Leadership Trainer Lifelong Learning

Matt Williams is a social change designer. He currently serves as a Leadership Trainer at LifeLabs Learning, the go-to management development resource for innovative companies (like Lyft, Reddit, Sony Music, and Warby Parker). In his role, he coaches leaders on creating team cultures that institute behaviors of inclusion, effective feedback, people development, strategic thinking habits, and more. Prior to this role, Williams served as a Director in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Wake Forest University, ranked among the top-30 national universities in the United States of America. In his role, he was a senior strategist to the organization’s C-Suite and helped deliver programs and culturally appropriate communication to recruit and retain underrepresented students, faculty, and staff.

As a social scientist, Williams’ research centers the state-sanctioned violence experienced by Black people across the identity spectrum and how its contested online. While most of the nation almost exclusively focuses on police violence that cisgender black men experience, Williams opts to explore the role that gender, gender identity and race play to ensure we develop more holistic solutions to systemic inequality.

In 2016, he co-founded Hustle, a nonprofit focused on growing local economies by shaping equitable systems that bridge the gap of entrepreneurial inequality for women, people of color, and those in marginalized business districts. He holds an undergraduate and graduate degree in Communication and certificates in social justice education. Prominent coverage of his work includes South by Southwest, Public Radio, Fast Company, TEDx, Fortune, Digital Blackness, and Race Forward.