PROFILE
Madison Butler is a native New Englander who has brought her east coast energy to Texas. She is a Black, queer woman, and she is also a survivor. She is the owner/founder of Blue Haired Unicorn, a consulting agency. Her work is focused around designing spaces and creating scalable strategies to achieve psychological safety. She is an outspoken advocate for mental health, removing the stigma around trauma and advocates for being “human at work’. She is passionate about facilitating hard conversations through storytelling, data and tough empathy.
Madison has been featured in major news outlets such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Business Insider, Rolling Stone, and Der Spiegel. She has been recognized by Linkedin as a top Black voice to follow. She was also recognized as Austin’s rising star by DivInc in 2021.She is looked upon as an expert in her field and is passionate about using her platform to have the hard conversations.
Madison is committed to deconstructing the status quo and rebuilding corporate America, one organization at a time. Her mission is to ensure that no one ever feels like spaces were not made for them because we all deserve to live out loud. She is a start-up enthusiast and is passionate about building inclusive teams from the ground up with early stage companies. Madison is committed to helping change the narrative around what it looks like to be “human at work”, and hopes to reshape the way we look at ourselves at work and in life.
SPEAKING TOPICS
Colouring Outside of the Lines: Living Your Life for You
This talk will focus on the process and liberation in breaking away from societal expectations. It is easy to feel trapped when society creates a mold for you to stay within, but life is beautiful when you determine what it looks like. Madison Butler is a fierce advocate for being human at work, and this talk centers on just that- being human without expectations of those around us but being you for you.
Decoding Code Switching: Surviving Corporate America
Black folx are disproportionately more likely than their white peers to say they sometimes feel the need to change the way they express themselves when they are around people with different racial, class, and ethnic backgrounds. Code-switching is a practice that is familiar to many Black people and POC around the world. But for many, this goes beyond the longing to be accepted by White Culture. In many cases, it is a survival mechanism and a trauma response.
Antiracism And Allyship: A Guide
Anti-Racism and allyship have become corporate America’s favorite buzzwords. How can we ensure that our actions represent our adjectives? Anti-racism and allyship both center around action rather than performance. We will explore how to create actionable change as any ally/accomplice and what it means to truly be anti-racist.
Race, Privilege & Intersectionality
Diversity and privilege are intersectional. There are three forms of intersectionality that impact social groups on a daily basis in different ways. Intersectional privilege means that biases exist within each social group causing many marginalized folx to feel further ostracized because of their identities. Biases within our own communities can be harmful and must be acknowledged in order to achieve psychological safety within our own organizations. No social group is a monolith and we have to unpack the truth around intersectionality.
Scaling Your Organization Ethically: Leadership Training
We all want our organizations to grow, but how can we do that in an ethical way? People first. In order to grow your organization in a way that is sustainable, scalable, and ethical you must be willing to be people-centric. Human-centric behaviors start before hiring and don’t stop when people leave our organizations. We have to create policies that support everyone, not just some. Benefits and perks aren’t about craft beer and kombucha, they are about how we are supporting our entire population.
