The Tom Tom team is thrilled to share some exciting updates to our speaker lineup for this April’s Summit. At our six conferences you’ll find globally recognized creatives and entrepreneurs, changemakers of all types, and industry power players, to boot. We’ve got more than 200 speakers headed our way in fewer than 50 days, so please mark your calendars and get ready to Tom Tom with us.
Notable highlights include Greg Carlock, the architect of the Green New Deal; Andrew Therriault, the first-ever Chief Data Officer for the City of Boston who now manages a team of data scientists working on infrastructure improvements at Facebook; Burning Man cofounder Michael Mikel and Melani Douglass, a leader at the National Museum for Women in the Arts and the great-great granddaughter of abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass; ProPublica reporter Beena Raghavendran; and finally talk will turn to Amazon HQ2 with two of the central architects of Virginia’s deal: VEDP CEO Stephen Moret, Virginia Tech President Timothy Sands.
Scroll through to see more in-depth, conference-by-conference highlights. See you in April!
YOUTH INNOVATION Tuesday, April 9: Last month, we announced that Jaclyn Corin, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (Parkland, Florida) senior who co-founded March for Our Lives, will keynote our Youth Innovation Conference, presented in partnership with UVA’s Curry School of Education and ReinventED Lab. We’re now pleased to add that Corin will stick around to judge our Social Impact Challenge—where students from high schools across the region pitch innovative solutions to society’s most pressing problems—and that she’ll be joined by hometown hero Zyahna Bryant! Bryant is the founder of Charlottesville High School’s Black Student Union and the author of Reclaim. At once a true Charlottesville local and a nationally celebrated community activist, Bryant has been highlighted in The New York Times, The New Yorker Magazine, and Vice News. Learn More.
Wednesday, April 10: For Tom Tom’s core conference, more than sixty speakers are en route to downtown Charlottesville, from as far as San Francisco and as near as UVA. Here’s what’s new: ProPublica reporter Beena Raghavendran will join Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Giles Morris and UVA Media Studies professor Meredith Clark for a conversation about engagement journalism and reporting on equity issues in small cities. Larry Terry, Executive Director of the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at UVA’s Batten School, has signed on to moderate a panel about equitable policing in America’s hometowns, featuring UVA Police Chief Tommye Sutton and Arlington, Massachusetts Police Chief Fred Ryan. Joe Iacobucci, Director of Transit for Sam Schwartz Transportation, which NPR addicts will recognize from this recent episode of Fresh Air, will join our panel on, “How Should Your City Prepare for Autonomous Vehicles?” Speaking of audio, The NewDEAL’s Ryan Coonerty-hosted podcast An Honorable Profession will tape an episode at this very conference, guest-starring Mayor Robyn Tannehill from Oxford, Mississippi and Mayor Andria McClellan from Norfolk, Virginia. Joanne Page of the New York-based Fortune Society and Yulise Waters of Dallas’s Second Chance Community Improvement Program Court (SCIPP) will bolster our “Second Chance City” session, focusing on how cities can best integrate the formerly incarcerated. Lastly (for now!), Zach Markovits, Director of City Progress for What Works Cities, will speak on the transformative power of data for small cities. Learn More.
Wednesday, April 10: Tom Tom’s Renewable Energy Conference is a must-attend industry gathering. Greg Carlock, author of the game-changing A Green New Deal, has confirmed for a fireside chat about emerging business opportunity. Meanwhile, our conference panels are brimming with industry insiders and major decision-makers: Delegate David Toscano of the Virginia General Assembly, David Murray of MDV-SEIA, Virginia’s Deputy Secretary of Commerce Angela Navarro, Andrew Gohn of AWEA, and reporter Elizabeth McGowan of Renewal News are just a fraction of the speakers you’ll meet. Learn More.
Thursday, April 11: Tom Tom’s Creative Ecosystem’s Conference is shaping up to be one for the books. Melani Douglass, who’s a leader at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the founder of the nomadic Family Museum, and the great-great granddaughter of abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, will join us in a conversation led by Monticello’s Gayle Jessup White. Allison Wright, Executive Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, has signed on to moderate our conversation with Appalachian artist and organizer Robert Gipe. Also: Burning Man is coming to Tom Tom! Burning Man cofounder Michael Mikel aka “Danger Ranger” will appear in conversation with the NEA’s Michael Orlove about turning a utopian idea into a global movement. Also on the great-idea front: Lisa Murch of Mural Arts Philadelphia will speak about how the organization became the nation’s largest public art program and one of its most admired.
Thursday, April 11: For the past two years, Tom Tom’s AMLC has sold out, and we don’t expect this year’s results to be any different. For starters, we’re pleased to announce the conference’s first keynote: Andrew Therriault, who was the first-ever Chief Data Officer for the City of Boston, who founded the Democratic National Committee’s data science team, and who now manages a team of data scientists working on infrastructure improvements at Facebook.
Friday, April 12: Tom Tom’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Conference, presented in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation and the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at UVA’s Darden School of Business, is a must for all investors, accelerators, economic developers, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem builders. Darden’s Mike Lennox will lead a session called, “Nation of 100 Austins: How can your city become the next hot metro?” featuring a roundtable of mayors including former Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett. GO Virginia chair John O. “Dubby” Wynne will lead a session on developing a statewide ecosystem, while the Batten Institute’s Director Sean Carr will lead a panel about university-community partnerships. And our Amazon HQ2 session has really heated up: In addition to VEDP CEO Stephen Moret, we have confirmed Virginia Tech President Timothy Sands, Christina Winn from Arlington Economic Development, and Stephanie Landrum from Alexandria Economic Development Partnership for a candid conversation about how our state sealed the deal and how our cities will benefit. Same goes for our session on Opportunity Zones: Erik Johnston, Director of the Virginia Department of Housing and Development; Jeanne Bonds from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond; and Matt Illian, Managing Director of Virginia Impact Investing Forum, are all on deck.
Friday, April 12: Big news for our university student mega-competition: The Gates Foundation’s Henry Hipps, Deputy Director for K-12 Education, is heading to Tom Tom to be a celebrity judge at this year’s Innovators Cup. He’ll be joined by Silicon Valley investor Navin Thukkaram; Karen Jackson, former Secretary of Technology for Virginia; Jason Feifer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and David Hall, partner at Rise of the Rest seed fund. Don’t miss them at the AEIC finals at 2pm.
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