Kate Downing Khaled
Founder and CEO
Company: Imagine DeliverRole: Session Presenter
Kate Downing Khaled is the founder and CEO of Imagine Deliver, a nationally award-winning systems transformation strategy and insights firm focused across government, philanthropy, financial services, and healthcare sectors.
Kate is the kind of leader who will believe in others even when they don’t believe in themselves. As a strategist and former community organizer, she’s an expert at listening to teams and leading them in transformative directions. She has the uncanny ability to see beyond the limitations others place on themselves to spot brilliance in the people around her. With nearly two decades of experience in philanthropy, community-based research, and human-centered design, Kate knows the best services and products are designed by the very same people who use them.
She founded Imagine Deliver because she routinely saw systems operating in ways that left people out of problem-solving, rather than meaningfully including them — creating scenarios where both businesses and talented people lost out. She helps bold, intersectional leaders eliminate this disconnect by showing them how to tap into the genius of their employees, communities, and customers to build more creative, inventive, and cutting-edge solutions.
In 2021, Kate was named to the Minneapolis/Saint Paul Business Journal “40 Under 40” for her regional impact and leadership, as well as the Twin Cities Business “Tech 20” for Mailroom, a novel HR Tech SaaS platform she founded to help companies maximize their internal talent base and inclusively improve retention of top diverse talent.
Kate holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University and a Master of Public Health from the University of Minnesota.