The 10th Annual Women Investing in Nebraska Grant Awards Celebration will be October 26 at 11:30 a.m. at the Lied Center for Performing Arts in Lincoln.
WIN members and guests may register to attend in person or via Zoom with this link: Register
Preeta Bansal, a senior government and business leader, diplomat, adviser and thought leader, is the keynote speaker at the event.
WIN’s annual grants will be awarded at the event. Each year WIN selects a University of Nebraska and a Nebraska nonprofit project to support. With this year’s grants, the group will have awarded more than $1.5 million.
Bansal is a thought leader and high-profile “boomeranger” to Nebraska – though perhaps with a larger and longer arc than is usual for most boomerangs. After growing up in Lincoln in the 1970s and going through Lincoln Public Schools for her K-12 education, she had a high-profile career for 35 years at dizzying heights of power, public and private. Among her public roles, she served as general counsel and senior policy advisor in the Obama White House, Solicitor General of the State of New York, U.S diplomat and chair of a federal human rights commission (in which capacity she advised on the drafting of the constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan), and law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. In the private sector, she served as a global general counsel for HSBC Holdings, plc in London, one of the world’s largest banks, and partner and practice chair of leading international law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in New York City. She has lectured at MIT, Harvard, and Singularity University in Silicon Valley.
A graduate of Lincoln East High School, Preeta attended Harvard-Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School in the 1980s. Living and working in New York City, she received the National Organization of Women’s “Woman of Power and Influence Award” in 2006 and was named one of the “50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America” by the National Law Journal in 2008.
She is currently a co-creator of several leading global movements aiming to redistribute power and reconceive authentic power in an age of disrupted and disintermediated institutions – aiming to empower communities and human networks by using ancient wisdom tools and modern technologies, and drawing upon network science, quantum physics and emerging developments in neuroscience and biology to amplify small shifts. She is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent corporate director of Nelnet, Inc. (NYSE: NNI), and a member of many other nonprofit boards and advisory councils – including a valued member of the advisory councils for UNL’s Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts and the Jeffrey S. Raikes School for Computer Science and Management, and for UNMC.