KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Allison Kluger
Lecturer, Stanford Graduate School of Business & Author
Allison Kluger is a four-time Emmy-nominated Producer with over 25 years of experience in broadcast media and entertainment, from network television (Good Morning America, The View) to new media platforms including electronic retail, interactive television, and digital media. She is also a freelance writer and media consultant. Her superpowers are being an innovative content creator, an expert at messaging, and a media coach across all platforms.
Since 2013 Allison is a Lecturer of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in four courses, three of which she created: Reputation Management, Strategic Communication, Personal Branding (which she teaches with Tyra Banks) and Strategic Pivoting for Your Next Chapter (which features guest speaker Alex Rodriguez, ARod). Allison has also created seminars and one-day workshops on Executive Presence for Women, Storytelling as Strategy, Personal and Business Branding, Moderating Panels and Fireside Chats, and Media Training.
Allison is the recipient of the Dorothy J. King Lecturer in Leadership for 2017-2018, The Class of 1978 Lectureship of 2024-2025, was voted one of the top 3 educators at the GSB in 2023, received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the MsX class of 2024, and the MBA Distinguished Teaching Award of 2026. She is an advisor for many of her graduate students’ new ventures, she mentors young women and men in leadership and personal branding and gives lectures and keynote speeches all over the world. Allison just co-authored her first book, Brand Up 2.0, discussing how Reputation Management and Executive Presence influence your personal brand. In her spare time, she is a voracious reader, officiates weddings for fun, and raises her two boys and dog, Ripley, with her husband Mark.
Dr. Leona Tate
Activist, Civil Rights Pioneer, & Community Advocate
On November 14, 1960, six years after Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated schools unconstitutional, six-year-old Leona Tate entered history as one of the four young girls who desegregated New Orleans’ public elementary schools—the first in the Deep South to do so. Alongside Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost, Tate integrated McDonogh No. 19 Elementary School in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, while Ruby Bridges entered William Frantz School just minutes later. The event, broadcast across the nation and the world, became a defining moment of the Civil Rights Movement. Escorted by federal marshals, the girls’ walk into school that morning signaled not only the dismantling of legalized segregation in New Orleans but also the courage of children who bore the weight of a nation’s struggle for justice.
In 2009, she founded the Leona Tate Foundation for Change (LTFC), serving as its volunteer Executive Director until 2021. Under her leadership, LTFC provided critical community programs, including free summer camps, after-school tutoring, adult literacy initiatives, holiday drives, and food pantries. The foundation also managed the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum, which preserved and shared the neighborhood’s layered history of resilience.
Six decades later, Tate transformed that same site of history into a living institution for change. In 2020, in partnership with Alembic Community Developers, LTFC acquired and redeveloped the historic McDonogh No. 19 campus. Reopened in 2022 as the Tate, Etienne, and Prevost (TEP) Center, the site now stands as a mixed-use hub dedicated to the history of school desegregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and the broader story of Black life in New Orleans. Dr. Tate envisions the TEP Center as both a memorial and a catalyst: a safe space for dialogue, education, and training in anti-racism and restorative justice.
Her work has been recognized through numerous honors, including honorary doctorates from St. Thomas Christian University, Macalester College, and Tulane University. Beyond her public leadership, Tate treasures her role as a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, grounding her commitment to community in a deep devotion to family.
Dr. Leona Tate’s journey—from a six-year-old child at the forefront of desegregation to a nationally recognized leader in education, activism, and community restoration—embodies the enduring struggle for racial justice and the power of personal resilience to shape collective history.
Krista Tippett
Broadcaster & Author
Krista Tippett is a Peabody-award winning broadcaster, National Humanities Medalist, and New York Times bestselling author. She created the groundbreaking public radio show and podcast On Being, which pursues deep thinking, moral imagination, social creativity, and joy towards the renewal of inner life, outer life, and life together. It has won the highest honors in broadcast, Internet and podcasting, and been downloaded over 450 million times. The On Being Project, which Krista founded in 2013, also engages “quiet conversations” to accompany the generative people and possibilities within this tender, tumultuous time to be alive. She received the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2014 for "thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. On air and in print, Ms. Tippett avoids easy answers, embracing complexity and inviting people of every background to join her conversation about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom."
Krista grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, worked as a young journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin, and later received a Master of Divinity from Yale. She is the author of three books, most recently Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.