Shanaya Dungey has helped guide the African American Leadership Forum through organizational growth, executive transition, and institutional change. As chief operating officer since 2023, she has supported the organization’s evolution into a multimillion-dollar Black-led “think-and-do” tank; most recently, she helped maintain organizational continuity through a CEO transition. Dungey is also the only non-CEO executive member of the LinkingLeaders Partnership, a coalition of more than 5,500 Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous Twin Cities leaders. “CEOs are visionaries and dreamers. I ask very different questions,” she says. “I tend to focus on how we are going to make traction, what implications our actions will have, and how we can get results.”