Expert Speakers - 2010 Pathways to Power Conference
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Cokie Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News, providing analysis for all network news programming. From 1996-2002 she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program This Week. Roberts also serves as Senior News Analyst for National Public Radio. In her more than forty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards, including three Emmys. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and was cited by the American Women in Radio and Television as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting.
In addition to her appearances on the airwaves, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by United Media. The Roberts are also contributing editors to USA Weekend Magazine, and together they wrote From this Day Forward, an account of their more than forty year marriage and other marriages in American history. The book immediately went onto The New York Times bestseller list, following Cokie Roberts’s number one bestseller, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters, an account of women’s roles and relationships throughout American history. Roberts histories of women in America’s founding era--Founding Mothers, published in 2004 and Ladies of Liberty in 2008, also became instant bestsellers.
Cokie Roberts holds more than twenty honorary degrees, serves on the boards of several non-profit institutions and on the President’s Commission on Service and Civic Participation. This year the Library of Congress named her a “Living Legend,” one of the very few Americans to have attained that honor. She is the mother of two and grandmother of six.
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Award-winning public radio reporter and host Rebecca Roberts is currently a substitute host for NPR News programs including Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and Weekend Edition Sunday. Roberts returned to her hometown of Washington, DC, in 2006 to host WETA-FM's The Intersection, a news talk show which had her leading discussions on social, political, economic and cultural trends affecting the Greater Washington area. (The Intersection ended when WETA returned to a classical music format in early 2007.) Before returning to Washington, Roberts hosted Your Call on KALW-FM in San Francisco, a local call-in show covering politics and culture.
In addition to her hosting duties, Roberts is a tenacious reporter in search of good stories. She's "interviewed" dairy cows and transgenic goats, spent the night on a freezing mountaintop with amateur astronomers, sweated through Bikram yoga, and investigated Icelandic geysers in high heels. Her work has been heard on programs such as Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend America, and Talk of the Nation.
For four years, Roberts was the technology reporter for The World, a co-production of Public Radio International, The BBC, and WGBH Boston. She also hosted Springboard, an Emmy-nominated public television series exploring the intersection of technology and society, produced at KQED-TV San Francisco. Roberts was the founding producer of Beyond Computers, a nationally distributed weekly public radio program about humans and computers. And while she is in fact a computer geek, covering technology has allowed her to vicariously satisfy her geek instincts without actually having to do the work herself.
Roberts got her start in radio working for Shorr & Associates, a political media firm in Philadelphia. She holds a B.A. in political science from Princeton University. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, Dan Hartman, an investment banker, their three grubby little boys, and a dog named Frog.
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Marisa Rivera-Albert is the President of Mpowerment Works, a consulting firm designed to impact global change by empowering people and focusing on empowering the majority: “Women”. Marisa Rivera-Albert is a Social Entrepreneur. Her extensive work experience in the non-profit, government and private sectors have always been used to resolve justice and equality issues facing the world today. Ms. Rivera-Albert has over 30 years of combined educational, consulting, international, and community development, leadership development experience. Prior to starting Mpowerment Works, Ms. Rivera-Albert was President of the National Hispana Leadership Institute (NHLI), the top leadership program for Latinas in the country.
Her work experience also includes several assignments overseas, including working for the U.S. Information Agency, the U.S. Embassy in Panama and as a consultant in organizational development in Spain. She was an invited U.S. State Department speaker in Argentina and Peru as well as invited to speak on Women Empowerment in Bolivia and Mexico. She served as as an international elections observer in Honduras. Ms. Rivera-Albert has also participated in a fellowship to Israel with the American Jewish Committee and Project Interchange.
Ms. Rivera-Albert is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has a BA in Communications from American University and a Master’s degree in Education Administration from Western Illinois University. She is also a graduate of the Harvard University JFK School of Government Executive Program, the Center for Creative Leadership Institute, the Gallup Leadership Institute, the HACR Harvard Business Executive Program on Corporate Governance, and the Mexican American Solidarity Foundation.
She is the recipient of the Cesar Chavez Community Service Award given by the US Hispanic Leadership Institute, and she was awarded as one of the 21 Leaders for the 21st Century by Women’s eNews. She is also the recipient of the “Huesped Ilustre" Medal from the city of Ayacucho, Peru, The Women Helping Women Award by the Hispanic Professional Women’s Association, the Trailblazer Award by Latina Style Magazine, the Global Impact Leadership Award from the Hispanic Women’s Corporation, the Superior Honor Award from the State Department, the Administrative Excellence In Promoting Multiculturalism Award from Western Illinois University, and the Illumination Award from the City Club of the Quad Cities. Ms. Rivera-Albert has been featured in Hispanic Magazine, the Woman MBA Magazine, the TV show Hispanics Today, Lifetime Television for Women, Champions of Change, LatinaStyle Magazine, Monster.com and the Soy Latina, Soy Unica SAMHSA website.
Barbara Annis is a recognized leading expert in Inclusive Leadership and Gender Initiatives. Barbara and her associates are dedicated to removing organizational and leadership barriers by bringing the latest research and thinking on Leadership, Gender Diversity and Inclusiveness into the workplace, so that organizations can turn gender diversity into a powerful technology of success. Over the last 20 years, Barbara Annis & Associates has facilitated over 3,000 corporate workshops, keynotes, and executive coaching sessions on Gender Intelligent Leadership to Fortune 500 Corporations, including Deloitte & Touche, IBM, Smith Barney Citigroup, UBS, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Intel.
Barbara is Chair of the Women’s Leadership Board at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (www.hkswomensleadershipboard.org). Her extensive studies have included work with exceptional thinkers such as linguist Dr. Fernando Flores at Berkeley, neuroscientist Ruben Gur at the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Virginia Satir, Dr. W. E. Deming, and Dr. Willis Harman, Founder of the Noetic Sciences Foundation and The World Business Academy. She was recently awarded the International Alliance for Women Word of Difference Lifetime Achievement Award.
Barbara is also a recognized author – her first book, Same Words, Different Language, uncovers groundbreaking insights and tools for creating powerful win-win relationships between the genders, and provides ways to break through gender barriers. Her new book, Leadership and the Sexes, published last month by John Wiley, reveals the latest brain-based research on gender differences in leadership, and shows how to maximize the innate talents of both genders in the workplace and in the world.
Sally Helgesen is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and consultant, and one of the world’s brand-name experts on women’s leadership. Her most recent book, The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, explores how women’s perceptual insights can transform organizations. She is also author of the best-selling The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership, hailed as “the classic work” on women's leadership style, translated into 14 languages, and continually in print for twenty years. An earlier book, The Web of Inclusion: A New Architecture for Building Great Organizations, was cited in The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership of all time.
Sally develops and delivers leadership programs for corporations, partnership firms, universities and non-profits around the globe. Clients include Microsoft, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Ernst & Young, Credit Suisse, Textron, The World Bank, The United Way, the Council of Independent Colleges, The Office of Public Management UK; The Global Forum on Women, Society and the Economy, Paris; The Center for Distributed Education, Oslo; and ING Amsterdam. Sally has consulted with the United Nations Development Program on strengthening women’s programs in Africa and Asia, led seminars at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Smith College, and been visiting scholar at Northwestern University and the Lauriston Institute in Melbourne Australia. She is a contributing editor to the magazine Strategy+ Business and a member of the International Women’s Forum, and articles about her work have been featured in Fortune, The New York Times, Fast Company, and Business Week.
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Julissa Marenco is the President of ZGS Communications Station Group. In this capacity, she oversees the management of and provides strategic direction for 13 Telemundo stations and 3 radio stations across the country. Prior to her current position, Ms. Marenco was appointed by the President of the United States to serve as a White House Fellow, a non-partisan program which is renowned as America’s most prestigious program for leadership and public service. Subsequently, she was selected to serve as a Special Assistant to the Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Before becoming a White House Fellow, Julissa Marenco was the General Manager of WZDC-25 Telemundo Washington DC, a ZGS owned station. In this role, she directed the day-to-day operation of the station encompassing advertising and business development, community and public relations, marketing and promotions, and news and programming. Throughout her tenure, she built and developed key grassroots initiatives including signature ZGS campaigns such as La Buena Vida (The Good Life), a health and wellness campaign which has helped thousands of viewers across the country. She brokered partnerships with other media outlets, sports franchises and key local organizations to create unique platforms and position Telemundo as the premiere Spanish language broadcaster in the nation’s capital. Ms. Marenco received several management awards for her vision, leadership and commitment to service.
Ms. Marenco began her communications and broadcasting career with Blair Television in New York. She later joined Telemundo Network in 1998. In 2001 she moved to ZGS, Telemundo’s largest independent station group. She started as the group’s National Sales Manager in New York. In 2002 she was promoted to General Sales Manager for Telemundo’s Washington DC affiliate where she later rose to the post of General Manager of the station.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ms. Marenco was raised in Hudson County, New Jersey and is a first generation Hispanic American. Her mother immigrated from the Dominican Republic and her father hails from El Salvador. Ms. Marenco is passionate about public service, media and the power of television. She believes that being a broadcaster is both a privilege and a responsibility and that a station is first and foremost accountable to the viewer. She has served on several boards including the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences-National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter, YWCA-National Capital Area Chapter, The Advertising Club of the Washington Metropolitan area and the George Mason University Diversity Advisory Board.
Since 2001, she has taught at Howard University’s Media Sales Institute. Ms. Marenco serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation and Rowan University’s Alumni Board. Julissa Marenco received a B.A. from Rowan University in Communications with a concentration in Radio/Television/Film. She is a graduate of Leadership Greater Washington.
Tynesia Boyea Robinson is the Executive Director of Year Up in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit committed to providing significant growth opportunities for underserved young adults. Her wide range of experience in IT, six sigma and international business development made her a valuable asset to the Year Up team, and has resulted in growth from a class of 22 students and 8 corporate partners in 2006 to a class of close to 500 students and over 300 corporate partners in 2009. She also created a performance assessment tool for Year Up which was recognized by The Bridgespan Group as an industry best practice.
Prior to joining Year Up, Tynesia held leadership roles in several business units at General Electric. In this role, she was responsible for integrating processes, policies, and over 200 employees into GE Mortgage Insurance. Earlier in her career, she led several eBusiness and process improvement projects at GE Transportation Systems. In addition to her work responsibilities, Tynesia was the community service chair for the GE African-American Forum and a mentor to young adults through various community and faith-based groups.
Tynesia received her MBA from Harvard Business school, where she won the Harvard Student Association MBA Award, was the lead in their annual musical satire, and was a founding member of the HBS student group BPBA (Business Plan for Black America) commissioned by the NAACP to improve the education, economics, and opportunities for disadvantaged African-Americans. She holds a dual degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Duke University.
Jackie Norris, a New York native, went to college at SUNY’s Geneseo campus. After graduation, she worked on Capitol Hill, spending seven years in the office of Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.) before going to the White House. There Norris worked as Vice President Al Gore's scheduler and as director of Scheduling and Advance for HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo.
In 1998, she left the White House and moved to Iowa, where she worked on Tom Vilsack’s (D) gubernatorial campaign. She also served asGore's political director for Iowa during the 2000 presidential election.
Then Norris moved out of politics. She earned her secondary education teacher certification from Iowa State University in 2002 and became a high school government and history teacher. Norris went back to school again in 2005 after earning a fellowship for her work as a teacher. She studied the mobilization of young voters at Iowa State.
Norris joinedBarack Obama's presidential campaign in 2007 and put her studies to the test, organizing huge number of voters for Obama during both the Iowa Democratic caucuses and the general election. “We are grateful to have Jackie play this important role in our organization,” campaign managerDavid Plouffe said after Norris was appointed Iowa state director for the general election. “The network of volunteers and grassroots energy built up during the historic primary season has given us an enormous and unprecedented opportunity in the general election.
After the campaign, she was named chief of staff for Michelle Obama. Norris worked closely with Michelle Obama as she decided what issues to tackle at the beginning of her husband's administration. The First Lady made issues surrounding working families and military families her top priority and also focused on promoting healthy food.
Norris left the East Wing in June 2009 to take a position as senior adviser to the Corporation for National and Community Service.
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Suzanne A. George is a Principal of Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm, and a member of the Operations Committee of Albright Capital Management, an affiliated investment advisory firm focused on emerging markets. She draws on more than 15 years experience in strategic project management focusing on operations and resource allocation. She manages an extensive portfolio, including market entry strategy, business development, contract negotiations, operational execution, and financial oversight.
Ms. George works to bring clients together and maximize their opportunities by broadening access to key forums and opinion leaders, generating the synergy necessary to leverage the strengths of the firm to the benefit of its clients. Ms. George also co-manages the Aspen Atlantic Group, an initiative of 20 former foreign ministers who meet biannually in cities around the world. She served as the Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of State during the Clinton Administration with responsibility for management and coordination of travel and meetings in over 100 countries for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Ms. George also served as a liaison to the White House and other Cabinet agencies for the Secretary of State.