Julie Castro Abrams, Founder, How Women Lead
Julie Castro Abrams is an experienced CEO and sought-after speaker on entrepreneurship, philanthropy, how women lead and strategies for achieving business success and equity. Julie focuses on propelling leaders and teams to the next level by helping executives lead to results. She is widely recognized because of her unique ability to connect people and facilitate rich conversations that make change happen. Her networks boast the most influential women in venture, corporate and social sector leadership. Julie is an expert at building high performance, multicultural teams, building boards that perform, and creating high impact brands. She has a successful consulting practice with leaders she admires to achieve their growth and breakthrough goals.
Julie's commitment to justice and community are well known in her personal and professional endeavors. She serves as a leader on the boards of organizations focused on women, Latinos, economic development and the arts. Julie serves on the boards of women owned start-ups and local and global non-profits including the Women’s Funding Network, Association for Enterprise Opportunity, Co-Chair of the Bay Area Vital Voices, Rise Up and It’s Time Network. Julie is a philanthropist who launched the Bay Area Women Leader's Network and its Philanthropy Network. Thousands of new businesses attribute their launch and growth to her support which has resulted in millions toward the economic growth in communities. She is a leader in the country's movement to build small businesses.
Julie has won many awards including the Jobs Genius Award, Morgan Stanley Innovation Award, Cisco Innovation in Technology, "Women Who Could Be President" League of Women Voters, Stevie Award for Best Non Profit Executive, Human Rights Award from the Commission on the Status of Women, the Women of Color Action Network, Leadership California and the Marin Women's Hall of Fame in 2011.
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Noni Allwood
Noni Allwood’s career spans over 20 years as an executive, an entrepreneur and an innovator. Her corporate career includes senior roles for Fortune 500 companies, including Cisco, Tandem Computers, and Exxon Corporation. As an entrepreneur, she is founder of Noni Allwood & Associates and co-founder of Innovo21. In the area of Diversity and Inclusion, Ms. Allwood is a Senior Fellow & Senior Advisor to the Center for Talent Innovation, leading research and innovation of practices to advance women and multicultural talent globally.
Her roles and contributions in the corporate world include education, research and innovation of practices for the optimization of talent, having established a Global Gender Diversity function for Cisco Systems. As an expert in business operations, Ms. Allwood established a function to integrate acquisitions into a global sales organization, created a learning and development group for a global sales force, managed a transformation project for sales operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa and developed a company-wide project management methodology for use by the global sales organization.
Ms. Allwood is Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor to the Center for Talent Innovation, a highly regarded think tank where she leads research and seeding of practices to accelerate integration of all streams of talent. Her client base includes Fortune 500 corporations including technology, healthcare, biotechnology, travel, electronics manufacturing and non-profit industries.
Ms. Allwood currently serves on the Board of Geographic Expeditions. She is a member of the Advisory Boards to the Gender Equality Principles Initiative of the City and County of San Francisco and Co-Chair of the Advisory Board for Professional Business Women of California. She is currently a member of the Bay Area Council for Vital Voices, a global organization dedicated to the development of women leaders globally. Ms. Allwood has a degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad Centroamericana (El Salvador) and completed the Stanford University School of Business Executive Program.
In 2004, she was honored with the Inspirational Immigrant Award from Upwardly Global. In 2007, she was recognized by Flexperience, as one of the “Top 25 Bay Area Women Redefining Success.” In June of 2008, Mexican American Community Services Agency of San Jose, California named Ms. Allwood one of the “Most Influential Latinos in Silicon Valley”.
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Mercedes Martin
Mercedes Martin is a dynamic senior executive with an extensive and varied management background leading high-level organizational development, talent management, and diversity initiatives for large multi-national organizations. She is recognized as a respected leader and advocate for aligning programs with the company's needs to impact growth, profitability, and human capital. She is a highly sought after speaker and consultant in the areas of organizational assessment, cultural globalization, and leadership development. She has presented to National Organizational Development Network (ODN), Society of Intercultural Education and Training and Research (SIETAR), National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE), UC Berkeley. Mercedes is currently the Associate Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Ernst & Young, a global leader in in assurance, tax, transaction, advisory services and strategic growth markets. She joined the company in 2007 as an Assistant Director and Development Consultant and was quickly promoted into her current role where she leads the design, development and implementation of employee development and talent management strategies. She also provides consulting, coaching and business partner leadership to the executive leadership group. Some of her biggest accomplishment at EY include: launching company-wide change initiatives in Midwest, Mexico City and Central America; increasing client relationships by 10% of total clients; and rolling out the internationally recognized “Team Acceleration Program" that has increased team effectiveness and employee engagement.
Prior to her role at EY, Mercedes co-founded and led the day-to-day operations at InPartnership Consulting, an organizational development and strategic change firm that specialized in resolving cross-cultural conflicts and rebuilding workplace teams through Latino and African American leadership programs. In this capacity, she engaged with numerous Fortune 50 companies, including Proctor and Gamble, Shell Oil, Kellogg's and PepsiCo to assess, design and deliver programs that fostered inclusive environments in which leadership and teamwork could flourish. Earlier in her career, Mercedes served the United States as a member of the United States Air Force where she obtained the position of Staff Development Officer and achieved Master Facilitator in "Total Quality Management". One of her major responsibilities was to train officers and enlisted medical personnel towards satisfying their professional leadership requirements, which played a major role in shaping her career path. Mercedes has a Master of Science in Leadership Development from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelor of Science in Transcultural Nursing from the University of Miami. Additionally, she obtained a Facilitator and Training Certificate from UC-Berkeley. She is a member of over a dozen professional organizations and serves on the advisory board of the Women's Leadership Institute at John F. Kennedy University
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