Last Updated
April 9, 2020
Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest F. Javier Torres-Campos, Director, Thriving Cultures, Surdna Foundation. [Live show recorded: April 7. 2020.]
Guest: F. Javier Torres-Campos
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guest
F. JAVIER TORRES-CAMPOS serves as Program Director of the Thriving Cultures program overseeing a $9 million grantmaking portfolio seeking to advance the Foundation’s social justice mission. His career has been committed to building just and sustainable communities in partnership with artists and culture/tradition bearers.
Prior to joining Surdna, Javier served as the Director of National Grantmaking at ArtPlace America. In his role, he was responsible for building a comprehensive set of demonstration projects that illustrated the many ways in which arts and culture can strengthen the processes and outcomes of the planning and development field across the United States. Under his leadership, the National Creative Placemaking Fund at ArtPlace supported 279 creative placemaking projects totaling $86.4 million across 46 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Prior to ArtPlace, Javier was Senior Program Officer for Arts and Culture at the Boston Foundation where he led an exploration of the role of culture as a tool for transformation, sustainability, and as central to the development of vibrant communities. Javier also spent six years as the Director of Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, a program of IBA, a community based multi-disciplinary arts complex that operates as a regional presenter and local programmer for Latino arts.
Javier was a board member for Grantmakers in the Arts and an advisory board member for the Design Studio for Social Intervention. He has previously served as a board member for the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, MASSCreative, was a member of the MA Governor’s Creative Economy Council and Chair for the Boston Cultural Council.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by Javier Torres. Javier is currently the Director of the Surdna Foundation's Thriving Cultures Program, where he oversees a grantmaking portfolio seeking to advance the foundation's social justice mission. Prior to Surdna, he's done a number of things including serving as the Director of National Grant Making at Art Place America, served as a Senior Program Officer for Arts and Culture at the Boston Foundation, was the Director of the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, was a Board Member for Grantmakers in the Arts, and once when we were both attending a conference in Los Angeles, he recommended a coffee shop that served one of the best cappuccinos I've ever had. Without further ado, Javier, welcome to the show.
Javier Torres:
Good morning y'all. How you doing?
Lauren Ruffin:
Good. I didn't know this about the LA coffee situation.
Javier Torres:
It was G&B, right Tim?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Javier Torres:
Yeah. It's in Grand Central Market. It's one of the most amazing magical places. You get to go, it's open air. They make a lot of ice drinks that they actually use cocktail shakers and it just gets a special froth and a special flavor. The coffee beans are really roasted well. So I'm a coffee junkie.
Lauren Ruffin:
Okay. You're always good for a good restaurant recommendation. So I'm not surprised. I just didn't know that was a connection y'all shared.
Javier Torres:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
So Javier, super excited to talk to you as always. You always drop some nuggets of wisdom, but first just a quick check in. How are you doing and how's your community doing?
Javier Torres:
Times are hard. I have been inside since March 1st when I flew home from the For Freedoms Congress in Los Angeles. We were being given some flexibility by the office to decide whether we wanted to travel in to the office and I realized that there were at least three staff members that lived in the epicenter of the breakout between Westchester and New Rochelle. So I recommended to my team to stay home. As much as I can, I think I'm really trying to stay focused on checking in with family and friends. I'm lucky enough that I live close to Prospect Park, so I take some walks and taking it day by day. I've been inside now, Friday will be six weeks. It's intense, it's hard, and I think it's just important for us all to do if we want this thing to wrap itself up so that we can begin to get back to some level of normalcy.
Lauren Ruffin:
When you popped on screen in the green room, I was thinking about, I know so much about what your life usually looks like with the travel and the working out. I didn't realize you'd been inside for six weeks. How are you maintaining some sense of normalcy because you're on the go?
Javier Torres:
All the time. I am fortunate enough that my good friend and trainer Corey lives not too far from me. We've made some agreements about how we each travel through the city and he is still coming to me three or four days a week to help me with workouts in my apartment, which has been a godsend because I'm fortunate enough to live in a full service building in Brooklyn, but they closed the gym in my building so I have no weights. But it's been good. On days he's not here, he sends me workouts and interestingly enough, good timing. I bought myself an Apple watch four weeks before this all started and for anybody who has one, they have the rings of activity. You set these daily goals about how many calories you're going to burn or how often you're moving. So that's kept me going.
Javier Torres:
I try to keep a routine. I actually get out of my pajamas every morning and make sure that I get dressed. Although I realized that sometimes it's nice not to, and usually by 7:30 I'm winding down. I'm an early morning guy. I get up at five o'clock to start my day and have my coffee and read the news. But that's the way that I've been trying to do it. Also, quite frankly limiting how many people I can stay in touch with. I'm fortunate enough that because of my work, I've traveled throughout the country and know so many amazing, beautiful people that are used to checking in with me once or twice a year, which is manageable. But now everybody wants to talk every other day and it's just humanly impossible. I'm an introvert, I need to have some time alone to process my own feelings and thoughts and I've been trying to figure out what are those little self care moments and just being okay to say I need to be still and not talk to anybody.
Lauren Ruffin:
Prior to this I was pretty, because I've been working remote for the last four years and so getting dressed every morning wasn't as important to me.
Javier Torres:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Full disclosure. But I'm getting up and putting on clothes. I'm not putting on hard pants.
Javier Torres:
Sure. Right. Right.
Lauren Ruffin:
I am at least changing from my evening wear to my day wear. In terms of, you mentioned everyone wanting to stay in touch, how are you communicating with your grantees and can you share a little bit about what your thoughts and messaging is on what a funder's support to their grantees can look like right now or Surdna is sort of approaching that?
Javier Torres:
I think what I've tried to recognize is that everybody needs something different. We created sort of an institutional message that went out to all of our partners about the way in which we wanted to be of support and provide flexibility with grants, with grant reports and applications in this particular moment in time. There are a lot of foundations that are trying to be first out to figure out what is the thing we need to do? What is the fund we need to create? How do we do conference calls nonstop with our grantees so that everyone can process? It has been my perspective that I don't want to take up any more of anybody's time. Folks are already being drained with additional needs in their communities and so we sent two followup messages to our partners and to our direct grantees used for the thriving cultures portfolio to say, "You saw the message from our president, you know the flexibility that you have, but we don't know what we don't know and we're not going to bombard you with requests for your time. You need to let us know what you need from us."
Javier Torres:
Folks have been generous to reach out. Some folks wanted a little bit more of a coached or facilitated conversation, which we were able to do for those that wanted to, but my personal perspective has been just to respect that these are all human beings that have full-on lives, that they need to now manage and maintain both work and home in this crisis, which creates all kinds of other limitations and requirements for who they are. The foundation is being measured. We're really trying to think about the three phases of response and not being reactionary. So we really start first with thinking critically about how do we look at unspent administrative dollars for this fiscal year for us that ends June 30th? How do we convert those to grant-making dollars?
Javier Torres:
What are the other pools of money that folks expected to spend that they just aren't? So there were some communications grantmaking and membership grantmaking that was going to happen that's being repurposed. Beyond that, we're really thinking of the immediate emergency response that needs to happen now for human beings who need to pay rent or a mortgage or get food or being able to buy some hand sanitizer or whatever it is that people need. Then there is as life somewhat begins to go back to normal, what is the investment that we need to do to ensure that nonprofits can get back off the ground? We've been thinking a lot about how do we keep people's payrolls open. And then finally knowing that this is going to last for a long time. The impacts of this are going to fundamentally change our world.
Javier Torres:
Some of our strategy and thriving cultures really anticipated this disruption to our world. It's a world-building strategy that's about imagining the systems and structures we need to build so that we can withstand these kinds of impacts. Then some of it is about the additional resources that we'll have to distribute or how we'll do those. It's a bit of a balancing act. We've taken a hit to the endowment and there are some folks in the foundation that are interested in increasing spending because of the way that the foundation uses a 12 quarter average to determine its annual spending limit. Right now we won't see the impact of that on our budget, but we will in two or three years when the full impact of this decline in the market actually is showing up in the 12 market average or the 12th quarter average.
Javier Torres:
So it's a little bit of, let's wait, let's listen, let's learn and making sure that we are as present and available as possible for folks to know that we're available if there's something that they want and need.
Tim Cynova:
You mentioned world-building, and correct me if I'm wrong, Lauren Ruffin wears a lot of hats literally and figuratively, but one of the hats that she wears is as Cofounder of Crux and I remember something about you all working together on a world-building game or exercise. Is that indeed correct?
Javier Torres:
It is correct.
Tim Cynova:
Great.
Javier Torres:
Lauren can probably talk a little bit about Crux if you haven't before.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I've spoken about it on the show, but I feel like everything that we talk about is about really designing a world, the world we want to see and also recognizing the one that we live in to really pull it apart. And the game we did wasn't as much a world-building game, but it was a game on venture capital investment and sort of coming up with profiles and having funders and investors and walk through various profiles to show the sort of hidden barriers, the implicit bias that exists and who's able to access capital. That was a fun game.
Javier Torres:
It was.
Lauren Ruffin:
It was a year ago and-
Javier Torres:
Because so much of the work you're doing with Crux is about building future infrastructure.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, Exactly.
Javier Torres:
That's a conversation that we've been in with Angie Kim and with lots of others that have recognized for so long that our current systems don't serve our creative community. What are cooperative ownership models and alternative economies that really value love and generosity and abundance and assign values to those things as opposed to our current scarcity models that have already been proven to be false.
Lauren Ruffin:
I think we're seeing so many of those things that ethos rise to the top right now. I applaud Surdna because we talk a lot about all the various roles that you can play in movement building and I think there were a lot of foundations who were first out of the gate and already after the CARES Act passed people are talking about having sort of multiple phases of this because it looks like we're not talking about what people are going to do in April, but we're talking about probably in terms of for the art sector in particular, probably an 18 to 24 month recovery. I mean I'm talking to artists who couldn't pay rent on this past Wednesday, won't be able to pay rent for the next probably, they will have work probably for four to six months, so I think I really applaud you thinking about the long game. Has there been a conversation at Surdna, I know that y'all are a funder who doesn't provide funds directly to individual artists. Has there been a conversation about revisiting that policy?
Javier Torres:
Yeah, so it started before COVID became a pandemic or was named a pandemic that we knew we wanted to work with intermediaries that are part of our regranting strategy at the moment and that we needed to file the paperwork as an institution to be able to do individual giving. That's heightened at this particular moment because when you really think about where does the emergency money need to go, people have just started GoFundMe accounts because they have access to commercial kitchens. They have a car and they're trying to get food money, gas money, protective masks and cleaning supplies. For the folks that can't pay rent, can't buy food, can't get out of their home, and we can't legally in most cases give money to those GoFundMe accounts without making it extremely onerous on them and on ourselves.
Javier Torres:
So we are having that conversation. I think it's something that's absolutely necessary for us to do as 102 year old institution who's currently undergoing a complete internal policy review over the course of the next 12 months. It's one of the things that our relatively new CEO, whose just a little over a year in, Don Chen, really asked us to do is to make sure that all of our policies across the foundation are in alignment with the values that we publicly state. Those are questions and an analysis that hasn't been done in a long time so it'll be part of that process, including other things like thinking about the maximum grants that we can make. Right now, our maximum grants are three years. There's consideration for going to longer and just having all of those conversations with our board so that we can move forward and make sure that we are living that social justice value. Not just saying that we're a social justice foundation.
Lauren Ruffin:
Tim, do you have anything?
Tim Cynova:
Oh, yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
I have so many questions, but I don't want to dominate the conversation-
Tim Cynova:
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Lauren Ruffin:
But you know I could do that.
Tim Cynova:
Go ahead Lauren.
Lauren Ruffin:
So I had a conversation with one of our other, we've asked a couple of our guests this question as we're looking to the future. What do you think is going to happen? We talked about that sort of 18 to 24 month timeline, but how do you think the world opens back up again? And how do you think artists begin to reenter the world? It's dangerous, but do you have any predictions?
Javier Torres:
So here's the thing. I, as a reader of Octavia Butler, I'm anticipating some ugly moments in our future. I've already started to see some of those with friends in Harlem that have been victims of hate crimes from people in their buildings, not even from strangers on the street. And then seeing the sort of multiple repercussions of what's happening in our society, where at least there was a small business that was able to support that individual in Harlem. They called the police, they filed a report, but the courts are closed. So that person knows somebody in their building who wants to physically harm them and cannot file a restraining order to keep them away because the legal system right now isn't up and running for that to happen. And so I think that I've heard of people's cars being broken into at stoplights because people are desperate right now.
Javier Torres:
And I think we need to recognize that. I don't understand how it is that when the market is in free fall, the federal government and the fed are very comfortable stopping trading, but they haven't been able to see the equivalent around a mortgage, utility and rent freeze that can benefit everybody. We're in free fall. Ain't nobody got no money. And so I'm concerned that we're going to be dealing with a much larger homeless population. I'm concerned that our current social infrastructure isn't prepared to deal with the homeless populations that we have. And that's going to have a lot of impact in our day to day sort of social interactions when people again are increasing in their desperation just to survive.
Javier Torres:
The optimist in me has been really focused on connecting with folks that understand that thoughts and energy and ideas and stories can build worlds. The way that our world is ordered is because in general a few men got into a room and decided that something was going to happen a certain way and so what does it look like for us to make decisions intentionally about how we're going to engage with those around us, our neighbors, strangers on the street, people in the grocery store and sort of getting clearer and clearer about our circle of influence and the impact that we can have and if we're all paying attention to that, then there's a way for us to fundamentally shift what happens when the world tries to return to normal.
Javier Torres:
There've been lots of conversations online to encourage folks to think about, yeah, you miss outside, but does the normal that you are used to, is that really something you want to return to? The grind culture of working 10 to 12 hour days, working six days a week or even five days a week. That I think that this is a really powerful moment for to realize, look, for example, as people of color we've been told that for black people in this country, that reparations weren't something that the federal government was capable of doing, that it would bankrupt this country. And now we're seeing that, oh they can just write a $1,200 check to 85% of families across the country plus $500 per child or dependent. So the money's always there. It's about the will and we all are responsible for imagining, believing and then shifting our own behavior in order to change that world so that these potentially really negative things that can happen don't take such strong holds in our society.
Javier Torres:
There are a lot of power grabs in the federal government right now, and we've been thinking about the watchdogs and nonprofit advocacy organizations that need support because this is what governments and people in power typically do is that when there is chaos, it's the opportunity to consolidate power. And so I think we all just need to be diligent about those small things. It is where we have control. It is where we have power and not try to save the world, not try to be out there thinking that somebody like me, yes, I sit in a very privileged position, but I actually don't have millions of dollars in a bank account that I get to authorize to write checks to. So my prediction is things could be really ugly. My hope that I hold on to is I actually believe in human beings and I believe that there are enough of us that are beginning to take that red pill, proverbial red pill from the matrix are beginning to see the code and not just the design and thinking about the ways in which we can shift power and shift our society for the better.
Lauren Ruffin:
Confession. I've never seen the Matrix.
Javier Torres:
Wow. Wow. That's amazing.
Lauren Ruffin:
You guys heard it here first.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, wow Lauren.
Javier Torres:
I love that.
Lauren Ruffin:
It's one of those major cultural touchstones that I at this point know enough about to know about, but I can laugh and smile and be like, oh yeah, the Matrix ha ha ha. Never seen it.
Tim Cynova:
And now you're just not going to see it because you made it this far.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I've actually that's, usually my secret is that I've never had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but this is-
Javier Torres:
Wow.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Javier Torres:
Oh my God. They're actually kind of delicious.
Lauren Ruffin:
But the Matrix is another secret.
Javier Torres:
[crosstalk 00:17:09] mom has been so lazy, she doesn't want to cook and she's just been eating peanut butter and jelly.
Tim Cynova:
Wow. We are covering a lot of ground in this episode. I mean, no one expected those last two things.
Lauren Ruffin:
But yeah, I mean I think, I worry about that stuff Javier. In New Mexico, we had the biggest gun sales last month. One of my regular biking routes is past one of the big firearms suppliers here. And the majority of gun purchasers were first time gun owners. You can walk in and buy a gun here, which means you've got kids at home all day with people who probably don't have gun safes. I just keep thinking about what are the repercussions of this sort of moment where everyone is fearful. So yeah, I think you're spot on. Are your colleagues and sort of, are they adjusting to remote work? Are you hearing anything from them and sort of practically how is certain a setup to work remote for the near future, for the longterm future?
Javier Torres:
It has been a mixed bag. I have to be honest, I have peers who've lost friends this past weekend. I have a peer that just lost their father to COVID this morning. There are folks on various teams that have been living with family to save money and now are in a position where they're trying to figure out, do I have enough bandwidth so that I can work all day on my wifi. There are folks that are in lower positions, roles inside of the foundation have limited minutes, but they're expected to be on their phone all day making phone calls. So I'm grateful that the foundation created a new homeworking reimbursement policy and allocated a sizable amount of dollars per each employee, whether they were part time or full time, didn't matter. Everybody got to purchase the things that they needed, so I was able to get a mouse, a keyboard.
Javier Torres:
I bought this amazing pad for my floor so that I'm not sitting in a chair all day and my legs don't get tired, an extra monitor for my laptop so that we can try and be as ergonomic as possible and so some folks are increasing their bandwidth on their wifi. Some folks are able to increase their minutes on their cell phone and I think that's been helpful, but I've personally just been encouraging folks that we need to give each other grace. If that means you can't work a five day work week, then fine, let's restructure and don't work a five day work week. If that means that these eight to 10 hour days are too long and you need to start later or end earlier, then we just need to figure that out. The first thing that the foundation did was to create a policy of unlimited sick days that we just needed to register them, but that they would not be deducted from our accumulated sick days based on our benefit packages.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's great.
Javier Torres:
So I've been reminding folks, sick days can be mental health days, sick days can be emotional wellbeing days. You don't need to be going to the doctor or taking care of somebody who is coughing up a lung. You just actually need to think about your whole humanity. And so we've been trying to hold it together with that. One of my teammates is trying to move, was supposed to move on April 1st and there are lots of restrictions about how and when that can happen now in a place like New York City and trying to figure out how we get her into a safer, quieter space where she can both take care of work and take care of herself. But those are just the realities of this changing world. I've been reading articles about folks that are stuck inside now in physically abusive relationships.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh I know, yeah.
Javier Torres:
While that I know of, that's not happening inside of the Surdna Foundation staff, but it's real. We just never know what people's living conditions are and we make assumptions about the fact that just because they work at a high powered institution that their lives are okay, but these are humans with real problems that are, we're all just trying to do the best that we can do. So it's a little bit of just emotional support, some financial support and then providing as much flexibility as possible. One of the other conversations that came up recently in our, we have weekly staff meetings now where we try to bring everybody together, was the real question of there were lots of plans that we had going on before this all started. And so folks were trying to keep those plans on track and do all this other work and somebody finally rang the bell to say maybe we just press pause on anything that we were planning in advance unless it actually addresses the current moment and needs of human beings, which I appreciate and now is an evolving discussion at Surdna.
Lauren Ruffin:
I think that's really smart. One of the conversations that I can't remember if we were talking about it internally at [inaudible 00:21:27] or it popped up on the live stream last week was everyone is sort of issuing laptops to employees and in large cities in particular you have a lot of folks who are living with unrelated roommates and so there's been a rash of laptop theft that's happening, like sort of living with someone who's going to steal. Sometimes the technology actually creates an unsafe environment for folks so I think it's great that we're having that conversation as an organization because we just think about take a whole laptop, this is great, doing you a favor and it's actually not doing someone a favor at all.
Javier Torres:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think most so many of us, and that's one of the fundamental problems is that we don't think holistically about how we're caring for people. We sometimes fall into this idea of, oh well we have so we can offer something that will fundamentally improve somebody's life, but we don't always think about the negative externalities. And it's part of what I admire about the work that the two of you have always done and that I think Surdna really tries to do is to ask the folks that are going to be most impacted by this whether or not it's a good idea before we pull the trigger on something. Is this what you actually need? Otherwise maybe we shouldn't do it.
Lauren Ruffin:
Switching gears a little bit to ask you to put on your GIA Board Member hat, what are you hearing from the field at large and sort of how's GIA thinking about, you have a conference coming up in the fall that I saw. We've extended the deadline for proposals and that sort of thing. So I think sort of my penultimate question, gatherings, which is the thing that GIA does. How is the board, how is an organization approaching gathering right now?
Javier Torres:
The bio that I sent you, as I mentioned, is outdated. So I haven't been a board member for GIA for about a year and a half, but it needs to be updated. But I am the co-chair for this year's conference. So the question is still totally relevant. No, I mean I think what I'm hearing nationally is that everyone's just trying to figure out, there are folks that are worried about the big institutions that generate a good amount of earned revenue and especially the mid and smalls that rely on that. I think some of the more critical thinkers are recognizing that any impact that we're seeing on organizations is exacerbated when you get down to the humans, whether it's the staff or the contract workers that were hired for those performances. If the foundations aren't given the flexibility for payments to be made, whether or not the events happen. And those are some of the sort of transitions that we need go through that we need to think through is that while we fund it for a certain amount of engagement, the reality is people just need to get paid and we need to forgive.
Javier Torres:
And so I have been letting folks know, wherever possible, just like GIA, things are moving to virtual. So in a couple of weeks I am doing a webinar on new economy for artists with Angie Kim and with Dr. Jeffreen Hayes from Threewalls Gallery in Chicago organized by GIA to really think about what are the four thinking ideas for the infrastructure that artists need to be able to capitalize on their contributions to society. So I'm excited for Angie and Jeffreen and to be able to have that conversation because I think there are two of the foremost thinkers along those lines. Recognizing what appropriate support actually looks like. From an event perspective, we've already raised as a committee whether we should be continued planning for GIA. Some folks when the deadline got extended by two weeks, were like, why bother? This isn't going to work out. And the reality is that contracts were signed for hotels, so until the hotel says that they won't be legally open, we kind of have to keep planning at least through labor day for a November event until we have a better sense of what's going to happen.
Javier Torres:
The good news is that the theme that was selected for the conference is still relevant. There are lots of conversations about do we move the convening to the springtime in the case that the hotel will let us out of the contract, they'll be happy to have us on another date. So that's a whole operational question too about a shift in programming that impacts the staff and impacts other conferences that people might have anticipated they'd be participating in in the spring because this is typically happening in the fall. Beyond that, there have been conversations about does the full conference move to virtual? Many of us just think it's unrealistic. Allied Media Conference just announced that they're moving their full conference to being virtual after not having done one last year for their Chrysalis year as they thought about the next generation or iteration of their organization and how it would support the field.
Javier Torres:
I believe in that community figuring out how they're going to do that well because they've historically been great at re-imagining the way that people connect around important conversations or conversations that are important to them. And I have great skepticism about this kind of engagement, effectively replacing our ability to do certain things, learn certain things, and have authentic conversations. So I don't know. I mean, we're moving forward and trying to continue to provide content, whether that's in written form, whether that's a webinar or a virtual conversation. There have been national conference calls for funders to come together to organize, collaborate, coordinate. And so all of that's happening. Just like you were asking about the, I don't know if you asked before or after we started the official stream about the $75 million fund that's been created to support individual artists that's being led by Creative Capital and USA artists, which I think is exciting and great and fantastic.
Javier Torres:
But the other conversation that's being had is do those two organizations actually get the money to those that are most in need? Are they supporting the radical cultural organizer in the South? Do they recognize them within their criteria? And if not, does there needs to be another entity with a whole other fund that it's going to support. So I know there's been conversation about the participants in the Intercultural Leadership Institute that include the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, PA'I Foundation, First Peoples Fund and Alternate Roots to have a complimentary fund that would support those artists that wouldn't typically be eligible for a creative capital or us artists award.
Javier Torres:
So I think it runs the gamut. Again, I don't think anybody really knows what they're doing. As is the case for most of us as adults, we think that we're supposed to have the answers, but most of us are making it up as we go. Some people are just more comfortable trusting their instincts and speaking up than others. Some people like to move really quickly and others are going to be slow and measured in trying to take in as much information as possible and coming up with a more strategic or informed decision. I don't know if I actually got to your question.
Lauren Ruffin:
No, you absolutely did.
Tim Cynova:
Well, and I think that was a great way to end our episode Javier. Thank you so much for being with us today. I've enjoyed riding along with your conversation. It's one of those things where I'm like, wow, this is fascinating. Wait I should be asking some questions.
Lauren Ruffin:
Sorry. I was a Jabberwocky.
Tim Cynova:
No, this is great. Thank you so much for being on the show today.
Javier Torres:
Thank you. Really great to see you both. Stay safe.
Tim Cynova:
Continue the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE adventure with us on our next episode when we're joined by Deborah Cullinan, Chief Executive Officer of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Miss us in the meantime, you can download more Work. Shouldn't. Suck. episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and rewatch Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE episodes over on workshouldntsuck.co. If you've enjoyed the conversation or are just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review in iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.
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