Main Stage

Innovate for Good Challenge Award

Independent Sector and Accenture welcome you to join us in celebrating the 2019 Innovate for Good Challenge Award winners on the Main Stage. The winners will be revealed live as we showcase their incredible innovations in artificial intelligence, blockchain, and extended reality.

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150 150 Christian Clansky

Closing Main Stage: Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Eddie Bocanegra, Michael McAfee, Tonika Johnson, Roy Kinsey

Big Announcement: We're thrilled to announce that Mayor Lori Lightfoot has cleared her schedule to join the Upswell! She'll be on the Main Stage to talk about equitable change in Chicago.   --- As a young man, Eddie Bocanegra was on both sides of the narrative of gun violence in Chicago, eventually spending 14 years in…

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150 150 Jacqueline Brennan

Main Stage: Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel is a leading voice in the movement for interfaith cooperation and the Founder and President of Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), a national nonprofit working to make interfaith cooperation a social norm. He is the author of Acts of Faith, Sacred Ground, Interfaith Leadership and Out of Many Faiths. Named by US News & World Report as…

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150 150 Jacqueline Brennan

Innovation Main Stage: Mick Ebeling

When’s the last time you looked at a seemingly insurmountable societal challenge and said with total confidence, I can fix that? For Mick Ebeling, that’s just an average day. Whether it’s helping a paraplegic artist create again, printing limbs for amputees in war-torn countries, or enabling deaf people to experience the awesome power of music,…

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150 150 Jacqueline Brennan

Main Stage: Michele Norris

Michele Norris is a Peabody Award-winning journalist, founder of The Race Card Project and Executive Director of The Bridge, The Aspen Institute’s new program on race, identity, connectivity and inclusion. For more than a decade Norris served as a host of NPR’s All Things Considered where she interviewed world leaders, American presidents, Nobel laureates, leading thinkers and…

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150 150 Jacqueline Brennan

Main Stage: Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates lives and works in Chicago where he creates work that focuses on space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. In 2010, Gates created the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit platform aimed at galvanizing communities through neighborhood regeneration and the development of educational and arts programming and amenities. Many of the foundation’s initiatives have…

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150 150 Jacqueline Brennan

Opening Main Stage: Dan Cardinali

Sense-making is something that happens in community. That’s a core belief for Dan Cardinali, President and CEO of Independent Sector, so he’s devoted his opening remarks to helping make sense of what lies ahead. How do you create a three-day event that offers nearly 300,000 different pathways … and what’s the point of it all?…

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150 150 Jacqueline Brennan
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