Kelli is the Head of Global Inclusion & Diversity and Corporate Citizenship for the CFA Institute. Based out of Charlottesvile, VA, her main role is to “promote and advance socially responsible practices in the environment, social, and governance areas for the organization’s operations and activities.” In short, Kelli strives to ensure the members of her organization leave the world better than they found it.
Transcript
My name is Kelly Palmer and I'm the Head of Global Inclusion and Diversity and Corporate Citizenship for CFA Institute. We are first and foremost a credentialer. We provide a certification called The Charter and we also provide continuing education, business resources, advocacy and many of the things you would expect from a professional association. So my work is in three parts, inclusion and diversity, corporate citizenship and environmental sustainability and in short, we want to leave the world better than we found it. So under inclusion and diversity we're thinking about our employees and their experience as well as our members and test-takers. Under corporate citizenship, that's the additional things we do in the communities that we occupy, where our offices are located and there are 10 around the world. And then under environmental sustainability it's all about minimizing our carbon footprint. It's about making the business case across the organization and making it in a variety of geographic context because we operate in not just the Americas but APAC, Asia Pacific and AMEA, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. So it's being able to convey the importance and salience of the work in a way that each audience will hear it. So to give you an example, my last two weeks included a public speaking engagement with the U.S. Pension Funds in Boston followed by a retreat with our business resource groups followed by a retreat with our diversity and inclusion counsel and now we're in the Virginia Film Festival where we're supporting the education of high school and middle school students and I'm off to the next thing on Friday which is engaging our high potential employees. It's a fast pace. There're definitely deliberate scheduled deliverables and landmarks throughout the year but there's also all the opportunities that present themselves, be they issues that pop up that are of concern or doors that open that I need to walk through because we've been waiting for it.
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