Mark Travis Rivera

Many people want to support marginalized colleagues but are unsure where to start. Mark Travis Rivera unpacks what allyship at work actually looks like, drawing on his own experience as a disabled, queer Latino professional navigating rooms not built for him. He gives participants language for unconscious bias and concrete tactics for using positional privilege to amplify colleagues from underrepresented groups, leaving them with a clearer, less theoretical sense of what showing up as an ally requires day to day.

Transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming employees often face disparities that go unnoticed by the colleagues around them. Mark Travis Rivera walks through how gender identity and expression shape someone's day-to-day experience at work, from hiring to daily interactions. He offers practical steps for building policies and everyday practices that better support TNBGNC employees, giving teams a more concrete understanding of gaps they may not have previously recognized, drawn from his own work training organizations on inclusive gender practice.

Most diversity, equity, and inclusion work still treats race, gender, and sexuality as separate categories, missing how they overlap in a single person's experience. Mark Travis Rivera introduces intersectionality as a working framework rather than an abstract concept, drawing on his own life as a disabled, queer, Puerto Rican man. Participants come away with a way to think about DEI that reflects the full humanity of their teams rather than one identity at a time.

Mark Travis Rivera built his TEDx Talk around a simple but difficult premise: that career potential is often blocked by identities people have not yet learned to accept in themselves. He walks through his own journey as a disabled, queer, Puerto Rican man discovering how self-acceptance and career growth are connected, particularly for people historically underrepresented within the LGBTQIA2S+ movement. Audiences leave with a more grounded sense of how self-acceptance can unlock their own next step.

Stories connect people and can move entire communities to act. Mark Travis Rivera introduces the foundations of storytelling as both craft and tool, drawing on his own path as an author, choreographer, and founder of The Professional Storyteller. He shows participants how to identify and shape the stories they already carry, giving them a practical starting point for finding their own voice, whether on a stage, in writing, or in everyday conversation.