Women At The Helm 2013
President and CEO, GLAAD
Media virtuoso Sarah Kate Ellis is the brains behind some of our national media brands’ biggest success stories—and she’ll use her wide-ranging experience in her new role, as president and CEO of GLAAD. Her direction and ideas have energized outlets including Real Simple, Vogue, House & Garden, InStyle and New York, and she’s also using those skills to empower our community. As a cochair of OUT at Time, Inc., this outspoken advocate and brilliant communications strategist led programming to spotlight the diversity of the LGBT community and worked to educate the organization’s straight allies on LGBT issues. Throughout her career, she has earned seven MIN awards for marketing innovation, two President’s Awards, and MIN’s Sales Executive Team of the Year award in 2012, and recently served as Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Martini Media. You might also recognize Ellis from the memoir she co-authored with her wife Kristen Ellis-Henderson in 2011, Times Two: Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made, an autobiography about their simultaneous pregnancies and road to motherhood. What’s she up to now? Let’s just say the board of directors of GLAAD didn’t have to look far to find the perfect candidate to serve as their new leader: Ellis will step into the role in January, in GLAAD’s NYC office. Ellis says she’s excited to further cultivate GLAAD’s work in the media and share stories from our community: “I look forward to creating a world where LGBT people and our families have the freedom to joyously—and openly—live a life they love!”
Today, business owners incorporate their beliefs in fairness and equality into their work. Nonprofit directors combine their passion for social justice with managerial prowess. Meet the new wave of out leaders who talk the talk and walk the walk.
JESSICA GONZALEZ
Founder and CEO, InCharged
As a student in advertising design, Jessica Gonzalez became increasingly annoyed with a grievance nearly all of us have faced—her phone was constantly dying. “I was always scouring the halls for an electric outlet to plug in my phone. Then one day that ‘Ah-ha!’ moment came: Why can’t a company sponsor a charging station where I can charge my phone and watch a short ad for the service?” Despite having no engineering background, Gonzalez pursued the idea. She built a cellphone charging station with her bare hands, tested it and sold it before she even had a working unit. Immediately, she moved back home with her parents and took on two jobs to completely self-fund her new technological endeavor. Now, InCharged is set to hit $1,000,000 in revenue in its first year of operations, and holds the potential to become part of the infrastructure of our daily lives, on par with ATMs, GPS systems, smartphones and other once-novel technologies. Gonzalez advises other tech innovators and creative artists in communications to take it one day (and one order) at a time: “You don’t need to have a 50-page business plan and for everything to be perfect. Try to execute the idea and test it out, spending as little money as possible, and if it works, you can grow from there!”
