/ The signature open
Every Lakeshia keynote opens the same way it could only open once: with a live read of the exact room the audience is sitting in. The arrival sequence. The signage. The sightlines. The four blocks around the door.
Ten minutes in, the room is looking at a building they’ve entered a hundred times and seeing it for the first time.
No other speaker opens this way, because no other speaker can.
It requires a geographer’s eye, a planner’s training, and fifteen years of facilitation. It travels to every venue and is different every time.
Signature keynote · 30–60 min
Your organization has a strategy for people, programs, and money. It has no strategy for place — even though place is quietly overruling all three.
Lakeshia reveals the five forces no floor plan, site plan, or strategic plan ever captures, and shows the audience how those forces are editing their visitors, their workforce, and their impact right now, without permission.
The unforgettable turn: attendance isn’t a marketing problem. Trust isn’t a messaging problem. Belonging isn’t a programming problem. They’re geography problems.
“The map decides who shows up — not the invite list.”
The five forces
Signature keynote · also an interactive workshop
Every dataset tells a story. The question is whether it’s telling the one you think it is.
Lakeshia invites audiences to sit with an uncomfortable truth: the harm data causes to communities is rarely intentional — and that’s exactly what makes it so persistent. Well-meaning organizations collect, analyze, and publish data every day in ways that quietly burden the very communities they aim to serve. The problem isn’t bad actors. It’s unexamined practice.
Drawing on more than fifteen years across urban planning, spatial analysis, and community engagement, she walks audiences through six critical points where good intentions and harmful outcomes intersect.
Audiences leave with a new lens for their own work: not a compliance checklist, but a practice — a set of questions to carry into every survey design, dashboard, report, and community meeting.
Because ethical data work isn’t about avoiding data. It’s about refusing to let the unintended stay unexamined.
Ideal for researchers, planners, public health professionals, nonprofit and philanthropic teams, government agencies, and anyone whose work turns communities into numbers.
The six critical points
As a workshop
The same framework becomes a hands-on working session (half-day or full-day) where participants apply the six critical points to their own live projects — auditing a real dataset, survey instrument, or report through each lens, surfacing unintended harms before they ship, and leaving with concrete revisions rather than just awareness. Best for teams who want to move from “we should think about this” to “here’s what we changed.”
Standalone keynotes and conference sessions, each built on frameworks Lakeshia authored.
Every empty chair at your last event had a reason, and most of the reasons were geographic. A forensic look at the audience you don’t have — where they are, what stopped them, and why "we invited everyone" has never once been true.
Your visitor experience doesn’t begin at your entrance. It begins about four blocks away — at the bus stop that isn’t there, the highway that isn’t "just across the street," the corner where people decide whether your building is for them. Nobody experiences a drawing. They experience a place.
Most organizations are informed by community: gather input, consider it, decide anyway — the plan would survive the community’s absence. Lakeshia makes the case for the harder preposition: guided by, where the plan can’t survive their absence because it was never yours to begin with.
Formats
30–60 minute keynotes · conference sessions · executive retreats · virtual and in-person. Every keynote opens with a Place Read of your venue.