PINAYISTA FULL SUMMIT SCHEDULE
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8
CIEL CREATIVE SPACE – 2611 EIGHTH ST, BERKELEY, CA, 94710
AGENDA
10AM: welcome
10:15AM: GROUNDING & ALTAR
10:30AM: LIGHTNING TALKS
Fast, inspiring stories from Pinay changemakers shaping the next generation of entrepreneurs and leaders.
Featuring: Cecilia Apelin (CEO, CIEL Creative Space), Adelina Tancioco (CEO, Surrendered Healing), Charleen Caabay (Chef and COO, The People’s Ecosystem), Lisa Angulo Reid (CEO, Dear Flor).
Cecilia Caparas Apelin is an entrepreneur, creative visionary, and brand strategist with a passion for design, fashion, and art. She is the CEO and Co-founder of Ciel Creative Space, a 55,000-square-foot artistic sanctuary in Berkeley, CA, where creatives come together to explore, collaborate, and produce across interconnected studios and event spaces. Driven by a mission to disrupt the creative industry, Cecilia is dedicated to creating pathways and opening doors for BIPOC women creatives, producers, and entrepreneurs, championing inclusion and innovation at every step.
Adelina Tancioco, MSW, is a proud Bay Area born and raised Pinay, speaker, and founder of Surrendered Healing. She helps Filipina entrepreneurs align with Divine guidance, honoring their ancestors while building businesses rooted in faith, purpose, and flow.
Charleen Caabay is an entrepreneur, chef, and business leader with over 15 years of experience across technology, hospitality, and cannabis. A former IT professional turned self-taught chef, she made history as the first Filipino American to win Food Network’s Chopped and later co-founded The People’s Dispensary and The People’s Holdings. With expertise in product development, branding, and multi-site operations, Charleen continues to champion equity, innovation, and community impact in every venture she leads.
Lisa Angulo Reid is the co-founder and CEO of Dear Flor, the first Filipina-owned company crafting infused gummies inspired by Filipino flavors like ube, calamansi, and buko pandan. A former advertising executive with over two decades of experience building global consumer brands, she now channels that expertise into reclaiming space for Filipino culture in wellness and consumer goods. She also hosts 100 Ways to Filipino, a podcast and storytelling platform reframing what it means to be Filipino through the voices of artists, entrepreneurs, and changemakers worldwide.
11AM: COMMUNITY PANEL - ROOTS & WINGS
Theme: Intergenerational Healing In Heritage, Hustle & Money
Rooted in our 2025 Summit theme of Homecoming, Roots & Wings opens with an intimate conversation between Pinay entrepreneurs and the women who raised or inspired them. Together, they’ll reflect on heritage, hustle, and the unspoken stories around money, risk, and survival that shape our families. This dialogue invites us to confront inherited fears, unpack financial narratives, and reimagine what wealth and success can mean for our community.
Featuring: Dr. Jean-Aurellia Tolentino, Gina Mariko Rosales, Lillian Rosales, Adrienne Reyes, Hannah Pioquinto, and Joyce Reyes.
Joyce Ayo Reyes is a retired executive from the health insurance industry who has dedicated her post-corporate life to the healing arts. Guided by a deep spiritual calling, Joyce embraced the practice of Pranic Healing and now serves as the Executive Director of the American Pranic Healing Association. She is also the co-owner of Sacred House LA, a healing space committed to holistic well-being and energetic transformation.
Joyce’s philanthropic spirit led her to found New Hope New Life, a nonprofit organization providing Pranic Healing services to cancer patients in need of energetic and emotional support. With decades of leadership experience and a profound commitment to service, Joyce now focuses on expanding access to energy healing and empowering others on their path to wellness.
Lillian Rosales was an I.T. leader with over 40 years experience in controls design & sustainment, compliance, business analysis, and application development, Lillian Alinea Rosales retired in 2023 as Senior Director for Controls and Compliance with Kaiser Permanente.
Her focus has now shifted to being “Lola Ling” to Aki, travel, learning to be a gardener and better cook, and most importantly enjoying family and making memories.
Adrienne Reyes is a multidisciplinary entrepreneur working at the intersection of healing, creativity, and community impact. As a life force chef, sound healer, and energy practitioner, she crafts transformative experiences that nourish both body and soul. Through her work both in nonprofit leadership and creative direction, she brings visionary ideas to life with purpose and heart. Her mission is to elevate consciousness, foster connection, and design spaces – both physical and energetic – that heal and inspire.
Gina Mariko Rosales is a powerhouse Event Producer, social impact entrepreneur, and cultural strategist based in San Francisco. She is the Founder & CEO of Make It Mariko, an award-winning events agency led by women of color as well as Executive Director of Brave New Spaces. Gina co-founded several cultural initiatives including UNDISCOVERED SF Filipino Night Market, Pinayista, Balay Kreative, Weddings In Color, and the POC Food & Wine Festival – each designed to amplify the voices of creatives of color through events.
12:10PM: LUNCH
1:00PM-2:15PM: SPEAKER WORKSHOPS BREAKOUT A
Practical, guided sessions to help you grow your craft, business, and vision. Led by: Audrey Bansil, Vicki Abadesco, Karen Retardo, Gail Beltran Nott, Michelle Florendo, JL Umipig-Candelario, and Alex Cabal.
Reclaiming Power: Releasing Limiting Beliefs & Building Boldly with audrey bansil
About the Workshop
What if the real blocks in your business aren’t strategy or skill—but the stories you’ve inherited about your worth?
In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore how imposter syndrome, colonial mentality, and internalized perfectionism show up in the Filipina entrepreneurial journey. You’ll identify the limiting beliefs that are quietly holding you back, and learn how to reframe them through the lens of growth mindset, cultural grounding, and intentional leadership. Together, we’ll blend mindset work with cultural healing so you can move from self-doubt to self-trust—and build from a place of power.
Expect a mix of reflection, community connection, and practical tools you can take into your next big move.
Workshop Takeaways
- A better understanding of how cultural dynamics impact confidence and self-worth
- Tools to recognize and reframe limiting beliefs
- A clearer sense of their value, leadership voice, and purpose
- Space to connect with others navigating similar challenges
Audrey Bansil is passionate about helping professionals release self-doubt and step into their power. She serves as president of FilExcellence, a global Filipino empowerment community, and leads talent development at a major media company. Drawing on both lived experience and corporate expertise, Audrey creates spaces for healing, growth, and bold leadership rooted in cultural pride.
Rooted & Rising: Sustaining Your Legacy as a Pinay Entrepreneur with vicki abadesco
About the Workshop
After 10+ years of building, creating, and leading, you’ve proven your resilience and vision as a Pinay entrepreneur. Now, the question is: How do you sustain, scale, and still stay true to your heart?
This workshop is designed for the Rooted Pinayista community—leaders who are seasoned in business and ready to explore what’s next. Together, we’ll blend soulful reflection with practical strategy to help you grow in alignment with your deepest values.
You’ll walk away with a renewed sense of clarity, tools to strengthen your foundation, and community inspiration to keep leading with courage and joy in the next season of your entrepreneurial journey.
Workshop Takeaways
In this interactive session, we will:
- Revisit your core “why” to ensure your business continues to nourish both you and your community.
- Explore systems, structures, and strategies that prevent burnout and support long-term growth.
- Identify opportunities for expansion—whether scaling, delegating, or pivoting—while staying grounded in purpose.
- Envision the legacy you want to leave, and map out the next moves that will bring it to life.
Vicki Abadesco is a visionary entrepreneur, nonprofit leader, speaker, coach, and mentor renowned for her unwavering commitment to growth and transformation. Through her organization, Soul Shoppe, she and her team have touched the hearts and minds of over one million elementary school students with their conflict resolution and peacemaking curriculum.
Pera Na, Pera Pa: Transforming Your Money Mindset with karen retardo
About the Workshop
Have you ever said “Pera na, pera pa!” with a laugh, but deep down you truly wish you had more? This talk is for every Pinay who wants to move beyond just wishing and start building real wealth. We’ll explore the common money stories we tell ourselves and the cultural habits that keep us from financial growth. Get ready to transform your mindset from “sakto lang” (just enough) to one of abundance. You’ll leave with practical tips to reframe your relationship with money and empower yourself to create the financial future you’ve always dreamed of.
Workshop Takeaways
In this talk, you’ll get more than just advice; you’ll get a new perspective. Participants will leave with:
- The ability to identify and reframe the limiting beliefs that are holding them back.
- A clear, actionable plan to start building healthier financial habits immediately.
- The confidence and motivation to pursue their financial goals, whether big or small.
- An understanding of how to shift from a “sakto lang” mindset to a life of financial abundance and opportunity.
Karen Retardo is a nurse, coach and speaker who helps Filipno nurses step into leadersrhip or entrepreneurship with confidence. She empowered them to speak up, claim their dreams and succeed with losing their cultural values.
2:30PM-3:45PM: SPEAKER WORKSHOPS BREAKOUTS B
Your Voice Matters: How to Share What You Know and Attract Your Aligned Clients with gail beltran nott
About the Workshop
Are you ready to stop being the best-kept secret in your industry? We’ll explore how to turn your real experience into content that actually connects, without the perfectionism, performance pressure, or feeling like you have to sound like everyone else.
We’ll cover:
- The 3 storytelling shifts that turn your experience into magnetic content
- The framework for sharing insights that build authority and community
- Real-time practice translating your stories into social media content
This isn’t about becoming louder or more polished. It’s about becoming truer to who you are while building a business that reflects your values and serves your community.
You’ll leave with concrete content ideas, a clearer sense of your unique voice, and the confidence to start sharing what you know with the world.
Workshop Takeaways
- Create your Impact Compass Statement – a clear, authentic summary of who you serve, how you help them, and what you stand for. This becomes the foundation for all of your marketing.
- You’ll then learn the Insights Story framework that turns your experience, expertise, and wisdom into shareable insights without overthinking or perfectionism to create a simple content strategy plan.
About Gail:
As a Thought Leadership & Messaging Coach, Gail Beltran Nott helps values-driven entrepreneurs turn lived experience into magnetic messaging that attracts aligned clients. Her work is shaped by her own nonlinear journey from web programmer to massage therapist to 2019 Oakland Small Business of the Year, plus deep exploration of decolonization, ancestral healing, and neurodivergence. Through her signature frameworks and Impact Messaging Lab, Gail helps changemakers stop second-guessing their brilliance and start speaking from their truth.
Decision Mapping for Pinay Entrepreneurs: Tools for Moving Forward with Clarity with michelle florendo
About the Workshop
As Pinay entrepreneurs, we make countless decisions that shape our businesses, our impact, and our lives. Yet without a structured approach to decision-making, we can find ourselves stuck in analysis paralysis or second-guessing our choices.
Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach Michelle Florendo will teach you how to use principles from decision engineering to make better decisions with less stress and more clarity. Through guided exercises and peer discussions, you’ll learn to break any decision down into its three core components, identify what matters most in your choices, and build confidence in your decision-making—even when outcomes are uncertain.
This isn’t about finding the “perfect” decision—it’s about making good decisions faster, with less overwhelm, and with the support of your sisterhood.
Workshop Takeaways
- Understand what many people get wrong about good decision-making and how to use that insight to make decisions faster and with more confidence
- Practice decision-mapping techniques on real-world scenarios and current decisions they’re facing in their entrepreneurial journey
- Connect with fellow Pinay entrepreneurs through small group exercises, building relationships that can serve as future decision-making support and thought partnership
Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach who teaches people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the past decade, she has spoken to audiences around the globe and has coached hundreds of leaders across tech, healthcare, and financial services, from pre-IPO startups to Fortune 500 companies. She’s been an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, is a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, and hosts the podcast, Ask A Decision Engineer.
Re-membering with JL Umipig-Candelario and Alex Cabal
About the Workshop
“Re-membering” is for the children of the generations after us, but also the children of our generation, the children within us. We will share in Embodied Practice of healing and uplifting the power of a person’s connection to honoring their body and the creative force within it with 3 creative and embodied exercises. This work is a part of a larger body of work that JL Umipig has been cultivating including “”The Re-memberings of a Colonized Child”” and “Creative Justice” and has invited Alex to envision future collaborations through.
We offer this to our Pinayista community as a moment to cultivate tools to center our own Creative Force and be reminded of our wholeness in a time when our lives and the lives of our community are being threatened and attacked. This workshop and work is dedicated to all the children of the world from LA to Palestine to the Congo to Sudan. “
Participants can expect a moment to engage in hands on creative practice and also embodied somatic exercises that will center them in whatever purpose they are being called to in their lives. This is a workshop centering the child/children around and within us and creating a container to tend to the children within us and the honoring of our lives in wholeness.
This collaboration is one that we have been cultivating in the past year, we understand our Creative Force as individuals and how we have both supported our community to reconnect and be held through tools supporting their (re)connection to their Pilipin@/x roots with our Artistry and our intention. Alex brings an ability to source Artistic practice alongside JL who brings facilitation of collective healing into the space. This will be the first place where we will be sharing in open community out our collaboration in-person in community.
JL Umipig is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker whose practice centers on collective healing, ancestral remembering, and creative justice. Through works like The Re-memberings of a Colonized Child and Creative Justice, JL cultivates spaces for embodied reflection and liberation—inviting communities to reconnect with their bodies, stories, and creative power as pathways toward wholeness and freedom.
Alex Cabal is an artist and community practitioner who weaves creativity, movement, and cultural storytelling to support others in reconnecting to their Pilipin@/x roots. Through art and embodied practice, Alex helps communities reclaim self-expression as a tool for healing and empowerment. Their collaboration with JL explores how art and somatics can nurture the child within us and remind us of our shared humanity.
3:45PM: BREAK
4:00PM: CLOSING PANEL - Turn Up the Volume: Pinays in Music & Media
A conversation on storytelling, representation, and building our own stages. Featuring:, Lady Ray, Former Radio Personality & Community Engagement Director (Facilitator and Panelist); Anne Marie Ceralvo, One Vo1ce; Freska Griarte, KOIT; and Erin Lim and Angela Tabora, Bitch Talk Podcast.
Freska Griarte is a Bay Area native and veteran radio personality who co-hosts Freska and Rudy in the Mornings on 102.9 KBLX and middays on 96.5 KOIT in San Francisco. A breast cancer survivor, single mother, and 2nd-degree black belt in Taekwondo, she’s spent much of her career in the Bay Area with stops in Honolulu and Sacramento connecting with listeners through her warm, relatable storytelling. The 2020 recipient of the Ocampo-Henry Memorial Award in Radio from the Philippine American Press Club USA, Freska has built a loyal following through her community work and infectious zest for life. She believes in living life to the fullest: “Don’t carry hate, fear, or past hurt in your heart because that only takes up room for the goodness you could be receiving.”
Anne Marie Ceralvo is an Oakland-based singer-songwriter and vocal producer who’s been bringing soulful harmonies to collaborations since 1998. Between 1998 and 2005, she performed regularly with her singing group One Vo1ce. The pandemic reignited her creative path when they reconnected to release their 4th LP, “ISO,” in July 2021. A member of One Vo1ce and Bless The Titas, Anne Marie provides session vocals for clients across genres and collaborates remotely with songwriters, producers, and lyricists. Her mission is simple: “Produce music with creatives of the highest caliber—music that inspires others—music that brings meaning to people’s lives.”
Born on the Peninsula and raised in the East Bay, Erin Lim has made San Francisco her home and has worked in the film, sports, hospitality, television, arts, and radio industries her entire working life. Erin is still thinking about working on writing her first “tight five” stand-up comedy, loves watching Chopped in her free time (to her husband’s dismay), and is looking forward to finally finishing her first documentary she and her podcast partner, Ange, started in 2013 – The Nomadic Family Project.
Angela Tabora is the co-host of the Bitch Talk Podcast. Ange has worked in post-production for several production companies in the Bay Area. Most recently, she managed political campaigns in Oakland and San Francisco. She is a documentary filmmaker and a world traveler. When not working on her personal projects (and sometimes during), she enjoys a glass of whiskey and a game of pool.
LadyRAY is 106 KMEL On-Air Personality! Catch her Monday to Friday 6am-10am on the Sana G Morning Show and talking everything for your Bay Area Weekend, Saturday 6am-10am – she is also a national voice for iHeartRadio and can be heard on iHeartRadio’s Throwbacks nightly in 12 other markets from the East to the West Coast. Her podcast ‘This Mama Got Drama’ gives moms a space to celebrate the adventures of being a full-time career driven parent because the juggle is real and so is the drama! She is equally as passionate about her role as the Community Engagement Director for iHeartMedia San Francisco, where she gets to work with non-profits helping them spotlight the ways they uplift and support the communities most in need!
4:45PM: CLOSING
5:00PM: PULUTAN PARTY with BLESS THE TITAS!
7:00PM: AFTERPARTY!
We would love to stay connected!