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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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 income fund manager, a data junkie, a social worker and many more.