This week the world celebrated International Women’s Day.
In recognition of this special day, I thought it was important to convene a discussion about the impact women make in the social good sector. My team at Altus Marketing, led by Megan Klingensmith, our Chief of Staff, joined up with Mariana Garcia, Managing Partner at The Zumaya Group to bring together an amazing panel of industry leaders and powerful voices on this subject in our sector.
We heard from Tammy Ramos, J.D., Executive Director at LatinaVIDA, Gretchen Littlefield, CEO of Moore, Amira Barger, MBA, CVA, CFRE, Executive Vice President of Client Engagement, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, and Communications at Edelman, Lisa Z. Greer, Philanthropist, Entrepreneur, Convener, Investor, Author, and Mom, and KT Moore, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Cadence Design Systems.
What you’ll see and hear in this video is a frank conversation about what is going right in our industry related to empowering women’s voices and elevating women into leadership roles across the sector. You’ll also hear where we still need work, from pay equity to mentorship and advocacy, to supporting development opportunities for young women, women of color, and first generation women.
Here’s a short list of the key points I personally took away from the conversation:
- We are all individually responsible to become culturally-aware
- If we don’t create space and opportunity for “others” to have a seat at the table where influence happens and decisions are made, we’re not really embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion
- If you want to be a great ally, when you’re in the room where power is held, your opportunity and responsibility is to speak the names of those who weren’t invited into the room
- Diversity brings profit
- You can overcome imposter syndrome with four steps: 1) Track your successes/achievements, 2) Manage your inner critic, 3) Leverage a support network, and 4) Seek professional help if necessary
This is an important conversation topic, and I hope that this discussion is simply the start of bigger and more frequent discussions across our sector. I invite you to listen and share your thoughts on the conversation here.