Featured Speaker:
Kimberly A. Ritter
Director of Development, Exchange Initiative
Senior Account Manager, Nix Conference & Meeting Management
Kimberly Ritter is a veteran in the hotel and meeting planning industry and is the Senior Account Manager specializing in large event planning at Nix Conference & Meeting Management. Kimberly’s main market segment is the religious clientele. She also spearheads the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) trafficking initiative. Nix has been dedicated to combating child sex trafficking in hotel properties since 2008. Nix was recently awarded International recognition as a Top Member for The Code as one of thirteen U.S. companies from around the world who are true leaders of child protection in tourism. Aside from her work as a meeting planner, Ritter brings awareness to the issue of sex trafficking though speaking engagements, written articles and press interviews.
Ritter is also the Director for Development for Exchange Initiative, an organization formed by Nix Conference & Meeting Management in 2013 to educate, empower and engage individuals and organizations with real resources to help put an end to sex trafficking. Exchange has developed a smartphone app, TraffickCam, which invites travelers to capture hotel room images with their camera phone and upload those images to a database. (For more information: Global Sisters Report, Q&A with Kimberly Ritter.) The app will provide consistent protocol to improve the ability of investigators to match photos being searched online for missing children. Awards received by Kimberly include the 2017 Ignatian Spirituality Award, the 2015 Spirit of St. Louis’s Women’s Fund Community Spirit Award, the 2014 Congressional Victims’ Rights Caucus Allied Professional Award, the 2012 FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award, the 2013 Missouri Athletic Club’s Woman of Distinction and the 2012 St. Louis Woman of Achievement for Human Welfare Award. In 2012, she was selected by Successful Meetings Magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential People in the Meetings Industry.
Kimberly serves as an advisory board member for ECAPT–USA and on the board of directors for Women of Achievement. She is also a member of the Religious Conference Management Association.