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Health, Wealth, and Safety

The INTERRUPT RACISM Summit is an online, immersive learning experience for youth and adults, uniquely designed for attendees to participate and come together to identify, interrupt, and dismantle processes of systemic racism.

The theme of the second annual Virtual INTERRUPT RACISM Summit is “Health, Wealth, and Safety for BIPOC.”

Accessibility

ASL interpreters provided upon request and subject to availability.
(Registrations requesting services must be received 10 business days prior to the event.)

Scholarships

A limited number of student scholarships are available. Click here to submit a request.

Not your average conference

Experience an innovative, immersive learning experience unlike any other.

Using cutting-edge technology from Bevy, the INTERRUPT RACISM Summit approximates an in-person conference in ways you’ve never seen before online!

Single login link

Log in using a single link, and you’re in! Unlike similar virtual events that involve lists of Zoom links, the Summit is housed inside a single webpage.

Change sessions at will

Throughout the Summit, three or more workshops/presentations will be running at the same time. Just like at an in-person conference, attendees can choose to enter or switch sessions at any time—without having to find a different link!

Chat across sessions

A unified chat feature allows attendees to get connected and stay connected easily—even across sessions! Have a question for a presenter after their workshop ends? Send them a quick direct message from anywhere at the Summit. It’s that easy!

Day 1: Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Day 1 Welcome Session (8:45 am): Dr. Seanelle Hawkins (Urban League of Rochester)

Opening Keynote (9 am): Marc Morial (National Urban League)

Session 1: 10-10:45 am

• 1A) Responding to Racist Remarks

  • Presenter: Nanette D. Massey

• 1B) Bridging the Cultural Divide While Addressing Barriers to Language Access

  • Presenters: Cheryl Hayward & Jesus Paesch

• 1C) Intersectional Accomplice Allyship

  • Moderators: Angela Douglas & Dr. Karen King

Session 2: 11-11:45 am

• 2A) Leading for Racial Justice in Predominantly White Organizations: A Guide for Change

  • Presenter: Dr. Donna Harris

• 2B) White Supremacy Culture: Characteristics and Antidotes

  • Presenters: Dr. Sim J. Covington, Jr. & Sandra Katz

• 2C) Surviving A Toxic Workplace Culture While Still Being Yourself

  • Presenter: Cyndi Weekes Bradley
    

Keynote (12 pm): Michelle Williams

Session 3: 1-1:45 pm

• 3A) The Impact of Micro-Aggressions

  • Presenter: Julio Jordan

• 3B) Healing Racism's Invisible Wounds

  • Presenter: Dr. Elaine Ferguson
    

Session 4: 2-2:45 pm

• 4A) I’m Woke and I'm Proud: A New Perspective on Critical Race Theory

  • Presenter: Kelvin L. Weathers

• 4B) Equitable Climate Action through Community Involvement

  • Presenters: Brady Fergusson & Dr. Kristen Van Hooreweghe

• 4C) My Mother's Journey: Interview and Q&A with Documentary Filmmaker Sam Hampton

  • Presenter: Dr. Sam Hampton

  • Moderator: Dan T. Butler
    

Keynote (3 pm): Dr. Randal D. Pinkett (BCT Partners)

Session 5: 4-4:45 pm

• 5A) Dismantling Structural Racism: The Role of Organization Design in Decolonizing Organizations

  • Presenters: Sally Breyley Parker, Rich Thayer, William Zybach

• 5B) Not all Asians are “Crazy Rich:” Dismantling Stereotypes and the Myth of the Model Minority

  • Presenter: Khanh Nguyễn

• 5C) Racism and Mental Health: How Do We Heal from What Continues to Be Ongoing?

  • Presenter: Lisa M. Slade
    

Day 1 Closing Session (5 pm): Dr. Seanelle Hawkins (Urban League of Rochester)

Day 2: Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Day 2 Welcome Session (9:15 am): Dr. Seanelle Hawkins (Urban League of Rochester)

Keynote (9:30 am): Harriet A. Washington

Session 6: 10:30-11:15 am

• 6A) Inclusion is Everyone’s Work: On Trauma and Organizational Diversity Planning

  • Presenters: Kesha Carter, Betty García Mathewson, Terrell Smith

• 6B) Interrupting Racism Through Youth Voice

  • Presenters: Andrea Bertucci & Sierra Fisher

• 6C) Race Amity: The Other Tradition

  • Presenters: Omobowale Ayorinde & Joseph D. Fargnoli
    

Networking Break: 11:15 am-12 pm

Keynote (12 pm): Manjusha P. Kulkarni (Stop AAPI Hate, A3PCON)

Session 7: 1-1:45 pm

• 7A) Healing and Reconciliation through Forgiveness—Not Only for Our Personal Lives, but for the Workplace and Our Communities, Too

  • Presenter: Ronalyn Pollack

• 7B) Racial Awareness and Identifying Internalized Racism and Bias

  • Presenter: Mynesha Spencer

• 7C) Fireproof Yourself: Preventing Diversity Burnout for Sustainable Progress

  • Presenter: Kari Zee
    

Session 8: 2-2:45 pm

• 8A) The Significance of Racial Literacy for School Leaders

  • Presenters: Dr. Jeff Linn & Diantha B. Watts

• 8B) Walking Through the Door and Shutting it Behind You: When Marginalized People Are the Gatekeepers

  • Presenters: Dr. Larry Collier & Tamisha Sales

• 8C) MindFULLY You: Exploring Your Whole Story to Combat Racism and Achieve Mental Wellness

  • Presenter: Alexis Russell
    

Keynote (3 pm): Courtney “Courn” Ahn (Courtney Ahn Design)

Panel (4 pm): Urban League CEOs

Day 2 Closing Session (5 pm): Dr. Seanelle Hawkins (Urban League of Rochester)

Michelle Williams is a Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter, actress, entrepreneur, designer, television host, and member of one of the most successful recording groups of all time, Destiny’s Child. In 2018, Williams reunited with Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland for a long-awaited reunion performance during both weekends of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. She has also recorded four critically-acclaimed albums as a solo artist, including Journey to Freedom, whose song “Say Yes” was certified Gold.

Between recording projects, Williams made her theatrical stage debut as the title role of the hit Broadway musical Aida. Williams has since appeared in productions of The Color Purple and Broadway and London’s West End productions of Chicago. She also was featured in the acclaimed stage play What My Husband Doesn’t Know, and a national tour with the musical Fela! Williams also starred in the Oxygen network series Fix My Choir and has served as a guest host on talk shows such as The View, ET, The Real, and many more. In 2019, after making it to the semi-final round, Michelle was revealed as “Butterfly” on the #1 rated FOX television show The Masked Singer.

As an entrepreneur, Williams recently launched “Believe at Home” by Michelle Williams: a sophisticated bedding collection, featuring exquisite and vibrant comforters, duvets, coverlets, sheets and shams inspired by her grandmother’s quilting.

An advocate for mental health and empowerment, Williams is an ambassador for the Office on Women's Health, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she promotes awareness for maintaining optimum physical and mental health through nutrition, exercise, and proper medical care. In May 2021, she released her memoir about her own mental health journey, Checking In: How Getting Real about Depression Saved My Life—and Can Save Yours.

Arrangements for the appearance of Ms. Williams made through Greater Talent Network, New York, NY.

Dr. Randal D. Pinkett has established himself as an entrepreneur, speaker, author and scholar, and as a leading voice for his generation in business, technology, diversity and inclusion. He is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of his fifth venture, BCT Partners, a multimillion-dollar research, training, consulting, technology, and data analytics firm headquartered in Newark, NJ. BCT’s mission is to provide insights about diverse people that lead to equity, and the company has been named to Black Enterprise’s BE 100 list of the nation’s largest African American-owned businesses.

Dr. Pinkett has won countless awards and is an expert in several areas relating to emerging technologies, “big data” analytics, social innovation, culture, diversity, equity and inclusion. Most notably, Dr. Pinkett was the first African-American to receive the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at Rutgers University. He holds five academic degrees. He was also the winner of NBC’s hit reality television show, The Apprentice, having been selected as one of 18 candidates chosen from among 1 million applicants.

A published author and academic scholar, Dr. Pinkett's first book, Campus CEO: The Student Entrepreneur's Guide to Launching a Multimillion-Dollar Business, was released in February 2007. That same year he also released the audio book The No-Money Down CEO: How to Start Your Dream Business with Little or No Cash. Along with his Rutgers roommate and business partner, Dr. Jeffrey Robinson, he is the co-author of Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness in 2008, and the forthcoming Black Faces in High Places.

Harriet A. Washington is a prolific science writer, editor and ethicist who is the author of the seminal Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award, and five other well-received books, including A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind and her newly released latest book Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research.

Washington is a Writing Fellow in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and has been the 2015-2016 Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute. She has also been a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has held fellowships at Stanford University and teaches bioethics at Columbia University, where she delivered the 2020 commencement speech to Columbia’s School of Public Health graduates and won Columbia’s 2020 Mailman School of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award, as well as its 2020-21 Kenneth and Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award. Washington has written widely for popular publications and has been published in referenced books and journals such as Nature, JAMA, The American Journal of Public Health, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Harvard Public Health Review, Isis, and The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She has been Editor of the Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health, a guest Editor of The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, and served as a reviewer for the Journal of the American Association of Bioethics and the Humanities.

Ms. Washington has also worked as a classical-music announcer for public radio and curates a medical-film series.

Arrangements for the appearance of Ms. Washington made through Greater Talent Network, New York, NY.

Manjusha "Manju" P. Kulkarni is Executive Director of Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), a coalition of over forty community-based organizations that serves and represents the 1.5 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County. Manju also serves as a Lecturer in the Asian American Studies Department of UCLA. In March 2020, Manju co-founded Stop AAPI Hate, the nation’s leading aggregator of COVID-19-related hate incidents against AAPIs.

Manju's work has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, CBS News, and CNN, as well as several ethnic media outlets. On March 18, 2021, Manju testified before Congress at the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on the issue of anti-Asian hate; she shared Stop AAPI Hate data, as well as policy recommendations for addressing the current wave of racism and discrimination faced by AAPIs in the U.S.

Manju received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University and a Juris Doctor degree from Boston University School of Law. In 2014, Manju received the White House Champions of Change award from President Obama for her dedication to improving health care access for Asian American communities.

Courtney "Courn" Ahn is a multidisciplinary designer, illustrator, and freelance creative based in Portland, Oregon. Her direct experience as a Korean American has largely shaped her career philosophy, serving as inspiration for the social justice advocacy present in her creative work.

Through her freelance studio, Courtney Ahn Design, she aims to provide accessible design services for small BIPOC business-owners and partner with organizations working directly in the equity space as a force for good.

In recent months, Courn has found purpose in using art as a tool for activism, sharing weekly posts navigating white supremacy and oppressive systems through her Instagram account, @courtneyahndesign.