Ask Malia Lazu what she thinks about most American diversity and inclusion efforts and she might give you a blank stare. Why? Where many D & I efforts chase numbers, Malia has spent the past 20 years strategically engaging the connective tissue of community networks to build authentic, lasting diversity initiatives that change both lives and bottom lines.
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A connoisseur culture-creator and King-ian organizer, Malia’s deep, experiential work at the intersection of community, culture, art, politics and business has earned her a reputation as a person who can move mountains and create sustained change.

Her keen understanding of structural inequity and truth-telling insights about race, class, generation and gender, have literally transformed how organizations, and the people who lead them, do their work in the world.
The results speak for themselves:

• ​Through her program MassVote, Malia is credited with forever changing the voting landscape in Boston.
• Her 2004 work with the Young Democrats and culture creators, including Eminem, in eight swing states and California was truly influential on the minority vote turnout for the 2008 election.
• Alongside Grammy award musician and activist Harry Belafonte, Malia created The Gathering for Justice which focused on retraining and relaunching more than 3500 gang members to become stand-up citizens and budding entrepreneurs.
• In 2014, unhappy with how the startup ecosystem was looking past worthy startup entrepreneurs of color, Malia created Accelerate Boston (XclerateBOS), a startup accelerator that has helped launch more than 20 minority-owned businesses across the health, wellness, retail, design and restaurant industries.
• For MGM Hotels & Casinos, Malia created the company’s most successful employee engagement vehicle when she sent 61,000 employees on an implicit bias scavenger hunt around Las Vegas that uncovered the prevalence of white culture in the city

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Malia founded The Urban Labs during her Mel King Fellowship at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. There she developed her ground-breaking  LEXICON™ methodology that pairs corporations with the community partners they need to know in order to recreate themselves for a diverse, Millennial workforce.

Named one of the 50 founders to watch in Essence Magazine, Malia is a political science graduate of Emerson College. She has been profiled on MTV, Showtime, ABC-TV, and Fox News, where she was a commentator for ten years. She sits on The Nation Magazine Editorial Board, the Eastern Bank Board of Incorporators, the Board of the Boston Society of Architects and the Black Economic Council of MA.

HIRE MALIA AT YOUR ORGANIZATION!