Brave Space Leadership Conference

The Brave Space Leadership Conference is a one-day immersive gathering designed to help leaders cultivate the courage, creativity, self-awareness and emotional intelligence needed to foster inclusive workplaces and communities. Through interactive workshops, storytelling, and arts-based reflection, participants explore how to lead with authenticity, empathy, and accountability in spaces where difference and discomfort coexist.

Participants will:

1. Practice Brave Space principles that center radical empathy, curiosity, and courage over comfort.
2. Use the arts as a reflective tool to identify leadership areas of low awareness and build creative strategies for change.
3. Foster community among diverse leaders who are committed to transforming their organizations into spaces of belonging and accountability.
   

Visit the conference website: https://www.mosaiceducationnetwork.com/bslc

Info: Start the day with a shared breakfast and informal check-in time designed to help participants arrive fully, connect with others, and transition from daily demands into a reflective learning space.

Info: The Welcome formally opens the Brave Space Leadership Conference by setting intentions, outlining the day’s flow, and establishing shared community agreements. Participants will be introduced to the Brave Space framework and invited into a learning environment rooted in courage, care, reflection, and collective responsibility.

Info: Dr. Melissa Crum connects emotional validation to workplace culture transformation. Through personal stories, she shows how self-abandonment begins early—and follows us into leadership. At work, it appears as people-pleasing, weak boundaries, silence in the face of misalignment, and chasing approval over purpose. Cultures built on self-abandonment cannot sustain trust or equity. When leaders stop self-abandoning, they stop modeling it—and culture change becomes possible.

Info: This interactive, arts-based session invites participants to explore leadership through music, storytelling, and collective reflection. In this 30-minute workshop, local hip-hop artist Chris Hearns performs an original song centered on bravery, resilience, and overcoming challenges. Participants receive the song’s lyrics and engage in guided table conversations, identifying lines that resonate with their personal leadership journeys. Together, groups unpack themes of courage, rejection, identity, and perseverance—connecting the emotional truths in the music to real workplace dynamics.

Info: Table facilitators lead small group conversations leadership goals over lunch.

Info: This workshop invites leaders into the galleries to examine how identity, assumptions, and everyday leadership practices shape workplace systems and culture. Grounded in Brave Space principles and critical reflection, participants will explore how power, race, gender, and unexamined beliefs become embedded in policies, norms, and behaviors. Leaders will work in small groups with an art educator, using select artworks in the galleries as reflective tools to surface insight, practice accountability, and clarify impact versus intent.

Info: In this powerful keynote, Nona Jones invites leaders to reconsider rejection not as a setback, but as a profound teacher. Drawing from her personal journey, Nona shares how moments that could have derailed her instead became catalysts for purpose, resilience, and leadership clarity. The session will conclude with a live Q&A, offering participants space to engage, reflect, and connect the message to their own leadership journeys.

Info: The conference concludes with a reflective closing and book signing, offering participants space to integrate the day’s insights and honor the collective journey.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Columbus Museum of Art, 480 East Broad Street, Columbus, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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