Kahlil Greene

Kahlil Greene uses his unique leadership experiences and Gen-Z perspective to provide a youthful, forward-looking, and much-needed intervention to commonplace and antiquated DE&I strategies. He has authored op-eds about organizational equity in the LA Times and Washington Post; and his article “Dear CEO’s: A Gen Zer’s Open Letter to His Future Employers” was published in the Harvard Business Review. As a junior in college, Greene completed a summer internship with McKinsey and Company and later earned a Hall of Fame designation from the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Washington for his fundraising and support of the nonprofit.

Prior to this, Kahlil Greene was elected the first Black student body president in Yale’s 318-year history. At the end of his year and a half-long term–which lasted through the COVID-19 pandemic–his administration’s successes included grassroots fundraising over $57,000 for racial justice organizations in one week; launching six affinity networks to increase racial, socioeconomic, and gender representation on the Council; and kickstarting a walk-in mental health counseling program for students. Greene stayed true to his campaign promises to be direct in critiques of Yale’s administration and actively supportive of student-led movements and protests–a hallmark of his presidency.

Today, Greene is also a New York Times featured social media influencer who is verified on Instagram and has over 440k followers and 12mm views on TikTok. Both Instagram and Facebook, Inc. have collaborated with and sponsored Greene’s work directly. He often engages in political discourse with social media influencers and users from all backgrounds, and now uses his influence to generate awareness around social issues as they arise in real-time.

Be the Change

If you had a deep concern with your workplace’s management, culture, or impact and had a great idea for improvement–would you voice this to your boss? If they shot the idea down, but you still believed in it, what would you do next? As the poet, Langston Hughes asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?”

In this talk/breakout, Greene will use successes from his time as student body president at Yale, an institution older than America itself, to illustrate how one individual can disturb the inertia of a workplace set in its ways by rallying coworkers and taking the action needed for a proposal to come to life. With his expertise studying the History of Social Change and Social Movements and as a member of Yale’s prestigious Grand Strategy Program, he provides a framework for action-oriented change and leadership that worked for some of the most impactful figures in history. The same framework guided him as he pushed Yale to remove grades for the first time in its history, dedicate $100,000 to student-led environmental projects, permanently provide menstrual products in all residential buildings, and so much more during his tenure.

DEI in the New Decade

After the summer of 2020, the nation manifested a heightened awareness of the societal impact of corporations. Now, students across colleges and universities are collectively blacklisting, or “canceling”, certain companies for insufficient support of underrepresented and marginalized communities that exist both inside and outside of the organization. This causes firms to lose talent and public image, and because this happens through social media and informal networks, they don’t even know. In this keynote/breakout, Greene will discuss young people’s expectations for diversity, equity, and inclusion across institutions and how organizations can live up to the DEI standards of this new decade.