Executive Team

Executive Director, Yvette Irvin
 

Yvette Irvin, Executive Director

Yvette Irvin is passionate about diversity and began working with the California Diversity Council as a volunteer in 2007.  She accepted the post as Executive Director for San Francisco in 2008 and became Executive Director for all of California in 2009. 

Yvette actively works with the CADC Board of Directors to grow the Council’s reach and expand its offerings throughout California.  Yvette drives all strategy for the Council’s business, volunteer and financial operations for all regions across California.  She also collaborates with the National Diversity Council to ensure efficiencies across the organizations. 

Throughout her 20 year career, Yvette has led communications and marketing programs for a variety of communications industries including print, television, and the Internet.  She has championed successful web and marketing initiatives for a broad number of Fortune 500 companies including Yahoo!, Visa, Johnson & Johnson, Fox KTTV, and Essence Magazine and owns marketing company, SavvyClick Marketing, which she founded to help businesses thrive in the ever-changing online world. 

Yvette is a native of Silicon Valley and, with her husband and teen-aged son, lives in the San Mateo County home she grew up in.  Yvette is a graduate of UCLA. 

President, Ruth Simeon, M.A.
 

Ruth Simeon, Executive President

Ruth Simeon is a management consultant who for the last twenty-five years has been addressing the issues of diversity across auto, insurance, banking, pharmaceutical and food industries.  She has worked with such renowned diversity consultants as Dr. Price Cobbs and Dr. Rita Boags.   Ruth has helped build sustainable mentoring programs, assessed discriminatory leadership practices, and conducted diversity and management workshops.
As an executive in the nonprofit sector and senior manager in the aerospace and utility industries, she created diversity interventions and programs which helped resolve community tensions and overcome discriminatory practices in hostile and consent decree environments.  During her leadership she was also responsible for improved quality results, increased team productivity and leadership development. 

Ruth was Director of Training for the Pan American Games and was responsible for the cultural awareness training of 35,000 volunteers for the Games.   As an Arthur Anderson certified trainer she was responsible for culturally sensitive training delivered to staff from fifty-four countries around the world.
She is Executive Secretary for the California Diversity Council San Francisco chapter and helped build a partnership with the University of Southern California to produce a Women In Leadership Symposium.   Ruth was appointed by Mayor Villaraigosa as a Los Angeles City Commissioner for the Workforce Investment Board.  Most recently, she conducted management workshops for PACE, Pacific Asian Consortium in Employment and presented to  NW Diversity Central on cross cultural mentoring.  She is working on a global mentoring project with a Bay area corporation. 

Vice President, Kevin L. Nichols 

Kevin L. Nichols, Vice President, CADC

 Kevin L. Nichols is the President & CEO of KLN Publishing, LLC and a legal industry consultant specializing in three areas, Litigation (with an emphasis in technology), Diversity, and Professional/Business Development utilizing social media.  Developing diversity programs at several firms, most recently at Holland & Knight LLP, and interfacing with the legal community has enabled Kevin to create a proactive and reputable personal brand of excellence.  While at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Affirmative Action and Diversity Program, Kevin monitored the diversity matrices, which included salary, rate of promotion, etc. regarding the age, gender, and ethnicity of employees at the laboratory and provided analysis regarding same.  Kevin consults with local non-profits and corporations regarding human resource issues and conflict resolution.  He is also the moderator of two extremely active groups on LinkedIn and a columnist for The Globe Newspapers, both located in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Kevin has been featured on LinkedIn’s Blog, Yahoo’s Blog, in the Examiner, CNN Money, MarketWatch, and the Wall Street Journal.  As Vice President of the California Diversity Council, Kevin strategically advises on event planning, programming, and membership development.

Financial Secretary, (Open Position) 

Secretary (Open Position)