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Caroline Casey
Founder of Valuable500, Global Advocate for Inclusion & Motivational Speaker
Caroline Casey
Founder of Valuable500, Global Advocate for Inclusion & Motivational Speaker
Biography
Caroline Casey, founder of Valuable500, operates at the frontier of Diversity and Inclusion (D&I). She is frequently invited to contribute at ground-breaking events such DAVOS World Economic Forum, One Young World, Skull etc. Comfortably straddling the worlds of business and activism, she has the ear of business and access to the world’s largest community of CEOs. Her aim is to help shape a society where everyone is free to be fully themselves, regardless of ability or disability. To achieve this, Caroline has harnessed the skills and vision of over 400 global business leaders whose companies are making the biggest financial investment into disability in the world.
Caroline has a unique ability to bring together the intersection of head and heart. Whether she is being interviewed or working as a panelist or speaker at an event, she moves people to accept themselves and others, make positive changes, realize their own value, and be vulnerable and authentic. Her passion and drive are rooted in her personal story about growing up and trying to fit in as a legally blind person. As a former management consultant and daughter of a successful entrepreneur, Caroline recognized the power of business to make change happen. Today her work is catalyzing business leaders to take full ownership of their inclusion agenda and to shed the constraints that stop inclusion from becoming a reality.
Caroline is an Ashoka Fellow and Eisenhower Fellow and also a past advisor for the Clinton Global Initiative, and Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Some of the audiences Caroline as addressed globally include MDRT, Microsoft, Accenture, Stryker, Salesforce, EY, Malmo University, University of Regina, Rolls Royce and many others.
Speaker Videos
TEDTalk: Looking Past Limits
I Believe In You, Because You Believe It's Possible
Speech Topics
Diversity & Inclusion: The One-Dimensional Approach is Gone
The D&I agenda is growing and evolving, fast. Caroline has the ear of the biggest CEO community in the world and leverages that knowledge to highlight and share the complexities and challenges of keeping up with those changes. The reality is that the one-dimensional approach is gone. Today, the scene is being disrupted by intersectionality and multi-dimensionality; it’s about inclusion, equity, diversity, belonging, and more.
In this talk, Caroline paints a vivid picture of what businesses need to look out for and what potential directions they might take. Just as she has done with audiences at Davos, One Young World, Clinton Initiative and others, she inspires people to review how, as both individuals and organizations, we can do better.
Motivational: It's the Cracks Where the Light Gets In. There is No Hollywood Ending.
Leonard Cohen’s lyric ‘It's the cracks where the light gets in’ is Caroline’s mantra to help others see the good in all of their flaws. In this talk, Caroline shares her life story to help illustrate how every experience can lead to something better if only you allow it. She calls it ‘phosphorescence thinking’—the idea that you need the black to see the light.
Exploring the power of pain and difficulty to drive personal and professional growth, she stimulates audiences to connect with themselves and believe that they have every right to be their authentic selves. She offers a new take on ‘resilience’, showing us how each event that occurs in life changes you and that you can use those changes, however small, to move forward with the confidence to adapt—and develop what she calls ‘sustainable grit’.
Leadership: The Relationship Between Authentic Leadership and Self-Acceptance
Authenticity and trust are more important than ever for leaders today. Caroline believes you cannot speak to authenticity if you do not accept who you are—the shadow and the light. In this empowering talk, she paints a picture of leadership that is all about taking personal responsibility in order to engender greater trust, loyalty and buy-in. Using her own story as an example, she shares how her own empathy, vision, decision-making and ability to energize others improved remarkably once she consciously embarked on the journey to accepting herself.
Leaders, she argues, need to acknowledge what Caroline calls ‘the power of grey’—the idea that most of us, most of the time, operate somewhere in between polarities of good and bad, success and failure. Being at either extreme is very limiting.
In the talk, Caroline explores some of the key elements of self-acceptance and how they made her a better leader:
• Cultivating Self-Compassion,
• Letting Go of Guilt ,
• Learning to Forgive Ourselves.
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