December 10, 2020

This afternoon, December 10th, Epstein’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee was honored to wrap-up its 2020 Program with a virtual presentation from Wendy Lewis, the former Global Chief Diversity Officer and VP of Global Community Engagement at the McDonald’s Corporation.

Prior to retiring earlier this year, Wendy was responsible for guiding McDonald’s global diversity and inclusion efforts across all McDonald’s Corporation business functions to enrich the organization’s history and culture of opportunity, growth and economic impact within diverse communities and strategic partnerships. Her primary focus was to direct the “diversity IS inclusion” business strategy as the value proposition for total employee engagement for business results.

Before joining McDonald’s, Wendy spent almost 30 years at Major League Baseball (MLB), where she developed and implemented numerous innovative and successful metric-driven strategies and initiatives throughout the league and the sports industry. She designed MLB’s Diversity Economic Impact Engagement (DEIE). The DEIE model was developed to advance MLB’s workforce and supply chain engagement levels league-wide.

Wendy’s Epstein D&I-sponsored presentation featured an overview of her experiences at McDonald’s and with MLB, as well as definitions on diversity and inclusion and equality and equity. In addition, Wendy took time to talk about the specific efforts Epstein is making with our Diversity & Inclusion initiative. Topics included: becoming allies for each other through being sponsors, amplifiers and scholars; working with the reality of unconscious bias; and building relationships to prosper far into future.

In addition to Wendy’s very engaging and informative presentation, Wendy took additional time out to answer a number of questions from our staff based in Chicago and New York.

Wendy holds a Bachelor of Science in psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh and an MBA from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.