aesthetically speaking
Minnesota R&B/soul’s top six new prospects
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Insight News February 1 - February 7, 2016
Vol. 43 No. 5 • The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • insightnews.com
PROFILES IN EXCELLENCE
Anika Ward ensuring diversity in State’s hiring By Harry Colbert, Jr. Contributing Writer
Angela Talton
Angela Talton promoted to Nielson Chief Diversity Officer
Twenty years ago in 1996 during one of Chris Rock’s HBO stand-up comedy specials the comedian said about Minnesota, “Ain’t no Black people in Minnesota. The only Black people you find in Minnesota are Prince and Kirby Puckett.” Sadly, that same year, the state lost one of its favorite sons, Puckett, to a stroke. And while the state still lacks the diversity, Prince is not the only one left. And at the highest level of government Anika Ward is doing her part to see that jokes such as the one Rock told in 1996 can no longer be relevant. Recognizing the lack in diversity in hiring at the state level, and in particular at the highest level in state government, this past March Gov. Mark Dayton hired Ward to lead the charge for diversity, naming her statewide executive recruiter –
WARD TURN TO 6 Photo: Minnesota Management & Budget
All elections matter:
It’s time to make our voices heard at the ballot box in 2016 By Melanie L. Campbell NNPA News Wire Guest Columnist On February 1, Iowa, which has a 3.4 percent Black population and New Hampshire, which is less than 2 percent Black, will hold their presidential caucus and primary. From there, the primary battles move to states with larger Black populations — first in South Carolina where over 27.8 percent of its population is Black. Then it’s on to Super Tuesday with several southern states with large Black populations that are key
Neilsen
Freddie Allen/AMG/NNPA
Melanie Campbell, the president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, says that history has proven that all politics is local and that local elections matter. Photo taken during a NAACP press conference at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 2015.
for presidential candidates to win their party nominations including Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. The additional reality is that in less than one year the presidency of Barack Obama, the first African American President, comes to an end. We were reminded of this reality on January 12th, when President Obama delivered his final State of the Union message. I watched the President with bittersweet remembrance of his historic and impactful twoterm presidency. The President
BALLOT TURN TO 2
NEW YORK – Nielsen Holdings announced Angela Talton has been promoted to chief diversity officer. “Diversity and inclusion are crucial to our growth, strength, and ability to innovate. Angela’s vision, leadership and execution have helped us reimagine diversity at a global scale,” said Mitch Barns, Nielson CEO. “As Nielsen’s chief diversity officer, she will be a vital part of my leadership team and a champion for our companywide investments to ensure our business is representative of the communities where we live and work.” Prior to this appointment, Talton served as senior vice president, Global Diversity and Inclusion, and she will continue to oversee Nielsen’s diversity and inclusion programs including supplier diversity, training and employee engagement. Talton has been with Nielsen since 2007, joining the company as senior vice president for Global Call Center Operations. Prior to joining Nielsen, she held the positions of divisional vice president at Sears Holdings Corporation and vice president, Business Processes at ALLTEL Communications. Talton holds a degree in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Nielsen is the rating service used to gauge television audience size and demography.
Economic inequality at home and abroad By Julianne Malveaux NNPA News Wire Columnist Days before the opening of the World Economic Forum, Oxfam, the international organization that works on world poverty issues, released a report that addressed inequality. They found the international wealth gap growing rapidly. Last year, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the bottom half of the world population. Wealth has become much more concentrated – in 2010, more than five times as many people shared the same amount of wealth as the bottom half. While the top 62 people saw their wealth grow by 44 percent
in five years, the bottom half saw their wealth drop by about the same amount (41 percent). And world incomes reflect increasingly concentrated wealth inequality. Nearly half of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day. One in five people – 1.2 billion – live on less than a dollar a day. Oxfam says that, “growing economic inequality is bad for us all – it undermines growth and social cohesion…the consequences for the world’s poorest people are particularly severe.” While the Oxfam world inequality data is jarring, we don’t have to go global to witness the “particularly severe” consequences of domestic income and wealth inequality. Consider Flint, Michigan, the small (population
INEQUALITY 6 TURN TO
Flint River in Downtown Flint, Michigan (1974)
U.S. Army Corp of Engineers
Car review
Health
Business
Community
2016 Hyundai Elantra Value Edition
Food first: Food should be fun!
Secrets to an empowered fundraising team
Minnesota Parent magazine hosts 10th annual Camp Fair
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