Bold conversations for choosing courage over cynicism
Join Continuing Education for a FREE series of bold conversations for people choosing hope and meeting the world’s challenges with purpose. With so many reasons for despair, where are we finding real cause for hope?
Join Continuing Education at the University of St. Michael’s College for a free virtual speaker series exploring how hope becomes action in sustainability, leadership, social impact, spirituality, technology, and the arts.
Hope is not wishful thinking. It is the decision to engage with our world’s most urgent challenges and work toward meaningful change , from climate and culture to how we live our values in our workplaces and communities.
Hope in Action brings together innovators, faculty, alumni, and leaders who are meeting urgent challenges with clarity, courage, and purpose.
Come to be inspired. Leave ready to act.
Inclusive Change in Uncertain Times: Exploring how Leaders Guide Organizations Through Strain, Conflict and Change
We are living through a moment marked by constant change, institutional strain, and growing polarization. Leaders are being asked to guide organizations through complex transitions while responding to fatigue, resistance, and competing demands for fairness and accountability. This conversation steps back from quick fixes to ask a deeper question: how can we lead meaningful change when the conditions for stability, trust, and consensus feel increasingly fragile?
In conversation with Dr. Shilpa Tiwari, Program Director for the Diploma in Social Responsibility & Sustainability at USMC CE, leadership and gender-equity practitioner, researcher, and founder of Accelerate Her Future, Dr. Golnaz Golnaraghi will explore what inclusive change management looks like when systems are under strain and certainty is in short supply, reflecting on how leaders can respond to disruption without losing sight of equity, accountability, and long-term vision.
This discussion will consider the human side of change, focusing on how compassion, communication, and attention to lived experience can help organizations move beyond reactive responses toward more thoughtful, system-level transformation.
Dr. Golnaz Golnaraghi
Dr. Golnaz Golnaraghi is leadership scholar, educator, and social impact entrepreneur whose work focuses EDI and intersectional gender equity in organizations and the human and social dimensions of responsible leadership . With more than three decades of experience spanning corporate, higher education, and social innovation, she examines how organizations can design systems of work that advance equity, dignity, and opportunity.
She is the Founder and President of Accelerate Her Future, an organization advancing the career development and leadership of Indigenous, Black and racialized women across Canada. Through research, leadership development, and partnerships across sectors, Golnaz works to translate evidence and lived experience into practical strategies that help organizations build more equitable, inclusive, and high-performing workplaces, an increasingly important pillar of social responsibility and ESG leadership. She has led multiple national, evidence-based research initiatives on career development and male allyship in partnership with funders and organizations, including the Future Skills Centre and UN Global Compact Network Canada.
Her scholarship examines diversity discourse, gender equity, and intersectionality in organizations, with particular attention to how power, privilege, and dominant narratives shape inclusion and opportunity at work. She has published in peer‑reviewed journals and edited volumes including the International Journal of Cross‑Cultural Management, and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, and has presented her research at international conferences including the Academy of Management. Her work also includes a longitudinal study examining how Canada’s Best Diversity Employers construct public diversity narratives and the business and moral case for diversity, equity, and inclusion on their corporate websites across two periods, 2013 and 2023. The first phase of this research was published in the Oxford Handbook of Diversity in Organizations (2017), and the second phase was presented at the British Academy of Management conference (2025). Golnaz has been recognized as a Globe and Mail Report on Business Changemaker.
Dr. Shilpa Tiwari
Dr. Tiwari is a sustainability and social impact executive with over fifteen years of progressive leadership experience spanning financial services, extractives, development, food systems, and communications.
Her work focuses on integrating sustainability strategy, impact measurement, and inclusive practices across complex organizations and multi-stakeholder environments.
Most recently, she has combined advisory work with social entrepreneurship as the founder of No Women No Spice, a fair-trade enterprise partnering with women farmers in Tanzania to build climate-resilient value chains. She also designs and delivers practitioner-focused training for mid-career professionals, boards, and mission-driven organizations.
Dr. Tiwari holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MES in Environmental Policy from York University, and a BSc in Environmental Science from Queen’s University.
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Examining Language and Communication Techniques for a More Hopeful Future
In the middle of an omnicrisis, how does one stay hopeful enough to take effective action? Having any hope can seem naive in times like these, amid wars, worsening climate disaster, populist autocracies on the rise, technology that destabilizes jobs and lives, and on and on.
But hope is always available, if you know how to find it. In conversation with strategist and writer Malcolm Gilderdale, communication scientist, educator, and author Dr. Haesun Moon will explain how better conversations can make us more hopeful and more effective, and practical methods for our own lives. Dr. Moon believes a deeper understanding of language and cognition can help us reshape our understanding of what’s possible in our own lives, in our personal relationships, and in our communities more broadly.
Through pragmatic, practical explanations (and her trademark sense of humour), Dr. Moon will help us shift our orientation toward hopefulness and find a way forward to what she calls “the preferred future.”
Dr. Haesun Moon
Haesun Moon, Ph.D., is a communication scientist, an educator, and author of Coaching A to Z: The Extraordinary Use of Ordinary Words and several collaborative books, including Thriving Women, Thriving World, and Foundations of Brief Coaching, a short handbook for professional coaches.
Haesun received her Ph.D. in Adult Education and Community Development from University of Toronto. She cares about people experiencing better conversations at home and at work – and she does that by training, coaching, and consulting. She believes that conversations can change the world, and she defines this process as hosting dialogic conditions in which people participate to imagineer and perform their preferred change. Her academic and professional research in coaching dialogues and pedagogy from the University of Toronto led to development of a simple coaching model, Dialogic Orientation Quadrant (DOQ).
The DOQ has transformed the way people coach and learn coaching worldwide. Haesun teaches Brief Coaching at the University of Toronto and serves as Executive Director at the Canadian Centre for Brief Coaching, and Principal at The Human Learning Institute. When not writing, Haesun enjoys filmmaking, carpentry, and golf. Haesun is a lover of early mornings, naps, good coffee, and fine pens with fine nibs, currently residing in Toronto with her mother and two exceptionally affectionate and independent dogs. You can visit her online at www.briefcoaching.ca and www.coachingatoz.com
Malcolm Gilderdale
Malcolm Gilderdale is a marketing strategist, writer, and thinker, currently working at Monks, where he works with tech companies, restaurant brands, financial institutions, and small businesses to craft experiences, digital platforms, and campaigns that connect with people. He’s worked with some of the world’s biggest companies, including Meta, Amazon, NVIDIA, WhatsApp, the Smithsonian and many more, and also crafted strategies, editorial, and digital platforms for major Canadian institutions including the CBC, the Toronto International Film Festival, Air Canada, the Hudson’s Bay Company and others.
Previous Talks
Rethinking creativity, work, and agency in the age of generative artificial intelligence
We are living through a moment where tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and GitHub Copilot are no longer futuristic curiosities, they are genuine collaborators in our writing, coding, designing, and decision-making. This talk steps back from the hype to ask a more human question: what happens to creativity, work, and personal agency when machines can generate ideas, images, and solutions at scale?
In conversation with Anshula Chowdhury, Lead Instructor, Social Impact Measurement Professional Certificate, technology and privacy lawyer Maleeha Akhtar will explore how these systems blur lines we once took for granted between author and tool, employee and employer, automation and autonomy. We’ll consider what it means to create in an age of algorithmic assistance, how power shifts when data becomes raw material for intelligence, and how law can protect not just innovation, but dignity, fairness, and meaningful human choice.
Ultimately, this session is about ensuring that as AI grows more capable, we remain intentional about the kind of society, and the kind of human role within it, we want to build.
Maleeha Akhtar
Maleeha Akhtar is a technology and privacy legal counsel at Volkswagen Group of Canada, where she navigates the complex intersection of law, technology, and ethics. Over the past decade, she’s advised organizations from Manulife to high-growth tech companies on AI governance, privacy law, and responsible technology deployment. Her career began at the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic, contributing to Supreme Court interventions on digital rights and researching the legal implications of technology.
Anshula Chowdhury
Anshula Chowdhury is a technology founder and full-stack AI builder who designs production systems for complex, regulated environments where getting it wrong has real consequences. With 14 years of experience leading companies, raising capital, and shipping ML and data infrastructure tools, her work focuses on Ethical AI (including research on bias detection in Knowledge Augmented Generation architectures), social impact measurement, and innovation policy. She approaches AI with both technical depth and healthy skepticism, using it as a rigorous professional tool rather than unquestioned automation. Anshula is the Lead Instructor for the Social Impact Professional Certificate at the University of St. Michael’s College Continuing Education and also teaches and researches at the University of Toronto, while writing a science fiction trilogy exploring consciousness, colonialism, and AI.
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