Mia Hye-Ri Baik
Founder
Mia is a global connector and culturally grounded strategist whose career began in U.S. government defense procurement and the Statue of Liberty Centennial Celebration, moved through asset management at a $13 billion real estate investment advisory firm, and advanced into The World Bank, where she was mentored by then President James D. Wolfensohn and helped build the institution's early distance learning and communications initiatives. She went on to found her own consultancy, carrying that same cross-sector fluency into cultural branding and communications work. She has worked with Boeing, CIGNA, Mars Wrigley, AEG, the (RED) Initiative, the Milken Institute, Kenyatta University, Georgetown University, Kochman-Mavrelis, the Judiciary and Economic Development Committees for the District of Columbia.
Mia’s commitment and passion for non-profit organizations includes, the Hunger Project’s 20th Anniversary, the Asia Society, the Kennedy Center, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, alongside board position with Daily Dental Care, LLC and fundraising for the Clinton Foundation, MOAD (Museum of the African Diaspora), and the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.
Mia has spent her career doing, informally and institution by institution, what Culturally Speaking® now exists to formalize. She translates culture (identity, trust, and connection) into language and systems that large organizations may act on. Her own life as an internationally adopted person gave her the firsthand instinct at the center of the Cultural Navigation System™: people are often described before they are asked. Being asked first is what makes trust possible.
VISION
A world where culture no longer divides human potential, because every individual and institution has a way to navigate it, with intelligence, acceptance, and trust.
“The lens through which I view and experience the world is a constant duality, holding gratitude and grief, identity and uncertainty, all at once. It became the foundation of my life’s work: bridging between cultures, between the head and the heart, and between what we know and how we live it.”
Mia is part of the largest diaspora of intercountry adoptees worldwide: Korean by birth, American by placement, and for most of her life, fully at home in neither. She has lived across ten major U.S. cities and abroad, working across finance, global development, media, brand strategy, and partnerships: direct, lived experience of the exact identity complexity the Cultural Navigation System™ is built to serve.
Her claim is universal: every human being is adopted into something. Families, schools, workplaces, countries, belief systems, all carry unwritten rules that have to be navigated. The adoptee is not the exception. The adoptee is the clearest case.
Every human being is adopted into something.
Not legally. Culturally.
Advisory Board
Patricia Costa Reis, PhD
Pediatric rheumatologist, L'Oréal-UNESCO Prize Laureate
Tamara Jackson
$17B+ raised in institutional assets, BNP Paribas, Northern Trust
Joel LaBelle
AI systems architect, 25+ years scaling enterprise platforms
Romi Nakajima
Creative Director, Jay-Z's 40/40 Club Asia, NHK World
Laura Newberry-Yokley
Cultural fluency strategist, 50+ countries, nine books
Bree Olofson
Systems change strategist, Microsoft, Gates Foundation
Darius Walker
Emmy, Peabody, and duPont-Columbia Award-winning journalist, CNN, CBS
Audra Wilson-Max
Director of Communications, COSA; CEO, Brand Africa
Tamara Jackson
$17B+ raised in institutional assets, BNP Paribas, Northern Trust
Tamara is an institutional business development executive building trust with CIOs, investment staff, board trustees, and search consultants who control access to capital allocation. Across senior roles including, Managing Director, Business Development Strategy and Execution with BNP Paribas Asset Management, and Northern Trust Global Investments, along with senior executive positions at Fiera Capital, Impax Asset Management, and Osmosis Investment Management, she has raised over $17 billion in new institutional assets under management by building durable advocacy inside firms where consultant relationships decide outcomes.
Tami also brings a sustained, credentialed thread of work in access and inclusion within institutional finance through the TOIGO Foundation’s minority MBA mentoring program, the Women Investing in Institutional Network (WIIIN) and 100 Women in Finance communities, and her appointment to the California State Financial Literacy Program Task Force.
Her combination of deep institutional distribution credibility paired with firsthand knowledge of how access barriers show up inside wealth management lets her stress-test Culturally Speaking®’s retention positioning.
Joel LaBelle
AI systems architect, 25+ years scaling enterprise platforms
Joel is a senior technology executive, software architect, and AI systems strategist with more than 25 years experience designing and shipping enterprise-scale platforms across financial services, healthcare, and education.
Joel’s career is bookended by the two capabilities Culturally Speaking® needs most: deep AI orchestration expertise and a proven ability to build production systems from zero. He architects AI delivery systems that coordinate multiple specialized agents, automate, optimize model selection, and enforce measurable quality through evaluation-driven architecture.
His foundation runs deep in the domains Culturally Speaking® serves. As Director of Software Architecture at FairHealth, CTO of Edgetrade, acquired by Knight Trading Group, Vice President at Nomura, and several consulting engagements with Octagon Strategy and Lime Financial, Joel brings the architectural discipline an identity-aware intelligence system demands. He builds the hard things. He builds them to last, with governance and reliability engineered from day one.
Romi Nakajima
Creative Director, Jay-Z's 40/40 Club Asia, NHK World
Romi is a Tokyo-born, Los Angeles-based Creative Director who has spent 20+ years doing exactly what Culturally Speaking® is building: a system for translating cultural identity across borders without losing its authenticity.
As Creative Art Director for the Jay-Z-founded 40/40 Club Asia Project, she led brand expansion across Tokyo, Shanghai, Macau, and Los Angeles; as Creative Director for a joint NHK World and Japan Ministry of Agriculture initiative, she brought Japanese culture, music, and fashion into genuine resonance with American markets; and at Asakusa ROX, she drove a 30% revenue increase through culture-forward creative strategy. A luxury beauty artist with Estée Lauder and AERIN Beauty and fluent in Japanese and English, Romi brings Culturally Speaking® the rare combination of creative vision, cross-cultural operational discipline, and lived cultural navigation that transforms an identity framework into a brand the world will feel.
Laura Newberry-Yokley
Cultural fluency strategist, 50+ countries, nine books
Laura has spent two decades proving across 50+ countries, 20+ languages with clients from Abbott, NAACP, SHRM, and United Way, cultural fluency is not a soft skill but a complete system.
Holding a BA in Spanish and Classical Studies, an MA in Women’s Studies in Religion, and an MBA, with international study spanning Spain, India, and Crete, Laura brings Culturally Speaking® the rare combination of academic rigor, global operational experience, and a whole-person perspective the platform's deepest work requires.
As founder of the Holistic Leadership Network, author of nine books, and creator of interdisciplinary podcast series reaching leaders across sectors, she arrives at Culturally Speaking® already building the audience, community, and dialogue the platform needs to grow, making her not just an advisor but an active distribution force for everything Culturally Speaking® is building.
Bree Olofson
Systems change strategist, Microsoft, Gates Foundation
Bree is a systems change strategist who builds the systems that make change irreversible. From embedding Equal Opportunity Employment into Microsoft’s core operations to nearly two decades at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation driving social justice initiatives and ground-level storytelling.
Bree has spent her career doing what Culturally Speaking® is now asking institutions to do: transforming culture into a structured system. Her operating principles are grounded in authentic connection is the most powerful shift for lasting adoption and the operational logic Culturally Speaking® is building its platform on.
She brings to Culturally Speaking® the institutional access, systems architecture expertise, and change management credibility that turns a compelling framework into a system that scales.
Patricia Costa Reis, PhD
Pediatric rheumatologist, L'Oréal-UNESCO Prize Laureate
Patricia is a Pediatric Rheumatologist, L’Oreal-UNESCO Prize laureate, and a researcher at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular Joao Lobo whose groundbreaking epigenetic work brings to Culturally Speaking® a scientific lens.
Her research proving that inherited biological mechanisms and environmental triggers shape outcomes beneath the surface - work published in Nature Reviews Rheumatology, protected by a granted patent, and now informing new treatment pathways - the scientific parallel to Culturally Speaking®’s core thesis: that identity, like biology, is shaped by systems operating below the visible level that require new frameworks to understand and new tools to navigate.
A professor at the Universidade de Lisboa, head of a pediatric research center, and a trusted public voice for scientific awareness across media, conferences, and community initiatives, Patricia gives Culturally Speaking® the institutional credibility and systems-level intelligence to position cultural navigation as a rigorous, evidence-based human science.
Darius Walker
Emmy, Peabody, and duPont-Columbia Award-winning journalist, CNN, CBS
Darius is an Emmy, Peabody, and duPont-Columbia Award-winning journalist and media executive who built some of the most trusted news platforms in the world. Now, he brings that architecture to Culturally Speaking®. Over 18 years at CNN across roles including New York Bureau Chief, Vice President of Global Business News, and Senior Director at the Washington, DC Bureau, he mastered how stories about culture, identity, and society are shaped and delivered to global audiences.
As the strategic architect behind CBSN, the CBS News 24-hour streaming network, he drove the platform to over one billion streams in 2020 - proving his ability to scale narrative platforms in a fragmented media landscape. A proven crisis communications strategist for large corporations and recipient of the New York Association of Black Journalists’ inaugural Trailblazer Award, Darius brings Culturally Speaking® the media credibility, storytelling architecture, and institutional navigation capability it needs to make cultural identity a story the world pays attention to.
Audra Wilson-Max
Director of Communications, COSA; CEO, Brand Africa
Audra is Director of Communications at the Committee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA) and CEO and Founder of Brand Africa, bringing to Culturally Speaking® a rare combination of global systems thinking, strategic narrative design, and cross-sector convening power. Trusted by the United Nations, the International Labour Organization, the Southern African Development Community, the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII), and Old Mutual to turn complex ambition into measurable outcomes.
She spent her career doing what Culturally Speaking® is building to scale: helping institutions and individuals navigate the systems that shape identity, connection, and participation. Known for bridging strategy, storytelling, and systems thinking across governments, private sector, labour, and civil society, she brings to Culturally Speaking® the institutional credibility, African market depth, and multi-stakeholder alignment that the platform requires as it grows globally.