Women's Influence: Leading Man Award-Winner Darnell Moore on Activism, Equity and Healing Power of Access

Darnell Moore is the 2023 Alex Barbanell Leading Man Award winner and VP of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix, author, social justice activist and podcast host.

Since the very beginning, Darnell Moore has relied on a community of women in his “huge” family with his mother, aunts, grandmothers, sisters and cousins contributing to his recognition that gender equity was absent and that everyone across identities needs to support each other in truth, healing and power.

“Darnell Moore is the 2023 Alex Barbanell Leading Man Award winner and VP of Inclusion Strategy at @Netflix, author, #socialjustice activist and podcast host. ”

As this year’s Alex Barbanell Leading Man Award honoree at the Power Up Conference and Conference 2023 on Women’s Equality Day, Moore, Vice President of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix, author, social justice activist and podcast host, draws on his life experiences—positive and traumatic—to shape his mission of equity, access, justice and authenticity of self.

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“When I began to understand so much of my self-perception and ideas of who I am as a man is tied to expectations of what men are supposed to be, I learned it is about creating awareness and to shift the terrain for all to have equal access to all things.” Moore adds, “How much of ourselves are not released because of expectations we are expected to meet and what lies we have believed in?”  

Read the Netflix Inclusion Report here  

Born to a 16-year-old mom in Camden, N.J., Moore has three sisters, two stepbrothers and more than four dozen cousins—just on his mother’s side.

“I grew up as a young person as a dreamer,” says Moore, an author and frequent commentator who hosts the podcast, Being Seen.

“Not only did I have a vision of my life as being free, my imagination was quite vast. But I always aware of people being mistreated,” he says, as his mother was physically abused by her own father as well as by Moore’s father, her husband.

“I care deeply about the need to do advocacy and community work related to gender and women’s safety and rights,” says Moore, whose national honors include The Root 100 in 2018. Moore will be honored at the Power Up Conference on the same day as the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, D.C., considered to be a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.   

Growing up with his teen mother, Moore says, was “a fast lesson in what it means to be a young Black girl raising me. She stopped going to high school and had to work really hard to make ends meet. I pulled out a check stub of hers and thought, ‘This doesn’t look like an amount that matches her work.’”

Gender pay equity was a reality for him at a very young age observing his young mother’s struggles.

“For Darnell Moore, #genderpay equity was a reality for him at a very young age observing his young mother’s struggles. #socialjustice”

“She took boxes out of the back of trucks at department stores, worked early, came home and did all the invisible labor of a mom. It was a crash course in understanding the difference in gender parity that shaped my life as a young boy,” says Moore, who has worked globally on human rights as a member of the first U.S. LGBTQ Delegation to Palestine.

Read more in Take The Lead on Leon Silver, 2020 Leading Man Award Winner

“I learned the word, feminism, far before I read Audre Lorde. I knew my mother and my sisters had lives shaped very differently because they were women,” Moore says.

““I learned the word, #feminism, far before I read Audre Lorde. I knew my mother and my sisters had lives shaped very differently because they were #women.” - Darnell Moore, VP Inclusion Strategy @Netflix.”

As a teen attending Camden High, and someone who was not presenting stereotypically male,Moore says he was attacked and set on fire by local teens who taunted him. He chronicles his experience in his 2018 award-winning memoir, No Ashes in the Fire, selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year  and winner of the Lambda Literary Award.

“The extraordinary nature is those violences are so mundane,” Moore says. “As a young person not yet identifying as queer, I was picked on a lot for my gender representation. I danced with girls and did not play football. But those types of violences and experiences are only extraordinary because they are so common,” says Moore, who also was editor of the 2013 book, Astor Place – Broadway – New York, about a barber shop, one of the last stores remaining from the 1940s in Lower Manhattan.

Read more in Take The Lead on creating allyship at work

After high school, Moore attended and graduated in 1999 with a degree in Social and Behavioral Science from Seton Hall University. He returned to Camden to start a career in nonprofits and education.

“Let me go after the American Dream,” Moore says he thought after graduating.  

He started out working at Urban Promise, became a youth missionary and after-school teacher. He then taught at San Miguel School in Camden, an all-boys school, then worked at the Center For Family Services running group homes and became director, as well as working for United Way. “All before I was 28,” Moore says.

He then pursued and earned his first masters degree in clinical counseling at Eastern University, before earning a Master of Arts degree in Theological Studies from Princeton Theological Seminary, says Moore, now 47.

“I spent all of my time trying to unlearn all the ideas that had me in a position of hating myself. Some of that self-hatred I learned was via the pulpit and some through society,” Moore says. “So I went to study all I could. I went there to live and learn.”

Later serving as Chair of the LGBTQ Concerns Advisory Commission under Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker, Moore was awarded the American Conference on Diversity, Humanitarian Award. In 2012, Rutgers University honored him with LGBTQ and Diversity Resource Center, Outstanding Academic Leadership Award, for his work on developing the Queer Newark Oral History Project. Moore also earned the First Annual Episcopal Diocese of Newark's Dr. Louie Crew Scholarship for individuals and groups working "at the intersection of sexuality and faith."

Learn more here about the 2023 Power Up Conference, Lead Your Intention

In 2019, Queerty named him one of the Pride50 “trailblazing individuals who actively ensure society remains moving towards equality, acceptance and dignity for all queer people.”

“In 2019, @Queerty named Moore one of the Pride50 “trailblazing individuals who actively ensure society remains moving towards #equality, acceptance and dignity for all #queer people.””

That same year, he joined Netflix, based in Los Angeles. “The gray in my beard is because I’ve had two decades of a trajectory after extensive work as a therapist and moving into education and nonprofits and research. All of my work I have ever done is centered on ensuring there can be conversations had that can help in any way possible to create more space at the table for people telling their stories.”

This is critical now—as well as historically.

OECD Forum Network’s recently released 2023 study, “Gender Equality in Times of Crisis, indicates that half of the people worldwide continue to believe men make better political leaders than women, about 45 per cent believe men make better business executives than women, while 30 per cent of women believe it is justified for a man to beat his wife.”

Just as Moore discovered in his own growth, The Forum Network reports gender stereotypes are harmful to equity.

“Gary Barker, CEO and co-founder of the Equimundo Center for Masculinities and Social Justice mentioned that IMAGES, one of the largest studies ever on men and gender, found that half or more of men continue to believe in traditional views of manhood – that men should be in control at home and in sexual relationships, that manhood requires emotional repression and going it alone and that violence is a valid means to solve problems. The research also found that men who believe in these restrictive and unequal norms are more likely to cause harm to themselves, to be less satisfied in their intimate and personal lives and to have worse health outcomes.”

As a journalist creating content, Moore is out to change the tide of history. He is an Editorial Collective Member of the Feminist Wire and contributor to Huffington Post and other major outlets.

“As a #journalist creating content, Moore is out to change the tide of history. He is an Editorial Collective Member of @thefeministwire and contributor to @huffpost and other major outlets. ”

“I moved into media as both a writer and someone who works with writers in so many ways—someone who has been behind the camera and in front of the camera.” He adds, “Several years ago I made a commitment as co-managing editor of Feminist Wire, and editor of Feminist Wire Books” to offer access across gender and all identities.

“The only thing I knew to be true was that I could get a lot of applause for work evidenced as extraordinary and I would say I don’t need applause to do the work tied into my growth and my internal freedom,” Moore says.

“The crux of my creative capacity is using storytelling to expand others’ world views,” says Moore, who has been a visiting fellow at Yale Divinity School and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University, a Lecturer at Rutgers University and The City College of New York.

“For the last 15 years I have used creative content as a narrative of equity and gender parity as an entry point,” says Moore, who serves as a board member of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY and The Tobago Center for Study and Practice of Indigenous Spirituality. “That content is organized around what I understand to be who gets to be included, whose stories we are telling and creating access to stories told around the world.” He adds, “Narrative is at the center.”

Receiving the Leading Man Award at the Power Up Conference (named after Barbanell, the late husband of Take The Lead co-founder Gloria Feldt), Moore is in conversation with Vada Manager, founder and CEO of Manager Global Holdings, and President and CEO of Manager Global Consulting Group, winner of the 2022 Award.

““For the last 15 years I have used creative content as a narrative of #equity and #genderparity as an entry point,” says Moore, who serves as a board member of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at @CUNY.”

Moore says, “I am honored by the award for work that more and more men in my community should be doing anyway. We as male-identified folks wherever they exist should feel so compelled, called and moved to think about dominance and power.”  

Read more in Take The Lead on Vada Manager

Moore adds, “I know our collective healing is tied to all of us to make sure no one has their foot on someone’s neck.”

Register here for The Power Up Conference and see Darnell Moore in conversation with Vada Manager

Take The Lead Leadership Takeaway of The Week:

“All of my work I have ever done is centered on ensuring there can be conversations had that can help in anyway possible to create more space at the table for people telling their stories.”

Darnell Moore, VP of Inclusion Strategy for Netflix and winner of Take The Lead’s 2023 Leading Man Award