can help blend your corporate objectives with the vision, strategy, and the execution you need for both short- and long-term success. Stacey is also a DISC certified assessment administrator. She believes that this particular assessment when utilized within an organization will open up the lines of communication across every level and will ultimately lead to a more productive and all around better performing team. She is even so bold to claim "communication changes lives. " That's how important this work is! Stacey lives in San Diego with her husband Chris and their two children Max and Jack and dog Roxy.

Looking at the varied and vibrant career of Ericka Riggs, diversity executive, Board member, thought leader, pocstock's Top 50 Black Leader of 2022, and 2020 Nancy Hill Award winner, a pattern quickly emerges. This creative, strategic Chief DE&I Officer of Omnicom Specialty Marketing Group has been about not just advancement, but also enhancement. Working in video promotions at Uptown Records and legendary MOTOWN, Ericka strengthened the people skills she developed as the daughter of a corporate executive whose career moved the family from Texas and Missouri to Maryland, New York and the D.C. area. Parlaying creative experience, exposure to myriad communities and cultures and natural empathy, Ericka segued to multicultural ad agency UniWorld Group, (UWG), rising from Creative Coordinator to producer before leaving to augment her portfolio with a marketing degree from George Mason University and a position in development at Northern Virginia University. In 2016, Ericka Riggs made an impressive return to New York as Foundation and Inclusion Director of The Advertising Club of New York. Under her guidance, the game-changing I’mPART Women’s Fellowship elevated the careers of BIPOC women managers into leadership roles. Her engagement initiatives, “Icons, Rockstars & Innovators,” “Women NOW: Master Class,” and “Culture Club” have been integral in helping to create a more inclusive advertising, marketing and media community. Ericka proudly serves as a Board member & Mentor, OmniWomen NY; 100 Roses from Concrete; 4A’s DEI Steering Committee; #WeAllRise; Circle of Change; 2020 MOBE Symposium Advisory Committee. Ericka has become a regular guest of industry podcasts, contributor to trade publications and panelist at notable events, (ie. AD Monster, The Female Quotient, Digiday, Mixed Company, ADWEEKNY, SXSW). Riggs attended Howard University and is a graduate of George Mason University’s School of Management.

Gillian French is a veteran Chief People Officer and an expert at scaling teams and building strong company culture. She is currently employee communications platform Workvivo’s people expert-in-residence. Prior to this, Gillian served as Chief People Officer at Cubic Telecom, where she oversaw all aspects of people development, culture, employee engagement, policies and practices. Gillian was previously Chief People Officer at CarTrawler, where she was an integral member of the leadership team for 12 years and scaled the business from 25 to 600 people. Before turning her skills to the technology sector, Gillian spent eight years at a leading Irish hotel group – Jurys Doyle Hotel Group – where she held several senior leadership roles across a range of departments and properties. Workvivo is the employee communication platform designed to foster natural, meaningful connection in teams, allowing companies to reach and engage their employees in ways that traditional tools simply can’t.

Doug has a tremendous amount of experience in leading the human resource function in both privately-held and publicly-traded, multinational technology companies. Most recently he was the CHRO for Coupang, an e-commerce startup based in South Korea where he was part of an aggressive growth phase as they expanded their global footprint. Prior to that, he was the Chief People Officer for Kabam, a mobile gaming startup, and Xyratex, a publicly-traded enterprise data storage company. Doug graduated from the University of California, Davis with a B.S in Economics.

Larry Dunivan is CEO of Namely, the leading HR platform for mid-sized companies and a 30-year veteran in HR and software spaces. Earlier in his career, Dunivan held leadership positions across sales, customer support and product at Ceridian, a cloud-based human capital management platform, before becoming Proposal Created: 03/30/21 Proposal Submitted: 04/09/21 Chief Revenue Officer of the company. There, he also served as Senior Vice President at Global HCM Products where he led the development, deployment and launch of an end-to-end talent management application. Prior to joining Namely, Dunivan was interim Chief Executive Officer at ThinkHR, a risk management software company.

Stacey McKibbin is the CEO of Consilio, a peak performance executioncompany that believes having a strong Middle Management Suite is the secret sauce of success. From their world class coaching, training and state of the art AI sales practice portal, Consilio has a proven system that works. Stacey leads her team of zealots by her example of passion and enthusiasm that guides leaders to accelerated success. As a Master Practitioner of NLP and student of The Art of Negotiation, Stacey can help blend your corporate objectives with the vision, strategy, and the execution you need for both short- and long-term success. Stacey is also a DISC certified assessment administrator. She believes that this particular assessment when utilized within an organization will open up the lines of communication across every level and will ultimately lead to a more productive and all around better performing team. She is even so bold to claim "communication changes lives. " That's how important this work is! Stacey lives in San Diego with her husband Chris and their two children Max and Jack and dog Roxy.

Fortune 500, and nonprofit experience to his role at Verblio. As CEO, he applies leading marketplace and SaaS principles to create an industry-leading content creation platform with 3,000 U.S.-based writers supporting the creation of premium content at scale in every niche. Verblio has been named an Inc 5000 winner 2x, a Mercury growth winner 5x, and was named a Colorado Company to watch in 2020. He also served in marketing, strategy, and operational leadership roles at LiveOps, Tendril, Western Union, Marketing Technologies Group and HSBC.

Cheryl Contee is the award-winning CEO of the digital agency Do Big Things, a diverse team that is using new narrative and new tech for causes and campaigns to create global change in a new era. Cheryl is the author of Mechanical Bull: How You Can Achieve Startup Success, available on Amazon. Previously, Cheryl was CEO of Fission Strategy, which brought Silicon Valley startup culture to the world’s leading causes and campaigns. She’s the co-founder of Attentive.ly, the first tech startup with a black female founder to be acquired by a NASDAQ company, the National Board Chair for Netroots Nation, and a proud co-founder of #YesWeCode. Learn more: www.dobigthings.today

Lisa Edwards is President and COO of Diligent Corporation, the largest governance, risk and compliance (“GRC”) SaaS provider serving over 23,000 organizations around the globe. Lisa is responsible for commercial growth and performance. Prior to joining Diligent, she served as EVP of Strategic Business Operations at Salesforce. Lisa also held leadership positions at Visa, Inc. and KnowledgeX, and co-founded Valubond, prior to the company’s acquisition by Knight Capital. Lisa received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She serves on the Board of Directors of Colgate-Palmolive Company, and is deeply involved in two non-profits where she previously served on the board, Playworks and the Presidio YMCA.

Gillian French is a veteran Chief People Officer and an expert at scaling teams and building strong company culture. She is currently employee communications platform Workvivo’s people expert-in-residence. Prior to this, Gillian served as Chief People Officer at Cubic Telecom, where she oversaw all aspects of people development, culture, employee engagement, policies and practices. Gillian was previously Chief People Officer at CarTrawler, where she was an integral member of the leadership team for 12 years and scaled the business from 25 to 600 people. Before turning her skills to the technology sector, Gillian spent eight years at a leading Irish hotel group – Jurys Doyle Hotel Group – where she held several senior leadership roles across a range of departments and properties. Workvivo is the employee communication platform designed to foster natural, meaningful connection in teams, allowing companies to reach and engage their employees in ways that traditional tools simply can’t.