New York, Dec. 9 & 10, 2019 – The second National Hispanic Leadership Summit at the United Nations concluded this week, acting as the culmination of We Are All Human Foundation’s (WAAH) regional summits and international events throughout the year. The goal was to report on findings and discuss the strategy for the Vision 2020: education, financial empowerment and perception change.
More than 500 leaders from the worlds of business, media, marketing and policy attended the summit, which was designed as a boardroom-style discussion to validate, update, and prioritize the key activities discussed in 2019 to finalize the creation of a game plan for the Hispanic community to move the needle in 2020.
“We must be the last generation that will ever face being invisible and not heard, not seen, not valued. We are the ones who have to open the door, so that our children can be the first generation of Hispanic stars, fully valued, fully paid, fully respected and recognized. The time has come. We’re ready to shine,” said Claudia Romo Edelman, founder of the We Are All Human Foundation.
Focusing on the top issues, opportunities and recommended actions for each area, the 2019 summit was devoted to presenting an overview of Hispanics in America, covering relevant topics such as the importance of inclusion and diversity in the workplace, the perspective of the future workforce, the best practices and the impact of culture on the perception of the Hispanic community and the Hispanic identity.
Through a partnership between the We Are All Human Foundation and Ancestry, a global leader in family history and consumer genomics, summit delegates volunteered to have their anonymized and aggregated DNA data analyzed and revealed during the program to underscore the deeper connections among Hispanic community of leaders.
In addition to Claudia Romo Edelman, the event was co-hosted by Dr. Juan Andrade, President & Co-Founder of USHLI; Henry Cisneros, Principal at Siebert Cisneros Shank & Co., L.L.C.; Janet Murguía, President & CEO of UnidosUS; Mauricio Gutierrez, CEO of NRG; David Kenny, CEO of Nielsen; Maria Rios, CEO of Nation Waste, Inc.; Tracey Skeans, Chief Transformation and People Officer at Yum! Brands.
The event also brought an activation by Gazillion Bubble Show, narrated by the futurist David Shingy. The goal was to showcase that it’s only by busting our bubbles that we will recognize what unites us instead of what divides us.
During the event, We Are All Human Foundation, in partnership with Grey and a number of Hispanic leaders and allies, also shared a campaign proposal and execution plan to rebrand and remarket Hispanics in America.
The event also held a signing ceremony dedicated to the Hispanic Promise, the first-of-its-kind national pledge to hire, promote, retain and celebrate Hispanics in the workplace, highlighting the importance of creating inclusive workplace environments. The pledge, which was launched at the World Economic Forum in 2019, has obtained more than 130 signatories including AT&T, Berkshire Bank, Condé Nast, Ernst & Young, IKEA, Nielsen and Siemens. Some of the companies that joined the pledge during the summit are Airbnb, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Lyft, Medtronic, and Qualcomm.
To view a recap of the Hispanic Leadership Summit and follow We Are All Human Foundation’s journey to unifying Hispanics visit their website.
About the Hispanic Leadership Summit
The Hispanic Leadership Summit is a non-partisan event that plans to go beyond sectoral interests to discuss and reflect on what unites America’s many Hispanic and Latinx communities, and what should be done to ensure their importance to the U.S.’s future is understood. Event sponsors included:
Golden Sponsors: Ancestry, APCO Worldwide, Beam Suntory, Dentsu Aegis Network, PepsiCo, Richard Edelman. Silver Sponsors: Dairy Management Inc, Google, Merck, NRG, UPS. Bronze Sponsors: Aflac, Chevron, Unilever, S&P Global, Verizon, Yum! Brands. Media Partners: Business Insider, Latino Leaders, Hispanic Executive, The Alumni Society.
About We Are All Human
We Are All Human is a foundation dedicated to advancing the agenda of equity, diversity, inclusion.
The We Are All Human Foundation is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit devoted to equity, diversity and inclusion. Made up of an experienced group of marketers and sustainability activists with backgrounds from the United Nations, global affairs, media, and the corporate world, our team is committed to making change through collective action. Our purpose is to maximize the volume of diverse voices, facilitate action-oriented conversations with input from all stakeholders, research the gaps for areas of continuous improvement and support the creation of inclusive environments.
“We know the world is diverse but we need inclusion to create equity”