March Virtual: Strengthening Employee Purpose Within Your Corporate Strategy

Tequilla Lopez is the Director, Social Impact at Best Buy.

George Serafeim is the Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he co-leads the Climate and Sustainability Impact AI Lab in the Digital, Data and Design Institute. He is currently teaching the course "Risks, Opportunities and Investments in an Era of Climate Change" that he designed for the elective curriculum of the MBA program and the course "Financial Reporting and Control" in the required MBA curriculum. Previously, he taught, with Professor Rebecca Henderson, the course “Reimagining Capitalism: Business and Big Problems”, which received the Ideas Worth Teaching Award from the Aspen Institute and the Grand Page Prize, and he created the Impact-Weighted Accounts Project that designed methodologies and large-scale data, and incubated dozens of pilot projects around the world on accounting for social and environmental impact from corporate activities. He has presented his research in over 60 countries around the world and ranks among the top 10 most popular authors out of over 12,000 business authors on the Social Science Research Network. His book "Purpose and Profit: How Business Can Lift Up the World" explores the challenges and opportunities in building and sustaining profitable purpose-driven organizations that have a measurable positive impact on society.

William Parham, Ph.D. is the Director, Mental Health and Wellness Program at the National Basketball Players Association.

Sean Gregory is a senior writer for TIME, covering sports for the magazine and TIME.com.

Since joining TIME in 2002, Gregory has written profiles of a wide range of athletes, including Usain Bolt, LeBron James, Tim Tebow, Novak Djokovic and Maria Sharapova. Gregory wrote TIME’s 2010 cover story on the concussion crisis in football and has written enterprise features on the Penn State football child-sex scandal, baseball in the Dominican Republic, the recruiting of preteen athletes by major college sports programs and the competitiveness of amputee golfers. Gregory has covered four Olympic Games for TIME, as well as multiple Super Bowls, World Series and NBA Finals. In 2011, Gregory began writing Keeping Score, a weekly sports column on TIME.com. Outside sports, Gregory has written in-depth pieces on Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the Supreme Court case against the controversial Westboro Baptist Church.

Prior to joining TIME, Gregory worked at the Associated Press; WFAN, New York City’s top all-sports radio station; and Sports Illustrated. He also spent three years working for a major financial-services company in New York.

A native of the Bronx, Gregory holds a B.A. in public policy from Princeton University, where he also played varsity basketball. He also holds an M.S. from the J-School.

Susan Moore is the Vice President, Corporate of Government Affairs & Corporate Responsibility at AMD.

Paul Rumsey serves as SVP, HR Strategic Operations at Advocate Health in Charlotte, NC. As a leader in the healthcare industry, Advocate Health has 150,000 teammates, a $27B net operating revenue, over 1000 sites of care and 67 hospitals. In this role Paul leads HR alignment, merger integrations, process improvement and enterprise culture.

Prior to Atrium Health, Paul served as the Chief Learning Officer at Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas, TX, where he led executive coaching, career development, leadership development, succession management and performance management for 12,000 employees. In 2016, Becker’s Hospital Review named him as one of the 10 Chief Learning Officers to know. Under his leadership, his team won the National Fund/CareerSTAT Emerging Leader Award and five ATD-Dallas Axis Awards.

Prior to Parkland, Paul Rumsey served as Vice President of Global Learning and Development for TGI Fridays, which has more than 70,000 team members located in almost 900 restaurants in 60 countries.

Prior to TGI Fridays, Paul was Vice President of Education Delivery and Operations Worldwide at MicroStrategy, a leading business intelligence company, where he led global education services team with clients like Facebook, Visa, eBay, Swedbank and Nestle. He previously worked led training for NurseLine operations at UnitedHealth Group.

In addition to holding two master’s degrees and a professional certificate in Human Resource Administration, he is a Certified Executive Coach with Marshall Goldsmith, DiSC, Situational Leadership and EQi-2.0 assessment/coaching.

Jennifer Kartono is the Senior Vice President, Human Resources at Iron Mountain.

Laura Donahue is the  Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility at CarMax.

Judith Almendra, Group Vice President of People & Culture of TTEC, is an accomplished human capital professional with a proven track record of integrating business and people strategies to drive results. With over 15 years of business and human capital experience, Judith has led teams in the implementation of traditional and innovative strategies in the areas of marketing and communications, public relations, learning and development, talent acquisition, performance management, succession and employee engagement and employee retention.

In her 12 years with TeleTech, Judith has held progressive leadership positions, covering multiple facets of the for Human Capital spectrum as well as leading the development of company’s proprietary human capital tools, programs and solutions. Through her career, she has gained deep expertise in the international business and multicultural markets. And, she has played key roles leading global cultural transformation.
She is originally from Mexico and moved to the US in 2001 to pursue her Masters in Business at the University of Colorado. She is also a board member of the TTEC Community Foundation. The mission of the foundation is to provide better education opportunities to children in underserved communities, which is something Judith is very passionate about.

After a career of non-profit development work, Jackie devoted the next phase of her career to being an oncology nurse and caring for patients and their families during some of their hardest moments. Now, as the leader of UWorld’s Corporate Giving, Jackie has the opportunity to merge her career paths into one while being focused on creating educational nursing content for nursing students and launching company-wide corporate philanthropy.  

Megan Trotter is the VP, Head of Social Impact & President, Zendesk Foundation at Zendesk.

Lydia Dishman is Fast Company’s senior editor for growth and engagement. She has also written for CBS Moneywatch, Fortune, The Guardian, Popular Science, and the New York Times, among others.

As the Social Impact lead at Fetch, Emily leads the nationwide Fetch it Forward program– engaging employees across Fetch through skills-based volunteerism, community programming, donation campaigns, and employee resource group collaborations. Emily began her corporate social responsibility career with the Brooklyn Nets and continued to impact communities through the power of sport with international teams and at the league level with the NBA. Before her time in CSR, Emily spent 6 years living and working in Asia for various multinational NGOs.

David Grubman leads the corporate sales functions at WizeHive with a focus on delivering employee giving and volunteer programs to companies. David has spent most of his career helping drive improved financial outcomes to consumers. With WizeHive he has worked with hundreds of companies to define their employee engagement through philanthropy programs. David is most passionate about environmental causes and resides in central California with his daughter, a cat, a dog, and, soon, a cow.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz at Work, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

Kaylee Kolditz is the Director, Vertical Markets at WizeHive, a growth stage SaaS company. With a background in the nonprofit world and experience helping technology companies grow, Kaylee is now focused on connecting purpose-driven organizations to technology that can increase engagement and impact. WizeHive’s current offerings include ZengineTM, a platform that powers application-centric processes such as grants, scholarships, and fellowships, and Bright Funds, the solution for workplace giving and volunteering programs. 

Smiti Bhatt Deorah is the Co-Founder and COO of Advantage Club, a Global Employee Engagement Platform with features like rewards, recognition, community building, and FlexBen on a unified platform. Currently, she heads various functions, including business development and customer relations.

An alumna of the University of California (UCLA) with a Master's degree in Computer Science, Smiti has a strong experience in B2B networking/relationships. Before co-founding Advantage Club with Sourabh Deorah, she was part of the first ten people in the customer engagement and sales team for SQL Azure at Microsoft Redmond.

Smiti envisions Advantage Club disrupting the traditional Employee Engagement and Experience industry. She firmly believes that corporations need to engage with their employees beyond salaries. Under her leadership, Advantage Club has transformed employee engagement in more than 1000 corporates in over 100 countries and has grown into a platform through which employers can engage more meaningfully with their employees.

In 2022, she was featured as 'Woman Leader of the Year' by BW Businessworld. With her guiding principle of "Every employee should feel the best which would lead them to perform the best", Smiti has redefined Advantage Club from an HR Tech Start-up to a multi-million-dollar venture.

Eric Bierig is the L&D Strategist at GrowthSpace.

Susan Hunt Stevens is the Founder & CEO of WeSpire, an award-winning employee experience technology platform focused on engaging people in environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives. She founded WeSpire to use her digital behavior change expertise to help people embrace healthier and more sustainable lifestyles after her son was diagnosed with serious food allergies. She was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year for New England, a Boston Business Journal Woman of Influence, and to the Environmental Leader 100 list. Prior to WeSpire, she spent 9 years at The New York Times Company, most recently as SVP/General Manager for Boston.com, a $60M digital media division. She has an MBA from The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, where she was named a Tuck Scholar, and graduated with high honors from Wesleyan University.

Jason Cerrato is the Vice President of Talent-centered Transformation for Eightfold, focused on the capabilities of our comprehensive Talent Intelligence Platform and the future of work. Prior to Eightfold, he was with Gartner as a Senior Research Director, focusing on HR technology and transformation.

With extensive experience in talent acquisition, Jason spent more than a decade with United Technologies Corporation (now RTX), where he was the Senior Director of Talent Acquisition, serving as the workstream owner for recruiting and onboarding for an enterprise-wide global HR transformation initiative. Jason has a master’s degree in human resource development and received the Global Fellow in Talent Management certification from the Talent Management
Institute and the Wharton School of Business.

Jason has been recognized by HR Executive as a Top 100 HR Tech influencer and also co-hosts The New Talent Code podcast, which provides insights and open discussion with industry leaders on all things talent and HR tech.