Chief Financial Officer Kristie Davis on Flexibility

“When you’re at a small company, you are building the ship while you’re going down the river in it,” Kristie says. “It's always different. It's always challenging. And that's what I like. I don't like to be bored, and I'm definitely never bored.”

Kurt Merriweather, Vice President of Innovation, on Curiosity

“In order to be a good jazz musician, first you need to be a good musician, but then there are the things that happen spontaneously, the themes that you need to be able to react to,” Kurt says. “That's a powerful metaphor for how we do things.”

Director of People and Culture Katie Gaebel on Belonging

“Once I understand someone’s lived experience or perspective, then what am I going to do with that? I’m going to try and create an environment that welcomes them and make the entire work environment and work culture a place where they feel like they belong,” Katie says.

“If I needed to take a class during work hours, my boss would say, ‘Go to class, just get your work done,’ and I would pop out for a class,” Kristie says. “It made me a harder worker, but at the same time, I didn't have the traditional college experience that some others may have had.”

That pace continued when she returned to school to get her MBA, while continuing to work full time. In her last semester of the program, she was also pregnant with her second child. Unfortunately, the baby decided to upset her mother’s careful schedule. 

“My second child was born during quantitative methods,” Kristie says. “I had my daughter on a Wednesday, and the next Wednesday I was in class. My mom and my grandma, neither one was happy with me, but I needed to pass the class. I had maybe two or three weeks left, and I just needed a ‘C,’ so I wouldn't have to retake the class.”

Looking back, Kristie says she isn’t sure how she was able to accomplish everything, other than being determined to graduate on time. 

The wrong job and the right decision

Her work ethic and determination to succeed paid off when she became the controller at a company in the mid-2000s. Kristie is proud of the achievement, but she is equally proud that she walked away from the job to prioritize her family.

“If you think back 15 years ago, if you only worked 40 hours a week, you weren't a good employee,” she says. “I would leave home in the morning, and my kids would be just getting up to get ready to go to school. When I came home, they would be getting ready for bed.”

The turning point came when Kristie needed time off to care for her older child, who was home with the flu. Instead of sympathy from her all-male team, she was asked why she couldn’t find someone else to watch the sick child. “Then it clicked in my head: these are all men with stay-at-home wives,” she says. “Even if their child had the flu, they could continue to move as normal.”

She understood then, if she continued working for the company, she would be expected to put her professional life first. She wouldn’t have the flexibility she wanted and the work-life balance she needed. “I knew that if I continued along that path, I wouldn't be happy,” Kristie says.

Instead, she quit, ​​vowing that she’d never again take a job that took her away from her children so much. 

Putting family first and the cheer business

Kristie left a job because she put her family first, and she became an entrepreneur for the same reason. One of three co-owners of the Raleigh Elite Diamonds Cheer Gym, Kristie credits her younger daughter for getting her into the business. 

“I did not set out to own my own business,” she says with a smile. “I always tell people, I got suckered.”

More than a decade ago, Kristie’s daughter came to the car after her cheer and tumbling classes, despondent because her coach was planning to quit. The scheduling, paperwork, and other administrative duties had become too much for her. “Mom, you have to help. You’re good at administrative stuff. Please just see what she needs,” Kristie recalls her daughter saying.

After a short conversation with the coach, Kristie agreed to take over the registration and other office duties. That arrangement worked for several years, until the gym outgrew its rented space. With competitions coming up soon, the cheer teams needed a consistent place to practice, so Kristie suggested they buy their own building.

“Six years later, we're still there,” she says. “That's how I got into it. It was not intentional. I didn't cheer. I still ironically don't know a whole lot about cheerleading.” 

Bringing it all together

The cheer gym was a labor of love, but to pay the bills, Kristie held a series of accounting jobs. In March 2013, she joined Donald Thompson’s team at the technology firm I-Cubed, where he was CEO. Kristie was the accounting manager at I-Cubed for a little more than two years, but after the company was sold, the two colleagues parted ways. Then, in 2018, Kristie was invited to a meeting with Donald.

“And Don doesn't meet with people just to meet with people,” she says. Sure enough, during the meeting Donald asked her if she would consider working for him again, this time at Walk West, a digital marketing company where he had recently become CEO. After meeting with the rest of the leadership team, everyone agreed it was a good fit.

“That's how I ended up coming back to work with Don for the second time,” she says. “If you think about it, it makes sense. You gather the people that you already trust and know.”

A few years later, after The Diversity Movement (TDM) separated from Walk West, Kristie followed Donald to the new company. Today, she is once again on the leadership team of a growing business, but the environment couldn’t be more different from her job nearly 20 years ago. At TDM, there is a greater understanding of emotional wellness and support for family priorities. It’s also a small business where everyone’s roles shift in order to accomplish the company’s goals. 

“When you're at a smaller company, you get to touch a lot of different things versus at a large company you typically do one piece all day, every day, and you never really see the complete picture,” Kristie says. “Here, I get to see it all.”

For example, it was her responsibility to find new office space for TDM and attend to the details of outfitting and renovating the space – not a customary task for the head of finance. But the assignment touched every aspect of the business: making sure the space was affordable, ensuring it could accommodate a growth-minded company, and recognizing its potential as an event space that would help create community and bring people together. 

“When you’re at a small company, you are building the ship while you’re going down the river in it,” Kristie says. “It's always different. It's always challenging. And that's what I like. I don't like to be bored, and I'm definitely never bored.”

It pays to be curious and adventurous

Given his early inclinations to dissect household electronics, it’s no surprise that Kurt has a B.S. in electrical engineering from The Ohio State University. But after several years of working as a systems analyst for Procter and Gamble, he surprised a number of people by quitting to pursue an M.B.A. 

“At P&G, there was a training program called P&G College. They put you together with a team, and the goal would be to increase the sales of a brand. I was thinking, ‘How can I change distribution to get more market share? How can I change these different elements of a brand to get into new markets?’ That was really fascinating to me,” Kurt says. “It was way more exciting than trying to figure out how to make things, physically.”

After attending the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, his journey took him to product management in Silicon Valley and then to AOL in the mid 2000s, where he managed business operations for its premium music service, AOL Music Now. That job was also pivotal, as it enabled him to combine his love for music, his fascination with technology, and his talent for business strategy.

“I wanted to follow my passion working more in entertainment-related things,” he says. “That moment at AOL was probably the moment that shifted my ability to do some things that I've done ever since then.” 

One of those things was his subsequent work at Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel. Kurt was responsible for business development at Discovery Digital Media, which included digital properties Discovery.com, TLC.com, AnimalPlanet.com and Discovery News. Among his accomplishments was helping develop technology that enabled viewers to select a moment in the television program they were watching, and in real time, get additional related content on their phones. The innovation resulted in a patent for Kurt and his team.  

“That was a lot of fun, when I was at Discovery,” he says.

In 2013, Kurt and his family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, following his parents and his brother. He joined ReverbNation, first as a senior vice president and then as chief product officer. The web-based platform provides a central site for independent musicians, producers, and venues to collaborate and communicate.  

“My family has been the thread that has moved me along my career,” Kurt says. “A lot of people have chased opportunities, and I've done it the other way around. I've found things around where my family is.”

Along with his corporate endeavors and raising his children, Kurt usually has a side hustle. He launched a fitness and wellness company with his wife, Valerie, in 2004 and a business consulting firm in 2016. These forays into entrepreneurship left him well prepared to help launch The Diversity Movement.

Launching and growing TDM

Also in 2016, Kurt connected with Donald Thompson, and the two started working together later that year at Walk West, a digital marketing agency. In 2019, having put together some professional development courses and projects around multicultural marketing, Donald brought the idea of a course on diversity, equity, and inclusion to the team. Jackie Ferguson wrote the course, “Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox,” and Kurt was responsible for developing business opportunities to sell it.

“I happened to connect with a friend of mine, who was part of a consulting company called Vynamic. She connected us to the team at BAYADA Home Health Care, and that's how BAYADA came to TDM. That's how the business came to be,” he says. “That opportunity was so significant that we were able to jumpstart the business from that.”

Today, Kurt is focused on the future of The Diversity Movement, how it can grow and keep innovating. He approaches those goals from three directions: developing new products, cultivating investors, and speaking to executive teams. 

While new products and investors are obviously essential to growth, conversations with C-suite leaders might seem less so. But DEI strategy can’t be successful without buy-in from the top. Kurt explains how DEI can help executives create better teams, attract new customers, and keep and retain talent. He also outlines how working with diverse suppliers can benefit organizations by driving costs down and accessing new ideas and markets. 

“I spend a lot of time with executives, helping them think about DEI from a different perspective, not only from a belonging perspective, but what's the business reason to do it,” Kurt says. 

“Those messages are important for executives to hear, in addition to messages around allyship and belonging.”

Creating a winning strategy and helping the team

Along with curiosity, teamwork is a refrain that has echoed throughout Kurt’s life, as a jazz musician, a sports enthusiast, and a business leader. 

“Being part of a team – a band or a sports team – the best people understand not only their position but everyone else's and then figure out how they fit into it,” he says.

When things happen in the market, Kurt says, the TDM team needs to react quickly and strategically, so they can serve clients and make sure they have the tools, resources, and guidance they need to be successful. 

“In order to be a good jazz musician, first you need to be a good musician, but then there are the things that happen spontaneously, the themes that you need to be able to react to,” he says. “That's a powerful metaphor for how we do things.” 

And then there's the scoreboard. Kurt admits that he likes to win, whether that’s in sports or in the marketplace. As an example of a recent winning product, he cites Analytics, a data and insights platform that enables client organizations to visualize employee sentiment and engagement according to demographics or business unit. Just like managing any other critical business function, C-Suite leaders can easily see their company’s DEI progress and the areas that need improvement.

“I like solving problems. That's what excites me about anything. I want to figure things out that haven't been figured out before,” Kurt says. “That's the thing that gets me going every day: How do we do this?”

“I don't know how we're going to do it, but we're going to figure it out, because we always do.”

One courageous conversation 

Seven years ago, Katie ran an internship program at Oregon State University for historically marginalized populations: students of color, first-generation students, or those who identify as LGBTQ+. She and Jasmin, a student whose family worked as migrant farm laborers, were driving to a meeting with another professor, and the younger woman was doing most of the talking, asking about Katie’s background and family.

Suddenly, Jasmin paused, took a deep breath, and said, ‘Katie, you know, if you want to build a relationship with someone who comes from a different background than you, you can’t be afraid to ask questions about who they are and where they come from. Why do you feel hesitant to ask those questions?”

“I don't want to say the wrong thing,” Katie replied. “I'm curious, and I want to build that rapport with you, but sometimes, I don't know how to ask the questions.”

“You just have to try,” Jasmine reassured her. “Sometimes you make mistakes, and that's okay, but you have to try.” 

Katie felt as if she had been shaken awake. She had assumed that she was being respectful, giving space for the relationship to develop organically. Instead, by remaining silent, Katie was communicating that she wasn’t interested in her student and their relationship didn't matter.

“I needed to be okay with knowing that I'm going to make mistakes,” Katie says, still marveling at the courage it took for Jasmin to confront her and correct her misconceptions. 

“I'll never forget that car ride,” she says. “Jasmin and I still talk, and I remind her of that moment all the time and how much I learned from her. It was a humbling experience for me.”

Early habits of observation and study

That reluctance to be inquisitive could have come from her own innate introversion, or it might have been a legacy from growing up in a military family that valued privacy. When she was young, her father was a Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter pilot, and the family relocated several times. Katie lived in Borinquen, Puerto Rico; San Diego; and finally, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. Wherever she went, she had to make new friends and figure out where she belonged. 

“As a child, I was pretty shy. Some of that probably came from moving around a lot, but it was also this observation mode – feeling out the new community, the new culture, people who I was with, and how I would be able to navigate these new experiences,” Katie says.

Those early experiences heightened her desire to understand people and why they behaved a certain way. She studied psychology, German, and intercultural studies in college, relishing finding the similarities among people and deepening her realization that everyone wants to be heard, seen, and valued as an individual.

Memorable lessons from travel

As a student, Katie lived for a time in Austria, and the study abroad program was an opportunity to travel widely in Europe. Many of her experiences were “off the beaten path,” and they taught her to be self-sufficient and resilient.

“I was interacting with people on trains. I was asking for directions in the street. I was having to try to speak in Italian or French, and navigate the subway system and the metro,” Katie says. "It brought me out of my comfort zone and taught me a lot about the things that I could do, the things that I was able to accomplish.” 

Her adventures also enabled her to connect with people over food and shared interest in the places she visited. During one memorable excursion, Katie and a friend were visiting Siena, Italy, and stopped to ask an older man for directions. He spoke no English and the two visitors had limited Italian, so instead of offering directions, the man led Katie and her friend to the neighborhood where he grew up and into a restaurant that he loved. 

“Through his eyes and the pride that he had in his own upbringing and his own culture, we got to experience Siena. I’ll never forget that sharing of culture and that connection with another person,” Katie says.

Academic achievement and making a difference

Her experiences traveling in Europe also opened her eyes to issues of equity and inclusion – in particular the barriers to higher education that immigrants must navigate and overcome. These observations informed her dissertation and the research that led to her doctorate in international and comparative education. 

As someone who always wanted to be a professor, the academic achievement was a big milestone. And while Katie enjoyed a lot of what she was able to do, she eventually realized that her impact was limited to the students who took her class, colleagues, and maybe folks who read something she wrote or heard her speak. Katie wanted a wider audience and a bigger sphere of influence. 

Her initial pivot was out of academia and into career readiness and career development. In that role, she was able to talk to hundreds of students about their career journeys. She could also work to remove some of the barriers to success, increase access to opportunities, and increase equity at a school-wide level, not just in her classroom. 

“That's where I became really passionate. I could develop individuals and work with them to amplify their voices. But if I'm not also working on removing those systemic barriers, I'm not doing what I need to do to set them up for success,” Katie says. 

Impact and values at The Diversity Movement

Her desire to remove systemic barriers and help people be successful in their careers inspired her to explore ways to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace. That journey of discovery eventually led her to The Diversity Movement (TDM), which she joined in 2022. 

“I knew I could have a profound impact inside the organization, but also I could translate those internal pieces to our clients. My work would have multiple impacts, because then that would reach their employees, their clients,” Katie says. “That ripple effect in the community would be profound.”

A faithful devotee of the lunchtime power walk, Katie is committed to personal and team wellness. Not content to merely talk about belonging, she has put her values into action. In just a few months at TDM, she has conducted stay interviews, organized a team-building project with a local nonprofit, spoken out about “quiet quitting,” and advised clients about inclusive onboarding procedures. 

“Once I understand someone’s lived experience or perspective, then what am I going to do with that? I’m going to try and create an environment that welcomes them and make the entire work environment and work culture a place where they feel like they belong,” she says.

“We all experience love; we all want to smile; we all want to belong. These are the things that bring us together.”