Ignite Tracks
Ignite Tracks are like mini-courses you can take during the conference, designed to help you develop specific skills and materials. Each Track has 3 sessions which are carefully designed to build on each other.
Track #1
Beyond the Basics: The Next Two Levels of AI Adoption
Your team has mastered AI as a tool — summarizing, analyzing, drafting. This session maps the next two stages of maturity: AI as a connected collaborator that acts across systems, and AI as a delegated operator that runs multi-step processes with human oversight. Executives leave with a shared vocabulary, a maturity framework, and 2-3 concrete pilot ideas for their own teams.
Led by Nolwenn Godard & Michelle Riconscente
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AI as a smart assistant — you ask, it answers. Single-turn tasks: summarize this, analyze that spreadsheet, combine these docs.
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AI as a connected collaborator. It pulls from multiple tools/data sources, holds context across a workflow, and offers judgment — not just synthesis but recommendations, scenario comparisons, first-draft strategy.
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AI as an operator. Autonomous or semi-autonomous agents execute multi-step business processes end-to-end (research → draft → route for approval → act), with humans setting guardrails and reviewing checkpoints rather than doing each step.
As Margaret Atwood says, “A word after a word after a word is power.” In these sessions we’ll share a practitioner’s view of how to make the adventure of writing build upon itself to make something powerful.
Led by Delida Costin, Ashley McLain, & Michelle Newcome
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Writing is power, but even more than that it’s a form of deep thinking. As E.M. Forster said in his 1927 book, “Aspects of the Novel” “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Writing has the power to not only convey ideas, it can also shape our reality and help us discover bigger truths about our why. In this session, you will explore how to find your own adventure by identifying why you write and where you want to be heard.
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In HiPower we talk a lot about impact and platform, but the adventure can be deeper than that. Writing can be a fundamental activity to both support your platform and build impact, but it’s also a deeply felt human need to find self-expression. In this session you’ll learn about different altitudes of effort and editing as well as real-life examples and lessons learned from inception to publication and promotion.
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed.”
― Red Smith, To Absent Friends
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The putting together of word after word is solitary, but the creation of writing is best done in community. Flannery O’Conner, a famously reclusive writer, said “The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside her (sic) community seldom has such a problem.” In this session, we’ll learn how to build community and manage collaboration to make sure your writing isn’t so lonely.
Whether you're adding impact work alongside your career or making service the focus of your next chapter, this track turns ideas into a concrete plan. Find your cause, design your approach, and build momentum alongside fellow HiPower members, wherever you are on the journey.
Led by Mona Sabet & Vicki Johnson
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Are you an Explorer, a Designer, or an Accelerator? We'll start by identifying where you are in your impact journey. Explorers will brainstorm causes across civic, health, community, and economic issues, while Designers and Accelerators share the work they're already building. We'll map the range of organizational vehicles for driving change, and you'll leave having taken your first concrete step.
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We'll get to work. Explorers will research organizations aligned with their chosen interest areas and use a decision framework to choose a path forward. Designers and Accelerators will build a concept plan grounded in a theory of change. We'll close by sharing works in progress so the room can learn from one another, ask questions, and connect across cause areas.
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Mona and Vicki will share insights on how they built their social impact initiatives. Then, in small peer circles, you'll bring your challenges, roadblocks, and questions and get advice, connections, and encouragement in return. We'll close by brainstorming ways to keep the conversation going, including profiling members' impact work on the HiPower website.