SPEAKING

Talks that expand our sense of what is possible and move us from awareness to action.

From panels to conferences to workplace events, my talk spans four areas: growing our equity consciousness, building connections, designing equity structures, and sparking our imagination of new worlds — the same framework that grounds my consulting and facilitation work.

Joyce Chiao

Joyce Chiao is a speaker and facilitator whose work sits at the intersection of organizational and equity strategy. She brings a multi-layered lens to the work, often weaving together her experiences as a second-generation daughter of immigrants, a decade of organizational consulting, and her grounding in social justice scholarship. Her talks blend intellectual rigor with personal honesty, leaving audiences with sharper analysis and clearer next steps.

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SPEAKING CATALOG

Topics & Talks

These sessions build the analytical foundation for equity work. They focus on developing the awareness, language, and frameworks to name systems of oppression, understand how they operate, and identify what needs to change.

Equity Consciousness

  • Inequity persists because it operates across individual beliefs, interpersonal dynamics, institutional policies, and systemic structures simultaneously. This session maps those four levels and helps participants understand how they connect, where they show up in their own contexts, and what kinds of interventions are actually suited to each. This foundational framework offers a shared language and a clearer sense of where to focus attention to advance equity efforts.

    Good for: L&D teams, general conference audiences, organizations early in their equity journey

  • White supremacy often shows up in our organizational culture through dominant narratives that make them feel normal. This session names those patterns directly, examines how they operate inside institutions, and explores what it takes to build an organizational culture that actively challenges rather than reproduces them. It is designed for audiences ready to move beyond awareness into honest analysis.

    Good for: DEI practitioners, racial equity conferences, organizations with existing equity commitments

  • We all come to our work with a set of identities, experiences, and perspectives that shape what we notice, what we assume, and what we miss. This session introduces positionality as an analytical tool to help participants understand their own social location and how it influences their relationships, decisions, and practice. Grounded in reflection and dialogue, it builds the self-awareness that strengthens equity work.

    Good for: L&D teams, leadership conferences, ERGs, general conference audiences

  • From redlining and exclusionary zoning to welfare policy and criminal legal reform, the history of U.S. governance is also a history of institutionalized inequity. This session begins there: tracing how policy has been used to produce and sustain the conditions communities are still living with today and building the analytical framework to see those connections clearly. From that foundation, this session turns to the present, examining what it looks like for government agencies and public servants to reckon honestly with that history and use policy as a tool for repair rather than reproduction.

    Good for: Government agency staff and leadership, policy professionals, public administrators, nonprofit leaders working in policy advocacy, government-focused conferences, racial equity conferences

  • The nonprofit sector has long positioned itself as a force for social good, but its history tells a more complicated story. This session examines how the nonprofit industrial complex developed, philanthropic funding has shaped which communities get served and which forms of change get supported, and the dependence of the sector on institutional resources has historically functioned to contain rather than advance transformative change. From that foundation, it turns to the present: what it means to work toward justice within institutions shaped by those constraints and what justice-centered nonprofit practice can look like.

    Good for: Nonprofit leaders and staff, foundation and philanthropy professionals, racial equity conferences, social sector leadership programs, organizations examining their own institutional role

These sessions explore the relational conditions that make collective change possible. They focus on building trust across difference, sustaining community, and developing the bonds that turn individual commitment into shared action.

Connection

  • ERGs are most powerful when they work together, but cross-ERG collaboration rarely happens without intentional design. This session explores what makes coalitions across identity-based groups possible, what gets in the way, and how ERG leaders can build the relationships and shared agendas that turn individual groups into a collective force. Participants leave with practical strategies for initiating and sustaining cross-ERG partnership.

    Good for: ERG leaders and councils, L&D teams supporting ERG infrastructure

  • The dominant model of organizational life often sits at odds with the conditions required to move equity forwards. This session makes the case for community care as a structural practice that builds the trust, accountability, and collective capacity for sustaining equity work. Participants examine what community care looks like in practice and how to design the necessary organizational conditions that support it.

    Good for: Leadership conferences, ERGs, mission-driven organizations, nonprofit and government teams

  • Individual commitment to justice is necessary yet insufficient. Social change requires collective action, and collective action requires deliberate relationship-building across difference. This session explores the history and practice of social activism as a model for organizational change work, drawing on movement traditions to examine what sustained collective action actually looks like and what it demands of participants.

    Good for: Racial equity conferences, organizations with strong equity commitments, leadership development programs

These sessions translate equity commitments into organizational practice. They focus on examining the policies, systems, and decisions that either reproduce or interrupt inequity and building the concrete infrastructure for sustained change.

Structures

  • Most organizations know they want to do equity work but struggle to turn that commitment into a coherent strategy. This session walks through the core components of a sustained DEI effort, from assessment to goal-setting to planning and implementation, and explores the organizational conditions that make strategy ‘stick’ rather than stall. It is designed for practitioners and leaders who are responsible for building or running a DEI function and are ready to move from intention to infrastructure.

    Good for: DEI practitioners, HR and people operations professionals, human resources professional associations, organizations early in their equity journey

  • Building an equitable workplace requires equitable decision-making at every stage of how employees are recruited, hired, developed, evaluated, promoted, and retained. This session maps the employee lifecycle through an equity lens, identifying where inequity most commonly enters and what organizations can do at each stage to interrupt it. Participants leave with a concrete framework for auditing their own people practices and identifying high-leverage entry points for change.

    Good for: HR and people operations professionals, organizational leaders, human resources professional associations

  • Managers are where organizational equity commitments either take hold or fall apart, yet management training often does not equip people to lead inclusively in practice. This session focuses on the specific decisions, behaviors, and habits that define equitable people management: how to give feedback across difference, how to run meetings that include different voices, how to make promotion and development decisions that do not reproduce existing disparities, and how to build team cultures where people can do their best work. It is designed for people managers who want to lead with intention, not just good values.

    Good for: People managers and team leads, L&D teams, leadership development programs, human resource professional associations

  • Equity is most powerful when it is not a standalone program but instead a lens that shapes how an organization plans, prioritizes, and allocates resources at every level. This session examines what it looks like to integrate equity into an organization's strategic planning process as a core design principle and what senior leaders need to understand, commit to, and change for that integration to be feasible. It draws on real examples to illustrate what equity-centered strategy looks like in practice and what it demands of leadership.

    Good for: Senior leaders and executives, nonprofit executive directors, government agency leadership, organizational boards, leadership conferences

  • Community engagement is an integral part of how government agencies and nonprofits do their work, but standard engagement practices often reproduce the same inequities they claim to address, centering the most resourced voices and excluding those most affected by the decisions being made. This session examines what equitable community engagement looks like: how to design processes that reach communities typically left out, build trust, and invite community input that shapes outcomes rather than checking a compliance box. It is grounded in practice and designed for people who run or design engagement processes.

    Good for: Government agencies, nonprofit organizations, community development practitioners, policy professionals, public administrators

  • Traditional change management treats organizational change as something that happens to people — a process to be managed, communicated, and rolled out. Change stewardship is rooted in a different premise: that the people most affected by change are also the most essential to shaping it and that sustainable change requires building the collective capacity to navigate it together. This session examines the difference between those two orientations and how to embrace a stewardship model in practice. It offers a framework for guiding change in ways that are participatory, equity-centered, and built to last.

    Good for: Organizational leaders, change practitioners, DEI practitioners, government agency leadership, nonprofit executive directors, leadership conferences

  • Data is never neutral, as it reflects the choices of those who collect it, control it, and decide what it means. This session examines data not just as a technical tool but as a political one: who gets counted, who defines the metrics, and how data can be used to surface inequity rather than obscure it. Participants leave with a critical framework for approaching data in their own organizational contexts and a set of practical tools for using it in ways that shift rather than reinforce existing power structures.

    Good for: DEI practitioners, data and analytics teams, government agencies, nonprofit and foundation leaders, policy professionals

These sessions expand what feels possible. They focus on developing the vision, values, and creative capacity to build organizations and worlds that do not yet exist but are worth working toward.

Imagination

  • Equity work requires a clear vision of what we are building toward. This session guides participants through the practice of imagination as a leadership tool: developing a concrete picture of what equity looks like in their organization and community, mapping the distance between that vision and the present, and identifying practical strategies for closing the gap. It is designed for any leader who wants to move from reactive to generative in their equity practice.

    Good for: Leadership conferences, general conference audiences, public sector professionals, nonprofit leaders, ERGs

  • As federal DEI infrastructure erodes and organizational commitments face new scrutiny, the question for many leaders is not whether to continue the work but how. This session examines the current political landscape and explores what has changed, what has remained, and what it means for organizations trying to sustain meaningful equity efforts. It offers practical frameworks for protecting and advancing equity commitments when the external environment is working against them.

    Good for: Government agencies, nonprofit and foundation leaders, organizational leaders navigating DEI rollbacks, DEI practitioners

  • Most organizations can articulate what they are against (e.g., discrimination, inequity, exclusion) but struggle to name with equal clarity what they are for. This session goes beyond discussions of inequity and offers a framework for a vision of liberation: not simply the absence of harm but the active presence of the conditions for every person to live, work, and thrive with dignity. This session offers a set of principles that define what liberatory organizations look like in practice, how they operate differently from conventional ones, and what it takes to build toward them. Participants examine their own organizations against those principles, identifying where the distance is greatest and what conditions would need to change to close the gap.

    Good for: Nonprofit and foundation leaders, mission-driven organizations, government agency leadership, ERGs, leadership conferences, organizations with existing equity commitments

Asian American Identity and Power

  • Anti-Asian racism in the United States has a long history that predates COVID-19 and continues to persist today. Understanding that history is essential to understanding the present. This session traces the roots of anti-Asian racism in U.S. policy and culture, examines how it manifests today across interpersonal and institutional contexts, and explores what it means to respond with analysis and collective action. It is designed for both Asian and non-Asian audiences.

    Good for: AAPI ERGs, AAPI Heritage Month programming, racial equity conferences, general L&D audiences

  • The model minority myth harms harm Asian Americans, divides communities of color, and obscures the structural roots of racial inequity. This session unpacks where the myth came from, how it functions politically and organizationally, and what it costs Asian Americans and other communities of color when it goes unchallenged. It invites participants to examine how the myth shows up in their own workplaces and what it looks like to actively refuse it.

    Good for: AAPI ERGs, racial equity conferences, L&D teams, general conference audiences

  • Asian Americans occupy a complicated and often contested position in U.S. racial politics — sometimes positioned as model minorities, sometimes targeted as perpetual foreigners, sometimes recruited as wedges between other communities of color. This session examines that complexity and explores what it means for Asian Americans to locate themselves as participants in the broader project of racial and social justice. This session emphasizes solidarity, coalition-building, and the particular responsibilities that come with Asian American identity in the United States.

    Good for: AAPI ERGs, racial equity conferences, organizations doing cross-community coalition work

  • Asian Americans are navigating a political moment that demands a deliberate answer to the question of who we are, what we stand for, and what role we play in building the world we want to live in. This session examines what a grounded, values-driven model of Asian American leadership looks like in this moment, drawing on community, history, and collective purpose and challenging the assimilationist model of quiet excellence and individual advancement.

    Good for: AAPI ERGs, Asian American leadership development programs, women's leadership conferences, general leadership conferences

  • Asian women navigate a specific intersection of race and gender that is often either invisible or hypersexualized and rarely examined with the nuance it deserves. This session explores the particular ways racism and patriarchy compound for Asian women in organizational life, from stereotypes that suppress leadership visibility to the specific pressures of navigating predominantly white and/or men-dominated institutions. It draws on research and history to open a more honest conversation about what support and equity actually look like for this community.

    Good for: AAPI ERGs, women's leadership conferences, general L&D audiences, organizations focused on gender equity

These sessions explore Asian American identity, history, and experience. They focus on examining the forces that shape our communities, the narratives that constrain us, and what it looks like to lead, organize, and build collective power from a grounded sense of who we are.

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