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About Erin Yoshimura

Erin Yoshimura is the Executive Director for the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival (CDBF), a 501c3 non-profit organization. Having volunteered for CDBF for seven years, she takes on a larger role of a community event that’s become the largest pan-Asian cultural celebration in Colorado since 2001 drawing crowds over 100,000.

Prior to joining the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, Erin established Empowerful Changes™, a company that focuses on empowering clients to find their voice and stand with vigor through emotional intelligence training, personal branding and career coaching. Because she brings diversity to every room she enters, Erin uses her personal experiences to catalyze cultural awareness.

In 2010, Erin was selected as the Advocate of the Year by the Colorado chapter of Minority Enterprise & Education Development for her work in serving women and people of color. She also was selected as a 2010 Girl Scouts Woman of Distinction.

She’s created training programs, workshops and keynotes for clients including KUSA (Gannett), Raytheon, MillerCoors, Colorado State University, University of Colorado at Boulder, National Association of Asian American Professionals, National Unification Advisory Council, La Plata County, and the U.S. Mint in Denver. Erin coaches Executive Directors and Emerging Leaders for Los Angeles-based LEAP (Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, Inc).

She’s a certified Personal Brand strategist, certified Emotional Intelligence trainer, and a certified coach. Erin has also trained with and assisted for Lee Mun Wah (Color of Fear) of StirFry Seminars, a nationally-recognized master in diversity and communications training.

She’s been appointed by Denver City Council to the Mayor’s Denver Asian Pacific American Commission and also serves on the Advisory Board of the Human Rights and Community Relations Agency for the City and County of Denver.

Erin's career before becoming a trainer and coach was in high tech, where she was an East Asian product manager, IT project manager and change management analyst.

What she loved most about her jobs were the emotional and cultural dynamics of leading multi-cultural teams – whether they were made up of people in different countries, spread across different sites throughout the U.S. or even in different departments within the same building.

She combines her corporate experience and passion for diversity with training, branding and coaching to teach empowerful communication and cultural intelligence skills.

As a way to give back to the community, Erin, along with her husband, Gil Asakawa, founded www.visualizAsian.com to inspire and empower Asian American Pacific Islanders. They conduct live interviews with notable AAPI trailblazers from national politicians to writers, activists and entertainers using teleconference and web-streaming technology, to connect the community so they, too, can follow in their footsteps.