Power Lunch With Remarkable Filipina Women! (Aug. 18, 2006)

March 20 , 2007 - New York

March 8 , 2007 - San Francisco

Aug. 18, 2005 - San Francisco

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Celebrating Filipina Women in America, one of a series of events honoring 100 years of Filipino achievements and contributions to American business and society.

 

The Filipina Women's Network warmly invites you to a lively and thought-provoking discussion of being Filipina in the American workplace: bi-culturalism, career barriers and opportunities, personal insights of getting to their chosen field and why Filipina women are leading the way.  Panel speakers are:

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SPEAKER BIOS

HENNI JAY P. ESPINOSA has been in the media industry for over 6 years now.She has worked as reporter and producer for GMA Channel 7, The Filipino Channel and CNN International.She is now the editor-in-chief of the Kababayan Edition, the only weekly Filipino community magazine published in the San Francisco Bay Area.

JUNE FRANCES PARINA has worked in pubic relations for the past eight years specializing in media relations for venture capital and financial services firms. Currently she heads the venture capital accounts at SparkPR, a San-Francisco based boutique technology public relations group. Having built strong relationships with key editors and reporters at top business and VC media outlets, she has placed her clients in feature stories in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes and BusinessWeek, among others. Prior to that she worked for six years at The Blueshirt Group, an investor relations (IR) and financial communications boutique where she ran financial media and investor relations for its venture capital, private equity, investment banking, and financial
services clients. Prior to Blueshirt she spent two years at Financial Relations Board working with leading Internet, e-commerce, and telecom companies. Prior to FRB she spent two years in Augsburg, Germany working as a Business English teacher.

For the past two years June has served on the board of directors at Bindlestiff Studio, a San Francisco-based Filipino-American theater
where she co-chairs the public relations and community outreach committee. When she's not evangelizing Bindlestiff, she's spending time with her new husband, Peter.

June received a dual Bachelor of Arts in German and Sociology from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

JOCELYN VISTAN began her career in the health care field as a Reproductive Health Specialist at Planned Parenthood, performing HIV and pregnancy options counseling for teens and women. Her experience and passion for women's health led her to explore leadership roles as Center Manager for the Daly City clinic and eventually as the Planned Parenthood Regional Director for San Francisco and San Mateo Counties. After seven years in the nonprofit sector, Jocelyne moved on to Kaiser Permanente and became the Member Services Director. In this capacity Jocelyne performed a variety of roles from managing the dispute resolution process to building an Interpreter Services program that provided language services for patients with limited English proficiency. Now as the Health Care Ombudsman/Mediator (HCOM) at the Kaiser Permanente South San Francisco Medical Center, Jocelyne's role is to perform mediations and to ensure communications! continue between both patients and providers after a disappointing medical outcome.

Jocelyne is married to Pru and they have one child, a 6-year old Shih-Tzu named Taiko. Jocelyne is a first generation Filipina.

LINDA ORDONIO-DIXON is a Senior Trial Attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in San Francisco. The EEOC is the federal agency the enforces federal employment civil rights laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA).

During her ten years with the Commission, Ms. Dixon has worked on a wide scope of employment discrimination cases, for example: EEOC v. Stockton Steel - a religious discrimination case which alleged that Muslim employees were prevented from praying during their breaks and were subjected to offensive name calling such as “raghead” and “terrorist” and which settled for 1.1 million dollars; EEOC v. Harris Farms - a sexual harassment lawsuit on behalf of a Fresno farm-worker which resulted in a unanimous one million dollar verdict and EEOC v. Saipan Grand Hotel - a sexual harassment lawsuit on behalf of Filipina contract workers in Saipan which settled for $400,000.

Ms. Dixon worked for over a decade as a machinist prior to becoming an attorney. She completed her apprenticeship at Mare Island Naval Shipyard while working on nuclear submarines. When Mare Island closed in the early 1990s, she became the first woman ever to work in a journey-level position at the U.S. Mint in San Francisco. Her motivation to practice employment discrimination law was sparked by her negative experiences as a woman in a nontraditional trade.

MARISSA AROY's most recent work was producing and doing camera work for “Uneasy Peace,” about Northern Ireland’s peace process for Frontline World. She was post-production supervisor for the 2006
Oscar-nominated documentary short, “Mushroom Club," and worked as associate producer for three years on the HBO America Undercover Series documentary, “Rehab,” which won the Nancy Dickerson Whitehead Award for journalism. In the Philippines she was a segment producer for a local environmental television show and in the Dominican Republic she produced a short documentary about the effects of HIV and AIDS. Her film, “Step Show: Portrait of a Black Fraternity” screened at various film festivals including the New York International Film and Video Festival, The Black Hollywood Film Festival, Black Harvest Film Festival in Chicago, and the Film Arts Festival in San Francisco.

Aroy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College and a Masters degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California, Berkeley. She was the recipient of the Yoshiko Uchida Asian American Writers Fellowship and is involved in the Bay Area Asian American arts scene, working mostly with Bindlestiff Studio. She is a producer of the TV sitcom pilot, “Gun-powder,” which featured performers from Bindlestiff Studio and is currently working on “Filipina Debut Party” and another project about overseas Filipina workers and their families back home in the Philippines. When she’s not making or watching movies, she is an video production instructor at Berkeley City College.

NINI ALVERO has twenty-five years experience in the service of the Philippine Government, serving in various capacities in the Department of Trade and Industry in the fields of economic research, industy and trade policy, export marketing and investment promotion, and bilateral and multilateral government to government relations.

As a Foreign Trade and Investment Service Officer for the past 15 years, she has established a track record in establishing fruitful connections among business individuals and companies between her foreign post of assignment and the home country. She is recognized for her ability at fully developing the potentials of Philippine export products in a given country market, through the conceptualization, planning, organizing and successful implementation of participation in numerous trade promotion activities; as well as bringing in foreign direct investors from her host country by actively engaging in a focused investment promotion program.

She is also known to demonstrate excellent diplomatic skills as top negotiator resulting in the smooth resolution of bilateral and multilateral trade issues affecting the market access of Philippine products into her countries of assignment.

Before her posting as Special Trade Representative and Trade Commissioner for the US Western Region, her foreign assignments included stints in Washington D.C.; Los Angeles; Toronto and Paris.

FWN COUNCIL OF REMARKABLE FILIPINA WOMEN

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A little bit of history about the remarkable concept...

Pierre Wack, a visionary strategist at Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s, popularized the remarkable concept. According to Art Kleiner, author of The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and Forerunners of Corporate Change (1996), the remarkable people concept came from a book called Meetings With Remarkable Men (1950) written by G.I. Gurdjieff, a Russian philosopher/mystic known for future oriented thinking. Gurdjieff defined a remarkable person as having a resourceful mind and a tolerance for different ideas.

Wack meant something quite different. He introduced this concept into the corporate world by systematically seeking out provocative thinkers to help challenge and inform the company's planning.
Remarkable people are not traditional experts whose knowledge is deep but narrowly focused. Rather, remarkable people are original, systemic thinkers whose boundless curiosity and passion naturally
lead them to explore ideas beyond their own areas of expertise and in places no one else looks. Many other organizations followed this idea and set up their own similar programs. At Global Business
Network, a renowned futures research group, their Remarkable People are the greatest minds on the planet. They are remarkable people because their lives have directly affected the quality of life for many others.

ABOUT THE COUNCIL: The members of the Council are thought leaders and provocative thinkers, women of influence making meaningful change in their particular field, expressing a variety of perspectives. The Council members look outside the traditional world of work and at the broader issues and external forces (social, technological, economic, environmental, political) that influence the business environment. They do not focus on the next financial quarter, or even the next year or two, but on the next ten years. They do not dwell on common preoccupations of organizations today. They look to the future, outside-in thinking.

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WHO: "Remarkable Filipina Women" are entrepreneurs, organizational executives, and thought leaders - some are prominent, some still to be discovered - in fields where the future is being created. They bring to us key developments to watch and issues they track in their respective fields. They come from many areas of specialization - science and technology, culture and civilization, geopolitics and the environment. "Remarkable Filipina Women" stretch our thinking by pointing out issues that may be off everyone's radar screen, by reframing facts in surprising ways, and by finding connections between divergent developments.

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