In this episode, Change Catalyst Founder & CEO Melinda Briana Epler engages in an important conversation with Margenett Moore-Roberts, Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer of IPG – DXTRA, about how to raise our children as allies and advocates who can disrupt and redress race-based harm.
You’ll come away from this episode with an understanding of why and how to have tough conversations with children about racism, so that they can live in a just, fair, and peaceful world. We also discuss the critical need of reforming the white supremacy built into our American educational system, one that has often taught a one-sided and biased perspective of history.
Additional Resources:
- Interview with Ibram X. Kendi about his upcoming book with Jason Reynolds, “Stamped (For Kids)”
- Educational videos for teachers on “Freedom Reads: Anti-Bias Book Talk”
- About Rodney King, beaten by police in 1991
- “What is water to a fish?” – thinking about race from a white male perspective
- An article about Amy Cooper, who called the police and falsely accused a Black man of threatening her in 2020
- Amanda Gorman’s children’s book, “Change Sings”, and poetry collection “The Hill We Climb”
- More about Juneteenth
This episode is sponsored by AppDynamics, builders of the world’s only full-stack Business Observability platform. Join their team to help businesses thrive by turning performance into profit. Learn more at www.appdynamics.com/company/careers And by our in-kind sponsor Interpreter-Now, providing high-quality ASL interpreters.
You can watch the live show on Change Catalyst YouTube Channel here, with live captioning and ASL interpreters.
[Image description: promotion for the Leading With Empathy & Allyship show with the Change Catalyst logo, a photo of Melinda Briana Epler, Co-Founder Change Catalyst, white woman with long red hair, smiling and Margenett Moore-Roberts, Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer of IPG DXTRA, Black woman with black hair smiling, and text reading “Raising Our Children to be Allies & Advocates for Social Justice”]
Quotes
- “Kids can be purveyors of race-based harm or disruptors of race-based harm. Help them become a disruptor.”
- “Working through the discomfort of this, this becomes the opportunity. We have not figured out how to stop racism in hundreds of years. We haven’t. We are born into it. All of us. But, again, as a parent… you can change the trajectory of racism just by having a conversation. Let that be your motivation.”
- “Children don’t process differences as a deficiency. How did we arrive at the conclusion that if you are different, if you are not white specifically, somehow you are deficient? Just because it is different doesn’t mean it is a deficiency.”
Margenett Moore-Roberts
Chief of Inclusion & Diversity at IPG DXTRA
Margenett is the Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer for IPG DXTRA and leads the Office of Business Relevance, Inclusion & Equity (OBRIE) with a charter to drive alignment, collaboration, and business growth through the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) across IPG DXTRA’s collective of agency brands.
Prior to joining IPG DXTRA, Margenett served as Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer for Golin, where she had a remarkable impact on Golin’s inclusion and diversity efforts. Most notably championing efforts to embed inclusion and diversity into the agency’s brand positioning, core leadership competencies, leadership success framework, and Golin’s market approach to helping brands effectively engage with the profoundly diverse market.
Since joining the industry in May 2018, Margenett has been nominated for an IPG Inclusion Award, and selected as one of The Holmes Report’s 2019 Innovator 25 and one of The Network Journal’s Top 25 Women in Business. Her perspective has been featured in industry publications and events, including PRNews, PRSA LA Diversity & Inclusion Panel, The Atlantic Roundtable on Diversity, and the PRSA Tri-State Conference.
Prior to joining the Marketing Services industry, Margenett spent 6 years at Yahoo building the company’s first ever video advertising and video syndication networks, generating more than $100M in revenue over 3.5 years. During the second half of her tenure at Yahoo, Margenett become the company’s first Global Head of Inclusion & Diversity, driving the development of the company’s corporate perspective on Inclusion and Diversity and was a leading voice in the company’s position on challenging social and legal topics. During her time in Tech, Margenett was a speaker and panelist at many national diversity events and conferences, including the White House Conference on Inclusive STEM Education, Big Omaha, the Watermark Conference for Women, and more. Additionally, her perspective has been featured in industry publications, including TechCrunch, the Huffington Post, BBC Worldwide (London) and Tech Diversity Magazine.
Over the course of her career, Margenett has built a number of strategic business units from the ground up, creating real market value by transforming organizations through vision, insight, and leadership. She has held senior leadership roles across a broad range of functional areas and has worked across a variety of business sectors, including Telecommunications, Data Licensing, Content Syndication, Digital Media, Software Development, and, now, Marketing Services.
Margenett sits on the Board of Directors for the T. Howard Foundation, and holds Advisory positions with OpenSlate and Custom Collaborative. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Otterbein College.
Host: Melinda Briana Epler
Melinda Briana Epler has over 25 years of experience developing business innovation and inclusion strategies for startups, Fortune 500 companies, and global NGOs.
As CEO of Change Catalyst, Melinda currently works with the tech industry to solve diversity and inclusion together. Using her background in storytelling and large-scale culture change, she is a strategic advisor for tech companies, tech hubs, and governments around the world. She co-leads a series of global solutions-focused conferences called Tech Inclusion, where she has partnered with over 450 tech companies and community organizations and hosted 43 solutions-focused diversity and inclusion events around the world.
Previously, Melinda was a Marketing and Culture Executive and award-winning documentary filmmaker – her film and television work includes projects that exposed the AIDS crisis in South Africa, explored women’s rights in Turkey, and prepared communities for the effects of climate change. She has worked on several television shows, including NBC’s The West Wing.
Melinda is a TED speaker. She speaks, mentors and writes about diversity and inclusion in tech, allyship, social entrepreneurship, underrepresented entrepreneurs and investing. She has spoken on hundreds of stages around the world, including SXSW, Grace Hopper, Wisdom 2.0, the World Bank, Obama White House, Clinton Foundation, Black Enterprise, Google, Indeed, Capital One and McKinsey.
Watch Melinda’s TED Talk
Speaking Engagements
Change Catalyst Co-Founder Melinda Briana Epler has spoken across the globe in hundreds of venues and virtual events. Empathy, Allyship, Advocacy, Microaggressions, Inclusive Leadership, and Building Inclusive Teams are just some of the topics Melinda has spoken on. Let us know about your next speaking engagement needs! Melinda has also spoken on how to build organizational capacity to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, such as how to lead behavior change or how to build allies and advocates.
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