Speaking
Every keynote is unique while grounded in Meena's frontline experience as an elected leader, community builder, and advocate. Below are the starting points. The final talk is shaped with you.
Selected speaking engagements
A candid walk through of how a first-generation, first-in-family, first-Muslim elected official learned to enter, and rewrite, closed rooms of power.
Ideal for
Leadership summits · women's conferences · civic organizations
Concrete governance and policy moves to make institutions structurally equitable. Drawn from experiences delivering change in business school and governance boards.
Ideal for
Universities · school boards · healthcare · corporate DEI
The playbook behind raising major funding for technology-driven health and education and winning leadership races while centring the communities most impacted.
Ideal for
Marketing and fundraising galas · philanthropy · civic tech events
What it takes to govern a public school system serving tens of thousands of students, and what every board, big or small, can learn from it.
Ideal for
Education leadership · boards · public sector
What I speak about
Every keynote is tailored, but the through-line is the same: how do we move impact closer to people who need change the most? These frameworks help me drive the point home.
Why the people institutions claim to serve are rarely the ones sitting at the table making decisions about them. I ran for school board trustee at 21, the youngest candidate in my region's election, and became Vice-Chair before I turned 25. That experience taught me that institutions don't usually lack good intentions; they lack structural mechanisms for including the people closest to the problem. It's why I helped lead Waterloo Region's first youth wellbeing data collection project, and why I've stayed involved with Fora Network for Change's Rise on Boards initiative. I keep pushing to get young people into actual governance roles, not just consultation seats.
The institutions training tomorrow's leaders, business schools, school boards, civic bodies, often reproduce the exact exclusions they claim to be moving past, and changing that requires insiders willing to name it. This is the thinking behind Stolen By Smith, a campaign I co-organized calling out the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Queen's Smith School of Business, one that ended up sparking similar movements at business schools across Canada. It's also what I carry into my work as a sitting school board trustee, navigating governance and audit oversight from inside a system I'm simultaneously trying to reform.
There's a difference between an institution being technically available to a community and actually being reachable by it, and closing that gap takes more than language services. During my election, my team campaigned hardest in the neighbourhoods with the lowest turnout, which was inspired by work a few years earlier trying to gather data on family and child wellbeing in the least reached communities in my region. All of it taught me the same thing: real access means redesigning the format, timing, and delivery of a service around a community's actual life, not just translating the paperwork.