Keynote Speakers

Mark Alexander

President, Americas Simple Meals and Beverages

Campbell Soup Company

Mark R. Alexander is President-Americas Simple Meals and Beverages. He reports to Denise Morrison, President and Chief Executive Officer, and is a member of the Campbell Leadership Team. During his 25-year career with Campbell, Mark has held leadership, marketing and sales roles in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia, and Hong Kong.

Previously, Mark was President-Campbell North America and prior to that President-Campbell International, responsible for the company’s businesses in Asia Pacific, Europe, and Latin America.

Mark has served as Senior Vice President-Chief Customer Officer and President-North America Baking and Snacking, overseeing all of Campbell’s sales teams, including those in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, as well as Campbell’s Pepperidge Farm business. He was also President-Asia Pacific, overseeing Campbell’s businesses in this region, including Arnott’s Biscuits and Campbell’s.

Mark’s early roles at Campbell included Managing Director-U.K. and Ireland; Vice President-Soup and Grocery for Asia Pacific; Business Director for the ready-to-serve soup portfolio in the U.S.; and Vice President-Marketing for Campbell Canada.

Mark began his career with the D’Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles advertising agency.

Mark serves on the Board of Directors of MasCo Corporation and is Chairman of the Board of Governors GS1 US.

He earned his B.A. degree in economics and political science with honors from Queen’s University in Canada.

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Ahmad Ashkar

CEO and Founder

Hult Prize Foundation

Mr. Ahmad Ashkar is the Founder and CEO of the Hult Prize Foundation - named by TIME Magazine as one of the top five initiatives changing the world. Ahmad specializes in entrepreneurship, innovation, new market entry and global expansion and is on the advisory board of the UNDP. He is one of the world’s foremost experts in crowd and venture philanthropy and has been recognized as one of the top 10 entrepreneurs in the Middle East by Gulf Business.

Since founding the Hult Prize in 2009, he has led the growth of the initiative into the world’s largest millennial start-up movement for social good with established offices around the globe, hundreds of campus chapters in over 130 countries and strategic partnerships in place with President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. He has pioneered an alternative model of giving, which is centered around the development of robust start-up pipelines that focus on solving market-based challenges, ultimately transforming business minds from around the world into change agents for sustainable impact by leveraging crowd. Through the power of the Hult Prize hub and spoke university network, the Hult Prize is able to cultivate and build a whole new era of entrepreneurs that are disrupting at the intersection of doing good and doing well through custom tailored development of businesses which are impact centered, profit minded and market driven. The Hult Prize has been called “the Noble Prize for students,” and its portfolio of start-ups includes trailblazers in food security, healthcare, education and clean water.

Ahmad also serves as an adviser to family offices, private and government sector entities across the Middle East and Latin America, where he consults on economic empowerment and entrepreneurship, innovation, crowd science, social entrepreneurship and endowments. An expert in youth unemployment and crowded urban spaces, Ahmad is a recognized authority in his space, having been profiled as a social innovator by Harvard Business Review and distinguished as one of the top CEOs in the Middle East, recently appearing in cover stories for Arabian Business and INC.

He has regularly appeared as a coach and speaker at the World Economic Forum, UN and other notable gatherings. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera, Bloomberg, CCTV, CNN, CNBC, FOX, MBC and other major media outlets world-wide and has been profiled by leading publications in the Americas including, US, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecquador, Mexico, and across the Middle East and Europe. He has been referred as “one of the future leaders of the Arab Youth” by Gulf News in a front-page feature. Most recently, the Boston Globe recognized Ahmad and the Hult Prize as one of the top companies in their annual “Game-Changer” report.

As a Palestinian-American, Ahmad serves as an independent advisor to the municipality of his hometown of Tulkarm, West Bank, where he is also an active entrepreneur. Ahmad has founded multiple companies, arranged a series of public-private partnerships and developed groundbreaking action and impact-based educational programs. He serves as an advisor / board member to several companies across the tech, food, wellness, leisure and hospitality sectors. He is also a resident adviser to the economic development department of George Mason University and is a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan, Georgetown and the Hult International Business School – where he earned his MBA in international business and was the 2015 alumnus of the year.

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Chad Dickerson

CEO, President & Chair

Etsy

Chad is CEO, President and Chair of Etsy, leading the company in its mission and growing it into a global community of creative entrepreneurs and their customers.

Under Chad's leadership, marketplace sales by Etsy’s community of more than a million sellers have grown significantly. The company became a Certified B Corporation in 2012 and, in both 2013 and 2014, Etsy was named one of the Best Small & Medium Workplaces by the Great Place to Work® Institute. In April 2015, Chad was appointed as a member of the US Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations by President Barack Obama. He serves on the boards of the DUMBO Business Improvement District, the Partnership for New York City and St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Prior to becoming CEO in 2011, Chad was Etsy’s CTO. Before joining Etsy, Chad led Yahoo’s Brickhouse & Advanced Products team, and the Yahoo! Developer Network. Notably, he created the Yahoo! Hack Day initiative, the first internal innovation program of its kind.

Almost entirely self-taught in all things tech, Chad was an early advocate for the power of the Internet as a disruptive platform. He began his career in media, holding technical positions at InfoWorld Media Group, Salon.com, CNN, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Alicia Garza

Special Projects Director

National Domestic Workers Alliance

Co-Founder

#BlackLivesMatter

Alicia Garza is an organizer, writer, and freedom dreamer living and working in Oakland, CA. She is the Special Projects Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the nation’s leading voice for dignity and fairness for the millions of domestic workers in the United States, most of whom are women. She is also the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter, a national organizing project focused on combating anti-Black state sanctioned violence.

Alicia's work challenges us to celebrate the contributions of Black queer women's work within popular narratives of Black movements, and reminds us that the Black radical tradition is long, complex and international. Her activism reflects organizational strategies and visions that connect emerging social movements without diminishing the specificity of the structural violence facing Black lives. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her organizing work, including the Root 100 2015 list of African American achievers and influencers between the ages of 25 and 45, and was featured in the Politico 50 guide to the thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2015.

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Jay Coen Gilbert

Co-founder

B Lab

Jay Coen Gilbert is one of the three co-founders of B Lab, a nonprofit organization that serves a global movement of people using business as a force for good. Its vision is that one day all companies will compete not only to be the best in the world, but the Best for the World, and as a result society will enjoy a more shared and durable prosperity.

B Lab drives this systemic change by:

1. Building a global community of Certified B Corporations who meet the highest standards of verified, overall social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability.

2. Promoting Mission Alignment using innovative corporate structures like the benefit corporation to align the interests of business with those of society and to help high impact businesses be built to last.

3. Helping tens of thousands of businesses, investors, and institutions Measure What Matters by using the B Impact Assessment and B Analytics to manage their impact -- and the impact of the businesses with whom they work -- with as much rigor as their profits.

4. Inspiring millions to join the movement through compelling story-telling by B the Change Media.

Prior to B Lab and despite having no game, Jay co-founded and sold AND 1, a $250M basketball footwear and apparel company based outside Philadelphia. Jay led AND 1’s product and marketing and was AND 1’s CEO during its period of most rapid growth.

Jay is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, President of the Board of the Philadelphia chapter of KIPP Philadelphia Schools, a growing cluster of high performing public charter schools, and a Board member of Investors’ Circle and Social Venture Network, leading national networks of social entrepreneurs and early stage social investors.

Jay grew up in New York City before heading west to Stanford University, graduating with a degree in East Asian Studies in 1989. Prior to AND 1, Jay worked for McKinsey & Co and several organizations in NYC’s public and non-profit sectors.

Between AND 1 and B Lab, Jay enjoyed a sabbatical Down Under and in Monteverde, Costa Rica with his yogini wife Randi and their two children, Dex, 18, and Ria 16. They live in Berwyn, PA.

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Meika Hollender

Co-founder

Sustain Natural

Meika Hollender is the Co-Founder of Sustain Natural, a new brand of natural sexual wellness products marketed to women. She is also the creator of GetOnTop, a national campaign aimed at getting women to take control of their sexual health. She's a member of the NYC Venture Fellows Class of 2016 and received her MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business, where she was the President of the Social Enterprise Association.

Meika has also done stints at the brand strategy and design firm, Sterling Brands, and at Johnson & Johnson as a Sustainability Associate. She writes frequently on sexual health issues and advocacy for publications including Refinery 29 and is the co-author of the book Naturally Clean. Through Sustain's 10%4Women initiative, she is proud to work closely with Planned Parenthood. Meika was recently named one of twenty heros under forty giving millennials a good name by The New York Observer.

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Doug McMillon

President and CEO

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

Doug McMillon is the president and chief executive officer of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (Walmart).

As CEO, Doug leads a strong management team that is working to deliver Walmart’s mission of “saving people money so they can live better.” Under his leadership, Walmart is bringing together its stores, logistics network and digital commerce capabilities in new ways to empower customers to shop whenever, wherever and however they want.

From February 2009 to February 2014, Doug served as president and chief executive officer of Walmart International, a fast-growing segment of Walmart’s overall operations, with more than 6,400 stores and nearly 800,000 associates in 26 countries outside the United States. From 2006 to 2009, he served as president and chief executive officer of Sam’s Club, an operating segment of Walmart, with sales of more than $46 billion annually during his tenure.

Doug is a longtime champion of Walmart’s customers, its associates and the company’s culture. In 1984, he started out as an hourly summer associate in a Walmart distribution center. In 1990, while pursuing his MBA, he rejoined the company as an assistant manager in a Tulsa, Okla., Walmart store before moving to merchandising as a buyer trainee. He went on to serve in successful senior leadership roles in all of Walmart’s business segments. He remains a merchant at heart and understands where customers around the world are heading next.

Doug has served on the board of directors for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., since 2009 and currently is the chair of the Executive and Global Compensation committees. In addition, he serves on the boards of directors of the Consumer Goods Forum, the U.S.-China Business Council and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He also serves on the advisory board of the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing, China; the executive committee of Business Roundtable; and the Dean’s Advisory Board for the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. He has been recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Originally from Jonesboro, Ark., Doug graduated from the University of Arkansas with a bachelor of science in business administration. He earned his MBA in finance from the University of Tulsa.

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Kiah Williams

Co-founder & Director

SIRUM

Kiah Williams is co-founder of SIRUM, a 501(c)3 venture that saves medicine to save lives. Like a “Match.com” for unused medicine, SIRUM has helped redistribute over four million units of medicine worth $5.6 million to across 4 states.

Kiah previously led negotiations for the Clinton Foundation to create the Alliance Healthcare Initiative, an industry collaboration to reduce childhood obesity. Kiah developed partnerships with Fortune 100 companies to expand health benefits to 2 million children.

Williams earned her bachelors and masters degrees from Stanford University, where she was also the president of the NAACP. Kiah proudly hails from West Philadelphia and is passionate about health equity in underserved communities.

Kiah has been recognized as both a Forbes 30-Under-30 Social Entrepreneur stand-out and Outstanding Alumni, Silicon Valley Business Journal 40-Under-40, Draper Richards Kaplan Entrepreneur, and Westly Foundation Social Innovator.

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