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And 2026 carries something unusual. It’s been a century since the first organized black history observance started the tradition that eventually became what we know today. This year’s theme, established by ASALH (the founders of Black History Month), is “A Century of Black History Commemorations.”
That phrase matters because commemoration isn’t nostalgia. It’s a decision. It’s what a culture refuses to forget, and what it’s brave enough to name out loud.
When I think about what makes this particular Black History Month meaningful, I keep coming back to that word: decision. Every organization that creates space for this conversation is making a choice about what kind of workplace they’re building. They’re choosing to acknowledge that history doesn’t stay in the past—it shapes who gets heard today, who gets promoted, whose ideas get taken seriously, and whose concerns get dismissed.
If you plan events for a living, you already understand something most people miss. A stage isn’t just a platform—it’s a signal. A room isn’t just a room. It’s a rehearsal for how we listen, how we disagree, and how we treat each other when it’s inconvenient.
Every time you design a session, you’re teaching people something about what matters in your organization. The speakers you choose, the questions you ask, the way you structure participation—all of it sends a message about whose voices count and what kind of conversations are possible.
Here’s the tension I notice with culture month programming: it often gets so safe that it becomes forgettable, or so performative it becomes background noise. Black History Month deserves better than both outcomes. Not louder. Truer.
Celebration used to mean spotlight the story, applaud the progress, and move on. Now it has to mean something sharper: build a room where dignity isn’t negotiable, where people can say the thing they’ve been editing, and where listening isn’t a vibe—it’s a behavior.
In a noisy, polarized, distracted world, the organizations that win aren’t the ones that avoid hard conversations. They’re the ones that can hold them.
That’s where thoughtful Black History Month programming becomes more than a calendar obligation. It becomes a strategic tool for building the kind of organizational culture that can navigate complexity without collapsing into silence or spectacle.
Think about what actually happens in most February programming. You get a speaker, maybe a panel, perhaps a lunch-and-learn. Everyone nods. Some people are moved. Then March arrives, and nothing has changed about how your managers give feedback, how your hiring process works, or whose ideas get championed in meetings.
The best Black History Month events I’ve seen don’t just inform people about history. They equip people with skills they’ll use in March. Skills like holding space for difficult emotions, communicating across differences, and choosing courage when it’s easier to choose comfort.
This matters because the gap between what organizations say they value and what they actually practice is where culture goes to die. You can have beautiful mission statements about inclusion and still run meetings where the same three voices dominate every conversation. You can celebrate Black History Month with great fanfare and still have exit interviews that reveal people of color don’t feel heard or valued.
The programming that actually moves the needle doesn’t just acknowledge history. It uses history as a lens to see present-day patterns more clearly, and it gives people specific tools to create different outcomes starting immediately.
Daryl Davis doesn’t teach unity as a slogan. He teaches it as a discipline.
His work is a masterclass in something most organizations say they want but rarely train for: staying human in a high-emotion conversation. He shows what happens when curiosity replaces performance, when listening replaces winning, and when courage looks like asking one more question instead of delivering one more rebuttal.
The point isn’t that everyone agrees. The point is that contempt doesn’t get to run the meeting.
In 2026, when algorithms reward outrage and teams are increasingly polarized by media diets, politics, and identity, his message feels less like a diversity topic and more like a core leadership capability. It’s the ability to build trust across difference without requiring sameness.
What shifts in the room when Daryl speaks is profound. People stop treating dialogue like danger and start treating it like a skill they can practice. This makes him ideal for leadership development, navigating polarization, culture resets, community-building when trust is fragile, and any room that needs courage without escalation.
For Black History Month programming specifically, he demonstrates that commemoration can be active rather than passive. Instead of just learning about historical reconciliation, your audience learns how to practice it in real time, with real stakes, in their actual work environment.
Sarita Maybin is the antidote to passive-aggressive culture because she doesn’t just talk about better communication. She gives people words.
In most organizations, that’s the real bottleneck. People don’t avoid hard conversations because they don’t care. They avoid them because they don’t know what to say, and they don’t want to make it worse.
Sarita focuses on the micro-moments that quietly shape culture: the meeting where someone gets talked over, the email thread that turns sharp, the feedback that gets softened into meaninglessness, the customer interaction that could’ve been saved with one sentence.
She teaches respect as a behavior, not a value statement. She shows how to be direct without being brutal, clear without being cold, and honest without detonating trust.
In a world where remote work, chat culture, and speed have made miscommunication easier than ever, her work is timely because it’s usable immediately. Your team can apply what she teaches in their very next conversation.
When I think about Black History Month programming that actually changes behavior, Sarita’s approach stands out. She connects the historical struggle for dignity and voice to the everyday struggles your people face when trying to communicate with clarity and care.
What shifts in the room is immediate. People stop hinting and start communicating with clarity, courage, and care. She’s best for workplace culture, managers, customer-facing teams, feedback cultures, conflict-to-clarity moments, and any audience that needs practical tools more than inspiration.
Kimberlin Bolton brings a rare combination: leadership clarity with emotional truth. She helps rooms talk about change the way it actually happens, not as a PowerPoint, but as a human experience involving fear, identity, trust, and what people do when they’re uncertain.
She’s especially strong at translating big ideas like culture, resilience, and leadership into specific behaviors leaders can practice immediately. She does this without the cliché of “embrace change” or the false optimism of “everything will be fine.”
Kimberlin’s work becomes particularly resonant because she frames change not as something that happens to people, but as something people create through daily decisions. She connects the historical narrative of transformation to the personal narrative of growth.
What shifts in the room is fundamental. People stop managing change like a project and start leading it like a relationship. She’s ideal for change management, leadership development, values-in-action, transformation initiatives, and audiences that need courage without corny inspiration.
The century of black history commemorations this year reminds us that lasting change requires sustained commitment, not just moments of awareness. Kimberlin gives your leaders the framework to sustain that commitment when the cameras are off and the easy applause has faded.
Raven Solomon doesn’t treat inclusion as a program or a compliance box. She treats it as an operating system—the thing that determines whether your talent stays, whether innovation happens, and whether teams can actually collaborate under pressure.
Her sweet spot is helping organizations move from “we support belonging” to the real work: who gets heard, how decisions get made, what feedback sounds like, what leadership signals are being sent, especially across generational and cultural differences.
She’s also great for modern work realities like hybrid friction, identity fatigue, and the rising expectation, especially from Millennials and Gen Z, that values show up in behavior, not slogans.
For Black History Month programming, Raven connects the dots between historical exclusion and present-day systems. She doesn’t do this in a way that blames or shames. She does it in a way that empowers leaders to see what’s actually happening in their organizations and to make different choices.
What shifts in the room is perspective. Inclusion stops being nice and becomes strategic, measurable, and actionable. She’s best for inclusive leadership, multigenerational teams, culture strategy, leadership summits, and organizations building what’s next, not what used to work.
This matters because commemoration without action is just storytelling. Raven gives your people the tools to turn historical awareness into operational change.
Heather Younger’s work is built around a simple truth most cultures avoid: people don’t leave companies, they leave moments. The meeting where they weren’t heard. The manager who didn’t follow up. The values that disappeared when it got inconvenient.
She’s powerful because she makes care practical, not soft, not sentimental. More like listening as a leadership skill, trust as a daily practice, and culture as something you create in the micro-moments when no one’s watching.
This lands especially well in organizations tired of engagement initiatives that don’t change behavior. She gives leaders language and a standard.
Heather’s framework is particularly relevant because the history we’re commemorating is fundamentally about moments when people were not cared for, not heard, not valued. She helps leaders understand that creating a different future means creating different moments, starting today.
What shifts in the room is ownership. Leaders stop outsourcing culture to HR and start owning it in the day-to-day. She’s best for caring leadership, employee engagement, trust-building, retention moments, and teams that are tired of values that don’t show up in behavior.
When you’re designing Black History Month programming, Heather helps you move from “we care about this history” to “here’s how we practice care differently because of what we’ve learned.”
A few planner moves that consistently work when building Black History Month events:
Start with the after. Ask yourself what should be different thirty days later. Not a feeling, but a behavior, a conversation, a decision. If you can’t name it, you’re not ready to design the session yet.
This is where most planning goes wrong. Teams start with “we should do something for Black History Month” instead of “here’s the specific capability gap we need to close, and February gives us a compelling reason to address it.” The difference is everything.
For example, maybe your post-event goal is that managers know how to respond when someone brings up a microaggression instead of changing the subject or getting defensive. Maybe it’s that your leadership team can name three specific ways their decision-making process might inadvertently exclude certain voices. Maybe it’s that your employee resource groups feel genuinely supported rather than tokenized.
Pick one emotional target. Don’t aim for “inspired.” Be precise. Do you want people to feel seen, steadier, braver, more open, or more accountable? Different emotions require different session structures.
Inspiration is lovely, but it’s not a strategy. I’ve seen too many events that leave people feeling momentarily uplifted but fundamentally unchanged. The emotional outcome you choose should connect directly to the behavioral outcome you’re trying to create.
If you want people to feel braver, you need to create safety first. If you want them to feel more accountable, you need to help them see clearly what they’re accountable for without shame spiraling. If you want them to feel more open, you need to demonstrate what openness looks like in practice, not just as an aspiration.
Pair a story with a mechanism. A keynote alone is powerful, but a keynote plus facilitated dialogue prompts creates lasting change. Add a manager toolkit. Create a team commitment that’s specific enough to measure. Give people something to do with what they’ve learned.
This is the bridge between awareness and action. A story without structure rarely translates into behavior change because people don’t know what to do with their emotions after the session ends. But when you combine a powerful keynote with structured follow-up, something shifts.
I’ve seen this work beautifully when organizations create simple reflection guides that managers can use in their next team meeting, or when they develop conversation prompts that small groups can use to process what they heard and connect it to their specific work context.
Design for voice, especially the quiet kind. Anonymous questions work. Small groups work. Structured participation works. Generic invitations like “any thoughts?” rarely work because they privilege the people who are already comfortable speaking.
The people who most need to be heard in Black History Month conversations are often the people least likely to volunteer their perspective in a large group setting. If your session design only captures input from people who are confident speaking up in front of a hundred colleagues, you’re missing the whole point.
Think about creating digital question boards where people can submit thoughts anonymously. Use breakout discussions where the groups are small enough that quieter voices can emerge. Provide sentence stems that help people articulate half-formed thoughts without feeling like they need to have the perfect words.
Make it about work, not just history. History matters deeply. And it also shows up at work in hiring, feedback, meetings, trust, and belonging. The best programming connects historical context to present-day workplace dynamics without making the connection feel forced or didactic.
When you approach Black History Month this way, you’re not just checking a box. You’re building organizational capacity for the conversations that matter most, using the commemoration as a catalyst rather than a conclusion.
The organizations I’ve seen do this well are the ones that understand Black History Month isn’t separate from their business strategy. It’s directly connected to their ability to retain talent, innovate effectively, and build the kind of culture where people bring their best thinking instead of just their safest thinking.
A century of commemoration is a long time. Long enough to prove something important: progress isn’t a line. It’s a practice.
So maybe the most useful thing Black History Month can do inside an organization isn’t to produce a perfect program. Maybe it’s to help your people practice something rare: listening without defensiveness, speaking with clarity, and choosing dignity as a default setting.
If you’re building February programming and want a thought partner, reach out with three lines: your audience and industry, what the moment is (leadership summit, all-hands, kickoff, conference), and what you want to be different after.
I’ll send back a few speaker fits and how I’d frame the session so it lands with credibility and sticks. Because Black History Month deserves programming that’s as thoughtful as the history it commemorates.
📅 Let’s discuss next steps and schedule a 15-minute conversation today
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