“Beyond the Boardroom” Session Will Put Community Concerns at Center of Debate Over Jobs, Energy, Infrastructure and the Data Center Boom
The PuLSE Institute today announced that longtime Michigan labor leader and former State Representative Ronnie Peterson of Ypsilanti will join its 2026 Virtual Economic Justice Conference on Data Centers on Monday, October 12, adding two veteran voices in government, labor and community leadership to one of the conference’s most consequential sessions.
Peterson will participate in:
Beyond The Boardroom: What Residents Are Asking About the Data Center Boom
The 11:00 a.m. session is designed to move the data center conversation beyond corporate announcements, investment projections and technological promise and toward the questions being raised by the people and communities that will live with the consequences of this rapidly expanding infrastructure. To register for the conference visit The Institute eventbrite page.
Additional speakers representing different community perspectives will be announced for the Beyond the Boardroom session in the coming days.
“Billions of dollars may define the size of the data center boom, but they cannot by themselves define its success,” said nationally acclaimed journalist, author and public intellectual Bankole Thompson, Founder and Chairman of The PuLSE Institute. “Beyond the Boardroom will bring the conversation to where economic policy ultimately becomes real in the lives of workers, families and communities. The people who live with the decisions must be heard alongside those who make them.”
“Major economic development cannot be measured solely by the size of an investment or the infrastructure that is built,” said Attorney Tina M. Patterson, President and General Counsel of The PuLSE Institute. “It must also be measured by whether communities have a meaningful voice in decisions that affect their economic future. Beyond the Boardroom is about bringing those voices into the center of the conversation and asking what accountability, opportunity and responsible leadership should look like in the data center age.”
Ronnie Peterson brings decades of experience spanning organized labor, government and community development including serving as longtime political director for AFSCME Michigan Council 25. The former Michigan state representative represented the Ypsilanti area in the Legislature after serving on the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners. His extensive background in organized labor adds an important worker-centered perspective to a discussion increasingly focused on the economic promises accompanying the data center boom.
Peterson will bring the perspectives organized labor, workers and community life directly into a debate often dominated by discussions of capital investment, technology and energy capacity.
Beyond The Boardroom
The session will confront questions increasingly being asked as data centers expand across Michigan and the nation:
What will the data center boom mean for workers and local hiring? Will communities experience lasting economic opportunity? What will unprecedented electricity demand mean for households? How should public infrastructure and incentives be evaluated? And what responsibilities accompany investments capable of reshaping communities for generations?
Beyond the Boardroom is being structured as a major public-interest component of the conference not an afterthought to the corporate conversation.
It will follow the conference’s principal plenary discussion and examination of independent research, creating a deliberate progression from leadership and industry, to evidence, to the voices and concerns emerging from communities themselves.
Building on a High-Profile Economic Justice Forum
The 2026 gathering continues The PuLSE Institute’s tradition of convening major leaders from business, government, law, diplomacy and civil society to confront questions of poverty and economic inequality.
Previous PuLSE forums have featured leaders including former United Nations Under-Secretary-General and UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem; Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison; former U.S. Ambassador Anne Derse; U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Mark Randon; Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan President and CEO Tricia Keith; Strategic Staffing Solutions Founder and CEO Cindy Pasky; and DTE Energy Executive Chairman Jerry Norcia, among others.
Gary Torgow, Chairman of Huntington National Bank, delivered the opening keynote address at The PuLSE Institute’s 2024 National Conference on the Economy, where he addressed the affordable housing crisis and the need to expand homeownership and economic opportunity to communities at the bottom of the economic ladder.
That establishes The Institute’s annual economic justice conference as a forum where corporate leadership and public policy are examined alongside the experiences of communities confronting economic inequality.
A Moral Test for the Data Center Age
The 2026 conference will be held under the theme:
The Moral Responsibility of Leadership:
Economic Justice, Corporate Stewardship, and the Future of American Prosperity
This year, that overarching theme will be examined through the urgent issue of data centers and economic justice.
The conference comes as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other technologies accelerate demand for massive digital infrastructure and billions of dollars in new data center investment.
Confirmed conference speakers include Jerry Norcia, Executive Chairman of DTE Energy, and Joi Harris, President and CEO of DTE Energy, who will participate in the conference’s plenary discussion examining data centers and economic justice.
The conference is deliberately being convened during the week of the United Nations International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on October 17, connecting the extraordinary resources being marshaled for the digital economy with a larger question about poverty, opportunity and the responsibilities of leadership.
For more information about the conference send questions to info@thepulseinstitute.org
