The Fierce Urgency of Now Festival brings Boston’s diverse young professionals together with business leaders, organizations, and their peers to build connection, advance careers and ignite positive change.
09/14/2024 -
09/17/2024
Suffolk University - Sargent Hall
Join us to hear from experts on the evolving ecosystem of data and targeting, revealing answers to pressing questions in the industry.
09/24/2024
5:30pm - 7:30pm
Wayfair
Join us for an inspirational conversation with women leaders who have pioneered new initiatives and made significant impacts in their industries.
10/08/2024
9:30am - 11:00am
ML Strategies
Go deeper than basic DEI training to achieve higher productivity, satisfaction, and revenue growth with our new corporate workshop.
Join our Transformational DEI Certificate! Our comprehensive learning & development offerings are designed to connect and grow strong leaders who lead both inside and out of the office.
Our Women’s Leadership Program enables you to take your leadership to the next level by arming you with the most in-demand leadership toolkit.
Our Boston’s Future Leaders (BFL) program provides emerging leaders with a socially conscious and civically engaged leadership toolkit, as well as the opportunity to apply their knowledge through experiential assignments.
City Awake empowers young professionals in a variety of ways that encourages these rising leaders to stay invested in the region’s future success.
We are developing an ecosystem of corporations and partners with the influence and buying power to transform economic inclusion for minority business enterprises (MBEs).
BIMA (the Boston Interactive Media Association) serves a vibrant community of like-minded professionals from agencies, brands, publishers, and ad-tech companies with business interests in the New England market.
For 30 years, the Chamber’s Women’s Network has connected female professionals of all background and career levels. Today, our Women’s Network is the largest in New England, strengthening the professional networks of women each year.
The Massachusetts Apprentice Network convenes employers, training providers, and talent sources interested in developing and implementing apprenticeship programs in occupations across industries and statewide in fields such as tech, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and more.
We support small business through public policy initiatives, events designed to connect small businesses in Greater Boston to their peers and established business leaders, professional development offerings, and free small business advising.
Explore our mission and values to better understand how we are leading the business community forward.
Our member directory is your resource to discover, connect, and engage with Boston’s businesses from every industry and sector.
Think about an instance where you felt authentically and fully included – when your supervisor actively sought your feedback during a meeting, or a colleague took you out for coffee and asked you how you were really doing. Moments like these activate us and those around us to bring our best ideas to the table and live a more fulfilling, balanced life.
Our first-ever graduates of All in for Advancement dedicated the last year to piloting an initiative that will create moments like that for their community at their employer. This is no small feat, and it is clear that their leadership has made their organizations an even better place for women to work. But the work of an inclusive cultural influencers is never over. To support their continued work, and yours, we have summarized some of tools and frameworks we explored together.
Change requires an entrepreneurial mindset.
All in for Advancement opened with a puzzling and quilting exercise where participants got to experience firsthand the shift from a managerial, problem solving mentality to an entrepreneurial, learning through experimentation and iteration mindset. It is only when we stop looking at culture and inclusivity as a problem to be solved and start viewing it more fluidly that we can begin to take small actions to make huge improvements.
Change must be made in community.
When we look at a picture like the one above, it is natural for many of us to make a snap judgement about what this woman needs – a ladder, a tall person, another few inches of wingspan. However, we can’t truly know what this woman’s needs are without asking her – perhaps she just needs the shelves to be fully accessible. Likewise, it is up to us as cultural influencers to observe our surroundings, and then to do discovery work to find a solution that works for everyone. In All in for Advancement, participants started by observing and interviewing an outgroup, which steered their design thinking process.
In addition, they also designed the initiative in partnership with their team members (each participating company sends up to four participants) and with the support and buy-in of key leadership. Together, they selected a project at the intersection of desirability, feasibility, and viability.
Lastly, they designed their culture change initiative in community with the other participating organizations, and gave each other the gifts of feedback, advice, and connections.
Change is worth it.
Though change can be difficult, and more of a quilt than a straight-forward puzzle, it is worth it. Organizations with more inclusive cultures report greater innovation, smarter teams, more market competitiveness, an easier time recruiting talent, and higher levels of engagement from staff. Right now, inequality in women’s work is causing the world’s economy to lose $28 trillion in value.
Everyone is on a journey to be more inclusive – we can’t get it 100% right all the time. However, these tools can help to advance the crucial, entrepreneurial work of making your organization, and the region as a whole, a better, more inclusive place. With our collective power, we can make Greater Boston the best place for women to work.
Thank you to our 2019 INfluencers:
2020 Statements of Interest are being accepted now and are due by February 17. To learn more contact Caitlin Fisher at [email protected] or 617-557-7358 to set up an info session.
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