Welcome to Our New Look & Brand!
After nearly 10 years of driving diverse, equitable, and inclusive change, Empovia (formerly Change Catalyst) is focusing exclusively on learning and development solutions that drive inclusive and sustainable change.
What’s different? A new brand that embodies our new focus of empowering change through learning. As a part of our empowered learning solutions, we are excited to launch our new eLearning platform!
If you’re new here, welcome! And if you’ve been on this journey with us for a while, thank you for continuing to be part of our community.
Every Detail Counts
Our Name
Empovia develops empowered learning solutions steeped in empathy and empathy-building techniques, which are essential to the work of change. Each person has a unique POV that shapes their approach to learning.
We believe the best way to inspire action is via interactive learning. Our learning solutions use behavioral change strategies and innovative learning techniques that support learners in building awareness, changing behaviors and perspectives, acquiring inclusive skills, and implementing tangible tools for creating change.
Empovia is: empowered learning solutions that build empathy, incorporate unique points of view, and activate change—via training, online courses, speaking, coaching, and custom learning & development solutions.
Our Typeface
Our typeface is called Social. Social is a multi-people, multi-width mega collaboration made by many eyes and players across different genders and races—including underrepresented designers.
ABC Social has a sense of humor, with its freely designed forms and rounded shapes. As a friendly, smooth typeface, Social provides a warm welcome to the Empovia community.
Our Logo
Our logo is composed of three circles – reminiscent of ellipses or the continuing of a conversation, shifted in different sizes to reveal a change in perspective that only can occur when we look at things from a different angle. The places where they overlap show us Venn diagrams – because no matter how different we are, we can always find common ground while celebrating each other’s unique differences. Our gradients are inspired by representation, both queer and otherwise, as an LGBTQIA+-led and -operated, intersectionally diverse team.
A Note from Our Founder
Our Beginnings
Ten years ago, Wayne and I sat on a couch and talked about how we could change the tech industry together. While both of us had been working in the tech and startup industries off and on for years, we were frustrated with the slow change and wanted to accelerate diversity, equity, and inclusion in a bigger way. Over several months, met with many DEI advocates, investors, data scientists, and executives to discuss the deep systemic issues that contribute to inequity and a lack of diversity. We found:
- Siloed work, with no clear best practices
- Ecosystem-wide issues, from education and policy to investment and workplaces
- A lack of awareness and a lack of empathy
- A myth that qualified underrepresented technical talent didn’t exist
- Conversations that continuously focused much more on the problems than on the solutions
- A focus on women without a focus on all other underrepresented groups and intersectional women
Then we designed a conference to address these issues and more. Our conference was designed to bring the many parts of the ecosystem together to focus on solutions, with a career fair to bring underrepresented talent to companies that didn’t believe they existed. Our Tech Inclusion Conference was the first of its kind in the tech industry.
After a year of building momentum and trust in the industry, our first conference in 2015 sold out, and we had to turn candidates and companies away from the career fair! We removed the siloes, we established best practices as an industry, we addressed inequity in the whole tech ecosystem, we focused on solutions, and new talent was hired.
Over the next several years, across multiple continents, we created change in local tech ecosystems. We have worked with tech companies, investors, incubators, and accelerators to help them drive DEI through consulting, training, and systemic change. And we have expanded our influence and work far beyond tech.
Our Evolution
The pandemic moved us to let go of in-person events, and focus on deepening our work in learning and development solutions: training, speaking, advising, and coaching. Over the last year, we have also developed interactive eLearning courses based on our most popular training for our clients.
After 10 years, we have changed our name to Empovia. It’s short, sweet, and embedded with our values of empowering inclusive innovation.
With a new name and a renewed mission, we are bringing our eLearning courses to you on demand, through our new Empovia eLearning platform. Over the coming months, we will release additional courses and trainings that follow the intentional design, development, and testing protocols we’ve established. We would love to hear from you if you have a course topic you’d like us to build! Let us know what you want to learn.
The Empovia team are experts in behavioral science, interactive learning design, storytelling, and solutions that drive diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have been doing this work together for a decade: delivering empowered learning solutions driven by our own research and a growing body of behavioral and organizational science. As we continue to grow, we will expand our offerings and facilitation team to meet the needs of our clients and community.
Thank You
Thank you for being part of our journey and for working to lead the change with us. I invite you to explore all of our services, and please reach out if you’d like to discuss how we might partner together.
I’m personally grateful for each of you. It takes all of us to create the change we wish to see, with one act at a time. Thanks for all you do!
Warmly,
Melinda
