Lunch with a Leader

If you are looking for opinion and inspiration, come meet Eric Leidtke. Following a 26 year career at adidas where he drove $8B in revenue growth, Eric took on the global plastic crisis by founding Unless Collective, a regenerative model for footwear and apparel. Prominently featured in the documentary Buy Now!, Eric is a leader in creative responsibility-how products are designed, consumed and disposed. 

Interested in entrepreneurship and food!? Four years ago, with a small igloo cooler in front of his friend’s coffee shop in NE Portland, Nico’s Ice Cream got its start. Since then, Nico quickly scaled to four shops and now a s’mores shop. He is also the founder of Palanca, a Latinx-led initiative focused on empowering youth and encouraging an entrepreneurial mindset.

How do you go from an artist with a liberal arts education to becoming Chief of Staff for Portland City Council? Discover the themes of honoring manual labor that have run through Natalie’s work of strategic communications, storytelling in the Obama White House, government relations, starting a biodynamic vegetable farm, and grassroots initiatives such as ballot measure campaigns.

An alumnus of the foster care system, D’Artagnan has dedicated his career to serving society’s most vulnerable and a belief in shifting power back to communities. He is both a Child Welfare Consultant working to improve child outcomes within child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and VP of Community Partnerships for the 1803 Fund dedicated to nurturing collaboration, autonomy and power in Black Portland, through social and financial investment.

Register for this lunch if you want to hear about alumna Zoe Abbott Boyd’s career path to Goldman Sachs, whether to get an MBA, investment strategies, or navigating the workplace as LGBTQ+.