Meet The Speakers
Check out the incredible lineup of speakers you’ll learn from at the Build Ecosystems, Not Empires™ Summit!
Each speaker is a racialized founder with lived experience growing their own purpose-driven brands while revolutionizing their re-imagining what business can be.
*Please note that not all links will be functional until September 22nd. Stay tuned for more!
Meet Your Summit Host
Gelaine & the team at Founding Possibilities
Hey hey! I'm Gelaine Santiago (she/her). It's pronounced Elaine with a G :)
I’m an award-winning social entrepreneur, speaker, and human-centred growth strategist for justice-driven BIPOC founders. For the past 10 years, I’ve been working at the intersection of entrepreneurship, social justice, and cultural identity.
Previously, I co-founded Cambio & Co. Filipino Jewelry and Sinta & Co. Filipino Weddings, two mission-driven e-commerce brands partnering with artisans in the Philippines. My co-founder and I bootstrapped both into multiple six-figure companies serving customers in 21 countries, created over $1M worth of livelihood for Filipino artisans, and did it primarily through organic and community-led marketing.
Today I’m the Founder and CEO of Founding Possibilities—a growth partner and education studio that helps racialized entrepreneurs scale their online B2C businesses to six figures and beyond, while creating revolutionary wealth for their communities. I’m so excited you’re here!
Adelina Tancioco (she/her)
Founder & CEO of Surrendered Healing
Adelina Tancioco, MSW, is a therapist-trained certified coach, and founder of Surrendered Healing. While her professional credentials ground her work, she most identifies as a vessel of healing. Drawing from intuitive gifts passed down through generations, Adelina integrates ancestry, intuition, and divine guidance to help purpose-driven Women of Color reconnect with their inherent worth and highest calling. She believes that when people remember why they were created, they can build lives and businesses rooted in purpose, abundance, and collective impact. Adelina has delivered presentations for Yelp, UC Berkeley, and has been featured by AAPI Women Lead, UCLA, and the International Conference on Women. As a national and international speaker, she has shared the stage with transformational leader Mary Morrissey, activist Dr. Connie Wun, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen, inspiring audiences to lead with courage, purpose, and spiritual alignment.
Carissa Begonia (she/her)
Founder & CEO CONSCIOUSXCHANGE, Thought Leadership Collective
Carissa Begonia (she/her) is a business consultant and LinkedIn brand strategist, who helps women and BIPOC founders and leaders cultivate their power to make an impact.
She is the founder of CONSCIOUSXCHANGE, an equity-centered consulting company supporting BIPOC entrepreneurs in building sustainable, values-driven businesses.
She is also the co-founder of the Thought Leadership Collective (TLC), where she helps authors land traditional book deals, launch their books to hit bestseller lists, scale their businesses rooted in their book IP, and gain the recognition and respect they deserve.
A 2023 LinkedIn Top Voice, Carissa is known for her work in creating strategic relationships and networks that drive opportunities through her Currencies of Power framework—Authority, Visibility, Access, Influence, and Income.
Her work sits at the intersection of thought leadership, community, and economic empowerment, helping underrepresented leaders move from being the “first, only, or other” in the room to becoming the ones shaping it.
Crystal "Too Geek'd" Pope (she/they)
CEO & Visibility Strategist
Crystal "Too Geek'd" Pope is a Visibility Strategist who helps service-based entrepreneurs, especially wellness practitioners and guides, get known for their work without burning out or oversharing.
After years of watching brilliant visionaries stay hidden because traditional marketing felt draining and inauthentic, Crystal created the Easeful Visibility approach: a way to build sustainable visibility that matches how you naturally communicate and connect.
Through her signature S.T.A.R. Framework and personalized visibility strategies, she's helped clients move from behind-the-scenes to confidently visible, landing podcast features, speaking opportunities, and dream clients, all without becoming content machines.
Crystal believes visibility doesn't have to be loud to be effective. It just has to align with your energy and goals.
When she's not helping clients get seen on their terms, you can find her exploring San Diego with her family or geeking out over fashion tech.
Dani a.k.a. Stella Gold (they/them)
Wealth Coach & Death Doula
My name is Dani (aka Stella Gold), and I am a wealth coach, artist, and death doula for people who care about leaving this world better than they were born into it. I am the founder of My Gold Standard, a believer in ancestral healing, liberation from all oppressive systems, and collective care.
My Gold Standard's work is a blend of wealth and business coaching, financial literacy education, grief, death, and end of life planning, and spirituality. I believe in using business and financial literacy as an ecosystem for financial solidarity for ourselves AND the collective.
What I am truly about? Resourcing ourselves & the collective in creating a more just and liberated world, and rebirthing a new way forward.
Gelaine Santiago (she/her)
Social Entrepreneur, Speaker & Growth Partner For BIPOC Entrepreneurs at Founding Possibilities
Gelaine Santiago is an award-winning entrepreneur, speaker, and business coach for purpose-driven BIPOC founders. As the Founder and CEO of Founding Possibilities—a growth and education studio—she helps racialized entrepreneurs scale their B2C businesses to six figures and beyond while building generational wealth for their communities.
She teaches community-driven marketing, authentic leadership, and sustainable growth strategies that balance profit, performance, and purpose. Previously, Gelaine co-founded Cambio & Co. and Sinta & Co., two mission-driven e-commerce brands partnering with artisans in the Philippines. She bootstrapped both into multiple six-figure companies serving customers in 21 countries, powered primarily through organic and community-led marketing.
Her work has been featured in Forbes, CBC, Cosmopolitan, Huffington Post, and Rappler, and she was named one of RBC’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrants in 2019. Today, she partners with early-stage and scaling founders who want to grow their businesses while staying true to their identities and values.
Karolyn Wong (she/they)
Holistic Life Coach, Speaker, & Breathwork Facilitator
Karolyn Wong is a Holistic Life Coach + Breathwork Facilitator who supports Women of Color + LGBTQ+ People of Color through 1-on-1 & Group Coaching to come back home to the safety of your own bodies, to honor your true selves, needs, and desires, so that you can live and lead most authentically and confidently as yourself and create a life and community you truly love and deserve!
Karolyn is trained in facilitating meditation, breathwork, and chakra alignment to help people live in more aligned and intuitive ways by accessing their ancestral wisdom and intuition.
Karolyn offers talks at the intersection of healing and social justice, and has been the keynote speaker for the University of California Davis’ Conference on Mental Health and spoken for various organizations including Pinterest and the National Association of Asian American Professionals.
Karolyn is a Queer Chinese American Woman from Oakland, California, unceded Ohlone Land.
Kathy Kwon (she/her)
Brand & Website Designer
Kathy Kwon is the creative strategist and brand + web designer behind Bright Matters Studio. Often the challenge is that you can’t see your own brilliance from inside — and that’s where she comes in. Over a decade in creative — from visual storytelling for brands like MINI, Vice, and Red Bull, to six years designing brands and websites exclusively for visionary small businesses — has taught her that powerful brands come from strategy-first design. As one of the select experts inside Marie Forleo’s B-School, Kathy helps founders building toward their first six figures finally build websites that create traction, so they can confidently showcase their brilliance.
Khryzza Kelley (she/her)
Founder & CEO
Khryzza Kelley is an award‑winning multipreneur, 2026 Inspire 100 Awardee, 2025 eWomenNetwork Emerging Leader of the Year and 2024 ABAOC Small Business of the Year, and the founder of two purpose‑driven companies, CoWorq and On Fridays, We Scale. In just two years, she 10x’d profit, 42x’d her client base, and grew her team from 3 to 170, proving that small businesses can truly scale revenue, reach, and jobs created without VC money, paid ads, or underpaying their people. A former Fortune 500 leadership development professional turned small‑business scaling expert, Khryzza is the go‑to strategist for women founders who want to 10x with intention. Through her Purpose to Profit Framework and Small Business Scaling System, she helps entrepreneurs build companies that scale pro.
Meenadchi (she/her)
Somatic Healing Practitioner
Meenadchi is a somatic practitioner, educator, and facilitator working at the intersections of complex trauma, crisis stabilization, and empathic communication. She is the author of Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication (DNVC) — a workbook and framework that builds on the foundational work of Dr. Marshall Rosenberg while acknowledging systemic oppression, individual and collective trauma, and real-world power dynamics. She also works with Family Constellation Therapy, a somatic modality focused on clearing intergenerational trauma from the nervous system. As a faculty member of the Trauma of Money, she supports social changemakers in identifying and transforming inherited patterns around money, wealth, and survival — helping create more grounded, values-aligned relationships to resources. Her work helps individuals, teams, and organizations communicate more clearly, navigate conflict with greater awareness, and build the relational capacity needed to do their best work together.
Miriam Buttu (she/her)
Business Coach & Speaker
Miriam Buttu is a business coach and speaker who helps equity-driven leaders see their struggles as systemic patterns, not personal failures. She spent over 20 years as a nonprofit executive, working inside systems that weren't built for her as a Palestinian woman, and knows firsthand what it costs to shapeshift, overperform, and mistake survival for success. That experience became the foundation of her work: helping racialized and social impact leaders separate what the system created from what they've internalized as their own shortcomings, so they can build businesses and lives rooted in their own values instead.
Paloma B. Concordia (she/her)
Publicist, Founder & CEO of PapaLoDown Agency
Paloma B. Concordia (She/her) is a first generation Filipina and Spanish American, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She founded the PapaLoDown Agency in 2009, a boutique public relations company specializing in a client base of entrepreneurs and community organizations in the arts, culture, and community spaces.
teresa purugganan (she/they)
Founder & Holistic Systems Strategist
teresa purugganan is a queer, neurodivine holistic systems strategist, poet-writer, mama, and project doula who uses astrology, ancestral remembrance, and an anti-productivity lens to support women & femme of culture creatives, entrepreneurs, writers, witches with bringing their visions onto the internet or in some physical form (a book, a business, a home).
She runs creating in kapwa, a digital studio & collective dedicated to supporting queer, WOC creatives, our descendants, and accomplices in co-creating a more just, loving, compassionate world. she also loves jigsaw puzzles, long mealversations, and doodling.
Ashley A. Bernard (she/her)
Founder & Principal Community Strategist, inter alia creative co.
Ashley A. Bernard is a community strategist and the founder of inter alia creative co., a consultancy helping purpose-driven leaders build communities that are sustainable, values-aligned, and designed around real human capacity. The eldest daughter of Haitian immigrants, Ashley left a decade-long career in digital strategy and marketing to build a practice rooted in community, curiosity, freedom, love, growth, and humor.
Her work brings together community strategy, facilitation, member experience, and capacity-conscious design to help founders move beyond audiences that depend entirely on them and toward ecosystems where connection, leadership, and opportunity can be shared.
Drawing from her lived experience as a neurodivergent entrepreneur, Ashley is especially passionate about challenging extractive growth models and creating structures that support both collective impact and the people doing the work. She partners with founders, coaches, and mission-driven organizations to turn scattered networks, ambitious ideas, and founder-dependent knowledge into communities built with care.
Lana Kristine Flores-Jelenjev (she/her)
Founder - Neurodiversity Foundation/ Refugia
Lana Jelenjev is a healing-centered leadership guide, facilitator, and community alchemist whose work weaves neurodiversity, somatics, trauma-informed care, Filipino Indigenous Psychology, and decolonial futures. She is the founder of Refugia, a digital sanctuary for healing, resilience, and transformative learning, and co-founder of the Neurodiversity Foundation, where she supports leaders, educators, and changemakers in creating ecosystems rooted in belonging, relational attunement, and healing. Lana’s work bridges personal growth and systemic change, with a deep commitment to care, collaboration, and collective well-being. She supports individuals and communities in making sense of complexity through stories, reflection, and embodied practices. Her work draws on Filipino Indigenous psychology (kapwa and pakikiramdam), healing-centered frameworks, and relational practices to help people reconnect with themselves, each other, and the wider web of life. Her writing and facilitation create gentle yet powerful pathways toward belonging, repair, and regenerative futures.
Melinda Jackson (she/they)
Founder & Principal
Melinda is a Black, queer, nonbinary, neuro-sparkly wealth re-distribution advisor and social impact strategist with over 15 years of experience in the social change sector. Their work empowers entrepreneurs to fund the change they want to see by helping them create strategic and sustainable wealth re-distribution ecosystems in their businesses. Having worked with some of the biggest Grammy award winning artists and producers in the entertainment industry as a trusted impact advisor and project manager, Mel is expanding their practice to center revolutionary entrepreneurs, who they truly believe are advantageously positioned to become the financial backbone of liberation movements and grassroots change-making work. They are the Founder & Principal Advisor at the Rooted Firm and are fiercely dedicated to supporting work that will help us create a world order rooted in the inherent dignity of all beings.
Nadia De Ala (she/her)
Leadership & Negotiation Coach, Creative Entrepreneur & Founder
Nadia De Ala is an international leadership and negotiation strategist, coach, speaker, and writer. She helps BIPOC entrepreneurs, leaders, and changemakers build careers and businesses that create more income, freedom, and fulfillment by reimagining success without burnout, hustle culture, or abandoning their values. Her work integrates identity, leadership, negotiation, voice activation, nervous system awareness, and sustainable growth to help clients make aligned decisions, navigate risk and conflict, expand their visibility, and lead with greater confidence and authenticity.
For nearly a decade, Nadia has coached and consulted thousands of leaders across industries, and her work has been featured in CNBC, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, The New York Times (Kids), The Muse, and Fast Company. A queer Filipina and daughter of immigrants now based in Oaxaca, Mexico, Nadia is on a mission to help close the intersectional pay, leadership, and joy gap.
Sheena Dennise Ewan (she/they)
Founder & Strategic Sensitivity Advisor
Sheena Ewan centers her work on radical acceptance, guiding audiences through grief, mental health, and emotional resilience via keynote speaking and facilitation. She specifically supports Black women and femmes who have survived trauma, helping them reclaim self-trust and transform powerlessness into strength.
Sheena integrates universal spirituality like elemental wisdom, astrology, energy or somatic work and sacred ceremony to offer practical tools for grounding and personal transformation.
As an advocate for economic empowerment within marginalized communities, she assists visionary founders and change-makers in aligning spiritual practice with sustainable economic strategy through her platform, SheenaDennise.com.
Seven years ago, Sheena founded OnePeopleTO, a wellness collective committed to providing decolonized, accessible, and culturally meaningful mental health and spiritual care.
This summit was made possible by our platform sponsor Fern CRM
🌿Fern CRM is the ethical all-in-one business tool for brands that care about people, profits, and the planet.
Ethically priced to save you money AND we donate 5% of every payment to social and environmental causes.
So you can feel good about where your money goes, without sacrificing performance.
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LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The seed of Founding Possibilities was first planted in Tkarón:tó, known as the “Dish with One Spoon” territory, a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas of the Credit, and the Haudenosaunee to share and care for the land. For thousands of years, it has also been the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and is now home to many First Nation, Inuit and Métis communities.
Today, our community extends globally across oceans. We share with you this statement in solidarity with all displaced people as we hold each other in the complexity of diaspora experience. And we claim our responsibility to work in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples and across racial lines in the struggle for our collective liberation.
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