Fiftyfaces Focus 2025 Pride Special

Brad Baumoel is managing director and Global Head of LGBTQ+ affairs at JPMorgan Chase, a position he assumed in April 2021.  He previously was Portfolio Director for the Chase Digital Platform and prior to that led several large-scale transformative programs and teams across the institution. He was a founding member and prior leader of OPEN Finance NYC, a non-profit LGBT network for the Financial...

Welcome to our fourth Pride series of all time, which is full of personal narratives that will make you smile, may make you cry and will definitely make you think.  Join us as we discuss what allyship really means, share personal experiences across diverging global backgrops for LGBTQ+ rights, and take you into the realms of personal finance, international development and coaching.    Our stories...

Ray Tierney is a cybersecurity specialist who was formerly a paramedic.  Prior to that she was a Security Forces Security Specialist. We chart her path through school and into a series of professions that were explicitly intolerant towards LGBTQ identities and discuss how she was "outed" initially by a polygraph test, which contained particularly intrusive questions. We talk then about her transit...

Ronnie Woo is the chef and owner of The Delicious Cook, an LA-based private chef company that specializes in four-star dining experiences. He is an accomplished chef, television personality, and cookbook author ( Did You Eat Yet? , March 14, 2023) celebrated by his fans and peers alike for his infectious personality, background in dating & relationships, and creative Asian-American cuisine, wh...

Erryca Robicheaux describes herself as shaping the future of Diversity and Inclusion through technology.  She is a certified DEI leader and strategist as well as a Neurodiversity ERG lead.   Erryca grew up in Louisiana in a deeply religious household where attending church multiple times a week was common.  She describes some of the belief system and backdrop to that time, and then how she was “ou...

Dr. Safi Mojidi describes himself as a Point Guard of Cyber and Data Privacy.  He is the Founder and CEO of Hacking the Workforce, which co-creates employment opportunities for QTIPOC to upskill their lives and move from empowered to employed in cybersecurity. He is a Board Member and Director of Partnerships at TransTech Social Enterprises and has had a long career in cybersecurity.   We start wi...

Nathan Ortiz is an Associate DevOps Engineer at Red Door Interactive, based in the San Diego area. He previously was a software engineer at Trainsquare and prior to that was in the US Navy.    Our conversation starts with Nathan’s childhood in which he played a lot of different sports and after which he ultimately pursued a career in the navy. It was there that he found a supportive LGBTQ+ communi...

Vikki Le is currently studying in the medical field and is a Youtube content creator as well as marketing specialist.  She has focused on concept creation for transgender individuals including in the beauty, fashion and modeling industries and has spent time as a counselor to transgender youth.   Vikki grew up in South East Asia, an area which is actually quite accepting around transgenderism.  Sh...

Maggie Lower describes herself as a Pop Culture Enthusiast and Music Lover as well as a CMO and Board Member. She was previously CMO for Hootsuite, a social media management platform where she fostered a collaborative marketing approach. She joined the Board of Directors of Grindr the largest LGBTQIA+ social networking App and has won multiple awards as an LGBTQIA+ advocate and been a keynote spea...

Dru Holmquist is Principal and Head of Client Facing and Wealth Management Consulting Practices at Cutter Associates.  Now based in San Diego, Dru is also the founder of Out in Finance, an industry affiliate group for LGBTQ+ professionals in finance. Our conversation starts with Dru's upbringing in Minnesota, his early married life and how he approached coming out in stages - first in his personal...

Laura LaTourette is a financial planner that describes her practice as one designed to enable LGBTQ+ folx make a plan to simplify their lives to enable them to live authentically and leave a legacy of love. Based on her own 18 acre farm in Dahlonega Georgia,  Laura has been a financial planner for over 20 years and is also a National Resource Center Ambassador for LGBT Elder Issues.  Our conversat...

June is here, and we are delighted to be back with our annual Pride Series, that this year will be a little bit different.  It will be a bit different because although we are launching it in June, we intend to keep adding to the series all year long – because Pride is for life, not just every June. This year – to kick things off, we hear from the Founder of “Out in Finance” about the affinity grou...

Brison Scholar Lee Downing, also known as Dr. Scholar Lee, is an inspirational speaker, spiritual life coach, transformational leader and a leadership consultant based in the Atlanta, Georgia area. As a Black Man of Trans experience, he has unique insights into the challenges of transition and cloaks his guidance in a deep spirituality. "He is the host of the podcasts "The Dr. Scholar Lee Experien...

Chas Manning describes himself as being passionate about people and data. He obtained a degree in manufacturing engineering from Boston University, and has held a series of engineering and operating roles with some twists and turns in between. He lives with his husband Will and two dogs in the Oak Park area outside Chicago and we are in fact, neighbors. Our conversation starts with Chas's childhoo...

Jack Dodd describes himself as a human who talks about mental health. I came across him thanks to a powerful LinkedIn post he made about how boys get sad too, in which he called to normalize expressing emotion, sometimes at work. He is a corporate partnerships lead in the Charity Sector and prior to that worked in recruitment. I asked Jack to join me to talk about the mental health advocacy that i...

Leo Caldwell is an inclusion educator and consultant at Empathy by Design, and an assistant lecturer at Ball State University School of Journalism, where he teaches visual communication courses in the Journalism Department. He also teaches podcasting and strategic social media communication in the graduate program at Drexel University. Our conversation starts with a discussion of Leo's main focus,...

Robyn Grew is Group COO, general counsel and Head of ESG at Man Group as well as Head of Man Group US. Global Head of Legal and Compliance. She has been with the firm for over 12 years. Previously, she worked in a number of different compliance roles and at financial services firms. She lives with her wife in the New York City area and has a college-aged son. For Robyn, questioning authority was a...

Joanne Monck OBE is director of global education and equality, diversity and inclusion at the Believe Foundation. She's an advocate for transgender awareness as well as domestic abuse. She was awarded an OBE for services to Transgender  Equality as a Global LGBT Advocate and Independent Advisor in the 2021 New Year Honours List.   Joanne's story of transition is a searing one - she first tell's Da...

Zander Keig  is a social worker, emotional wellness and personal growth webinar facilitator, mental fitness coach, and social care clinical consultant based in Central Florida.  He is an advocate for mental wellbeing , LGBT veterans, and trans social care, and was named NASW National Social Worker of the Year in 2020 and NASW California Social Worker of the Year in 2018.  Our conversation starts w...

Kate Baur recently started her surgical residency in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has a particular interest in colo-rectal surgery, in particular as anal cancer is a cancer that has a higher incidence in populations such as the LGBTQ+ population.  Since recording her podcast she has not only started her surgical residency but has got married.  Our conversation starts with Kate's upbringing which saw h...

Elizabeth (Liz) Kleinerman is a Fixed Income Portfolio Manager at Wellington Management, based in Boston.  She has worked at Wellington for her entire career, and is Chair of the Advisory Board of the Wellington Foundation as well as a Founder of the firm’s Pride+ Network and a leader of its diversity and inclusion efforts.  She lives with her wife and two sons in the Boston area. Our conversation...

We are delighted to bring you our second Pride Special, in which we celebrate the career journeys of LGBTQ+ professionals around the world.   In this year’s series we speak with a surgeon in training committed to raising awareness of the LBGTQ+ community, a finance industry COO who was once a teenage rebel, a recent recipient of an OBE award for services to the diversity an inclusion, a fixed inco...

The Honorable Judge Victoria Kolakowski, is a judge of the Superior Court of Alameda County, in the Bay Area of California and in November 2010 she was the first Transgender person to be elected a Trial Judge. Judge Kolakowski is a committed advocate for transgender people and makes herself available throughout the United States and internationally for conferences, seminars and interviews acting a...

Perry Zizzi is a Managing Partner at Dentons based in Bucharest, Romania, and he has worked in corporate law since the mid 1990s, when we met as office mates in a midtown Manhattan law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. He is the President, Founder and Board Member of the Romanian Diversity Chamber of Commerce. Our trip down memory lane starts with Perry's childhood in upstate NY where his early fasci...

Oli Shakir-Khalil is an investment director in EM Debt at Fidelity International, based in London. We met at an industry conference where he discussed his role as a mental health ambassador within his firm and the industry and his efforts to amplify the importance of mental health awareness. He is passionate about the need to reinforce listening within organizations and the debunk the myth that th...