Kevin Powell

Powell feels he has been a leader his entire adult life, practically from the moment he set foot on the campus of Rutgers University in the mid 1980s as a teenager. Inspired by the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson and the anti-apartheid movement filtering through colleges nationwide, Powell threw himself into the role of student and youth leader on campus and off. Over time those early experiences have been translated into very visible and influential careers at MTV and Quincy Jones' Vibe magazine, as one of the most prominent voices of the hip-hop generation, and in New York City as a very active and well-respected community leader, trendsetter, business owner, and mover and shaker. Most recently Powell ran for Congress in Brooklyn, New York, and plans to seek elected office again in the near future. Indeed, Powell's varied experiences in academia, media, corporate America, politics, and the arts and entertainment worlds have afforded him the unique opportunity to develop a comprehensive action plan for leadership and leadership development in corporate America. This simple and accessible approach to leadership development includes a step-by-step guide on how individuals can identify their inner leadership qualities and skills, and how best to highlight those qualities and skills for the good of themselves and their company.

Kevin Powell has consulted and worked with a number of major corporate brands through the years, including Coca-Cola, Best Buy, Nike, VirginMobile, Clear Channel Communications, Nissan, Microsoft, and Random House. In this keynote presentation, Powell details moments in American history of corporate generosity; highlights some of the issues and crises affecting the American social fabric in these early days of the 21st century; and offers a concrete and multidimensional game plan for corporate involvement in the community, including ways a corporate entity can boost brand awareness or repair their brand image in the aftermath of not so positive media attention while giving back.

A product of post-Civil Rights and post-integration America, Kevin Powell brings to this presentation decades of personal and professional insight around diversity in America: he grew up in a segregated inner city environment and he spent the last of his adolescence in a predominantly White neighborhood; he attended Rutgers University, which had a small community of color and he was very active in Black student initiatives; Powell has worked for some of the biggest corporations on the planet—MTV/Viacom and Vibe when it was owned by Time Warner—and he has witnessed the embrace of hip-hop, a culture created by working-class Blacks and Latinos, by White America and mainstream entities. These experiences and more have led Powell to create a keynote speech/workshop that gets at why diversity and mutual respect are so important in the workplace. Powell maintains that if individual workers are not even comfortable with their own lives, their own particular social, political, and cultural heritages, then they cannot even begin to have proactive and healthy conversations with their employers or fellow employees. When talking about diversity, the obvious place to start is race and ethnicity. Powell does indeed begin there, but he broadens out the workshop to include probing observations about gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, as well as cultural and generational diversity.

Kevin Powell, one of the leading voices in America today, not only pays homage to the Civil Rights Movement, which greatly benefited his generation, the hip-hop generation, but he also traces the historical connections between the Civil Rights era and the hip-hop era. From Emmett Till's murder to Hurricane Katrina, from dr. King's Poor People's Campaign to the birth of hip-hop in the late 1960s/early 1970s, Powell tackles the tough questions of what was won and what was lost as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, why there has been vast class and generational gaps in Black America since the Civil Rights era, and what Hurricane Katrina brought to the surface as we watched it unfold on television, as many of us watched the Civil Rights struggles on television. Moreover, because Powell has been a central figure in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, including trips, himself, to New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Houston in the days immediately following the hurricane and flooding, he offers firsthand accounts and personal insights to what went wrong, how what went wrong falls into the ongoing struggles for Civil Rights, and why Mrs. Rosa Park's recent death is a reminder of the work ahead.

Powell would speak for about 45 minutes on his lifelong battles with sexism, dating to his years as a boy, as an adolescent and teen athlete, as a male very influenced by popular culture and street culture. Powell talks very candidly about the maturation of his sexist behavior in college, culminating with his pulling a knife on a fellow student.

His speech is not simply about discussing the problems, but also offering practical, proactive solutions to get males to rethink how we have defined manhood our entire lives, often at the physical, spiritual, and emotional expense of women. Indeed, he will talk very honestly about his periods of deep denial, about his counseling sessions, about the challenges he was given by women, about the books he began to read, and how all those things began to broaden my thinking and, in a sense, push him toward healing (an ongoing thing), consistent self-reflection, and, finally, the recognition that he had an obligation to speak out against any sexist behavior, whatever form.