ALBANY, NY — Melody Harkness, principal and CEO of Harkness Consulting Solutions, knows what it’s like to feel “boxed into a company.”
“Personally I have experienced tokenism and microaggressions, racism, sexism. For me it was a personal mission to try and bring about solutions for those who were going through similar experiences as myself,” she says.
In 2020 she took a leap of faith and opened her own consulting company in order to bring about more inclusive practices, policies, and procedures in the workplace. Through training, business marketing plans, workshops, and organizational assessments, Harkness and her team are on a mission to help businesses get the right skills and resources to motivate change and improvement.
Lillian Rafson, founder and CEO of Pack Up + Go and Melody’s first client, credits Harkness Consulting Solutions with elevating them both on a personal and professional level. “As a company, for our travelers, we are so focused on open-mindedness and encouraging people to learn about places and people and communities that they might not engage with every day, and I wanted my team to have that same opportunity,” Lillian said to Melody during their first ever in-person meeting after two years of working together. Melody nodded in agreement and added, “Progress is exactly that, people deciding they want to do more as an individual within this company.”
Sponsored by Hiscox Business Insurance.
Based in New York, Stephen Freeman is a Senior Editor at Trending Insurance News. Previously he has worked for Forbes and The Huffington Post. Steven is a graduate of Risk Management at the University of New York.