Vanessa Louis-Woolley’s Post

Our last round of new Board Members share a passion for strategic innovation and community engagement. Get to know them! Rachael Greenberg, a seasoned marketer at KPMG, brings a wealth of experience from her work with various high-profile accounts and her leadership in innovation marketing. Vanessa Louis-Woolley, a strategic advisor and brand expert, is dedicated to uncovering and activating powerful brand truths, ensuring organizations stand out and connect deeply with their audiences. James Griffin, leading strategy and operations at Included Health, has a rich background in healthcare consulting, focusing on empathetic patient care and organizational transformation. We know these 3 will help guide MMCO to new and exciting places. Read all about them on our blog and help us welcome them to the Board! https://lnkd.in/ddZySM7U #MMCO20 #MMCO #MindsMatterColorado #PeoplePreparationPossibilities #IgnitePossibility #IgnitePotential #IgniteTheFuture #IgniteOpportunity #MMCOBoardSpotlight #LeadershipInAction #CommunityChampions #InnovatorsAndLeaders

Last week in Denver, Major Futures Senior Partner Janell Moerer hosted an incredible summit that brought together health care leaders, executives, and brilliant minds across administration, AI, nursing, patient care, operations, and finance for an invigorating and wide-ranging discussion on how to best make industry-wide impact here in the United States and around the world. Coming soon: MF Health.

A lot of founders I've been talking to aren't quite sure when or how to engage a brand partner, or even what the problem they're really trying to solve is. I deeply believe brand should always be in support of business, so let's start there. What challenges are you facing as a business? What keeps you up at night as a founder? In the spirit of collaboration and making major changes together, I'm offering up 5 free 1 hour consultations with founders of purpose driven start-ups. Message me with an overview of your business and what challenge you are facing and let's talk about how you can move forward to create major impact.

This has been a fun piece to collab on. Our team has been rethinking how we build brands for the future, and its going to require a new set of tools and a new mindset. So we're playing around with the idea to stop thinking like a traditional Brand Strategist and start thinking like a Brand Anarchist✨. Put simply, this means walking away from rigid, singular frameworks and rulebooks, and instead exploring new models that enable continuous growth and innovation to build with and for culture. https://lnkd.in/gd-DBdWD

A note for anyone hiring freelance creatives with a “MUST HAVE [INDUSTRY] EXPERIENCE” requirement. Why are you limiting your search like this? Creatives who have experience working on ads for adult diapers did not have adult diapers experience at one point, and clearly they picked it up as well as a quality pair of adult diapers!   Hiring for a macaroni & cheese account and only searching for creatives with mac & cheese experience? What you’re likely getting in return is a bunch of leftover ideas that were too cheesy (literally!) for their previous agency. The whole point of hiring creatives is to bring fresh eyes to look at existing problems. I may not have experience on a trash bag account, but I throw things out all the time! I’ve seen a lot of trash in my day, and a lot of it comes from creatives who’ve been stuck working on multiple accounts in the same industry for way too long.

I have a confession. Over the last 4 weeks, I’ve seen many people I respect engage with ideas regarding the Israel - Palestinian crisis that are counter to what I held as fact. This forced me to challenge my beliefs and sources of information. I’ve found my answers but rather than force them on you, I’d invite you to consider a few questions: Can we hold multiple thoughts at the same time such as what hamas did on 10/7 was horrific AND collective punishment is not a plausible response? Can we appreciate that not agreeing with Israeli government policy isn’t antisemitism like not agreeing with Saudi Arabia policy isn’t Islamophobic same as not agreeing with all US government policy isn’t Anti-American? Can we mourn 1,500 Israeli civilians killed, 40 of them being children AND also mourn 9,000 Palestinians, 4,000 of them being children killed? Can we sadden for the 250,000 Israelis displaced AND sadden for the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza who are displaced AND pray for the >1,000 children in gaza trapped under rubble that may or not be still alive? Imagine terrorist leaders were hiding in bunkers below tel-aviv, or New York City, would we condone the demolition of the city resulting in thousands of innocent people dying and calling them “tragedies of the conflict”? Will the annihilation of Gaza lead to more or less sustainable security for Israel and its allies or does it fuel a recruitment to hatred? History confirms media is the strongest form of propaganda during war time, so should we watch news outlets or consider what objective humanitarian organizations such as the UN, WHO, amnesty international and human rights watch are saying about the crisis? If this is a religious conflict, why are religious organizations such as Jewish voices for peace, bat shalom, the Pope and Muslim organizations pleading for a cease fire? Why did 120 countries vote for a ceasefire and only 14 vote against it at the UN? Who are the 14 counties and why did they vote that way? If this conflict is a war against Hamas why have hundreds of Palestinians been killed and thousands jailed outside of Gaza without charges? For my healthcare colleagues that live in acronyms, did you know that in Gaza, Doctors have now added a new acronym to their medical library, WC-NSF - Wounded Child No Surviving Family? If you’ve come this far, I have one more confession. My primary purpose of this post is selfless, an effort to break down tribalism hoping to take some out of hostile outrage and spark critical thinking. Perhaps, this may progress some thought towards peace because it’s this critical thinking that will capture the whole truth, not any one side of the truth. My other purpose however is selfish. I am memorializing my thoughts so if my two young children ask me one day, when they read about this moment in history books, what I did at this time, I can tell them while I felt helpless and afraid, I used every platform I had to call for humanity.