What if the reason your employee engagement initiatives aren't gaining traction has nothing to do with the quality of your work and everything to do with where you started?

In this episode of Elevate, host Joy Fajardo sits down with Vanessa Lecorps, Vice President of Engagement and Belonging at Children's Aid, to explore what 25 years of culture work across corporate, academic, and nonprofit spaces has taught her about building engagement strategies that actually land with leaders.

Vanessa leads engagement for 2,000+ employees across 42 offices at one of New York City's most storied nonprofits, teaches at NYU, and serves as board president of the Women's Mentoring Network. Her approach is data-driven, cross-functional, and grounded in a simple belief: engagement work only adds value when it's connected to the business problem it's meant to solve.

Together, Joy and Vanessa explore how to start every engagement strategy with the right question, how to close the "say-do gap" that quietly erodes trust, what values in action really look like beyond the poster on the wall, and what the future of personalized employee engagement looks like as AI enters the picture.

If you're an engagement, HR, or Internal Comms leader who wants your work to resonate with leadership and drive real results, this episode will give you a new place to start.