Leigh-Kathryn Bonner

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner is the Founder and CEO of Bee Downtown and the BDT Leadership Institute. She is part of the TED Speaking Community; a 2017 Southern Living Southerner of the Year; a 2018 INC Magazine 30 Under 30 Rising Star; a 2019 Forbes Magazine 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur and North Carolina Woman of the Year; and one of the next 1,000 Entrepreneurs Redefining the American Dream according to Forbes Magazine.

A fourth-generation beekeeper, Bonner founded Bee Downtown to save the dwindling honeybee population while simultaneously providing corporations with a novel approach to sustainability. Bee Downtown installs and maintains beehives on corporate campuses for companies like Delta, NYSE, Dominion Energy, Microsoft, Cricket Wireless, Cisco, Chick-fil-A, MetLife and many more to help rebuild sustainable agriculture and cultivate great places to work.

With over 40 different biomimicry based leadership analogies, or parables, as Bonner likes to call them, she brings a wealth of knowledge and a few key lessons away from the honeybee, applying them to how humans can learn to be more effective leaders and build stronger teams. Each keynote revolves around a central story of what lessons of leadership we can take from one of Mother Nature’s best examples of a high performing team.

Bonner is a graduate of North Carolina State University, received her Nonprofit Management Certificate at Duke University, and is a Journeyman Beekeeper.