Join us for a one of kind event put together in partnership by The Center for Intentional Leadership and Social Media Charlotte. We’ve brought together four extraordinary, nationally-recognized local professionals (more info below) to discuss how their one idea ended up impacting their community, workplace, or environment in a major way.

We want to help innovative Charlotte professionals THINK BIG. We all have ideas of how to make a difference, but how do we actually go about doing that? How do we get started? Is it through Social Media? Is it networking or marketing? Does it take big bucks to make a game-changing play happen? Can we do it in our current job or in a large corporation? We put together four people who collectively have done it in almost every environment and situation.

This will be a combination of a panel, a forum, and an engaged audience discussion. Not only are you getting an evening of connecting and networking with some of the premier leaders in the Charlotte community, but you’ll also leave inspired to move your idea to impact. We envision a community where we all shift our passion into a game-changing play.

Our Panel consists of Caitlin Boyle, Rye Barcott, Bridget B. Sullivan, and Manoj Govindan:

Caitlin Boyle is a professional blogger, motivational speaker, and author of the books Operation Beautiful: Transforming the Way You See Yourself One Post-It Note at a Time; Operation Beautiful: One Note at a Time; and Healthy Tipping Point: A Powerful Program for a Stronger, Happier You. Her work has been featured on The Today Show and The Oprah Winfrey Network, as well as in magazines such as Glamour, Fitness, SELF, and Women's Day. She also helps her husband run the Holistic Wellness Center of Charlotte.

Rye Barcott is author of It Happened on the Way to War, a bestselling memoir about serving in the U.S. Marines while co-founding Carolina For Kibera, a non-governmental organization that develops leaders and prevents violence in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, where he was a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow. He is a TED Fellow and works as a special adviser to the Chairman and CEO of Duke Energy. In 2012, President Obama appointed him as a representative of the veteran community to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He was also named an ABC World News Person of the Year in 2006.

Bridget B. Sullivan is an event industry veteran and passionate radio show producer and host. Bridget has 25+ years of event industry experience, 6 years of community radio experience as an audio editor, producer and on air host, and has successfully managed a marketing and event management business for the last 20+ years. She has served as an independent contractor for three Olympic Games, and has produced and directed conferences that have been staged in Seoul, Korea, Thailand, Berlin, Paris, and stateside in San Francisco, Dallas, and Detroit just to name a few. In 2010, Bridget launched Ignite Charlotte, an event that features 5 minute talks by community members, and currently serves as the executive producer. Her labor of love since 2012 has been Voices From The Community, a two hour jazz and international music show that can be heard on iTunes, Soundcloud, MixCloud and of course via VoicesFromTheCommunity dot co.

Manoj Govindan is the Marketing and Strategic Partnership Executive for Technology Innovation Portfolio (TIP) at Bank of America (BAC) where he straddles technology r&d and business development through strategic alliances with investors, entrepreneurs and universities. Prior to that he was an active management and m&a consultant with such organizations as Wachovia, Duke Energy, Merrill Lynch, Ford, MetLife, Starbucks, Safeway and the State of New Mexico. He received his Bachelors in Engineering (Comp Sc.) from the Karnatak University of India and an Executive Fellows’ M.B.A. in crisis management from The Oakland Institute, CA.

Community: Committee member, Regional IT Talent Taskforce; Design committee member, Cornerstone Investment fund; Board member, New Leaders for New Schools; Board member, We Serve Again; Board member, WEF’s Charlotte Shapers; Board member, The PPL; Founding Partner, Maximus 113; Secretary, Foundation Ten10.