Canopy Leadership Forum
Expert Panelists + Learning Spaces
for Forward-Thinking Leaders
Learn in Community.
Lead with Confidence.
You are invited to participate in the inaugural cohort of the Canopy Leadership Forum!
Are you looking to deepen your capacity and skill to lead with compassion?
Are you wanting to invest in the systems and structures to support a thriving workplace culture?
Do you want to connect with like-minded leaders?
Are you curious how other organizations are approaching equity and inclusion work?
Do you want to learn best practices and bring them back to your team and organization?
If you answered yes to any of the above, then the Canopy Leadership Forum is for you!
The Canopy Leadership Forum is an opportunity for leaders to come together across organizations and learn from one another as well as from content area experts on key topics.
Participation in this cohort is ideal for Executive Leaders, People Operations Leaders, Directors of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and anyone else who is working to integrate equitable and inclusive leadership practices into their organizations systems and structures.
The cohort will include six sessions held via Zoom on:
June 21st, July 19th, August 16th, September 20th, and October 18th November 15th
Three sessions will be facilitated learning spaces for cohort participants to process the ideas shared in the expert presentations, share strategies that are working well within their organizations, and engage in consultancy to get support and feedback from one another.
Three sessions will feature presentations from content area experts on the topics below:
La’Kita Williams
Let's Build the Future of Work: Creating systems to support inclusive, resilient, and innovative culture.
As we can see and feel - work is changing, quickly. When organizations lack systems and structures this lack of clarity creates stress, confusion, and room for bias and allows power dynamics to shape decisions. In this session we will focus on ways to assess your culture and a framework for systems change to increase organizational agility and inclusion.
***
La'Kita Williams is the founder and principal strategist of CoCreate Work, a workplace culture consultancy guiding businesses to systems-level changes that result in measurable successes and inclusivity. She has done culture-building work with organizations from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. She specializes in taking a systems approach and works to connect systemic efforts to the individual outcomes at each level of the organization.
As a certified professional coach and trained Master’s level Social Worker, she has worked with small businesses, organizations, founders, and CEOs to strategically plan and design company culture, lead change, and enhance team experience. La’Kita has been quoted in the New York Times and written for Harvard Business Review.
Leonie Smith
Integrating restorative justice into Human Resources.
Restorative HR is an approach to managing personnel disputes in a way that addresses the needs of people who’ve been harmed as well as the people who are causing the harm. Traditional discipline in the workplace often excludes employees as a means to exert control and punish wrongdoing. Restorative approaches on the other hand foster inclusion, engagement and meaningful accountability. Restorative Practices have a wider focus and aim to build better relationships and a stronger community. This session will focus on learning some basic restorative justice practices and exploring where they can fit within the context of Human Resources.
***
Leonie Smith is a first-generation Canadian of Jamaican heritage. Her work is centered around her vocation, which is to support people from traditionally and historically marginalized populations to show up in the places that they live, work, and play in their full humanity. She is founder of The Thoughtful Workplace, People of Colour for Nonviolent Communication (POC4NVC), and Necessary Trouble Collective (NTC).
Along with coaching, Leonie works as an organizational consultant, restorative and transformative justice mediator, and trainer sharing principles of non-violence and Nonviolent Communication. She has over 20 years of experience in senior management positions in nonprofit organizations in communications, fundraising and human resources. Leonie is also a certified trainer in Nonviolent Communication, through the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) and a certified Facilitator and Trainer with Sociocracy for All. She resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Theresa Coney
Understanding and supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in professional spaces
Today’s environment has presented a definite shift in the manner in which organizations address diversity, equity and inclusion. This session will focus on developing an understanding of DEI perspectives in professional spaces, practical skills to address your organizational DEI concerns and ways to leverage the law in order to support building a positive, inclusive, and resilient workplace culture while also dispelling incorrect understandings of what is and isn’t recommended and permissible.
***
Theresa Wilson Coney, Esq. is an experienced, passionate advocate and thought leader in the areas of diversity, equity, inclusion and restorative justice. A litigator for 25 years handling criminal, child protective, civil rights, employment discrimination, mental health cases in State and Federal Courts. Theresa seeks justice by creating programs and strategies to reduce inequities that people of color face including developing and implementing an alternative to incarceration program for youth. A race equity trainer, restorative justice practitioner, litigation skills trainer and Adjunct Professor, training lawyers for more than 25 years. Theresa pioneered a multifaceted education program bringing together worldwide race equity leaders. She leads a Racial Equity Internship Program, engages with the judiciary, bar associations and other stakeholders to develop strategies to address the disparities which exist in our legal systems. Theresa is the inaugural Racial Equity Statewide Training Lead for Massachusetts’s Public Defender Office and a Hearing Officer for the Board of Bar Overseers for the Supreme Judicial Court.