Denver is set to host roughly 600 women from 27 countries this week as the International Women’s Forum convenes its 2026 World Leadership Conference and Gala, featuring retired Air Force Brigadier General Dana Born, the first woman to serve as dean of the U.S. Air Force Academy. Born, a 30-year Air Force veteran, is expected to share leadership lessons drawn from her role on the official working group that guided the Department of Defense’s repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy that once prevented gay, lesbian and bisexual service members from serving openly in the armed forces.
IWF Colorado was selected to host this year’s gathering, which runs November 11–13 in Denver, according to IWF Colorado. As part of the program, Born and fellow speaker Marilyn Gist will deliver the Susan Hammer Memorial Lecture, an honor named for the late IWF Oregon member Susan Hammer, described by the International Women’s Forum as a trailblazing lawyer, mediator and advocate for women’s advancement. This year’s lecture will explore moral leadership, both within organizations and in the broader world, per the same announcement.
As reported by the Colorado Springs Gazette, Born joined the International Women’s Forum in 2004, the year she became dean of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and has remained involved with the organization ever since. She now works as a senior distinguished fellow at the HOW Institute for Society, which the Gazette reports provides moral leadership training focused on connection, inspiration and purpose.
A Firsthand Seat at a Historic Military Shift
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed under the Obama administration in 2010, and Born served on the working group tasked with helping implement that change. The Gazette’s reporting states she recalled asking how to carry out the repeal effectively while maintaining military readiness, and that her group prepared for the transition by listening to and embracing different experiences as the Department of Defense solicited expertise for the shift. Born has described the process as incredibly effective, according to the same account.
The scale of that effort is laid out in the Pentagon working group’s own 2010 report, which notes it solicited the views of nearly 400,000 active-duty and reserve-component service members, a mobilization that prompted 115,052 responses, per the report hosted by globalsecurity.org. Investigators behind the report also conducted 95 face-to-face information exchange forums at 51 bases and installations around the world, interacting with more than 24,000 service members in the process. The group’s assignment, according to the same document, was to assess the impact of a possible repeal on military readiness, effectiveness, unit cohesion, recruiting, retention and family readiness.
Notably, the working group concluded that when paired with prompt implementation of its recommendations, the risk of repeal to overall military effectiveness was low. Its survey also found that 70% of service members predicted an openly gay colleague in their immediate unit would have a positive, mixed or no effect at all on the unit’s ability to work together, a finding that undercut some of the era’s loudest warnings about the policy change. A separate Joint Chiefs of Staff history describes the 2010 repeal act as reversing a long-standing prohibition against homosexuals serving in uniform.
This Year's Theme Echoes Denver's Own Story
This year’s conference carries the theme Navigating Peaks and Valleys: Leading Amid Uncertainty, a framing inspired by Denver’s history of resilience and reinvention, according to a news release cited by the Gazette. Born has tied that theme directly to her own philosophy, saying uncertainty does not reduce moral responsibility and that valleys are where character is developed and revealed, per the Gazette’s reporting.
The International Women’s Forum was founded in 1974 to bring accomplished women together to exchange ideas, and its members typically have reached some of the highest leadership levels in their organizations, the Gazette notes. The group holds two conferences annually, one in the United States and one internationally, according to the forum’s own conference listings, which describe the pairing as the World Leadership Conference and the Cornerstone Conference. Past gatherings have ranged from a 2025 World Leadership Conference in Seattle to a 2023 Cornerstone Conference in Helsinki, Finland, underscoring the global reach Denver joins this week.
