This week cred was joined by Valerie Jackson (Procor), Lili Gangas (Kapor Center), and Wahab Owolabi (URx & Facebook) for an important discussion on how event professionals can incorporate diversity and inclusion into their events. Diving into the impact of agendas featuring all-female speakers, to tracks focused on tech for POC, this interactive panel shared their insights into what will shape the events industry and agendas curated moving forward.
Here are a few highlights from the discussion:
“Don't make diversity a side dish. Make it the main one." - Valerie Jackson (Procore)
Know your audience and remember to ask yourself, “Is everyone spoken to?”
Make diversity, equity, and inclusion part of your planning process.
Understand your blind spots and leverage your network and partnerships to find solutions.
Couldn’t tune in live? Learn from the speakers themselves in the full recording:
More about the speakers.
Valerie Jackson, Senior Director, Global Inclusion and Diversity, Procore
Valerie Jackson currently serves as Senior Director of Global Inclusion and Diversity at Procore Technologies, where she helps all Procorians to build a more inclusive culture and a stronger, better business. A passionate developer of people and opportunities, Valerie has focused on building and leading inclusion initiatives in global companies for nearly 15 years, primarily in the legal industry. Earlier in her career, Valerie also practiced corporate finance law and served as an international policy advisor and negotiator for the U.S. public accounting regulator. A proud Atlanta native, Valerie has lived in 6 countries and now calls Southern California home. She earned her undergraduate degree with honors from Harvard University and her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.
Lili Gangas, Chief Technology Community Officer, Kapor Center
Lili is the Chief Technology Community Officer. In this role, Lili helps catalyze Oakland’s emergence as a social impact hub of tech done right – where tech, diverse talent, and action-driven partnerships can tackle pressing social and economic inequities of our communities head-on. Before coming to the Kapor Center, Lili was an Associate Principal at Accenture Technology Lab’s Open Innovation team, building bridges between startups and Global 2000 commercial clients through cross sector collaboration. She was also a founding member of the team at Booz Allen specializing in crowdsourcing, prize challenges, and open data solutions for the public sector. Before that, Lili could be found in the lab working on firmware solutions for the aerospace industry as a Senior Multi-Disciplined Software Engineer at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems. Lili holds an MBA from New York University Stern School of Business, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California and Systems Engineering Certification from UCLA Extension. In addition to her day jobs, Lili was an active TechStars Startup Weekend DC organizer, a judge of the Small Business Administration (SBA)’s Startup in a Day Challenge, an open data innovation panelist at the White House Council of Women and Girls session, and advisor to Dreamwakers.org and OpenDataNation.com. Outside of work, Lili enjoys getting to know cities via distance races – she’ a 5-time half marathoner and last year completed her first full marathon.
Wahab Owolabi, Founder, URx and Diversity Business Partner, Facebook
Wahab is an entrepreneur, a product manager, a recruiter, a marketer, and an athlete. He's worked at Startups, Universities, and in Venture Capital. He loves finding new ways to apply his unique skill set to solve problems and move teams forward. He enjoys building diverse communities of talent and scaling networks to achieve a common goal whether that is building engineering teams to fuel a startup (Rubrik), growing a network of future entrepreneurs and software engineers (a16z), or bringing a sense of community and belonging to the recruiting community (URx). As a leader, Wahab believes in a team-first approach. He finds opportunities to make an impact, move forward positive conversations around diversity & inclusion in tech, and support people less privileged are the most exciting.