During unprecedented times, people look to their leaders to provide reassurance and inspiration. As President and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota (WFMN), Gloria Perez seeks to deliver that level of leadership optimism to WFMN employees, stakeholders, grant recipients and those they serve.

Perez, who began this role in February, is a nationally recognized expert in helping women and girls achieve sustainable self-sufficiency and success. Her philosophy around leadership optimism stems from having a deep well of personal and professional experience handling adversity – and helping others achieve the same. “Good leaders inspire optimism in others,” she says.

Perez can readily see the intrinsic good in others, and even during tough times. Case in point: she regularly notes signs of goodness amid the global pandemic. “We have witnessed countless acts of kindness, reminding us that we are all in this together,” she says. “It is those many kindnesses – neighbors helping neighbors, people donating supplies to health care workers, people singing to one another in their neighborhoods – that make me optimistic that we will weather this crisis, together.”

Perez brings that same spirit of vibrant optimism to WFMN’s efforts to increase opportunities for women and girls in Minnesota – despite a world of uncertainty. “Unprecedented times are an ‘opportunity’ to really prioritize the important things, and our belief that working together can solve any problem,” she says.

As the first and largest statewide women’s foundation in the country, WFMN drives innovative solutions through grant-making, research and public policy to create a world of opportunity, safety and leadership for Minnesota women and girls. In 2019, WFMN invested more than $2.54 million in grants to multiple community-based organizations in Minnesota and impacted the lives of 437,000+ Minnesotans.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: The entire Breakfast Broadcast Audience

Donation: $5,000 to Feeding America

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Many people think that success in sports, as with success in business, “defines” a person for life. John Thomas, who initially rose to fame as a star basketball player with the Minnesota Golden Gophers and later as a first-round NBA draft pick, would beg to differ.

“I’m a person who happened to play basketball,” says Thomas, who doesn’t define himself as a former basketball player, but rather as a leader openly sharing and applying his life lessons to benefit others. As Vice President of Basketball Development for the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx, Thomas is responsible for managing and growing the organization’s Basketball Academy, connecting current NBA and WNBA players to the community and developing an NBA/WNBA alumni program.

Within each of these roles, Thomas imbues the work that he relishes – helping children and young adults reach their potential, especially off-court – with the years of successes and setbacks he’s experienced. For every perceived height Thomas has ever achieved, like helping the Gophers reach the 1997 NCAA Final Four, he’s endured corresponding tough times, such as being bounced across seven different NBA teams in 5 years, or exiting the NBA with initially little business, personal finance, or life skills knowledge.

This explains in part why Thomas seeks to ensure that the professional players he regularly sees, the businesspeople who comprise his work team, and the youth he instructs, all come away with a better understanding of their personal capabilities. Like knowing “what does your brand look like externally to others?” or realizing that “leadership starts with awareness and the ability to understand people.” The more you understand and appreciate others, he believes, the better you will be as a leader – and as a person.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: The entire Breakfast Broadcast Audience

Donation: $3,000 to Meals on Wheels America

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Using Resiliency to Find Purpose

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Charles Antis, founder and CEO of Southern California-based Antis Roofing, shows how positivity, coupled with passion, accountability and encouragement, can generate life-changing personal and business results. Antis applies his beliefs about social responsibility and giving to benefit his community and employees – and in the process lead one of the nation’s fastest-growing roofing companies.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Colleen Dockendorf of Ryan Companies

Donation: $5,496 to Second Harvest Heartland

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The Secret is Discovering Why You Exist

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Richard Davis is a good friend of the Good Leadership movement. His leadership has been featured in both the What Really Works, and How Goodness Pays books by Paul Batz. Leveraging his historic success as CEO of U.S. Bank, he is now the CEO of Make-A-Wish America – a national charity whose work grants wishes to make life better for kids with critical illnesses. Richard is the perfect speaker to help celebrate the 10th year of the Good Leadership Breakfast.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Helen Ng of Make-a-Wish MN

Donation: $6,900 to Make-A-Wish Minnesota

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The Business of Creating Hope

Nicole LaVoi, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the area of social and behavioral sciences in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota and the Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. Through her multidisciplinary research she answers critical questions that can make a difference in the lives of sport stakeholders.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Mary Foster Murray of Great Southern Bank

Donation: $3,228 to the Be The Match

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When Fairness and Injustice Drives Good Leadership

Julie Kae leads Qlik towards global sustainability and empowering nonprofits to effectively serve our planet and vulnerable populations. This includes leading sustainability reporting best practices internally and externally and managing strategic partnerships with the United Nations, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity, Private Sector Roundtable and other organizations. Qlik has received numerous awards for corporate responsibility under her leadership.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Dan Balach of Jimmy John’s

Donation: $4,850 to the FOCUS MN

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How Big Data and Childhood are Improving Climate Change

Alvin Abraham is the founding dean of the Dougherty Family College at the University of St. Thomas, a two-year college as part of the university’s mission to advance the common good, which welcomed its inaugural class of students in August 2017. He also serves on The Collective’s National Advisory Board at Teach For America, the board of directors at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, Teach For America Twin Cities, and Great MN Schools.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Jenna Biskupski, a student at the University of MN and intern at Cargill

Donation: $4,846 to the Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Greater Twin Cities

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Leveling the Playing Field for Young Leaders

Information technology is changing the way patients, consumers, providers and insurers access healthcare. Phil McKoy is a self-proclaimed “St. Paul kid” whose curiosity and people skills lifted him to the CIO of one of America’s most celebrated healthcare companies.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Nicole Muehlenhaus of Ergotron

Donation: $5,618 to the Center for Victims of Torture

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Lead With People First, and Results Will Follow

Monte Nuckols is the IT leader for the global SAP, Ariba and QAD ERP program for Adient, the global manufacturing leader in automotive seating. Monte recovered from an early life heart attack by working on his Seven Fs.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Josh McKinely of Target

Donation: $3,450 to Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation

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Goodness and Mastering the Soft Stuff

Megan Remark knows health care is personal. And she has committed her career to improving care for patients and assuring health care workers have the energy and resilience to thrive in their work. She has been a leader at HealthPartners for 23 years and has been the President and CEO of Regions Hospital since 2015.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Jennifer Hauschildt, CIO of Uponor

Donation: $4,186 to Lifeworks

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Goodness Starts with Us as Leaders

Stedman Graham is chairman and CEO of S. Graham & Associates. His Identity message is grounded in the fact that the key to success is self-leadership capability. His Identity Leadership programs, driven by his Nine-Step Success Process™, are based on the philosophy that individuals hold the power to their educational, career and personal success or failure.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Amy McMeans from Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation

Donation: $6,493 to Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation

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Do You Know Who You Are?

Greg’s mission at work is to make diversity and inclusion a business imperative. In order to do this, he focuses on workplace culture, customer loyalty, supplier diversity, and community outreach. His personal brand tag line is “Let’s do better.”

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Gary Spears from Reemo Heath

Donation: $5,784 to Genesys Works

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Are you leading as your authentic self?

Joseph had a humble start, working at a car dealership in Iowa. He worked his way up to a bank CEO and was sworn in as the Comptroller of the Currency for the United States in November 2017.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Megan Foley from MRA -The Management Association

Donation: $4,162 to Dress for Success

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Finding Goodness in Every Step of Your Journey

Pahoua is the Executive Director of the Citizens League, a non-profit think tank based in St. Paul. She is the first in her family to go to college, to complete grad school, and the first female to hold the role of Executive Director.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Megan Morrey, Content Marketing Specialist at Children’s Cancer Research Fund.

Donation: $4,100 to the Children’s Cancer Research Fund

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Goodness and Self-Doubt

Lindsey is a former Make A Wish Child, receiving a Dream Vacation to Disney World with her family in 2001. Since then, she has been recognized for years of involvement with Make A Wish and volunteerism at Children’s Hospitals around the US, and is enjoying a leadership career in Program Management at Medtronic and being a wife and mother of two.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Barb Hiller, Senior Licensing Manager at DecoPac, Inc.

Donation: $5,400 to the Autism Society of Minnesota

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An Unexpected Journey

Amanda K. Brinkman has been the Chief Brand & Communications Officer at Deluxe Corp, and a relentless champion in America’s quest to help small businesses thrive. She’s won almost every business community award bestowed by the Twin Cities business press, but her most rewarding honors come through her involvement with Small Business Revolution – a movement created to shine a spotlight on the vital impact that small businesses have on our economy, our communities, and our daily lives. Amanda is not only an on-camera talent, but also as the creator of the Small Business Revolution – Main Street TV series.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Candi Danek-Bennett of Creatis

Donation: $5,330 split between The American Cancer Society and Make-A-Wish MN

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Doing Well By Doing Good

Erik Gabrielson and Moira Petit are the second husband and wife speaker team at the Good Leadership Breakfast, they are partners together in the human potential coaching, research, and consulting firm Activ8. A dramatic and heroic healthcare journey centered around their one and only son, resulted in a real-life story about how encouragement, accountability, and good teamwork not only saved their son’s life, but gave them all a life where goodness pays.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Linda Dolan of University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies

Donation: $4,514 to Patrick Schoonover Heart Foundation

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How to Let Go, So You Can Fight For Something You Love

Paul is best known to the Good Leadership Breakfast as the very first sponsor of the breakfast when he was the Chief Marketing Officer at Cargill. At the March breakfast, he will unveil the research that is providing the content for the book, How Goodness Pays, that he and Paul Batz are currently co-authoring.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Catherine Sedacca of Sage Business Credit

Donation: $5,170 to Children’s Hospital (Children’s Minnesota Foundation)

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Exercise New Leadership Muscles

Jurriaan Kamp is one of the few contemporary thinkers who might actually be able to solve the world’s biggest problems. He’s the 2018 kick-off speaker, by way of Santa Barbra, California, on his way to his home in the Netherlands where in 1995 he launched the “solutions journalism” global magazine Ode. He and his wife De Puy moved their family to the US in the early 2000s where they renamed the magazine The Intelligent Optimist. He’s a prolific author, and a rare talent who can frame mind-twisting big problems into simple solutions that are easy to embrace. His book: The Intelligent Optimist’s Guide to Life: How to Find Health and Success in a World That’s a Better Place Than You Think has had a big impact on the Goodness Pays point of view.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Ken Ritterspach of Traction Results, LLC

Donation: $4,938 to Playworks

Future: How design thinking can shape your work and your life.

Joe is the President and Chief Creative Officer at Little & Company. His passion for design started as an eight-year old who created promotional posters for his family’s restaurant. Today, he is an expert in design thinking and one of the most respected leaders in the design community.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: James Wade of 2110 Design Group

Donation: $5,590 to the Minneapolis Urban League

Fun: How making your work playful and joyful is good for you and your business.

Darin is the Founder and CEO of Irish Titan, a digital agency focused on ecommerce, complex websites and digital strategy. Creating a culture of fun at work is critical to attracting and retaining top talent and clients that want to change the world.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Brenda Devlin of Harris Companies

Donation: $4,460 to Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services

Friends: How a strong support system helps you be a better leader.

Liwanag is the CEO of CaringBridge, the most widely used global nonprofit social network dedicated to helping family and friends communicate with and support loved ones during a health journey. Her work makes the health journey easier by using technology to help friends amplifying the love, hope, and compassion in the world.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: King Bavender, owner of Bavender Custom Clothiers

Donation: $4,328 to Rotary Foundation/Honduras WASH project.

Fitness: How to re-energize your personal and professional life.

Chris is a national health and fitness guru who is building an online fitness coaching and consulting business that touches 2 million people a month. Her message is positive, energizing, and encouraging – just what every good leader needs.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: JoAnn Harms from the Minnesota Vikings

Donation: $3,820 to Feed My Starving Children

Nathan helps youth and adults develop healthy, values-based money habits through Share, Save, Spend. He supports overall well-being by teaching youth about money, helping to decrease materialism, and increase self-esteem.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: Chady Al Ahmar and Heidi Humphrey from US Bank
Donation: $4,346 split between The Hill Museum and The Jeremiah Program

Alex is a master of the blended life. She’s the communications director at Fallon, the founder and owner of Strong Like Mama (a blog and clothing line) and also a mother. She uses her business to create positive messages of strength for women and mothers.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Carrie Howard from United Nations
Donation: $4,234 to The American Red Cross

Marc focuses on happiness every single day. He’s taken on the role of “Chief Happiness Officer” at his firm, Imagine IT, using positivity to connect with new clients. He pours the rest of his energy into The Gunnar Project, where he and a network of millennials, inspire other young people to intentionally pursue happiness.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Dr. Aleshka Santina and Dr. Amanda Haeg of Cadence Chiropractic
Donation: $4,934 to The Gunnar Project

Richard Leider is ranked by Forbes as one of the top 5 most respected executive coaches in the U.S. This February, he’ll share his visionary work on the power of purpose. Leider reminds his clients that they already possess purpose, and he fosters their will to live long and well.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Susan Adams Loyd of Better Business Bureau of MN and ND
Donation: $6,320 to the YouthLink

Jodi leads a life of significance as CEO of Minnesota’s largest human services non-profit. She is thriving in a transition from enterprise leader at Medtronic into non-profit leadership.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: George Klauser from Altair, a division of Lutheran Social Service
Donation: $4,804 to the Homeless Youth Program at Lutheran Social Service MN

As the CEO of TennCare, Rita is responsible for more than 500,000 consumers and is one of the most influential women leaders in healthcare. Raised by a single mom with 11 siblings, Rita understands and exemplifies fairness in ways few people understand.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Kathi Tunheim from Gustavus Adolphus College
Donation: $3,094 split between the Gustavus Mentoring Program and the Gustavus Women In Leadership Program

Patience is a “Best of Show” award winner from the Greater Twin Cities United Way for employee engagement strategy. She role models generosity, fun, and fairness in the workplace.

Bucket of Goodwill

Winner: J Allen from Master’s Alliance
Donation: $6,256 (includes a bonus donation of $2,000 from Master’s Alliance) to Urban Ventures

Jennifer is president of one of the most effective community hospitals in America. She is working with community leaders to promote resilience through the award-winning Bounce Back Project.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Corey Martin, Founder of Bounce Back Project
Donation: $4,626 to Bounce Back Project

A charismatic Brit, Matthew Allnatt is the chief executive at the largest social club west of the Mississippi. Matthew’s humor and charm is endearing to Jonathan Club members, staff and community leaders in Los Angeles.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Joe Kaufman, VP, Private Banker at Bremer Bank
Donation: $5,300 to Puppies Behind Bars

With Minnesota the place to be for major sporting events, Maureen Bausch lends her leadership skills to the upcoming 2018 Super Bowl. Maureen is accustomed to being an ambassador for the Twin Cities with 24 years of experience at the Mall of America.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Katie French, Administrative Fellow, Regions Hospital
Donation: $5,540 to Regions Hospital Foundation

Called a rock star by her peers, Beth Goetz recently stepped into a high-profile role at the University of Minnesota Athletics. Beth is leading significant fundraising and coaching changes with grace and dignity.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Russell St. John, Former CMO Entrust Datacard
Donation: $5,882 to SWMEC

A familiar face to many from her days behind the anchor desk at WCCO-TV, Colleen Needles Steward is focused on the hunt for excellence in television. Colleen founded Tremendous! Entertainment so she could tell longer stories and provide unprecedented access to fascinating places and people around the world.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Matthew Obermeyer from ADO Products
Donation: $5,112 to Treehouse

Mike is an Air Force veteran with battlefield skills who demonstrates good leadership as President of the Private Client Reserve of U.S. Bank. He was recognized in the Wall Street Journal in 2014 for the Bank’s initiatives to hire more than 1800 vets since 2012.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Kurt Nelson from The Lantern Group
Donation: $6,108 to the City of Lake Rotary Foundation

Kevin is a faith-based leader who is guiding the direction of the Minnesota Vikings. Hear how his courageous recovery from a childhood accident fueled his desire as an athlete, lawyer, and philanthropist.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Crystal Walsh from Medica
Donation: $4,340 to Carolyn’s Comforts

Becky brings a big business background from Medtronic into the fertile grounds of private liberal arts education. Hear why she is optimistic about our future through her experience as President of Gustavus Adolphus College.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Sarah Molnau of TechStar IT Solutions
Donation: $4,210 donated to the Southern Valley Alliance for Battered Women.

Björn is a technology wizard who is a pioneer in mobile web app development. Hear how his journey from Sweden to the US shaped his approach to business and community leadership, earning a Certificate of Commendation from the governor of Minnesota.

Bucket of Good Will

Winner: Mark Kelley
Donation: $2,972 donated to the Children’s Cancer Research Fund.