2021 speakers

Eileen has 13 years of experience working within Local Government operations and 22 years within the private sector which includes 12 years of experience working for Capita within Learning & Development and Transformation.

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Eileen is an experienced manager, with the ability to deliver both front line and back office operations and has worked for many years as a Business Analyst. Eileen is in fact a qualified CIPD Trainer who is currently a Performance and Development Manager working with Heads of Service to develop training plans; arranging training with learning providers; supporting graduates, apprentices and continuing professional development requests.

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Eileen is an enthusiastic active member of Black Employee and Embrace Networks and continues to show her strong and passionate advocacy for Diversity and Inclusion by participating as a Mentor in Capita’s Mutual Mentoring programme and as a Mentee in the 30% Club and Mission Include programme.
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Eileen has won ‘Cares Volunteer of the Year’ Business in The Community (BITC) 2011 award for creating an innovative way of raising positive awareness of cultural diversity among school children.

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Elliott is a Content Designer at Facebook, building Facebook's remote work product, Portal for Business. He came to UX late only discovering it after years of copywriting and journalism. Elliott is currently training to move from design to Product Management, and is passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion - helping people who haven’t had the opportunity to get into tech progress in the industry.

Erika Brodnock is an award winning entrepreneur (including Female Entrepreneur of the Year and Intel's Global Business Challenge), philanthropist, angel investor and keynote speaker. She is also the Head of Research at Extend Ventures a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a PhD candidate in the Inclusion Initiative at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences where she is researching how the power of big data and machine learning can be used to diversify access to funding and investment for diverse entrepreneurs and innovators.

Through her work at the intersection of technology, wellbeing and product development, Erika has built products and services in the ed-tech, child and parental wellbeing markets that disrupt and spearhead a path out of outdated systems.

Erika is Sky News’ resident parenting expert; founder of software companies Karisma Kidz and Kami; a Non-Executive Director of The Good Play Guide; and she serves on the advisory board of the APPG for Entrepreneurship.

Fifi Kara is a product designer at Facebook, where she works on new product experiences within the Facebook Reality Labs group. Prior to this Fifi led design for projects on Oculus Workrooms, Messenger as well as Workplace, blending her experience in B2B and consumer products. Alongside her role at Facebook, she is the Co-Founder of Good People Fund and angel investment collective that focuses on early stage companies who are founded by underrepresented groups.

Before joining Facebook Fifi was primarily focussed on scaling startups. As a former founder Fifi has launched products in the travel and financial services space as well as raised pre-seed and seed funding from institutional investors such as Y Combinator.

As well as this, Fifi was one of the first designers at Bulb (the UK’s fastest growing company) where she led design for the member facing products and saw the user base grow from 100,000 to 1.4million over 18 months.

Fifi earned her degree at the London School of Economics in Social Policy & Government and is a self-taught product designer.

It is challenging enough to be a member of the LGBT community in the West. Imagine functioning in a society that still criminalizes—and even debates the death penalty for—homosexual activity. That is the world facing Frank Mugisha. The 37-year-old, who came out at 14, spoke out against the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which mandated life in prison for LGBT Ugandans, and he led the campaign that eventually led to the bill’s invalidation by the courts. More battles lie ahead for a leader of a community that faces open hostility.

In 2005, the author known only as 'Jade' began releasing chapters of Keisha The [Da] Sket on Piczo. The work became a viral sensation, capturing black British culture and youth-authored youth experience. Jade LB is a London-based creative and academic writer whose writing explores Black women and relationships, Black British culture and the Black British working-class experience. One half of The Echo Chamber podcast, she has written articles and essays for Black Ballad and other publications and currently takes up space in academia. Here, she returns to Keisha The Sket, revisiting and amplifying a character she created when she was just thirteen.

Jaime Rogozinski founded WallStreetBets in 2012--a large online community which yields a commanding presence in the world of finance. It has been featured in Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch as well as Bloomberg, CNBC, Money Magazine, Forbes, Vice, Business Insider and Fortune.

In 2019, WallStreetBets amassed over 800,000 subscribers and more than 3 million monthly unique visitors. He holds a degree in Economics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is actively involved with tech and startup communities having been a judge for a range of awards including the Entrepreneurs Organization Student Award and Angel Hack, both focused on fostering entrepreneurship.

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My name is Jamal Downie, I currently manage young sales professionals within Dell Technologies Next Gen Sales Academy (NGSA). After graduating myself over 3 years ago I joined NGSA which has truly enabled me to be the person I am today. Excelling young talent and giving them the foundation for great careers is something that I thoroughly enjoy and doing so whilst creating a great and diverse culture is very fulfilling for me personally. Alongside this, I co-lead one of Dell Technologies employee resource groups, the Black Networking Alliance (BNA). BNA aims to improve representation, retention, and the business culture for ethnically diverse individuals within the business.

Jason Okundaye was born to British-Nigerian parents in South London in 1997. He writes essays, features, and profiles on politics and culture for publications such as the Guardian, the London Review of Books, British Vogue, GQ, Vice, Dazed, and i-D. He also co-curates the digital archive ‘Black and Gay, Back in the Day’ documenting Black LGBT life in Britain since the 1970s. He holds a first class degree in Human, Social and Political Science from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.  

His first book, Revolutionary Acts, a social history of Black gay men in Britain, will be published by Faber in spring 2024.

Joanne is proud to be listed on the Northern Power Womens Future top 50 list, and is the Deputy Head of Diversity & Inclusion for EY UK&I. Joanne previously led the Global D&I strategy for EY and is an accredited facilitator in Inclusive Leadership. She completed a Masters in HR Management with a dissertation in Psychological Safety in minority groups. With a background in Finance and Psychology she builds trusting relationships and focuses on outcome driven results to build sustainable culture change.  Guest lecturer at Salford University and studying culture and privilege as a Doctorate student with Cranfield University.

Jonathan Uesato is a research engineer at DeepMind. His research aims towards ensuring thatmachine learning systems have a positive impact on society, with particular focuses onrobustness, fairness, and alignment, as well as connections between these topics. Prior tojoining DeepMind, he worked at Cruise Automation and Microsoft Research.

Josh Rivers is the creator and host of the podcast Busy Being Black, which centres conversations with those who have learned and are learning to thrive at the intersection of their identities. He's the Head of Communications for UK Black Pride, Europe's largest pride celebration for LGBTQ people of colour; and the Communications Manager for Kaleidoscope Trust, the charity working to uphold the human rights of LGBTQ people across the Commonwealth.

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