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Farzin Farzad is an Organizational Justice practitioner with experience in higher education, local government, and the private sector. Holding two master’s degrees in international affairs and diplomacy as well as a certificate in conflict resolution skills, Farzin leverages his unique academic background, extensive travel experience, and experiential knowledge to provide comprehensive, thought-provoking local and global approaches to his work. In addition to training and education programs, Farzin is a seasoned project manager with expertise in developing strategies that build equitable workplace environments and government services, as well as Employee Resource Group events and programs. Farzin is the founder of Critical Equity Consulting, LLC, a boutique Organizational Justice consulting firm focused on helping organizations rebuild with a primary focus on creating equitable outcomes.
Ulduz Berenjforoosh Azar has a diverse background in numbers, having had 7+ years of Finance experience working in the tech industry at various stages and sizes. About 5 years ago she then was able to convert her quantitative experience into the people world. In People Analytics, she has supported the end-to-end employee experience and programs through numbers from recruiting to HR, designing and deploying surveys, headcount and DEI analysis, promotion and calibration descriptive analysis as well as people metrics analysis and dashboards. Ulduz received her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and holds a master’s in Finance. She currently oversees Critical Equity Consulting’s data People Analytics operations.
After graduating from Paris-Sorbonne University in 2013, Anouar El Hajjami-Jarri has had 8 years of experience working for companies of different sizes in three primary markets (France, U.S., Germany) as a Sales Manager and Sales Enablement Consultant. With a solid background in history, art history, psychosociology and communications, Anouar decided in 2020 to invest more of his time in tackling the roots of systemic racism and worldwide white supremacy. Adopting a strict academic approach based on the analysis of historical legal texts and a systematic verification of sources (peer-reviewed studies and research outlets only), he aims to bring to the workplace and to all interested communities and stakeholders, premium actionable knowledge to which access can be significantly limited (e.g., sources in French/Spanish/German/Arabic, niche information shared locally within European and African universities, etc.) In addition to his consultancy, Anouar is currently working on a sales methodology that brings Applied Post-Growth frameworks to organizations in order to achieve a seamless transition to an ethical and ecologically responsible economy.
As the Head of People and Culture at AMASS, Beatriz built an inclusive People Operations infrastructure from the ground up. As a senior leader at AMASS, Bea has grown a global team, improved retention & recruitment rates by 30%, and ensured diversity numbers are mirrored at every leadership level. She worked with all facets of the company, building culture while recruiting for roles from C-suite, to gin production, to creative. Beatriz builds vibrant and inclusive teams that are hard to leave— she did not lose a single employee to voluntary attrition during the great resignation.
Previously, at Ogilvy, she re-vamped recruiting flow to reduce redundancy and led the professionalization of the onboarding & offboarding process for the San Francisco and Sacramento offices. As the sole contributor supporting 500 employees’ day-to-day HR needs and leading employee diversity initiatives, Beatriz celebrated the most consistently favorable PULSE scores for Peer Satisfaction. Beatriz then joined RAPP, where she partnered with leaders across agency disciplines to recruit talent, build processes, and partner with employees to effect change. She is proud of her work with RAPP’s ‘The Neighborhood’ and Ogilvy’s ‘Well-thy Collective ‘to boost efforts to improve the lives of BIPOC employees.
Beatriz has leveraged skills from a background in the employment law non-profit world to successfully support today’s teams, creating solutions that address the root cause of issues adding friction to today’s teams.
Beatriz has maintained a 4.6/5 BIPOC employee approval rating and has a 96% employee PIP survival rate. She has a decade of experience building vibrant and inclusive teams that are hard to leave. Her peers commend her for offering data-based, consistently-reasoned, and equitable workplace solutions to the modern team’s complex challenges.
Organized action-oriented consultant with experience working for public entities and accustomed to leading and implementing change processes. Subject matter expert in civil rights, and diversity, equity, inclusion. Managed enterprise-wide organizational compliance with Title VI, environmental justice, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. Analytical thinker capable of performing detailed analysis of operations and systems to effect meaningful change.
Camille has twenty-four plus years’ experience managing various projects in the public transit sector. This included 14 years at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), San Jose, CA, and 9 years with VIA Metropolitan Transit, San Antonio, TX. Acted as the lead Title VI program manager for VTA’s BART Silicon Valley Extension, a $9 billion project.
Provides organizational compliance with State and Federal governmental regulations to include accounting changes and complex civil rights laws.
Rosie Yeung (she/her) is a Coach, Speaker and Trainer for Justice, Equity, Decolonization, and Inclusion (JEDI), helping people with privilege dismantle systemic inequity while helping people without privilege survive it. She is a Certified HR Leader and Chartered Professional Accountant, with over 20 years of professional and lived experiences, and holds certificates in coaching, inclusion, Indigenous history, human rights, and more.
As a Chinese-Canadian, immigrant, cis-straight female with invisible disabilities, Rosie specializes in intersectional diversity and Asian-Canadian identity, and loves coaching Asian and racialized women to succeed as their true selves.
Rosie also created and hosts the Changing Lenses Podcast, shifting our worldview on work and business by looking through a JEDI lens. Based in Toronto, Canada, Rosie enjoys travel (except during global pandemics), and has served communities in Guatemala, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda. To de-stress, Rosie enjoys movies, popcorn and ice cream –often simultaneously!
Sara Farooqi is a mother, partner, daughter, sister, and friend living in the Bay Area, California. She is the founder of Conscious Collectivist™, a practice dedicated to elevating interdependence as an antidote to the sociological and spiritual harms of hyper-individualism in U.S. culture. Sara offers facilitated conversations (called Wisdom Potlucks), workshops, and consultations that re-envision leadership & personal development through a collectivist lens.
In addition to her work with Conscious Collectivist™, Sara has over 15 years of experience as a strategic operations practitioner in the private, non-profit, and government sectors. She is a former board member of Muslims for Progressive Value and also served on the steering committee for MASGD: Muslim Alliance for Sexual & Gender Diversity.
“Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.” – Audre Lorde
Shannon M. Cisneros Ajayi (she/her/ella) is a DEIJ Strategist, Interculturalist, and Global Human Resource Leader. She partners with organizations and leadership committed to building inclusive, socially equitable systems and strategies to support transformational learning within their organizations and people throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, The Americas, and The Middle East.
While working with companies and organizations such as 3M, Anheuser-Busch, ASM, Cisco, Coloplast, Flanders, GE, General Mills, IBM, Kimberly-Clark, LG Electronics, Mastercard, Meta, PwC, Samsung, UnitedHealth Group, United Way, and the University of Minnesota, Shannon developed and practices a multidimensional approach to organizational development. She specifically integrates The Intercultural Development Continuum into her practice to ensure that initiatives on organizational culture (including diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice) are leading to changes in behavior at all levels.
Shannon is rooted in New Mexico, USA, and considers Singapore her second home. She also spent time living and studying in Spain. Shannon identifies as Chicana, of Indigenous-Mexican descent, and resides in Albuquerque, NM (on the ancestral lands of the Tiwa people) with her family and their Goldendoodle, Pepper. Shannon received her bachelor’s degree in Global Studies, completed her graduate coursework in Intercultural Relations, and received her master’s degree in Applied Adlerian Psychology.
Shiva Roofeh is a curious rebel with 10+ years in Executive Education specializing in Cultural Intelligence, Leadership and DEI, working as a global facilitator, educator and speaker. She believes that in today’s world stellar, and sustainable leaders are ones who know and embrace their personal and cultural DNA and strive to not just do better but be better.
She has lived, worked or studied in the US, Spain, England, Ireland, Italy and Iran, has worked closely with multinationals across EMEA and understands that regardless of external culture, changes needed in terms of conversations, actions and behaviors start with understanding internal culture.
She works with organizations in sectors ranging from big pharma to automotive and public housing as a consultant, designer and trainer on leadership, culture and DEI designing or delivering facilitations, trainings, talks and large scale leadership programs. Clients include: Gestamp, The European Central Bank, BASF, Google, Novartis, Roche, Unilever, Accenture, Merck, Repsol, ViacomCBS, CHEP, Generali and ABN AMRO to name a few. She is also an adjunct professor for Cultural Intelligence, HR and Diversity at IE business School and ICADE, and most recently gave a TEDx talk on Power.
In parallel to her corporate training work, she has also worked as the Campus Director of the Geneva Business School where she ushered in and implemented a new way of learning through facilitation based teaching, working to make the learning process more inclusive while also increasing learner accountability and psychological safety. As part of this initiative she launched a new BBA program fit for 21st century reality: a program grounded in experience, using the city as the classroom, that blends personal, professional and academic development and is directly connected to the Word Economic Forum’s top 10 skills for 2020 and aims to build sustainable, responsible leaders.
Previous to this she was the founder and leader of Madrid Lean In, a non-profit women’s leadership organization of 250+ members from 20+ countries focused on gender equity focusing on professional development through personal development.
In 2018 she was invited as an expert in Cultural Diversity to participate in a government sponsored Think Tank on Diversity 2.0.
An Iranian-American living in Spain, she speaks English, Spanish and Farsi.
A sociologist, certified change management practitioner, trauma-informed coach, recovering government statistician, project manager, and general disrupter. I spent twenty-ish years working for governments in Canada and the UK, as well as partnering with supranational agencies on data analysis, research, and statistical harmonization. In 2013, I joined the recovery efforts after the largest – at that time – extreme weather event-caused disaster in Canadian history. (We’ve surpassed that event several times now, the flood should really be referred to as Cassandra.) This experience galvanised my commitment to actively advocating for change and creating a more just and equitable suite of policies across government and government-funded bodies. I have been minimally successful.
My work has always focused on inclusion and equity. My thesis in the late 90s was on the differential impacts of gender-based technology adoption (unsurprising conclusion: it didn’t work out as well for women or other marginalised groups as it did, and continues to, for men). I then moved on to pay and working time equity, and – working with the International Labour Organisation – contributed to research on the marginalisation of certain working styles and the under-representation of women’s labour internationally, but specifically across Africa and Asia as a result of colonized definitions of what counts as working time.
When I returned to Canada, I worked on increasing equity and inclusion for cognitively impaired adults in personal and professional decision-making, access to appropriate services for children who’s parent language is not English, and as a change agent advocating for better representation of marginalised and historically oppressed communities in disaster financial assistance and other public safety issues. I Was the divisional lead for training and implementing Gender-Based Analysis Plus across policy and program options. I also worked on a team advocating for the inclusion of traditional Indigenous knowledge in floodplain mapping and declaring cultural artifacts as priceless to enable reparations on uninsured regalia. In addition, I worked with the Ministry of Culture to secure funding to preserve unearthed traditional encampments as a result of the Southern Alberta Floods in areas previously considered to have a low likelihood of archeological relevance.
I am a queer neurodivergent single mum of two and a proud member of the Metis Nation of Alberta. One of my dads was a cop and the other is a political refugee from Chile. Both of my bio-parents were adopted into white families. My mum is Metis and my dad’s second wife grew up as a deeply devout evangelical Christian farmer. It’s an interesting combination and I grew up between several worlds which has helped me successfully code most of my life. And that of course, comes with its own collection of experiences that inform how I interrogate the world.
Warren Wright has over 25-years of experience in survey research, employee engagement, employee performance management, and organizational development. He is Founder and CEO of Second Wave Learning whose mission is to humanize the workplace so every person feels valued. Warren is a former Managing Partner at Gallup where he managed and led Gallup’s Federal Consulting Practice, providing evidence-based solutions for federal agencies in the areas of employee engagement, leadership assessment and development, and high functioning teams. He contributed to the development of the Clifton StrengthsFinder, an assessment tool designed to identify the unique strengths combination of individuals. He has a subject matter expertise in engagement surveys, focus groups, leadership development, and workshop facilitation. Wright works with business leaders to develop and implement strategic planning processes that align with organization’s vision and mission. Warren has a specialty in generational research, having worked with historian and demographer Neil Howe, who coined the term “Millennials”. He is author of the book, Second Wave Millennials: Tapping the Potential of America’s Youth, published in 2019. He is Editor-in Chief of the C-suite NewsWire, a subscription-based publication reporting on work trends and the Future of Work. Warren is a frequent keynote speaker for associations and company conferences on the topic of leadership and generational research. He is a lifelong learner in the areas of human behavior, leadership and business outcomes. His top 5 Strengths are: Maximizer, Activator, Ideation, Developer, and Positivity.
Systemic and cultural change is the only real, lasting way to influence how we show up and interact in the workplace. Well-being is determined by our environments, and so our focus is building equitable and just organizational systems.
Inclusion, while best achieved by building an equitable foundation, requires continued commitment and agility. In our ever-evolving and globalizing world, we need the right tools to be able to interact inclusively across many cultures.
Psychological safety is a necessary component of organizational health. We take inclusion to the next level by addressing and distributing power as the key step to cultivating deep, meaningful relationships; and thus creating an environment where psychological safety is the default.
Humans have an inherent need to create and feel proud of our labor. However, current organizational structures alienate us from this pride. When we all become stakeholders in our own output, we become more acutely focused on our organization’s mission, in turn satisfying our needs.
