Recognized as one of 50 Game Changers of PR by PR News and a Champion of PR by PRWeek, Vanessa Wakeman is one of a few black women to found and own a social change agency— helping to shift the paradigm of an industry that is led primarily by white men. She shapes narratives and stories that reflect our multicultural world.

Vanessa is a futurist and strategic advisor. Her work through her company, The Wakeman Agency, focuses on the ecosystem of social change and advancing the efforts of mission-driven causes. Growing up in New York, Vanessa’s activism and commitment to social justice were instilled early on. She organized the workers at her first job, a catering company, to demand and win better labor conditions —when she was only 15. After working her way through college at some of New York City’s top law firms, she landed a position at Morgan Stanley. There, she created a record number of career opportunities for women and people of color in the firm’s technology department.

Vanessa is a trusted advisor to nonprofit organizations and socially responsible companies in the U.S. and internationally. She has successfully led initiatives to support values-driven transformation and communications for boards of directors, leadership, employees and other stakeholder groups.

Vanessa is highly knowledgeable in developing communication strategies, assessing organizational culture, creating safe spaces for difficult conversations, and helping to build frameworks for organizations to cultivate healthy and equitable environments.

During the COVID- 19 pandemic and in the wake of the recent racially motivated murders, she has been called upon by a number of organizations to help them re-imagine their values, culture and operations, through the lens of racial justice.

As a public relations expert and thought leader, Vanessa has created and executed highly successful engagements for clients that include The Alliance for Financial Inclusion, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, The New York Women’s Foundation, Hispanics in Philanthropy, and many others.

Vanessa is an outspoken voice on the need for more inclusion and equity in the public relations and nonprofit sectors, while also working to amplify the voices of underrepresented groups in the media. Most recently she created She Roars, the first thought leadership training program designed for women. The Narrative Justice Project soon followed, which is a free media training program developed specifically for people of color.

Vanessa has been a keynote presenter, session leader and panelist on topics ranging from philanthropy to thought leadership for women. Recent speaking engagements include UN Women, Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits, Utah Association of Nonprofits and the Women’s Leadership Institute at Manhattanville College.

In addition to her work at The Wakeman Agency, she serves on the Board of Directors of the Public Relations Society of America Foundation and the Commission for Public Relations Education, leading the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee to develop higher education curriculum standards through a multicultural lens.

Joyful Clemantine is a social entrepreneur, connector, an internationally renowned speaker, and a New York Times Bestselling Author. Her memoir THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS debuted with Crown Publishing in April 2018, and since has been published in seven languages. Joyful is currently the founder of 10Houses, a private network dedicated to cultivating entrepreneurship and equity, and a co-founder and connector of THINGY, an online platform whose mission is to capture, organize, and share creative ways of being to foster belonging.

Joyful lives to connect communities and transform individualistic perspectives into balanced structures of exchange and interaction. She catalyzes development personally, locally, and globally by centering the mind, body and spirit as a site for personal and communal growth.

Joyful provides practical, emotional and mental strategies to rewire habits and make decisions that serve equity in self, the home, the community and the workplace.

Informed by her personal experiences growing up in nine different countries, mostly in war torn regions across central and east Africa, Joyful emboldens communities to bring awareness to divisive labels and ideology embedded in oppressive identities based on class, race, and gender. She invites everyone to bring awareness and action back to self: Who are we without words? Who are we without labels?

Joyful received her BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University with a focus in African and Women’s Studies in 2014.

Dawn Engle is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the non-profit organization, The PeaceJam Foundation, which brings youth together with thirteen Nobel Peace Prize Laureates including the 14th Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Engle has been nominated eight times for the Nobel Peace Prize herself. She is the co-director of the award-winning documentary film, PEACEJAM and co-authored the book, PeaceJam: A Billion Simple Acts of Peace. In addition she directed the award-winning documentary films, 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy and Mayan Renaissance, which is the first in a series of feature length documentaries in PeaceJam’s Nobel Legacy Film Series.

Engle began her career as an economist, working for the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. She was the youngest women ever appointed to serve as Chief of Staff to a U.S. Senator. In 1991, she co-founded the Colorado Friends of Tibet, and in 1994, she and artist Ivan Suvanjieff began working together to create the PeaceJam program. Suvanjieff and Engle married in March 2000, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu presiding over the ceremony. In September 2008, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi and six other Nobel Peace Laureates joined together to launch PeaceJam’s Call to Action campaign calling for one billion acts of service and peace by the year 2018.

Mallika Dutt wakes leaders up to our interconnected truth and inspires us to question our current paradigms. She provides us with approaches and tools to strategically shake up and re-envision the world. Mallika has honed this approach through decades of experience leading culture change in entrepreneurial, nonprofit, and philanthropic fields. Her unique methodology combines ancient wisdom, contemplative practices, and social justice activism. The result? Connection and transformation.

As a strategic innovator, Mallika has pioneered effective approaches for social change through the founding of several nonprofits, including Breakthrough and Sakhi for South Asian Women. She has also provided transformational leadership in her roles as a Program Officer for Human Rights and Social Justice at the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi Office, the Director of the Norman Foundation, and the Associate Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University.

Now, Mallika leverages her experience as a changemaker to catalyze a new, interconnected leadership, through program design, facilitation, public speaking, and coaching. Her intersectional methodology incorporates creative and contemplative approaches, including: narrative strategy, storytelling, somatic embodiment, energy medicine, yoga and mindfulness practices.
A recipient of multiple awards, she received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2016. Mallika has served on several boards and committees and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A graduate of NYU Law School and Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, Mallika began her career as an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton. She is also the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from her undergraduate college, Mount Holyoke.