The 2023 Change Agent Mixer: Celebrating Health, Food and Financial Opportunity

Health care, food and access to capital: some of the systems that shape whether a community thrives. At the 2023 Change Agent Mixer, Gentlemen's Factory honored four people changing those systems from the inside.

Our annual signature event took over The DL on the Lower East Side on Wednesday, September 27, 2023, sponsored by TD Bank and SheaMoisture. As every year, the Mixer brought together people who should know each other, and then stopped the music to say thank you to the change agents among us.

The arrival

The night started with hugs, handshakes and introductions under the greenery at The DL, with a long table of charcuterie and fruit to keep the conversations going.

The program

Jeff Lindor, founder and CEO of Gentlemen's Factory, took the mic in front of a packed room to open the program and present this year's Change Agent Awards, co-branded with SheaMoisture.

The 2023 Change Agents

• Errol Pierre, Senior Vice President of State Programs at Healthfirst, New York's largest nonprofit health plan, and author of The Way Up: Climbing the Corporate Mountain as a Professional of Color (Wiley, 2022). A Bronx resident and adjunct professor at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, he mentors high school and college students in the Bronx and serves on the board of the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health.
• Dr. Kwesi Blackman, attending physician in Internal Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine. Born in Guyana and raised in Flatbush, he served two tours in Iraq as an Army field artillery sergeant before earning his associate degree at Kingsborough Community College, his medical degree at Howard University and an MBA from Long Island University.
• Chef JJ Johnson, chef, entrepreneur and author celebrated for the food of the African diaspora. He founded the rice-bowl restaurant FIELDTRIP, won a 2019 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Between Harlem and Heaven, and advocates for food justice and sustainability.¹
• Marcus Gonzales, banking executive at TD Bank, recognized for his work opening doors to financial opportunity in our community.

The celebration

With the awards handed out, the Mixer went back to doing what it does best: building community one conversation at a time.

Why it matters

A health executive opening doors for professionals of color, a veteran who went from community college to the hospital floor, a chef building a more just food system and a banker expanding access to opportunity: each of our 2023 Change Agents shows young Black and Brown men a different road to leadership. Explore our signature events, or sponsor the next Mixer.

Congratulations to Errol Pierre, Dr. Kwesi Blackman, Chef JJ Johnson and Marcus Gonzales, and thank you to TD Bank, SheaMoisture and everyone who joined us at The DL.