Dr. Jennifer Gomes has joined Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ (GS&) management team in the new role of head of equity, diversity and inclusion.
For nearly 20 years, Dr. Gomes has committed her career to addressing issues of social justice. She was most recently the founder and CEO of Positioned Inc., a company that developed, supported and empowered women of color in leadership positions and partnered with leadership teams to actualize and operationalize their diversity, equity and inclusion commitments.
Dr. Gomes will work directly with GS&P president and partner Derek Robson and be based at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. In her new role Dr. Gomes will develop a long-term strategy and road map to help increase representation, create a culture of belonging and contribution, and promote equity and fairness in everything GS&P does in both its San Francisco and New York City offices. She will collaborate with GS&P’s talent team on talent recruitment and development, as well as provide support to the company’s various Employee Resource Groups.
“At GS&P we’re cultivating a place where people do their very best work—work that moves people and reshapes culture. To that end our staff and our work need to reflect the world around us,” said Robson. “Dr. Gomes’ extensive experience designing and facilitating learning experiences in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion; organizational change; and leadership will be invaluable as she leads this effort.”
“As a society we are on the precipice of change, and we are uniquely positioned to help facilitate change by what we create and promote in advertising. Therefore, we have a responsibility to define, demonstrate and be steadfast in our beliefs and values,” said Dr. Gomes. “There is a great need for systemic change in our nation, and I look forward to partnering with the leadership and employees of Goodby Silverstein & Partners to empower them and affect real change.”
Prior to founding Positioned Inc., Dr. Gomes was the sr. director of strategic partnerships for the HotChalk and NYU Teacher Residency Program. Dr. Gomes has experience working in the nonprofit sector and extensive experience in teaching and leading at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She earned her EdD in organizational change and leadership from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; her MEd and EdS from National Louis University in Chicago; and her BA from Scripps College in Claremont, California.
The issue of racism has been at the forefront of GS&P’s work in recent months. The agency introduced the “Not a Gun” and “Not a Crime” campaigns, created in partnership with Courageous Conversation Global Foundation, to raise awareness of the fact that black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people are. Employees at GS&P also created the “Respond2Racism” movement to directly combat racism online and empower people by providing tools to address harassment in real life. As the inaugural project of that movement, the First Responder Twitter Bot was created to address hate against Asians and Asian Americans, which has surged by 900 percent on Twitter since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic. The bot automatically responds to COVID-19-incited racist tweets with videos to both educate the perpetrators and uplift Asian frontline workers.
Review: Director John Crowley’s “We Live In Time”
It's not hard to spend a few hours watching Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield fall and be in love. In "We Live In Time," filmmaker John Crowley puts the audience up close and personal with this photogenic British couple through the highs and lows of a relationships in their 30s.
Everyone starts to think about the idea of time, and not having enough of it to do everything they want, at some point. But it seems to hit a lot of us very acutely in that tricky, lovely third decade. There's that cruel biological clock, of course, but also careers and homes and families getting older. Throw a cancer diagnosis in there and that timer gets ever more aggressive.
While we, and Tobias (Garfield) and Almut (Pugh), do indeed live in time, as we're constantly reminded in big and small ways — clocks and stopwatches are ever-present, literally and metaphorically — the movie hovers above it. The storytelling jumps back and forth through time like a scattershot memory as we piece together these lives that intersect in an elaborate, mystical and darkly comedic way: Almut runs into Tobias with her car. Their first chat is in a hospital hallway, with those glaring fluorescent lights and him bruised and cut all over. But he's so struck by this beautiful woman in front of him, he barely seems to care.
I suppose this could be considered a Lubitschian "meet-cute" even if it knowingly pushes the boundaries of our understanding of that romance trope. Before the hit, Tobias was in a hotel, attempting to sign divorce papers and his pens were out of ink and pencils kept breaking. In a fit of near-mania he leaves, wearing only his bathrobe, to go to a corner store and buy more. Walking back, he drops something in the street and bang: A new relationship is born. It's the... Read More