Achieving DEI in Tech Vendor Selection

Kellie Brown

Founder/CEO

SpreadKarma

Kellie Brown is a crowdfunding consultant and social entrepreneur who has worked to leverage partnerships, philanthropy, and fundraising efforts for underserved and underestimated communities in Philadelphia and Baltimore for over a decade. She is the CEO/founder of the online fundraising platform, SpreadKarma.org. SpreadKarma® empowers positive social impact in underserved and marginalized communities through crowdfunding.

Kellie is also the co-creator of Spread Good Karma Day, August 1st, which kicks off Black Philanthropy Month. Last August, her team rallied volunteers and partnering organizations to help serve 150 families while delivering groceries and meals in Baltimore city. SpreadKarma® was recently listed as one of 20 promising tech startups to watch in Baltimore by Technical.ly. Other exciting news for SpreadKarma® includes the acceptance into Johns Hopkins Social Innovations Lab Accelerator that is running simultaneously with InnovationWorks-GSBI’s Accelerator. She’s the winner of the Aspiring Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) Foundation Pitch Competition as well as a finalist in the Attman Competitive Business Prize Competition and the Rise to the Challenge Pitch Competition hosted by the University of Baltimore. SpreadKarma® helps individuals, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit organizations, and businesses build stronger communities.

Shijuade Kadree

Director of Diversity Strategy

Snap, Inc.

An alumna of Emory University, Shijuade graduated with a joint degree from the Schools of Law and Public Health. A former defense attorney with Brooklyn Defender Services, Shijuade has significant government relations, policy, strategic planning and stakeholder cultivation and engagement experience.

Shijuade is currently the Director of Diversity Strategy for Snap, Inc, the parent company of Snapchat, working on equity and inclusion initiatives for the Snap user and staff communities. Formerly, she was the Chief Advocacy Officer for The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, as well as a legislative counsel for the New York City Council. She has legislative and organizational policy drafting experience, and leadership and executive coaching practice, across multiple interests and sectors, which informs how she tailors her guidance and approach for each client.

Shijuade has worked with all levels of government, for-profit and nonprofit actors, striving to ensure that the work being done is thoughtful, innovative, and inclusive, with an explicitly intersectional lens. She centers her work from a black, queer, feminist perspective, believing that when all of those needs are engaged and addressed, all will benefit from the outcome. A recipient of multiple awards for her work, she is also a sought after speaker, panelist and moderator.

Sevetri Wilson

Founder & CEO

Resilia

Sevetri Wilson is the Founder and CEO of technology startup Resilia, founded in 2016.

Sevetri is a 2010 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Public Service, the Jefferson Award; and her work was featured in the U.S. Senate report to the White House on Volunteerism in the U.S., under President Obama. Sevetri’s work and that of her clients has been featured in national publications such as USA Today, Time Magazine, and CNN. She serves as a voice for communities as a Forbes contributor and has amassed over 200,000 followers across social media.

Headquartered in New Orleans with a second office in New York, Resilia is revolutionizing how nonprofits are created and maintained, and how funders scale impact. In 2020, Sevetri became one of the only 50 Black women in the U.S. to have raised over $10M in venture funding. In September 2020, Sevetri was named a Rising Star on the Forbes Cloud 100 List. Resilia was named to Venture Beat’s top startups to watch out for in 2019; also in 2019, Sevetri was named to Inc. Magazine’s 100 Female Founders building world-changing companies and to PitchBook’s 27 leading black founders and investor list.

Prior to Resilia, she founded Solid Ground Innovations, LLC., a strategic communications agency and authored Solid Ground: How I Built a 7 Figure Company at 22 with Zero Capital. Her book spent 6 weeks at #1 on Amazon in the startup category. Learn more at SevetriWilson.com, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Gauri Manglik

CEO

Instrumentl

Gauri is the CEO and co-founder of Instrumentl. Before Instrumentl, she was building products at Airbnb and her last startup, Fondu.

Mitch Stein

Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Impact Officer

Pond

Mitch is a fanatic about impact with a strong belief in the scalability of social entrepreneurship. He’s on a mission to boost nonprofit impact by harnessing the economic engine of the sector to create shared digital infrastructure with pond.

Pond is a connection-centered marketplace that caters to the fluid needs of impact leaders, not the artificial urgency of tech sales cycles

Pond is the source of universal basic tech income for the 1.5 million nonprofits in the country (yes, all of them)

Pond is subverting the attention economy, for good.

Prior to founding Pond in 2020, Mitch was an experienced nonprofit fundraiser, board member and spent 7 years in investment banking at Goldman Sachs.