Professional Development Conference

• 9:00 am
  • Welcome
    • • Alice Thorell
• 9:05 am
  • The Fog Over the Mountains
    • • Felicia Ishino
• 11:15 am
  • 10 min. Break
• 11:25 am
  • Me Voy a Gozar La Vida (I'm going to enjoy life)
    • • Mia Navarro
• 1:00 pm
  • 55 min. Break
• 1:55 pm - 3:30 pm
  • Personal LeaderSHIFT
    • • Leni Marshall

Keynote Speaker: 

The Fog Beyond the Mountains 
Felicia Ishino, She/Her 

Explore Pacific Northwest narratives that tell the long history of racial difference in this region. Indigenous histories of racism are often overlooked, Black narratives hidden, Latinx stories obscured, and Asian heritage cloaked in fog. Our Pacific Northwest history matters. Stops include:  

• Mukilteo, WA - The Treaty of Point Elliott  
• Coos Bay, OR - Racial Terrorism in the PNW 
• Minidoka, ID - Japanese Exclusion 
• Seattle, WA - The Gang of Four 
• Pasco, WA - W Lewis St & 10th Ave - Farm Workers & Police Brutality 
• Portland, OR - Gentrification in Albina 

Beginning in the era of enslavement, moving through the era of racial terrorism, civil rights, and the modern era, each stop follows our unique narrative arc. Attendees will:  

• Connect history to the systems and the impact on society today. 
• Build a shared language and practice for reflection and honest conversation across different identities.  
• Leave with ways to keep the work going together. 

Sankofa Impact is a Black woman-led 501(c)3 nonprofit with deep roots in Seattle and over a decade of immersive, place-based education programs centered on the Black American freedom struggle. We have conducted dozens of trips with thousands of participants, preparing them for transformational encounters, bringing them to the places where this history happened, and facilitating the reflection and courageous conversations that unfold a 400-year narrative of Black struggle, joy, and culture. 

Sankofa Impact brings people together for place-based learning that confronts our history of racism, uplifts stories of resistance, and celebrates culture. We envision a community that holds a common memory grounded in unvarnished truth leading to our collective liberation. 

www.sankofaimpact.org  

Me Voy a Gozar La Vida  (I’m Going to Enjoy Life) 

Mia Navarro, She/Her 

This presentation represents an opportunity to share my (most recent) story of looking back in order to move forward well. I am actively recovering from a lifetime of perfectionism, hypervigilance, people pleasing, and legacy Depression Era scarcity/suffering mindset, and am currently in the midst of a major life reset. 

I hope to share my experience and tips with attendees in the hope that they can see themselves in and feel empowered by my experience, and we can learn from each other. 

My presentation has three main parts: 

1. Identify what is not working.  
2. Put it down. Stop carrying what no longer serves.  
3. What is next?  

Attendees will have the opportunity to: 

• Walk through those three steps on their own 
• Share reflections anonymously in a word cloud on the screen 
• Learn a few salsa steps 

Mia Navarro has been working in public administration and nonprofits since 2003. She joined OFM on March 1, 2023, as the Deputy Chief Cultural Officer with State Human Resources, and recently took a step back from leadership to serve as a Planning and Strategy Analyst for State HR.  

Prior to joining the State, Mia served as the Assistant Director of the City of Tacoma’s Office of Equity and Human Rights, Community Engagement Manager for the City of Tukwila, Associate Director of Community Services for the Tacoma Housing Authority, helped to implement the Systems Change Initiative to End Family Homelessness in Pierce County, and worked in several roles, including Executive Director, for the Washington State Coalition for the Homeless.  

Mia holds a Bachelors Degree from the University of Southern California, and a Masters in Business Administration from Western Governors University. Outside of work, Mia enjoys spending time with her family, salsa dancing, cold plunging and other outdoor adventures. 

Personal LeaderSHIFT  

Leni Marshall, She/Her 

An active-learning workshop for participants to engage with data-driven best practice tools and techniques that measurably improve intercultural agility - the capability to effectively understand and adapt behavior across cultural differences.  

Participants will: 

• Learn the “Think 5” technique and put it into practice.  
• Be led through a guided process to write a Personal Purpose Statement, a sentence answering the question, “what do I value and what do I want my actions and words to do?”  
• Apply their Personal Purpose statement in a professional development activity. 

Everyone benefits when State employees contribute fully, are heard clearly, and work productively with people across the varied experiences and perspectives represented in Washington’s populations.  

Participants leave with individualized, effective methods for better navigating the complexities of diverse interpersonal and communication practices including: 

• Values prioritization identification and how values apply to their “why.” 
• Personal Purpose statement development and practice. 
• Learned and practiced using the “Think 5” technique.  

Leni Marshall, PhD, has been an inclusion and equity solutions leader for more than 20 years. Like many people, she attended a lot of “diversity trainings” that had little long-term impact which drove her to study how to improve equity and inclusion in individuals and groups. She employs active-learning and data-driven best practices that advance intercultural awareness and generate inclusive change in lasting and measurable ways. 

Leni has compassion, curiosity, a sense of humor, and embodied experience across differences of race and ethnicity, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomics, dis/ability, religion, and culture. She invites you join her in living *on purpose*.  

• 8:30 am
  • Welcome
    • • Alice Thorell
• 8:35 am
  • Reclaim, Reconnect, Contribute: Transforming Lived Experience into Belonging
    • • Felicia Mullins
• 9:55 am
  • 10 min. Break
• 10:05 am
  • Community Engagement is a Practice of Humility
    • • Office of Equity Shared Power Design Team
• 11:25 am
  • 60 min. Break
• 12:25 pm
  • As as We Were Asked: Lessons from a Refugee Community
    • • Julie Pham
• 1:30 pm
  • 10 min. Break
• 1:40 pm
  • What's Up with White Women? Confronting Our Past, Exploring Our Present, and Cultivating Our Future
    • • Isla Govan & Tilman Smith
• 3:14 pm
  • 10 min. Break
• 3:25 pm - 5:00 pm
  • Leadership Inheritance: What we Carry Forward From the Women Who Shaped Us
    • • Raedene Copeland

Reclaim, Reconnect, Contribute: Transforming Lived Experience into Belonging 

Felicia Mullins, She/Her 

An interactive presentation inviting participants to look back with care so they move forward with greater clarity, or more fully recognize the ways they are already moving forward. The session helps participants recognize strengths, values, relationships, and purpose that may already be supporting healing, growth, and belonging. 

Using the Reclaim → Reconnect → Contribute framework, participants will reflect on what they have reclaimed, are reclaiming, or want to deepen; identify the people, communities, and opportunities that are already supporting or could further support that growth; and consider how their lived experience is shaping the ways they contribute to others. 

By the end of the session, participants will identify one strength, value, or sense of purpose they have reclaimed or want to reclaim; one relationship, community, or opportunity that supports its growth; and one contribution they want to continue, deepen, or begin. 

Felicia G. Mullins, MBA, is a public-sector strategist, U.S. military veteran, and organizational change leader. She is an Inclusion, Belonging and Well-Being Strategy Manager, connecting organizational strategy with culture, workforce experience, and human-centered change at the WA Department of Health. Felicia is a doctoral candidate studying repair and restorative practices in organizational cultures, particularly how organizations respond to harm, rebuild trust and belonging, and support meaningful change. 

Felicia contributes to statewide policy and employee communities through the ICSEW and the Washington State Women’s Commission Economic Well-Being Committee. She supports survivors of sexual assault, people returning to their communities from recovery and correctional programs, and teens and young adults navigating significant life challenges. 

When not working, teaching, or studying, Felicia can be found beachcombing, gardening and spending time with her golden retriever, Loki, an indispensable hiking partner and garden assistant. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/feliciagmullins

Community Engagement is a Practice of Humility 

Shared Power Design Team, Office of Equity 

An introduction to Washington State’s Shared Power Program, this interactive workshop supports a broader shift toward government that is more relational, transparent, accountable, and responsive to the people it serves. 

Participants will  

• Examine four indicators of Shared Power: Community Compensation, Community Engagement, Collective Decision-Making, and Targeted Universalism.  
• Explore how power operates through roles, relationships, expertise, systems, and decision-making—and identify opportunities to shift from simply inviting participation to creating meaningful influence. 
• Using a Learn–Reflect–Practice–Apply approach, connect concepts to participants’ real work.  
• Leave with practical tools and strategies to reduce participation barriers, compensate community expertise, strengthen collaborative decision-making, and use community knowledge and data to develop more responsive approaches. 
• Identify one concrete opportunity to apply Shared Power in their own work and begin developing practices to strengthen trust, collaboration, and community influence. 

The Shared Power Design Team at the Washington State Office of Equity includes Sabrina Njoroge, Jean Paul, Amber Ortiz-Diaz, and Rauneisha Larkins. The team works to transform how government partners with and serves communities via four key practices: building strong relationships, sharing decision-making, practicing accountability, and continuously learning and improving. Through this work, they help public servants build trust, collaborate more effectively, and meaningfully include the voices and experiences of people most affected by government decisions. Their goal is to support a more responsive, transparent, equitable, and community-centered government for all Washingtonians.  https://equity.wa.gov/shared-power-design

Ask as We Were Asked: Lessons from a Refugee Community 

Julie Pham, PhD She/Her 

We're taught to give help generously but ask for it reluctantly — especially women in public service, where self-sufficiency can feel like the safer path, and asking can feel like a risk to credibility. Dr. Julie Pham grew up inside a different model: she and her family arrived in Seattle as Vietnamese refugees in 1979, and six years later her parents left stable jobs to found a community newspaper, a leap only possible because refugees lent, borrowed, and asked freely from one another — a form of collective resilience Julie watched people in her community practice daily. 

Drawing on that history and using live polling, this interactive session invites attendees to look back at their own relationship with asking, then send those insights forward: recognizing personal reluctance to ask for help, learning a clear framework for asking well, and benchmarking shared challenges with peers in the room. Attendees will leave with practical language for asking without losing standing, and a renewed sense that individual asks build collective strength — for themselves, their teams, and the women coming up behind them. 

Dr. Julie Pham is the founder and the CEO of CuriosityBased, an organizational development firm based in Seattle. She is the author of the #1 Amazon New Release and Bestseller 7 Forms of Respect: A Guide to Transforming Your Communication and Relationships at Work and a TEDx Speaker ("Curiosity as a Practice"). 

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, and raised in Seattle, Dr. Pham earned a PhD at Cambridge University and graduated magna cum laude from University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as a journalist, historian, university lecturer, marketer, nonprofit executive, and management consultant.  

Dr. Pham has been recognized with numerous awards for her community leadership including Female Founders Alliance Champions Award (2019) in Advocate category, Harvard Business School's Young American Leaders Program (2018), a Puget Sound Business Journal ’40 under 40’ honoree (2011), and a Women's Center-University of Washington Woman of Courage honoree (2012). 

www.curiositybased.com 

What’s Up with White Women? Confronting our Past, Exploring our Present, and Cultivating our Future 

Ilsa Govan, She/Her 

When tackling topics of systemic racism, it’s all too easy to build narratives centered around white men and toxic masculinity. But white women have long held seats at the table— from their pre-Civil War ability to buy and sell enslaved people to the million-plus women members of the KKK, and beyond— as systems of white supremacy were built and maintained. We cannot skirt around the gendered roles of white women in systemic racism if we, as a society, hope to dismantle systems of oppression.  

In this session participants will explore how the history of white feminism and our socialization as white women has shaped the ways we show up in the workplace and beyond. They will leave with strategies for showing up in allyship and building stronger relationships, teams, and multiracial coalitions. 

Ilsa has more than 20 years of experience as a facilitator, consultant, writer and social justice activist. She has led conversations about racial equity at workshops and conferences across the country and is co-author of What's Up with White Women: Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege in Pursuit of Racial Justice. Prior to Cultures Connecting, Ilsa worked as an Equity and Race Specialist for Seattle Public Schools where she was tasked with addressing institutional racism in a large public organization.  

• www.culturesconnecting.com  
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilsagovan/ 
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/culturesconnecting/ 
• https://www.facebook.com/CulturesConnecting 
• Insta: @cultures.connecting

Leadership Inheritance: What We Carry Forward from the Women Who Shaped Us 

Raedene Copeland, She/Her 

When tackling topics of systemic racism, it’s all too easy to build narratives centered around white men and toxic masculinity. But white women have long held seats at the table— from their pre-Civil War ability to buy and sell enslaved people to the million-plus women members of the KKK, and beyond— as systems of white supremacy were built and maintained. We cannot skirt around the gendered roles of white women in systemic racism if we, as a society, hope to dismantle systems of oppression.  

In this session participants will explore how the history of white feminism and our socialization as white women has shaped the ways we show up in the workplace and beyond. They will leave with strategies for showing up in allyship and building stronger relationships, teams, and multiracial coalitions. 

Dr. Raedene Copeland is a leadership strategist, keynote speaker, creator of the CIC Leadership Compass™, and author of forthcoming book Sole Impact: How Authentic Leaders Earn Fierce Loyalty. Known as The Sole Coach™, she helps leaders become the reason their best people stay. Her proprietary framework connects Credibility, Influence, and Culture to help leaders earn trust, inspire commitment, and build organizations that hold under pressure.  

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, her journey as an immigrant leader navigating U.S. institutional systems shaped her understanding of how credibility is earned, influence is built, and belonging is created.  

A former tenured professor, assistant provost of faculty research and development, and organizational transformation leader, Dr. Copeland has advised and developed leaders across Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, higher education institutions, and nonprofit organizations worldwide. She holds a PhD in Consumer, Apparel, and Retail Studies and an MBA.  

www.drraedenecopeland.com 

www.achievebrandconsulting.com