As Senior Director of MARC Branding, Gabriele is responsible for developing and executing the MARC brand amplification strategy. He acts as a voice for MARC to ensure the continued and growing recognition and strength of the brand and the impact it represents.
Gabriele is also the founder of Woke Daddy a platform where he shares his thoughts about fatherhood, masculinity and society at large. Prior to joining Catalyst, he accumulated 10+ years of international marketing and branding experience in an advertising agency and as an entrepreneur.

HOMBRE: What exactly is MARC?
Ludo Gabriele: MARC is an initiative from Catalyst. Catalyst is an organization created in 1962 at the start of the feminist movement and the opening up of the workplace to women. MARC came much later; it started in 2009 as a research initiative which led to other initiatives around interrupting sexism and now it is a full fledged suite of programs. MARC stands for Men Advocating Real Change so essentially it’s an initiative designed to inspire and equip men with the skills to be more effective in becoming gender partners in the workplace.
Now we have programs that reach all levels of an organization from top of the house to people at entry level.H: What are some of those programs?
LG: We have six. One is the MARC Executive Dialogue, which is six hours long for C-level executives. We have the MARC Leaders Immersive programs for directors and above. We try to have a 70 percent ratio of men in all the programs that we do.
Then we have the MARC Learning Series that is three times, and three hours online.
There is the MARC Foundation that is really the entry program which kind of starts the awareness around this idea of gender equity.
We have a MARC Dialogue Team that is a self-led curriculum to continue learning. People do it at a grassroots level of the organization.

We also have MARC Managers because they are really at a critical place when it comes to creating inclusive culture. They have to manage very conflicting objectives from the top and also deal with everyday work. Those are the programs, but MARC is also a movement.

H: How often do those programs happen and how many people participate?
LG: It ranges in varieties and modalities. The programs that we offer are for Catalyst supporters so individuals need to be members of an organization of Catalyst to participate.

It’s what we call the refer service portion of Catalyst. Think of it as a workshop format. Essentially an organization contracts us and then we develop the workshop. Some of them are longer term, like one or two year long, and for some there is a shorter start and end date.

H: You mentioned MARC is a movement, what can you tell us about that?
LG: MARC’s mission is to benefit the larger masculinity conversation and to contribute meaningfully from a place of accountability and responsibility of men. But also coming from a lot of compassion because we know as men the conversations tend to be oversimplified and extremely polarized. It’s important to bring nuance to that conversation because a lot of men want to be involved but many are not socialized to do that from a young age.
A start to the way that we contribute is through events so we have put together two flagships events around masculinity.

H: What can you tell us about those events?
LG: The first in 2020 was exclusively online called MARC Summit where we organized the event around the life stages of men explaining that this masculinity conversation doesn’t only happen in the workplace, it starts way before and stays with you basically in the way you perceive yourself, perceive women, and perceive others.
That was the first one, right before the Pandemic.
And in 2022 we did a hybrid event, some of it online and some in person and the in-person component was done in four continents: Panama, Singapore, the USA, and Switzerland. The idea was to bring cultural nuances that are critical into those conversations.
I know your audience is Latin men so the Panama one is of interest. We looked at the language component and how gendered the Spanish language is. That has tremendous influence in the way we address others and also the culture, the machismo that exists.
The intersection between language and culture brings when there’s an underlying theme of masculinity. For healthy masculinity cultural connotations are critical.

H: Are you planning more events?
LG: Maybe in 2024.

H: How do you see the role of MARC in corporate culture?
LG: Because we started as a research report everything we do comes from research. That’s very important and that effort has not stopped. Any learning program that has been created as a result is basically what Catalyst is known for.
It’s important that people understand that those conversations are not nice to have but they are rooted in facts and we have grown tremendously.

Below are additional details about the various MARC initiatives.
For more information about MARC and Catalyst visit www.catalyst.org/marc

MARC PROGRAMS

MARC Leaders Immersive
This immersive workshop enables leaders to engage at a more emotional level and connect more deeply to equity and inclusion challenges to drive real change.