About the Presenters:

Aubery Blanche is The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp, and a startup investor and advisor. Through all her work, she seeks to question, reimagine, and redesign the systems and practices that surround us to ensure that all people can access equitable opportunities and build a better world. Her work is undergirded by her training in social scientific methods and grounded in the fundamental dignity and value of every person. Her professional expertise covers a broad range of equitable enterprise operations, from talent lifecycle programs and accessible product development to event design and communications & media.

She is the inventor of the balanced teams approach to building proportional representation and a culture of belonging in the workplace. She works to open source these methods for all practitioners and business leaders, and releases thought leadership and tools to create positive change at here at aubreyblanche.com.

She is an advisor / investor to a variety of companies seeking to build a more just world, including OnRamp, Seed&Spark, Stark, Joonko, and Pivot Diversity. Her work has been featured in Wired, the Wall Street Journal, the Australian Financial Review, USA Today, Re/Code, First Round Review, and more. She also has previous academic affiliations with Stanford and Northwestern, and an appointment at the Equity by Design Lab at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Despite the accolades listed here, she asks that you engage with her work to judge her competence: traditional proxies of merit and/or competence help reinforce the systems that keep incredible people from the opportunities they deserve.

Angela Palmer Vice President of Organizational Equity & Special Projects at the Alliance of Arizona Nonprofits + Arizona Grantmakers Forum, leads diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (IDEA) efforts at all levels within her organization. Angela has dedicated her life to asking challenging questions, consistently engaging in difficult conversations, and advocating for necessary change on behalf of others and the teams that she has led. Angela's propensity for leading positive change on behalf of others was also apparent in her work at The Phoenix Symphony and Free Arts for Abused Children of Arizona. While living much of her Arizona-based time in Phoenix, Angela came to know Northern Arizona as both a gallery director and nonprofit leader, focusing on achieving operational efficiency simultaneous with growth in the community. In volunteer roles at the Humane Society of Sedona and Tedx Sedona, she came to fully appreciate the needs of the state’s rural communities.  

Angela’s passion for championing underrepresented communities can be traced to her being named a Math for America Fellow. With a teaching post in a Brooklyn, New York transfer school, she served low-socioeconomic, over-age, under-credited teens receiving their last chance to graduate with a high school diploma. This commitment to making instructional design and delivery accessible to at-risk populations fueled her work as a curriculum developer at Edgenuity, Grand Canyon University, and the Sanford Inspire Program at Arizona State University.   Angela, a first-generation (maternal) American and first-generation college graduate, holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from New York University and master’s degrees in mathematics secondary education and business administration with a focus on global management from, respectively, Columbia University and Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Salome Mwangi, an accomplished speaker, trainer, and culture broker, provides services that bridge the cultural divide for refugee and immigrant communities. She advocates for intentional cross-cultural living through language interpretation and training that addresses cultures - yours, mine, and ours —their beauty and their challenges. She has called Boise, ID, home since relocating via the refugee resettlement program from Nairobi, Kenya, where her professional background was in banking, finance, and information technology. Upon arrival in Idaho nearly 20 years ago, she helped bridge the language and cultural gap between limited English proficient immigrants and their service providers. Today she is an entrepreneur with her own company, Mwangi’z Inc. Salome is passionate about bringing more voices and flavors to the table—figuratively and literally.

Auri East - I am a scientifically-based, shame-reducing, pleasure-positive, and trauma-informed Sex/ual/ity Educator and Consultant. Essentially, that means that I use research--among many other useful tools--to elevate myriad intersectional identities so that participants may develop empathy for the Other and self-acceptance for whomever they themselves are. I present content in terms of what pleasure is possible given one's own gender, body, sexuality, value-system, etc., and I provide space for participants to determine that for themselves. Content, curriculum, and activities are designed for a gradient of engagement so participants may self-determine their experiences--this ensures my workshop space is an as-safe-as-possible learning environment for everyone. It meets them where they are available to learn.    As a Consultant, my values remain the same. I am most interested in working with school faculty and administrators, non-profit organizations, and for-profit businesses to help them improve their hiring practices, content/curriculum, internal and external documents, websites, and general culture to ensure gender- and sexuality-diverse students, clients, and employees feel safe and seen. These consultations always include some level of education.

Tanisha Townsend, Senior Manager, DEI Micron Technology, Inc.   Tanisha Townsend is a Senior Program Manager of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion for Micron Technology. Tanisha is a certified diversity and inclusion leader who partners with Micron’s executive leaders to ensure the successful execution of the DEI commitments within Micron. She also is responsible for the execution of Micron’s DEI survey and awards strategies. She is dedicated to fostering an inclusive work environment and partnering with leaders to ensure effective action and accountability of DE&I goals.   Tanisha is a United States Air Force Veteran. She has in-depth experience working in both the public and private sectors. Tanisha has more than 15 years of experience in project management, program management, and change management and has managed teams in the successful execution of many medium and large-scale departmental, human resource, and technological projects as well as transformational projects.  She holds certifications in both project management, agile methodologies, and change management.  She is currently a doctoral candidate pursuing a Doctorate of Education focused in organizational development and organizational leadership and she is expected to complete her degree in 2023; she has a Master of Business Administration degree with a focus in project management and accounting; and she has two bachelors’ degrees: in Management  and Business Information Systems.

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