The murder of George Floyd in summer 2020 by a police officer in Minneapolis led Julian and Kim MacQueen to act locally.
The couple, founders of Innisfree Hotels, started the Equity Project Alliance in Pensacola to fight, he said, “systemic racism as part of our culture that exists not just in Pensacola but across the country and the world. It was basically a call to action about what we could do locally.”
Now Lusharon Wiley, former vice president of corporate culture at Innisfree, has been named the EPA’s first full-time executive director. The EPA is administered by Innisfree’s corporate social responsibility and outreach program, The Hive.
“She’s spent her whole life in preparation for this position,” Julian MacQueen said. “She was one of the Equity Project Alliance’s founding members, and in her career she has always had diversity and inclusion at the top of her mind.”
Wiley, who turns 72 in weeks, is a two-time cancer survivor who, before joining Innisfree six years ago, worked in both Academic Affairs and Student Affairs at the University of West Florida, where she would eventually become Associate Dean. She led many diversity and inclusion initiatives at the university and founded the Argo Pantry to ensure UWF students had access to food.