2026 Culture Impact Award nominations are closed.
Submit your 2027 nomination today!
We're excited to recognize individuals who go above and beyond to positively influence workplace culture. Whether through fostering collaboration, demonstrating exemplary leadership, or championing inclusivity, these nominees are driving progress towards creating a better world of work.
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The CultureCon Impact Awards celebrate individuals who embody their organization’s values and make significant contributions toward building a meaningful, engaging, and productive work environment. These awards highlight the power and influence of one person to create a positive space where every team member feels valued, supported, and empowered.
2026 Winners
Dr. Isa Karabed, DSW
Founder and CEO at Karabed Leadership Group
Dr. Isa Karabed is the Founder and CEO of Karabed Leadership Group, where she helps organizations build stronger leaders and healthier workplace cultures through leadership development, executive coaching, and human-centered innovation. She received the 2026 Culture Impact Award for the transformational work she led during her tenure at LifeMoves, one of the nation's leading nonprofits dedicated to ending homelessness. There, she reimagined how organizational culture could be built through trust, belonging, and accountability, recognizing that when the people serving vulnerable communities thrive, the communities they serve do too. By designing leadership development programs, expanding employee resource groups, embedding psychological safety and conflict resolution into everyday leadership practices, and creating systems that elevated both employee and client voices, Dr. Karabed helped turn culture from an aspiration into an organizational capability. Drawing from both her professional expertise and her own lived experience, she leads with the belief that every person deserves to be seen, valued, and empowered to reach their full potential—a philosophy that continues to shape her work and inspire leaders across sectors.
Izzie St. John
Philanthropy Coordinator at American Cancer Society
Izabella (Izzie) St. John is a Philanthropy Coordinator at the American Cancer Society, where she helps advance the organization's mission to improve the lives of people with cancer and their families through meaningful donor engagement and exceptional stewardship. She received the 2026 Culture Impact Award for the remarkable way she has built connection, belonging, and positivity across a geographically dispersed team, proving that culture isn't defined by proximity but by how people make one another feel. Whether she's supporting colleagues through thoughtful collaboration, celebrating personal and professional milestones, strengthening donor communications, or creating opportunities for teammates across the country to connect, Izzie consistently helps others feel seen, valued, and inspired. Her colleagues describe her as the heart of their team, someone whose optimism, authenticity, and unwavering support create an environment where people do their best work, strengthening not only workplace culture but also the mission of the American Cancer Society and the communities it serves.
2025 Winners
Aisha Blackwell
Chief People and Operations Officer at Young Community Developers
Aisha Blackwell has been a transformational force, building her organization’s HR function from the ground up and redefining what a thriving nonprofit workplace can look like. Joining at the onset of the pandemic with no existing HR infrastructure, Aisha led with vision and resilience—hiring a full HR team, introducing structured 1:1s, creating recognition and reward systems, launching ERGs, rolling out leadership training, and implementing a full organizational re-structure. Her efforts introduced tools like mental wellness platforms, PTO Exchange, and ADP TotalSource, all while nurturing a culture grounded in emotional intelligence and psychological safety. The result: stronger teams, increased retention, reduced negativity, and a renewed sense of purpose across the organization. Even long-tenured skeptics have started to embrace the shift. Aisha’s leadership has not only elevated internal culture, it has strengthened the organization’s ability to serve its community with clarity, compassion, and cohesion.
Emily Witko
Head of Culture at Hugging Face
Emily is redefining what inclusion looks like in tech by building systems where belonging is embedded, not mandated. Through their innovative “DEIB as a service” model, Emily decentralized equity and inclusion efforts, empowering every team to take ownership of building an inclusive culture. Their work has delivered measurable outcomes: women engineers nearly doubled, women’s pay equity rose by 13 percentage points, and employee NPS jumped from 37 to 52 in just over a year. From revamping parental leave policies to launching transparent compensation audits, Emily's values-driven, systems-focused approach has transformed DEIB from a set of programs into a structural foundation for how Hugging Face operates. In a moment where many companies are scaling back, Emily’s work stands as proof that inclusion, when woven into the fabric of an organization, creates lasting cultural impact.
Who Can I Nominate?
You can nominate anyone! Whether it’s a colleague whose actions have had a meaningful impact on your organization's culture or even yourself if you believe your efforts align with the award criteria, all nominations are welcome.
Winners Receive
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CultureCon Impact Award issued in-person at the CultureCon 2026 Innovation Showcase and Culture Impact Awards ceremony on Tuesday, August 4th, 2026.
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Four (4) complimentary tickets to CultureCon 2026 and the VIP After Party
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Digital recognition badge.
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Recognition in CultureCon's e-newsletter (over 12K subscribers), blog post and social media.
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Featured on the Culture Impact Award webpage.