Alnoba Leadership Awards Teach-In

ABOUT MORNING TEACH INS

The 5 Keys to Daring Leadership – The Pinnacle Model

At Pinnacle, we believe strong leaders make stronger communities and high performing teams allow great leaders to have the greatest impact. Based at Alnoba, we have helped hundreds of leaders from around the world strengthen their teams and drive immediate and lasting change for over 30 years.

In this session, we’ll review what over three decades of results have proven to be The Top 5 Keys to Leading High Performing Teams. You’ll learn the importance of building a culture of growth – an environment that people can thrive in and reach their full potential where leaders model the behaviors that lead to success and encourage their teams to speak openly and take risks to drive results. See how leveraging the brain power of a team will lead to innovation and walk away armed with time-tested tools to drive accountability through effective goal setting.

Pinnacle is New England’s top resource in leadership & team development. Since 1993, we’ve built up a proven record of results with leaders from 80+ countries.

Presenter: Danielle Giannone
Senior Vice President of Pinnacle Leadership & Team Development

An expert in leadership, team development and coaching, Danielle has spent the past twenty years transforming the performance of numerous organizations worldwide. Driven by her passion to help people reach their full potential, she has advised leaders at all levels and helped build high performing teams on six continents. A skilled facilitator and trainer, she pushes leaders to see the biggest obstacles that stand in their way, dig into the hot issues that hold them back and find the courage to lead effectively.

Presenter: Danny Tyrrell
Vice President 0f Pinnacle Leadership & Team Development

Danny has dedicated the past 15 years to leading diverse teams across various industries, including international travel and health & wellness technology. At Pinnacle, he utilizes his executive background to develop courageous leaders and effective teams. He focuses on goal clarity, identification of the top barriers that are in a team’s way and alignment on key priorities

“Calling in the Call Out Culture” by Loretta J. Ross

Dr. Ross’s presentation will challenge the Call Out Culture of social justice movements and academic spaces in order to build a united human rights movement. The teach in will cover 5 topics: 1) Understanding what Calling In/Calling Out is; 2) Exploring why people should care about building a human rights movement through Calling In; 3) Discussing what it feels like to call people in; 4) Examining what Calling In looks like; 5) Learning where, when and how to use Calling In techniques in the future.

Presenter: Loretta J. Ross
Activist, Public Intellectual, Professor

Loretta’s activism began at 16 when she was tear-gassed at a demonstration as a first-year student at Howard University in 1970. She was one of the first African American women to direct a rape crisis center in the 1970’s, where she used her own story of sexual assault to facilitate a conversation with incarcerated rapists, teaching them Black feminist theory.

As part of a 50-year history in social justice activism, she was the national coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective from 2005–2012 and co-created the theory of Reproductive Justice in 1994.

Ross’s mentor, the legendary C.T. Vivian, told her when she started her job, “When you ask people to give up hate, you have to be there for them when they do.” And so, she was. She monitored hate crimes, accompanied Floyd Cochran, national spokesman for Aryan Nation, on his atonement tour and taught anti racism to some whose families were members of the KKK.

Ross was national co-director of the April 25, 2004, March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C., the largest protest march in U.S. history at that time with 1.15 million participants. She founded the National Center for Human Rights

She is a 2022 recipient of the Alnoba Moment of Truth Award for Leadership for Gender Equity and the McArthur Prize, as well as a 2023 Inductee to the National Women’s Hall of Fame

Do We Have The Tools To Abandon Fossil Fuels?

Transitioning society from polluting, single-use fossil fuels to renewable energy combined with battery storage is one of the greatest challenges, and wealth-creation opportunities, of our time. Most people do not realize how rapidly clean technology solutions are progressing to harness and store abundant wind, solar and hydro power.

To date, the Inflation Reduction Act has unleashed more than $700 billion in U.S. clean energy investments in mining and manufacturing, positioning America to compete with China’s historical dominance of solar, wind and electric vehicle manufacturing.

From his front row seat in the clean energy industry, ReVision Energy co-founder Phil Coupe is witnessing astonishing clean energy progress that was unimaginable 20 years ago when he started the 100% employee-owned company. Phil’s talk will emphatically answer one of the most urgent questions facing humanity, while providing insights on where the next trillion dollars of wealth are being created in the U.S. economy.

Presenter: Phil Coupe
Co-Founder, ReVision Energy

As co-founder and aspirational visionary, Phil focuses on leadership, business strategy, communications and the national security implications of over-reliance on finite fossil fuels. Prior to the launch of ReVision Energy, he worked as a journalist in Washington, DC before helping start up a business that twice made the Inc. 500 List of Fastest-Growing Companies in America. To match growth with purpose, Phil immersed himself in the early movement toward corporate social responsibility and socially responsible business practices, leading the startup to win awards for its “Community Focus” program that invested in solutions to homelessness, at-risk youth and environmental degradation.

Other recognition included a Volunteer of the Year Award presented by former Sec. of State Colin Powell, the Community Hero Award from City Year Washington, Business Leader for the Environment Award from the Sierra Club and more recently the CEO Environmental Leadership Award from Alnoba that recognized ReVision’s co-founders.

At ReVision Energy Phil engineered the cause-related marketing strategy and relationship-based sales approach that helped the company quickly grow from a garage startup to one of the most respected clean energy companies in New England.

Strong girls. Strong women. Stronger world.

Join this conversation as two brave and brilliant Moment of Truth Award recipients share lessons from their work to keep girls and women safe, strong and on paths for success. Their experiences range from Maryam Montague’s groundbreaking work on a new menstrual solution to tackle period poverty, with a focus on the global south, and her program to keep girls in school and stop underage marriages in Morocco and Syria to Christa Big Canoe’s service as Lead Commission Counsel for Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, as well as her current work to for truth and accountability on behalf of their families.

Presenter: Maryam Montague
Founder, Project Soar

Maryam Montague is trying to stop child marriage of teen girls in Morocco and Syria, as well as advance menstrual rights using a new menstrual solution, she and her colleagues developed called the Soar Hurya.

In 2013, she created Project Soar in Morocco and later added sites in Syria and Uganda. Project Soar envisions a world where every marginalized teen girl knows her value, voice, body, rights and path – and seeks to empower teen girls to be the leaders of today and tomorrow. They provide empowerment coaching through a 25-workshop curriculum based on neuroscience, sustainable menstrual health kits, and advocacy training on teen girl issues. It’s free for the girls, but to take part, they must pledge to stay in school.

Prior to founding Project Soar, Montague had a 25-year career as a humanitarian aid worker, including stints at the National Democratic Institute, an international nonprofit group. She worked on training women to run for office and prisoner rights among other issues.

The non-profit program started at Montague’s boutique hotel, Peacock Pavilions, that she and her husband built on an eight-acre olive grove on the outskirts of Marrakech, with the mission statement, Be Good, Make Good, Do Good.

Their replicable, scalable model has allowed Project Soar to scale to 138+ chapters nationwide in Morocco and was successfully piloted in five sites in Uganda and four sites in Northwest Syria. To date, Project Soar has provided 24,925 hours of empowerment. With an active network of 6,338+ Soar Girls, Project Soar is growing the teen girl movement. Their results are impressive.

• 100% of Soar girls plan to go to the next grade level
• 89% passed the school year
• Less than 1% became child brides

Presenter: Christa Big Canoe
Legal Advocacy Director, Aboriginal Legal Services, Toronto, Canada

Right now, four out of every five Indigenous American women are affected by violence, and are murdered at rates more than 10 times the national average. By far the majority of those crimes are committed by individuals from outside the Native American community, often falling through jurisdictional cracks. It’s a crisis that demands action–a crisis that prompted Christa Big Canoe to take the kind of bold action that leads to big impact.

Christa is the Legal Advocacy Director for Aboriginal Legal Services (ALS), a nonprofit organization that works with the families of missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW) navigate the legal system to find justice for their loved ones.

In 2017, Christa was appointed Senior and then Lead Commission Council for Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Christa took a two and a half year leave from her work at ALS to lead thirteen Indigenous lawyers, twenty-six statement gatherers and a support team responsible for collecting truth from survivors and families. The testimonies from “truth finding gatherings” have created one of the largest evidentiary records in Canada.

Christa also represented six of the seven families in the “Seven Youth Inquest” in Thunder Bay. This investigation of the deaths of seven Indigenous students resulted in 145 federal and provincial recommendations to improve accountability, safety and education outcomes for Nishnawbe Aski Nation youths. While at Legal Aid Ontario, she led the province-wide Aboriginal Justice Strategy aimed at removing barriers to the legal system for indigenous people.

Christa’s unwavering courage to confront this critical issue and take action to bring about real change makes her an exceptional leader.

From One Man’s Mission to a Worldwide Movement for Clean Water – A Conversation with Doc Hendley

Please don’t tell Doc it can’t be done – because he will not rest until he finds a way to get water to the most in need and in the hardest places to reach in the midst of extreme conditions, including war zones, and natural disaster areas.

Doc Hendley dreamed up the concept of Wine To Water while bartending and playing music in nightclubs around Raleigh, NC.

In February 2004, Doc held his first fundraiser. And by August, he was living halfway around the globe in Sudan, Africa installing water systems for victims of the government-supported genocide. His life would never be the same. After spending one year in Darfur, Doc returned home. The haunting memories of what he had witnessed drove him to continue building the organization he started with that first fundraiser in a bar. Doc was determined to provide clean water for the world.

In 2007, after working two jobs and volunteering his time for three years, Doc launched Wine To Water. His dream of fighting the world’s water crisis became a reality. But that was just the beginning. In 2009, Doc was named as a top ten CNN Hero for that year, and the ripples continued to grow. Soon Doc was speaking to packed houses, including two TEDx events and national media outlets. Thousands were inspired by his story and Wine To Water grew from one man’s mission into a movement for clean water.

Presenter: Doc Hendley
Founder, Wine to Water

Doc Hendley is the founder and president of Wine To Water, a non-profit that radically transformed the process of bringing clean water to people in need anywhere in the world.

A musician and former bartender, Hendley launched Wine To Water in 2004 while bartending and playing music in nightclubs in Raleigh, North Carolina. At that time, he traveled to Darfur, Sudan and with the money raised, began installing water systems for victims of government-supported genocide.

Doc is a frequent speaker, and often leads Wine To Water filter build programs. Filter builds are hands-on, socially responsible experiences for companies and organizations to assemble filters and make their own strides in alleviating the world’s water crisis.

ABOUT AFTERNOON TEACH INS

The Top 5 Keys to High Performing Teams – The Pinnacle Model

At Pinnacle, we believe strong leaders make stronger communities and high performing teams allow great leaders to have the greatest impact. Based at Alnoba, we have helped hundreds of leaders from around the world strengthen their teams and drive immediate and lasting change for over 30 years.

In this session, we’ll review what over three decades of results have proven to be The Top 5 Keys to Leading High Performing Teams. You’ll learn the importance of building a culture of growth – an environment that people can thrive in and reach their full potential where leaders model the behaviors that lead to success and encourage their teams to speak openly and take risks to drive results. See how leveraging the brain power of a team will lead to innovation and walk away armed with time-tested tools to drive accountability through effective goal setting.

Pinnacle is New England’s top resource in leadership & team development. Since 1993, we’ve built up a proven record of results with leaders from 80+ countries.

Presenter: Danielle Giannone
Senior Vice President of Pinnacle Leadership & Team Development

An expert in leadership, team development and coaching, Danielle has spent the past twenty years transforming the performance of numerous organizations worldwide. Driven by her passion to help people reach their full potential, she has advised leaders at all levels and helped build high performing teams on six continents. A skilled facilitator and trainer, she pushes leaders to see the biggest obstacles that stand in their way, dig into the hot issues that hold them back and find the courage to lead effectively.

Presenter: Danny Tyrrell
Vice President 0f Pinnacle Leadership & Team Development

Danny has dedicated the past 15 years to leading diverse teams across various industries, including international travel and health & wellness technology. At Pinnacle, he utilizes his executive background to develop courageous leaders and effective teams. He focuses on goal clarity, identification of the top barriers that are in a team’s way and alignment on key priorities.

PEOPLE PLANET PROFIT

Fiona Wilson leads a panel of creative, thoughtful and compassionate business leaders who are determined to harness the power of enterprise to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, while continuing to generate profit. These leaders will share their stories of how they use innovative approaches to achieve their vision of business as a force for good.

Presenter: Dr. Fiona Wilson
Chief Sustainability Officer and Executive Director of the Sustainability Institute, University of New Hampshire

Dr. Fiona Wilson is the Chief Sustainability Officer for the University of New Hampshire (UNH), the state’s flagship public university, a land, sea and space grant institution, and a recognized national leader in sustainability. She is also Executive Director of UNH’s Sustainability Institute. Fiona  was previously a founder and Executive Director of UNH’s Changemaker Collaborative, the Institute’s partnership with Paul College and the Carsey School, which offers sustainability-related high-impact programs steeped in real-world experiential learning, with a mission to inspire, train and support the next generation of leaders with the confidence and competence to drive sustainable change in their careers. She was also a member of UNH’s Paul College’s faculty for eight years where her teaching and research focused on how innovative responsible business approaches can help tackle the world’s sustainability challenges. Earlier, Fiona spent almost on the decade at the Simmons College School of Management.

Prior to her academic career, Fiona spent fifteen years in the business world, including as VP of Marketing for CMGI, an internet investment and operating company, and in various roles at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising in both London and Barcelona.

Presenter: Melissa LaCasse
Ceo and Co-Founder, Tanbark MFP

Melissa Lacasse is the CEO and co-founder of Tanbark Molded Fiber, a manufacturing start-up focused on replacing single-use plastic with bio-based solutions. She is passionate about developing new markets and opportunities for Maine heritage industries.

Melissa co-founded Tanbark in 2021. She is happy to change the face of manufacturing by challenging the status quo. She wants to arrest the plastic epidemic and believes in shared prosperity. Tanbark allows her to use her skills in B2B Sales and Business Development. She is also skilled in fundraising and content syndication, having had a career in public radio.

Melissa is Chair of the Board for Maine Technology Institute, where she serves as the Sector Representative for Advanced Technologies for Forestry and Agriculture, and also serves on the Board of Trustees for Maine Public.

What do you think about when you think about health?

The neighborhood you live in rarely makes the list. However, research shows that the places in which we live, work, play, grow, and learn matter more for good health than access to health care and genetics combined. A new wave of development is sweeping cities in the Boston metro area. Using this development to transform neighborhoods presents one of the most significant opportunities of our time to improve the health of thousands of New Englanders.

The relationship between housing and health is complex. Understanding how to build neighborhoods in a way that improves the health of residents is at the heart of the Healthy Neighborhoods Study. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies and Planning partnered with nine Massachusetts communities, training local residents to participate in research on community well-being with a focus on the social and environmental determinants of health.  This research informed a parallel impact investment fund that has so far produced more than 600 units of healthy, transited oriented housing in formerly redlined communities.

Please join CLF President Brad Campbell, CLF Director of Research Caty Taborda, and the Healthy Neighborhoods Study team in exploring the complex issues at the intersection of housing, health, and environment as well as the challenge of improving health and well-being while giving communities more ownership of change.

Presenter: Bradley Campbell
President, Conservation Law Foundation

For over 30 years, Bradley M. Campbell has been at the forefront of shaping the country’s most significant environmental policies and laws. A former White House senior appointee during the Clinton administration, Brad was the Regional Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Mid-Atlantic Region and served as Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Brad has a wide range of experience overseeing large public agencies, developing strategic litigation, and negotiating innovative agreements that have resulted in environmental milestones in New England and across the United States.

As Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Brad set the toughest stormwater pollution standards in the nation; initiated and negotiated the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants; and secured permanent protection for more than 800,000 acres of watershed lands under threat of development in New Jersey’s Highlands region.

As founder and principal of Bradley M. Campbell LLC, he successfully litigated on behalf of a low-income community to remedy drinking water contamination; negotiated agreements supporting the development of solar energy projects; and led litigation arising from catastrophic oil and chemical spills. During this time, Campbell also founded Swan Creek Energy, LLC, a renewable energy development firm responsible for several of the largest commercial-scale solar projects in New Jersey.

During his time at CLF, Brad has overseen numerous successes in the courtroom and in state houses throughout New England. Under his leadership, CLF has taken on Exxon, Shell, and Gulf Oil for their failure to protect communities and prepare their facilities for climate impacts. CLF has also succeeded in passing enforceable new climate laws in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine.

CLF has expanded its staff since Brad took the helm as president, which has greatly increased the reach and impact of the organization’s work in New England and beyond. At the same time, grant funding and individual giving have grown significantly under Brad’s leadership.

Presenter: Caty Taborda
Director of Research and Metrics, Conservation Law Foundation

Caty is the Director of Research and Metrics at Conservation Law Foundation. Prior to joining CLF, Caty was a program director at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research supporting community engaged research and health equity initiatives. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota, as well as an MA in Women’s & Gender Studies from Brandeis University and a BA from Hamilton College.

Presenter: Shinelle Kirk
Research Associate, Conservation Law Foundation

Shinelle serves as the Research Associate working on the Healthy Neighborhoods Study. In this role, she manages research data and works with community partners to turn research into action. She comes to CLF from Boston Medical Center, where she worked as a Senior Researcher in the Department of Emergency Medicine. Shinelle holds a BS in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Presenter: Anisha Patil
Manager of Community Engaged Research, Conservation Law Foundation

Anisha is the Manager of Community Engaged Research in the Healthy Neighborhoods Study. She has a master’s degree from MIT in urban planning with a focus on climate justice and participatory action research. She previously worked at Silent Spring Institute on environmental health literacy and has a background in people-centered design and engineering from Olin College.

Changing the World through Stories

Both Holly Morris and Jill Tidman are writers, filmmakers, activists and nonprofit leaders. They know how the power of a just cause and a well told story can change the world. Holly Morris has dedicated her professional life to telling stories of courageous women and pushing for environmental justice and women’s empowerment. From her PBS series and book Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine – to her heart wrenching films Exposure and Babushka’s of Chernobyl and now as the leader of Tomorrow’s Women, a nonprofit which empowers young Israeli and Palestinian women to create change in areas of conflict. Jill leads the Redford Center a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 by Robert Redford and his son James Redford, which advances environmental solutions through the power of stories.

Presenter: Holly Morris
Filmmaker and Executive Director, Tomorrow’s Women

Holly Morris’s career, focused on global women’s empowerment, cross-cultural relationships and storytelling, equips her with the skills to lead Tomorrow’s Women through these unprecedented times and beyond.  Morris shares the stories of women changemakers on the international stage, from her award-winning documentaries to the TED Talks stage, to writing Adventure Divas:  Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine, which was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice.  As a documentary director, Morris is best known for Exposure, about an extraordinary expedition of women from Arab and Western countries and their journey to the North Pole; and the Babushkas of Chernobyl, about the resilient elderly women living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine.  Morris is the co-founder of Powderkeg Writers Space in New York City, and the former Editorial Director of the book publishing company, Seal Press.

Presenter: Jill Tidman
Executive Director, The Redford Center

Jill Tidman is Executive Director of The Redford Center, an independent nonprofit organization founded in 2005 by Robert Redford and his son James Redford. Jill has worked with the organization since its founding and took the helm in 2012 to lead the vision, strategy, and operations in service of advancing environmental solutions through the power of stories that move people to act. She has produced three award-winning feature documentaries and impact campaigns, and draws on her experience as a writer, filmmaker, and activist, and her passion for sustainability and environmental justice, to create a new way forward for impactful environmental films. Prior to The Redford Center, Jill led projects for Business for Social Responsibility, Social Venture Network, The Natural Step, and Global Footprint Network, and she serves on the board of the KindHumans Foundations.

Open to All – The Power of Public Art and the Story of the Boston Art Triennial

Alnoba founders Alan and Harriet Lewis have long believed in pushing daring leaders to dream big and then backing them up when they take the leap.   When Kate Gilbert, who has agitated for more public art in the city for years, shared her vision for a Public Art Triennial – they were all in.  Kate and her team are poised to launch Boston’s first Triennial – joining just a few other cities in the U.S. willing to stage a citywide Public Art exhibition.  The Boston Public Art Triennial is the city’s first and only public organization dedicated to supporting artists and communities in presenting bold contemporary public art that opens minds, conversations, and spaces, resulting in a more vibrant, open and equitable region. Hear stories of public art in Boston, learn what it takes to unite artists and communities, and get a peak at what is planned for the big show next year.

Presenter: Kate Gilbert
Executive Director, Boston Public Art Triennial

Kate Gilbert founded Now + There in 2015, which became Boston Public Art Triennial in 2024, after completing an MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, and decades of programming, partnerships, curation, and creative placemaking with Boston cultural institutions. Gilbert is the 2020 recipient of NEFA’s Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art. Her call to civic leaders to advance art in public spaces was included in Idea City: How to Make Boston More Livable, Equitable, and Resilient (2023).

Presenter: Marguerite Wynter
Director of Partnerships and Engagement

Marguerite is an arts administrator and curator whose work focuses on the intersection of community and public engagement. Outside her role at the Boston Public Art Triennial, she consults with Deem Journal on their annual Designing for Dignity Symposium. Previously, she was the Public Programs & Partnerships Manager at the Chicago Architecture Biennial and held curatorial roles at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the 80WSE Gallery