Program

All session times are in Eastern Daylight Saving Time (EDT)
Day 1
Monday, Oct 4th

Optional Networking Session

Please pre-register for this session when you register for the conference! There is no cost to attend. This session is a gentle warm-up to two days of risk learning and fellowship. Find out how to maximize your experience, discover ways to connect to like-minded attendees, and learn how to choose the sessions that will help you advance risk practice in your organization.

Risk Avengers

Hear from heroes of the nonprofit risk universe—graduates of NRMC’s Risk Leadership Certificate Program—as they unleash their alter egos and share their riveting risk management adventures. Learn what these professionals accomplished in 2021 and what they plan to conquer next in 2022. Leave the session inspired by your peers, ready to fly back to your nonprofit, and stick the superhero landing before you vanquish villainous risks.
Holly B. Raymond
Dr. Beth Boyer Kollas
Julie Reyburn

Revival of the Risk Roundtable

In Arthurian legends, the Knights of the Round Table eventually devolved into warring factions. So can risk management initiatives fall apart and fail to produce their intended results. Whether risk-centered meetings suffer from an inability to cultivate buy-in from key players or turn into griping sessions that stall before risk mitigation strategies are ever spoken of, only the noblest Risk Champions can control chaos in these conversations. Attend this session to learn practical strategies for facilitating productive dialogue about risk, and to get more out of your risk assessment and risk mitigation meetings. Leave the session ready to revive your organization’s risk roundtable and continue your quest towards the holy grail of effective risk management practice.
Ann Terlizzi
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Esq.

Impeccable Insurance Program & Partner Management

Are you responsible for managing your organization’s insurable risks or insurance industry partners? Get the big picture perspective during this session, presented by a tremendous trio who represent the internal risk management team, insurance broker, and insurance carrier of one high-profile nonprofit organization. Using systems thinking, real-world insights, and their professional bond, the trio will share lessons from their productive partnership that can help nonprofit leaders leverage their insurance coverage and relationships to better serve their charitable missions.
Liz Bautista
David W. Mathews, CPCU, ARM, AAI
Mitch Mouchabeck

Forum on Relational Resilience

Join a panel of experienced nonprofit sector leaders to discuss the sector’s greatest opportunities to enhance risk/crisis preparedness and relational resilience. Come ready to engage in dialogue, exploring how charitable organizations and their networks can cooperate to endure periods of great stress, uncertainty, and disruption. Panelists will share their greatest lessons learned from COVID-19 while exploring prospects for cultivating resilience as a sector. Attendees will be invited to explore how complex, large-scale risk events can be better managed by leveraging our equally complex nonprofit networks.
Greg Zweber
Victor (“Vic”) Valentine
Denise Harlow
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Esq.

Secretly Superheroes: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Risk Champions

Whether you’re a nonprofit risk professional or you’re in need of one, this session illuminates how risk leaders can be low-key superheroes, demonstrating value and driving resilience within their organizations. Attend this session to benchmark your A-game as a risk leader and learn to show off your superhero cape (humbly!) to your risk oversight body or supervisor. Leave the session with greater confidence and capability in yourself as a Risk Champion.
Miranda Hora

Moving Beyond Allyship

Expressing solidarity and offering unconscious bias training might allow corporate teams to pat themselves on the back, but these actions do little to protect BIPOC employees from racism in the workplace. Attend this workshop to learn about strategies that have far greater potential to promote inclusion, advancement, and wellbeing of BIPOC team members. Attendees will leave this session with: An understanding of workplace anti-racism initiatives that actually work (versus those that don’t work, but are still done anyways) Advice for revamping anti-racism efforts to support behavioral change in employees, including specific exercises backed by research to reduce racist behaviors in the workplace An argument for altruistic allyship and how it benefits BIPOC employees and nonprofit missions much more than performative actions A shortlist of personal changes that each attendee can cultivate within themselves to become a better workplace ally to BIPOC team members.
Emily Holthaus

Workplace Wellness Wondercabinet

Adapting to pandemic lifestyles has challenged us all in different ways. Reset and recharge with this workshop where you’ll develop a wondercabinet full of simple wellness practices that you can use at your office or home office. During the session, attendees will practice calming and grounding exercises to help manage stress, and easy movement-based practices to cultivate creative energy and battle fatigue. Attendees will also leave with tips to better self-advocate for their wellness needs in the workplace. Leave this session more capable of managing the greatest risk to your personal productivity—your wellness.
Erin Gloeckner

Cyber Complexities

Cybersecurity initiatives must respond to—and leverage—the complexity of each nonprofit’s ecosystem, which includes reliance on vendors and partner organizations, remote work operations, emerging regulations and cyber threats, and more. This session will enable nonprofit leaders to see their entire system of cybersecurity risks and opportunities, and how these threats and prospects interact across the entities connected to your mission. Attendees will leave this session with: A big picture perspective on cyber stewardship and threats across your ecosystem Greater ability to discern when to manage risk by increasing or decreasing the complexity of your cyber ecosystem, and How trends in cybersecurity practice, insurance, and cyber threats will affect your nonprofit in the near future.
Claudiu Popa

Mission Control: Managing Reputation Risk

A righteous reputation keeps a nonprofit’s mission flying high, so when it comes to managing public perception, failure is not an option. Join this quest into the deep space of reputational risk to protect your nonprofit’s standing through strategic crisis communication, reputation monitoring, good governance, and more. The next time your team says, “Houston, we have a problem,” you’ll be ready to turn the risk of reputational ruin into an outstanding opportunity.
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Esq.

Business Continuity Plan Implementation: Do’s and Don’ts

Ramp up your organization’s resilience by investing in Business Continuity Planning (BCP)—a process used to minimize interruptions and enable recovery of operations and programs whenever serious disruptions or disaster strikes. This session will share road-tested strategies for effective BCP implementation, including practical insights and warnings from organizations whose BCP practices helped them survive and thrive during COVID-19. Leave the session ready to convert your Business Continuity Plan from paper to practice, preparing your organization for whatever local or global crisis comes next.
Abigail Hanks, MS, NCRI
Christina Griffiths
Mary Chelf
Kay Nakamura

Growing Up Fast: ERM Maturity Milestones

Childhood and teen years fly by fast, and nonprofit risk management functions/programs are often asked to grow up quickly, too. Attend this session to learn the inside scoop on evolving from risk management to Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) at a nonprofit organization. Attendees will enjoy the Nonprofit Risk Management Center’s take on ERM puberty: milestones for ERM maturity and effectiveness. This session will help attendees appreciate their ERM growing pains while making “adulting” a little less difficult.
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Esq.

Making Data-Driven Risk Decisions Like an Analytics Pro

Join a data analytics professional from the nonprofit world to learn how to incorporate data-driven decisions into your risk management program. Learn how to leverage new technology and analytic methods to derive greater value from your corporate data assets. Use data-driven decisions to better manage preventable and insurable risks, or to inform insurance partners and optimize coverage. Also, enjoy a few tips for creating compelling risk reports and data visualizations to inform decision-makers across your organization.
Patricia Saporito

Optional Networking Session

Join fellow Risk Champions for a short networking session to wrap up the first day of the live event. Please register to attend this session when you complete the conference registration process. There is no cost! Come one and come all!
Day 2
Tuesday, Oct 5th

Welcome to Day 2!

Enjoy performances from our musical guests for a gentle warm-up to the second day of the Virtual Risk Summit.

The Chocolate Factory

Attend this session to apply Willy Wonka-inspired wonder to the risk management discipline. Learn from two risk management thought leaders about how the discipline of risk management is changing in response to COVID-19 and other global megatrends. Challenge your conceptual understanding of “risk” and learn what these leaders learned from a risk event whose lasting impacts will be felt around the world for years to come. Look ahead and prepare your team to develop your own “everlasting gobstopper” risk resource—one that can change colors and flavors to meet the changing demands of our uncertain world.
Debra Cornelius, MSW
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Esq.

Bram Broker’s Dracula: A Gothic Insurance Horror Story

Join this lively literary-inspired session featuring three powerbrokers specializing in nonprofit service, as they tell terrifying tales about nonprofit clients who have sucked the life out of their insurance partnerships. Learn what makes a nonprofit client a preferred risk—and more fun to work with than a vengeful vampire. Become the client every broker wants to work with… one for whom they’ll say, “I have crossed oceans of time to find you.” (Quotation from Dracula by Bram Stoker)
Elizabeth Leontieff
Derek Symer
Scott Konrad

Accelerating Change: Insurance Industry Challenges and Opportunities

Global and national forces including the coronavirus pandemic, social justice initiatives, climate change, and advancements in artificial intelligence have all accelerated the need and motivation for change across the insurance industry. Attend this session to hear from a panel of insurance carrier executives whose companies serve the nonprofit sector as they explore the greatest challenges and opportunities the industry faces in 2021 and beyond. Gain insights into how current events, megatrends, and regulatory pressures are spurring insurance product innovations, changes in underwriting, and shifts like digitalization to meet new demands from policyholders—and how these shifts might affect your organization.
Timothy W. Lyons, CPCU, ARe
Bettina Rhodes
Michael Liguzinski
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Esq.

Paranoia Destroyer: Promoting Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Being asked to discuss your organization’s most pressing risks sometimes feels like taking too great a personal risk. All risk management initiatives rely on honest risk communication, but many nonprofit leaders struggle to convince their teams that their words are welcomed—and won’t result in recrimination. This session shares road-tested strategies for cultivating a safer space for risk communication at work. Learn to identify and correct corporate cultural norms that contribute to personal paranoia and empower your team as courageous champions of risk communication. Leave the session ready to benchmark your risk culture, sustain candid conversations about risk, and leverage psychological safety for risk management success.
Lauren LeMunyan, PCC
Whitney Thomey

Distance Dynamos: Managing the Risks and Rewards of Remote Workforces

Think tanks like the McKinsey Global Institute anticipate that more than 20% of the global workforce will continue to work remotely post-pandemic and be just as effective. Join this timely workshop to reimagine the office of the future and learn how remote workforces can continue contributing to mission success. This session will explore remote workforce risks and opportunities including employee engagement and wellbeing, reskilling, digitalization trends, cybersecurity considerations, and more. Leave the session better prepared to leverage your organization’s greatest asset—wherever they’re working from.
Whitney Thomey

LEGO Legacy: Building Successful Structures for Risk Responsibility

The building blocks of an effective risk management program are as varied and colorful as a case of LEGOs, with each nonprofit’s risk team looking quite different from the next. Join this playful session to review case studies on risk management function design and how responsibility for risk can be shared across an organization. Witness how well it works to combine risk with other business functions and learn lessons from multidisciplinary teams who run risk analysis and action initiatives to empower enterprise-wide resilience.
Heather Chadwick
Joseph Budzynski
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Esq.

Risk Oversight Responsibility and ERM Expertise for Boards of Directors

Now more than ever, nonprofit boards need risk-minded individuals to join their ranks. This session explores a board’s responsibility for risk oversight and the specific skills that directors need to steward their charitable missions while facing unprecedented uncertainty. Whether you sit on a board or report risk information to a board, this timely workshop will empower you to help identify and manage external and existential risks from the top-down, by readying your directors as risk managers—and risk-takers.
Ellen M. Hunt, Esq.
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Esq.

Rethink Ruinous Risks

Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties of the risk management discipline is preparing for the risks you can’t possibly predict. Gain a new perspective on risk by attending this thought-provoking workshop that uses COVID-19 as a backdrop to examine foundational concepts of uncertainty and the risk management discipline. Attendees will be invited to reconsider their understanding of Black Swan events, rethinking assumptions about how to anticipate and prepare for these absolutely unpredictable risks. The workshop will also distinguish Gray Swan events and strategies for managing these better-known possibilities that could still summon catastrophic consequences.
Dave Kyllo, Esq.

The Waiting Game: Defining Key Risk Indicators and Developing Foresight

Get ready to tackle an inherently difficult component of the risk management discipline: anticipating risk. This workshop explores the unpredictable—or sometimes somewhat sure—nature of risk, and what nonprofit leaders can do to better anticipate future probabilities in a world full of possibilities. Avoiding stuffy statistical modeling, this session offers accessible approaches for defining Key Risk Indicators and “warning signs” that a known risk might materialize. The session also touches on philosophies for developing foresight as a nonprofit leader or risk professional, which is useful both in preventing loss and in taking the right risks to move your mission forward.
Tara Thomas

Vendor Midway

Come one, come all to this dazzling display of vendor offerings! These short sessions showcase stupendous risk resources relevant to nonprofit leaders. By intermission, attendees will be jumping from their seats, thrilled to expand their risk management repertoires! The Vendor Midway includes short sketches from a variety of vendors offering services related to incident management, third-party risk, and crisis management.

The Queen’s Gambit: Integrating ERM and Strategy

Get on your way to grandmaster status by attending this stimulating, conceptual workshop illuminating the philosophies behind strategic risk management. Gain insights to raising risk-awareness in your organization’s strategy-setting process, and around the risks that affect—or are created by—business strategy decisions. Also, explore how ERM programs can better support a nonprofit team’s ability to execute its adopted strategies. Leave the workshop with your intellect inspired and get ready to make bold moves in the game of nonprofit stewardship.
Patricia Vaughan, Esq.
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Esq.

Storm Chasers: The Changing Risk Landscape for Nonprofits

Storm chasers never blink an eye when racing to the center of a raging storm. Their dedication to extracting scientific and photo evidence, statistics, and videos helps communities understand and better prepare for future storms. Lawyers who advise nonprofits are akin to storm chasers. Without hesitation, they travel to the danger zones in an organization’s changing risk landscape to understand what’s happening and send information back to decision-makers. This workshop explores the changing–but always fascinating–legal landscape surrounding nonprofit organizations. Attend this session to learn about concerning developments in the legal landscape that could bring stormy weather to your mission in the months and years to come.
Marialuisa S. Gallozzi, Esq.