Hear us now: Racial Equity in the Workplace

Keecha Harris is president and CEO of Keecha Harris and Associates, Inc (KHA), a US Small Business Administration 8(a) certified firm. KHA leads organizational development, project management, and evaluation projects for publicly and privately funded efforts. The firm has worked with grantmaking organizations with assets exceeding $340 billion. Among current efforts, Dr. Harris balances a portfolio that includes environmental, reproductive, economic mobility, and leadership development projects. Clients include the Robert Wood Johnson, AARP, William and Flora Hewlett, Schmidt Family, Bill and Melinda Gates, Open Society, and Energy foundations as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NorthFace and Wells Fargo. Her writing has been published in The Chronicle of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Quarterly. She is active on LinkedIN with nearly 4000 followers. Dr Harris is a distinguished alumna of both Iowa State University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, from which she was awarded each institution's highest awards. She serves on the board of directors of Orchid Capital Collective and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation.

Ali Webb’s first job out of college was as a reporter for a small newspaper in Texas. Her second job, however, was press secretary to the Mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, for seven years. Ali was the first female and youngest person to ever hold the position of press secretary in Los Angeles. She was subsequently appointed by President Bill Clinton to head Communications at the United States Department of Agriculture. Later, she served as Communications Director for The Nature Conservancy and as political director for the League of Conservation Voters.

For 19 years, she worked at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, one of the largest U.S. charitable foundations, where her last role was as Director of Michigan Programming, leading a team of 21 people and an annual grantmaking budget of $75 million. She now heads Ali Webb Strategies, a consulting firm that advises leaders and advances strategies that help organizations bridge the gap between expectations and outcomes using a racial equity lens. One of her most recent clients was the Constitutional Court of Kosovo, where she assisted with their organizational development.

Dr. Webb received her BA in Journalism from Stanford University and her MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2005, she earned her Ph.D. in Mass Media from Michigan State University.  

​She is currently a lecturer at the Nonprofit Management program at the School of Professional Studies at Columbia University. She also teaches in a new PhD program at the Lilly Family Foundation School, Indiana University. She has multiple articles published in the Encyclopedia of Public Relations and is also published in NonProfit Quarterly with articles including: How to Conduct Racial Equity Audits, What’s Required to Diversify Big Green, and Strategic Philantropy Gets a Wakeup Call. She has also written on team building in philanthropy for The Foundation Review.