This February, CLS hosted our inaugural Inclusive Leadership Symposium this week—Leading the Change – Embracing Inclusion for Collective Success. More than 200 industry leaders gathered in San Francisco to foster profound transformations within their organizations through the lens of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion.

Panelists discussed traits to being an inclusive leader, as the key to opening doors to generate new opportunities for people, historical health disparities within diverse communities and how health and health-adjacent organizations can play a role in advancing equity for underserved communities, the importance of influencing systems within organization and “doing the work”, as well as ways to debias processes that are barriers to success for diverse startups.

We were thrilled to see so much audience engagement, demonstrating the commitment and desire to create an inclusive environment for not only our teams but for our professional organizations as a whole.