Mental Health and Well-Being Amid a Global Pandemic (EP.47)

Recorded

April 27, 2021

Last Updated

November 4, 2021

This conversation was recorded as part of Work Shouldn't Suck's Ethical Re-Opening Summit that took place on April 27, 2021.

How can we and our organizations acknowledge and support the well-being of everyone as we continue to live and work through a global pandemic?

Resources mentioned during session:

Guests: Shannon Litzenberger, Sophia Park, Joann Lee Wagner

Moderator: Diane Ragsdale

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guests

SHANNON LITZENBERGER is an award winning dance artist, embodiment facilitator and experienced cultural leader working at the intersection of art, ideas and transformational change. As a dancer, performance maker and director, her work explores our relationship to land, the politics of belonging, and the forgotten wisdom of the body. She has been an invited resident artist at Soulpepper Theatre, Toronto Dance Theatre, Harbourfront Centre, Atlantic Ballet Theatre, Banff Centre, and the Gros Morne Summer Music Festival. She collaborates frequently with the Dark by Five Inter-arts ensemble and the Wind in the Leaves Collective. As a skilled freelance strategist, programmer, leadership developer, policy thinker and embodiment facilitator, she works with leading organizations in the arts, academia and the corporate sector. She is currently a faculty member at Banff Centre’s Cultural Leadership Program; a Program Associate with the Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO) working on issues of equity, inclusion and pluralism; a guest facilitator of embodied practice at the Ivey Business School; a Trudeau Foundation Mentor; and a Chalmers Fellow, exploring the application of embodied practice in leadership development and transformative change processes.

SOPHIA PARK (she/her) is a writer, independent curator, and general art person currently working out of Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY) and Gumi, South Korea. She studied neuroscience at Oberlin College, and will be a MA candidate at the School of Visual Arts in curatorial practice starting fall 2021. She’s worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and currently works at Fractured Atlas. She co-founded and helps run Jip Gallery, an apartment gallery turned curatorial collective, with fellow curators and friends. You can find her writing in numerous publications including Womanly Mag, Strata Mag, Monument Lab’s Bulletin, and more. She spends her time thinking and researching ideas around collective memory, migration, digital space, and Asia-futurism. She also loves to dance salsa, learn languages, and run longer than normal distances.

DIANE RAGSDALE is a speaker, writer, researcher, lecturer, and advisor on a range of arts and culture topics. She is currently serving as Director of the Cultural Leadership Program at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and is adjunct faculty at Yale University where she teaches an annual workshop series on Aesthetic Values in a Changed Cultural Context for the Theater Management MFA. Among other roles, Diane previously built an MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship for performance-based artists at The New School in Manhattan; served as a program officer for theater and dance at The Mellon Foundation; was managing director of the contemporary performing arts center, On the Boards; and ran a music festival in the beautiful North Idaho town of Sandpoint. Diane is currently a doctoral candidate at Erasmus University, Rotterdam; she holds an MFA in Acting & Directing from University of Missouri - Kansas City and a BS in Psychology and BFA in Theater from Tulane University. She writes the blog, Jumper which is published on ArtsJournal.com and she recently penned the essay, “To What End Permanence?” for the 2019 Haymarket published book, A Moment on the Clock of the World.

JOANN LEE WAGNER is Vice President of People Operations of Common Future. She is a program generalist and a people and culture specialist. When it comes to people and project management, Joann is on point. Her most memorable work wins end with people getting promoted or aligning themselves with the work that they’re most passionate about. She’s experienced at writing, communications, and running events for an audience of 5-500. She knows how to ask the right questions to facilitate a process, a conversation, or an individual’s growth. She likes to check things off the list and loves having fun while doing it. Her experience has been eclectic and linear. In a career spanning 15 years, she’s worked in small businesses, corporations, agencies, and nonprofits. She’s worked on suicide prevention, corporate social responsibility, employee engagement, leadership development, and organizational management. She holds official degrees in Cognitive Science, Environmental Management and Sustainability and unofficial degrees in yarn collecting, matriarch-ing, and whiskey drinking. 

Host

TIM CYNOVA (he/him) wears a multitude of hats, all in service of creating anti-racist workplaces where people can thrive. He is the Principal of the consulting group Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. and has deep knowledge and experience in HR and people-centric organizational design. He currently leads curriculum design in WSS’s areas of expertise: from sharing leadership and power to decolonizing the employee handbook and bylaws; talking with humans to how to hire. His book, Hire with Confidence, based on his experience leading hundreds of searches and “retooling” the traditional search process to center anti-racism and anti-oppression, is scheduled to be published in Winter 2021. In April 2021, he and WSS produced the Ethical Re-Opening Summit, a one-day online convening that explored the question, “How can we co-create a future where everyone thrives as we move into this next stage of a global pandemic?” In August 2021, Tim closed out his 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, the largest association of artists in the U.S., where he served in both the COO and Co-CEO roles, and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made this commitment in 2013. Additionally, he serves on the faculty of Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and The New School teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR; he's a trained mediator, and a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR). Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press. Also, during a particularly slow summer, he bicycled 3,902 miles across the United States.

Transcript

Shannon Litzenberger:

When I think about mental health and well-being, I immediately go to this idea that Western culture has disembodied us. It has given us the idea, the false idea, that our minds and bodies are separate entities. And they're not. In my way of thinking about embodiment, there is no such thing as mental health as different physical health, as different from an embodied self in the world health that we experience.

It's perhaps one of the problems of the system around us that we have also disconnected the way we think about and treat these issues, right? When you think about your mental health, when you can imagine describing symptoms or the state of your mental health, what you're probably describing is a physical symptom actually. You might be describing a challenge of being able to focus, or a lack of energy, or difficultly of connecting with joy. Those are deeply physical experiences.

Why I think this is so important for leaders is that just like the system is at this point of reckoning and recognition of the harm that it's created, I think leaders need to also recognize that some of these behaviors are embedded in us and we need access to a sense of embodied self-awareness in order to understand what these behaviors are, when they are useful to us, and when they might not be useful to us.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I’m Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that.

Earlier this year, podcasting's favorite co-host Lauren Ruffin and I produced Work Shouldn't Suck's Ethical Re-Opening Summit. The event took place online on Tuesday, April 27, and featured eight sessions, 25 amazing speakers, and covered a whole host of topics related to the ethical re-opening of workplaces amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

We raced to produce the Summit from start to finish in just three weeks as we felt the urgency and stress mounting as workplaces were in the midst of re-opening decisions. Several months on, we still feel the content is as necessary as ever, so we decided to release each of the sessions in podcast form.

In each of the eight sessions, you'll hear the conversations just as the Summit attendees did. As a reminder, in late April 2021, COVID vaccine distribution was just gaining speed and we had yet to begin hearing about the Delta variant. From that vantage point in time, it very much looked like by Fall 2021 things might be settling back into somewhat of a quote unquote normal routine. As I record this preamble in Fall 2021, that's not the case. We're now talking about break-through infections, booster shots, schools opening and closing again, hospital ICUs are packed in states across the U.S., and still how to safety gathering in indoors as the temperature again begins to drop with the change in seasons.

In this session: Mental Health & Well-Being Amid a Global Pandemic, the panel discusses how we and our organizations acknowledge and support the well-being of everyone as we continue to live and work through a global pandemic. Panelists include Shannon Litzenberger, Sophia Park, and Joann Lee Wagner, with the conversation moderated by the awesome Diane Ragsdale. So, over to you Diane...

Diane Ragsdale:

All right, folks. We are glad to see so many of you here today. I see we're now just on the hour, so I'm going to get started. Welcome to Mental Health and Well-being Amid a Global Pandemic. I'm Diane Ragsdale. I'm the Director of Cultural Leadership at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity among other gigs, and my pronouns are sh/her. I'm a white, middle aged woman. We're supposed to do visual descriptions. That's what I'm doing here. I'm a white, middle aged woman with kind of blondish, brownish, grayish, more and more grayish hair.

Diane Ragsdale:

I'm wearing a black top, and I'm sitting in front of sort of chartreuse colored curtains in my attic in The Netherlands, which is where I live. I am joined today by Joann Lee Wagner, Sophia Park, and Shannon Litzenberger. I'm going to introduce them as we get into our first round of questions. But before we start, we just a second ago decided it might be really nice to ask Shannon, and thank you Shannon for agreeing, to maybe do a 30 second to one minute exercise with us or movement of some kind. Shannon is an embodiment expert, dancer, and choreographer.

Diane Ragsdale:

We're going to get into what her work is about today. Shannon, something we might do quickly before we begin?

Shannon Litzenberger:

Sure, absolutely. Without any introduction, let's just find our gaze away from the computer screen for a moment and let your focus open wide into whatever space you're in. If you feel like sitting up in your chair or standing, placing your feet on the ground. I will just invite you to lift your cheekbones a little bit and gaze high up onto the horizon. If you don't have a horizon in front of you, you can imagine one. Just let the feeling of joy wash over you for a moment. One of the teachers that I have, she quotes a Jungian therapist that says, "We have a duty to joy."

Shannon Litzenberger:

It means that we're able to put ourselves in an embodied state using our imagination. Whatever you're feeling right now, we're going to call on our duty to joy and just look at the horizon and lift our cheekbones and feel joy wash over us. Take a couple of breaths here. When you feel that sense of joy, we'll just bring that back to the space together. Thanks for the offer, Diane. Your mic is on mute, Diane.

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah, thank you. That was really wonderful. I hope that each of you into the space where we have a quick 30 minutes to get into this topic, and then we'll open it up for questions. If you have questions along the way, please feel free to just pop over to that Q&A panel and jot them down, and we'll move over and take a look at those a bit later. I just want to give a bit of context before we get started. Concerns about mental health and well-being and stress in the workplace are nothing new. They precede the pandemic. But without a doubt, things have become much, much, much harder.

Diane Ragsdale:

This has become a priority or should have become one at any company or enterprise or organization or association. The tech company Project Include recently completed a survey of about 3,000 tech companies and some of what they've found is really hard to hear, but probably not surprising if you've been living through this in your own work situation. They say remote work since COVID-19 is exacerbating harm, harassment, and hostility. Harmful work experiences and anxiety have all increased, particularly among black, indigenous, Latinx and Asian folks, women and non-binary and transgender people, and those over 50.

Diane Ragsdale:

They're saying that employees are being hurt by increased work expectations, poor communication practices, lack of separation between work and home, and a focus on activity over impact. Seemingly interminable uncertainty which leads to the inability to plan results in depression, anxiety, problems concentrating, and brain fog. Just a couple of weeks ago, The New York Times gave us the word languishing to describe this overwhelm and fatigue that so many of us are feeling and suffering from.

Diane Ragsdale:

If leaders have not already made it a business imperative, have not made mental health and well-being a top consideration in all decisions, many are saying we need to do so now. This is what we're going to dive into. I am going to start with a round of questions that will give you a chance to get to know each of our panelists and the kind of work that they're already doing that intersects with mental health and well-being. Joann, if it's okay, I'd like to start with you. You're the Vice President of People Operations at Common Future, and you describe yourself as a people and culture specialist.

Diane Ragsdale:

You have degrees in cognitive science and environmental management and sustainability. Can you start with a visual description of yourself and then tell us a bit about Common Future and its mission and how you think about people and supporting their needs?

Joann Lee Wager:

Yeah, thanks so much, Diane, and thank you, Shannon, for that embodiment exercise. My nickname from my coworkers is Joy-Ann. That was definitely right up my ally and a nice place to ground us as we get into as we just heard the disturbing stats that Diane just shared with us. Hi, everyone. I'm glad to be here today. My name, again, is Joann. Pronouns are she/her. As a visual description, I have on a yellow shirt with flowers on it. I have fair skin, brown hair, brown eyes, and identify as Korean-American. I'm sitting in a black office chair and my background is kind of...

Joann Lee Wager:

You'll see my kitchen, work desk area, play kitchen over here for the kiddo, who may end up making an appearance, but we'll see. Just to get into the work of Common Future, at Common Future, our work really exist at the intersection of economic justice and racial justice. We're a nonprofit organization that addresses the racial wealth cap and builds wealth in primarily black, brown, indigenous, women-led, and Asian rural communities. We do that through entrepreneurship and really breaking down the barriers for folks of color, women and rural folks to really access resources.

Joann Lee Wager:

Over the last 18 years, we've worked with over 200 community leaders, including Vanessa Roanhorse of Native Women Lead, who we just heard on the main stage. And alongside these leaders, we're creating economic power choice ownership for those that are most often marginalized by our economic systems. We're a 21 person organization. We're black-led, majority people of color and women. Of course, because we're here in the context of speaking about the pandemic, I think it's also important to recognize that 25% of us also identify as working mothers.

Joann Lee Wager:

As we all know, it wasn't just the pandemic that was taxing the mental health and well-being of our folks over the past year. It was the continued murder of black people at the hands of police. It was the racial justice protests and the awakening of mainstream America to the realities that folks of color are living through every day. It was the domestic terrorism that we saw earlier this year at the Capitol and recently the increased violence and hate towards Asian people.

Joann Lee Wager:

When it comes to the people at Common Future, I can honestly say that many of us, and I'm sure many of you all, are carrying varying degrees of trauma, of grief, of loss, and so many of us are super just bone tired, right? Not only because of everything that's happening, but also getting the continuing work of childcare and the emergency homeschooling that's still continuing to this day, with many schools not reopened to the level that they had been previously.

Joann Lee Wager:

When I and the leaders at Common Future are thinking about how we support our people, it really starts with deeply understanding who our people are and just knowing that what's happening in our world is affecting them really at a deeply personal level. I think it's recognizing that emotional labor that our folks are carrying and then building our practices and policies from there so that we're doing what unfortunately we just heard about the example of Basecamp from the main stage where that kind of behavior is retraumatizing anyone who's already affected by what's happening.

Joann Lee Wager:

I think that for us as an organization, it's really important that we're not needing to explain again and again why we're sad, mad, depressed, languishing. I know I've been speaking for a little bit, but I'm just going to finish my point, Diane.

Diane Ragsdale:

Sure.


Joann Lee Wager:

Great. I just want to explain what support looks like in our organization. I would say it happens at the institutional, the interpersonal, and the individual levels. As an institution, we focus on this concept... When the pandemic was starting, we really started to focus on this concept of essentialism, which was written about by Greg McKeown in the book titled Essentialism. It's really this concept where your... Unlike the stat where Diane just shared, folks are just kind of focused on this productivity mindset of doing tasks.


Joann Lee Wager:

The concept of essentialism is really about focusing your energy on where you're making the biggest difference and either delegating or letting go really quite honestly of the rest. For us, in terms of our practice at our organization at the institution level, it really meant that our department heads were working with teams to actually reduce the workload to the extent possible.


Joann Lee Wager:

At the interpersonal level, it was about supervisors really modeling what this essentialist behavior is, and then also continuously reinforcing this culture of care and empathy in working with their direct reports and really in all the relationships that they have at work, and just asking questions like, "How are you really, or I know that these times might be hard on you. Please take time off, or how can I support?" I think that that interpersonal relationship and just like the recognition is so important when it comes to addressing mental health in the workplace.


Joann Lee Wager:

And finally, I think at the individual level, it was making sure that our employees had access to the mental health benefits and resources and knew how to take advantage of them, but also just like straight up paid time off. Last year, we closed our offices for three additional weeks in addition to the paid time off and the holidays that we already had in place. One of the weeks being the week of the election, which as we all know in the States anyway, it was just chaotic that week. Just anticipating those things.


Joann Lee Wager:

I think given the paid time off was super important just in terms of being able to address mental health and just continue this... Be really deeply empathetic to the situations of people. I think that this shift towards the role of managers in particular from delegating and overseeing to really having that empathetic mindset and being problem solving alongside employees so that... There was a Harvard Business Review article that just came out about that, about the shifting role of manager. I think that's exactly right.


Diane Ragsdale:

Thank you so much, Joann. What a great start to this conversation. If I remember that article, it came out two weeks ago. They were making the point that much of what we have historically thought management is will be automated actually, because more and more we see technology platforms that are arising to automate things like nudging employees or keeping track of deadlines, et cetera. That is this empathy that will become one of the core skills. Thank you so much for bringing that up. That's great. Sophia, can I bring you in here?


Diane Ragsdale:

You have a degree in neuroscience and are currently working at Fractured Atlas as a project management specialist. You also have a gallery that you co-founded and run I believe out of your apartment. Is that right?


Sophia Park:

Yeah, but loosely on the internet now.


Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah, yeah, and on the internet. But anyway, I think that that's extraordinary. As I understand it, you made your way from neuroscience into the arts and that this have partly to do with the growing conviction of the role the arts can play in people's lives and perhaps even in their wellbeing. I wonder if we could start with a vision description and hearing a bit about that transition.


Sophia Park:

Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Sophia. Pronouns are she/her. I am a light skinned East Asian woman with black long hair that's curly. I'm wearing this baby blue sweater, and in the background is my small Brooklyn apartment, where one side is the kitchen and the other side is actually a DJ turntable, and the walls are a blush pink color. I jumped from science to the arts, even though my fondness science will never fade, partially because of my own well-being and my concern for my well-being.


Sophia Park:

When I studied neuroscience, the path that we were given, the two options really were to I remember talking about this was to become a doctor or a doctor, to get an MD or a PhD. And not many other jobs were offered as a place where I could grow post school. I was pursuing that path and slowly came to realize that it just really wasn't for me. At the same time, I was spending a lot of time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while I was having those realizations about my science career and finding a lot of solace and a lot of just comfort being around artwork.


Sophia Park:

I decided to jump straight in and I applied for a job at the MET and was very fortunate to get a job and started my career there. I think while recently I've been really thinking about grieving within the context of the workplace as well and I actually wrote an article for Monument Lab's Bulletin about how we can think about memorials and public spaces and our relationship to grieving in terms of that as well. I've been thinking about things on multiple layers. It's interesting how the job that I have right now I'm very fortunate in a lot of ways.


Sophia Park:

I know, Diane, you mentioned the grieving article that I wrote and I was on a podcast with our co-CEO Tim about. That really came about because I was grieving before the pandemic. I think grief doesn't end there. I'm not a grief counselor or anything like that, but I had a coworker at the time who told me grief comes in waves and you just slowly start to build ways in which you could greet that wave better over time. I think work is one part of how we do that. That's the framework for what I am thinking about in terms of well-being and care.


Sophia Park:

I think, Joann, what you were thinking about, this empathy and this space of care is so important nowadays. Not that it ever wasn't before, but especially as we enter digital spaces, I think thinking about care within digital space is also very important and something that we forget because sometimes we think of the digital as a tool versus this communal space that we create. I'll stop there. I'm not quire sure, Diane, if I answered your question.


Diane Ragsdale:

I'm so glad you brought up that article which was really beautiful and I also remember listening to the podcast that you and a few other folks had done with Tim on the topic of grieving. Grief is actually a word that we're hearing a lot these days. People on many levels were grieving. I wonder what do you think workplaces can do actually in a practical way to be more empathic and responsive to employees who are going through grief now and as they come back into the workplace. What did you experience?


Sophia Park:

I think what Joann actually was talking about in terms of moving with empathy is super important. I remember I entered the conversation around grieving in the workplace as a younger professional and earlier on in my career. I remember feeling this incredible sense of oh no, I can't ask for a time off. I can't ask for help, because I think as young people we've been taught everything will fall apart if you're not there, it's not going to work out, or you're going to lose your job, or something grand is going to happen, partially due to obviously the job market and what economic histories that we've lived through, right?


Sophia Park:

But something that was super important was my manager at that time just said, "Take as much as you need. Take the time off." I know that sounds really simple, but just my manager being able to identify and know me well enough also to be like, "Hey, take a couple of days off, or don't worry about needing to ask me for time off to go do something to commemorate your friend or your family member." I think that first step of offering that space is super important. It's something I think people forget about often as something that they can do to be able to help someone who is grieving.


Diane Ragsdale:

It may sound simple, but it also sounds extraordinarily exceptional, at least in the US context. I know Fractured Atlas has in the past, I don't know currently, but explored unlimited vacation and things like that that seem like huge gifts at a time like this to give people... Maybe it was Joann, you personally mentioned this carving out time for emotional labor as a concept. Thank you, Sophia. Shannon, I'd love to get you into this conversation. You are a professional dancer and choreographer and also an embodiment expert, which we mentioned earlier.


Diane Ragsdale:

We got a little peek of just an exercise there. I know you've spent a lot of this COVID year exploring the intersections between embodiment, resilience, imagination, power dynamics, and how neuroscience actually can increase our understanding of the way these work together. You and I also work at the Banff Centre in the Cultural Leadership Program, where you teach embodied leadership or facilitate workshops really and lead sessions in that. I wonder if you could give a visual introduction and say just a bit about what embodied leadership is and how it helps leaders, why you think it's important.


Shannon Litzenberger:

Thanks, Diane. Hi, everyone. I'm Shannon. My pronouns are she/her. I am a light skinned woman of Eastern European descent. I have longish brown/blonde hair with bangs, and I'm wearing a V-neck t-shirt, short sleeved t-shirt with orange and blue and beige stripes. I'm sitting in a space that is a kind of loft space with the slanted ceiling and some bookcases and some silver tins behind me. I also have, that you can't see, a DJ booth to one side of me that belongs to my partner.


Shannon Litzenberger:

Embodiment, maybe I'll just say, because embodiment maybe an unfamiliar idea for some, although I recognize it's really gaining in mainstream visibility in this moment, but embodiment is just very simply how we are. And the how of us is a deeply relational way of being that's contextual, that's connected to environmental factors, that's connected to genetic and historical factors, personal experiences. The way we come to be ourselves is deeply shaped by our environment. I think this is a really important thing to remember that what is the world that has shaped our way of being.


Shannon Litzenberger:

I think as the pandemic has amplified this mainstream understanding of how systems have created conditions of harm, there's a simultaneous recognition that the forces that have shaped us inside that system have created a number of behaviors and tendencies and unconscious ways of being that are also quite harmful. I find that really salient to this conversation around well-being because we need to acknowledge that we are not a kind of independent entity inside a world. We are a connected, embedded self in the world, right?


Shannon Litzenberger:

Was is that self in the world dynamic and how is the world creating and how are we creating and replicating it inside of it? Of course, when I think about mental health and well-being, I immediately go to this idea that Western culture has disembodied us. It has given us the idea, the false idea, that our minds and bodies are separate entities. And they're not. In my way of thinking about embodiment, there is no such thing as mental health as different physical health, as different from an embodied self in the world health that we experience.


Shannon Litzenberger:

It's perhaps one of the problems of the system around us that we have also disconnected the way we think about and treat these issues, right? When you think about your mental health, when you can imagine describing symptoms or the state of your mental health, what you're probably describing is a physical symptom actually. You might be describing a challenge of being able to focus, or a lack of energy, or difficultly of connecting with joy. Those are deeply physical experiences.


Shannon Litzenberger:

Why I think this is so important for leaders is that just like the system is at this point of reckoning and recognition of the harm that it's created, I think leaders need to also recognize that some of these behaviors are embedded in us and we need access to a sense of embodied self-awareness in order to understand what these behaviors are, when they are useful to us, and when they might not be useful to us. Because if our aim is to create these cultures that are rooted in care, then we might need to acknowledge that our behaviors are not consciously contributing to creating a culture of care.


Shannon Litzenberger:

They might be connected to some other. Maybe it was a survival mechanism or coping mechanism or another way that we figured out how to be in this world, because this world taught us how to be, the world taught us how to feel, how to feel connected, how to feel a sense of self-worth. We learn that from our environment, and then we replicate it through our behavior. Maybe I'll just pause there.


Diane Ragsdale:

That's fascinating. I know that you've done some workshops on resilience with business school students as one of the areas. You've also explored power dynamics with business school students. Maybe just a quick follow-up, what's your sense of... Do these students get the work that you're doing? What do you think that they're gaining from this experience?


Shannon Litzenberger:

It's two. I have a relationship with a couple of different professors at business schools who are like, "Our students are stressed out right now and we want to support them," which is in and of itself an amazing offer. In doing some of these workshops recently, I think students... Some of the responses were... Probably the nicest response was, "Wow! No one ever paid attention to the fact that we're so stressed out and [inaudible 00:29:25] about it."


Shannon Litzenberger:

There was just a recognition that an offer of care was in and of itself a novel thing in an academic institution. That's our starting point, right? That's our starting point.


Diane Ragsdale:

Which really just reinforces your initial point, which is this environment, the system that you're in or the culture you're in has a lot to do with it. Thank you for that. Sophia, I'd love to bring you in here for a second because I remember reading... You sent me an article that you wrote on the Korean concept of Han that feels to me that it's really resonant with what Shannon's talking about in that you were talking about it in terms of being a communal experience and the way that epigenetics could explain why it was proliferating in a way across borders and across generations.


Diane Ragsdale:

Would you mind just talking a bit about that concept and the point that you were making in your article?


Sophia Park:

Yeah. Some context for that is I studied and conducted research in neurotoxicology, specifically studying the effects of environmental toxins on Huntington's disease. From that, I was thinking a lot about my own trauma and the trauma of so many Korean diaspora and greater immigrant folks. For Koreans, it's interesting we have this actual term, right? Like what you were talking about, Shannon, there's an embodied term for our collective trauma.


Sophia Park:

I was speculating that perhaps epigenetics, which was the idea that the environment affects you and your core and that is passed along through generations, may offer an answer for why Han is able to proliferate on a scientific level. But above that, I think it's also how we share our stories and how we share our culture and our language that also has to do with this idea of Han. It's a very difficult concept to describe. I wouldn't say it's just trauma, but it's also this idea of resiliency that we have. It's manifested in so many different ways.


Sophia Park:

It's manifested in how we grief and how we are super stubborn sometimes and how we care for each other. If you see another Korean, you always say hi. That's also all part of it, which I think is interesting because that means that it's not just the trauma. It's also our joy that's also part of it. The fact that it's passed along to generations, which was also deeply tied to the history of Korea and the wars and the colonization and imperialism that the country has gone through, that expanded to all of the global Koreans.


Sophia Park:

I'm not sure how it makes me feel, but it's definitely something that I think we should talk about. I think it's something that I also talk to another one of my friends whose of Jewish descent. He read this article and was like, "This is exactly what we've gone through as well." I think this idea of translating across multiple populations and communities I think demonstrates the importance of community care as well. That's something that I've pulled out from that conversation for sure.


Diane Ragsdale:

Wow. That's incredibly powerful. I think I've got the name of it right. I read a book I think called Culture Mapping. I'm sorry, I can't think of the title, but I'll try and find it and put it in the chat later. It was essentially going into crossing cultures, understanding people across cultures. It was written I think primarily for businesses who have to work in multiple cultures more and more with globalization. It just strikes me listening to you how there's really no one size fits all well-being either, right?


Diane Ragsdale:

We really need to be sensitive to these community, these cultural factors as well. Thank you for that. That was beautiful. Joann, I'm curious, and I see we're getting close to where we probably want to open up and look at questions. And I'm glad so many of you are putting things in the chat. Somebody just mentioned Body Keeps the Score, which is a book that Shannon talks about all the time and I've been listening to this past week on Audible. It's great.


Diane Ragsdale:

But Joann, I wonder if you have any perspective on this shift that we're making to trying to address these issues at that systemic level or environmental level. What does that bring to mind for you?


Joann Lee Wager:

Thank you, Diane. When Sophia was just talking about trauma and how it's held with resiliency, it made me think of a trans writer who wrote on this topic about how oftentimes, especially for folks of color or folks from marginalized community, the response to trauma is heart and parcel with our resiliency, right? How we survive. I think in traditional mental health settings it's almost like, oh well, if you have trauma, it's something where you need to take away the trauma.


Joann Lee Wager:

It's actually not the right frame even to look at it because it's like, well, these traumatic responses have been in response to things in our environment, things that are happening in the world and that continue to happen in the world. You're not trying to necessarily take away these responses, but rather find joy in the moments where you're still living in traumatic times because that is certainly essentially the place that we're still at. Thank you, Sophia, for bringing that up.


Joann Lee Wager:

I guess just when I think about the systemic shifts that are necessary or systems level, because that is the place where Common Future works, right? The economic systems that we live with are just so broken and are not beneficial to most of us and just benefit the few. We saw that as a part of the pandemic just in terms of who is benefiting. There's this stat that we have where an estimated 90% of all women and people of color owned businesses couldn't access the first round of PPP dollars, Paycheck Protection Program dollars.


Joann Lee Wager:

When I think about how we're responding to system change, it's like we're not trying to go back to the state where it's business as usual. We really want to build back what's better.


Joann Lee Wager:

I think the way that Common Future does it in our work at large is about grounding in trust and working with leaders like Vanessa Roanhorse of Native Women Lead and Laura Zabel of Springboard for the Arts, who we're going to be hearing from later on in this summit, who are really connected and have those deep relationships with communities and who can then partner with us to ensure that their communities have a seat at the table in decision making are really leading the strategy for how entrepreneurs are being connected to funding and advice and support and really are the ones who are developing the solutions for their communities.


Joann Lee Wager:

As a nonprofit living in the system, nonprofits are just historically so... Don't have the best reputation of caring for their people, of really prioritizing the programmatic approach to funding and support. I think that I would offer in the way that we approach supporting our people that it is that supporting the employees who are working on the programs that you can't disconnect that necessarily from how you're supporting folks at the community level.


Joann Lee Wager:

I think that when you're switching from that extractive mindset or that extractive system or like a zero-sum system of saying like, "Okay. Well, we can't support our employees because we need to support our programs." It's not the right mindset. I think that when you're building back the type of system we want to build back is one where we're seeking the long-term sustainability of people alongside the communities that we support.


Joann Lee Wager:

I think it's particularly important because the issues that we face are very much deeply entrenched long-term issues where it's never going to be a sprint to fix them, right? It's always going to be a marathon, and we need folks for the long haul who can really be in this work without burning out, without having mental breaks and breakdown. That's what we're doing at Common Future.


Diane Ragsdale:

Excellent. Thank you so much, Joann. I'm mindful of the time, and I'm going to just open up. I'm going to turn it to you, Shannon, first. Any final reflections on really anything that's come up today, any of the topics, or just any recommendations or thoughts that you have for folks as a point of closure?


Shannon Litzenberger:

Sure. Another great resource I could just point is Gabor Maté, a Canadian psychologist doctor, who wrote a book When the Body Says No. It's a great resource to understand the integrated view of health and social environment, if that's of interest. We can put it in the chat in a minute. So much has been said. It's been so delightful to be in conversation all of you, Joann, Sophia, and Diane. I think in some ways we're all saying the same thing. And perhaps for me, one of the parting ideas that I am holding is just this idea of slowing down.


Shannon Litzenberger:

We can't just work at the level of strategy. We have to work at the level of culture change. If we're trying to change culture, then we need to learn. We need to be in a state of learning. Anything new that we're learning, we can't do quickly or even necessarily efficiently at first. We do need to slow down. We need to create cultures of well-being in our organizations, and we have to understand that this is an active resistance in a world that wants us to be bigger, faster, better, and more.


Shannon Litzenberger:

We have to understand that this is the revolutionary work is to be a counterculture to the dominant culture of productivity that we're surrounded by and that's difficult work.


Diane Ragsdale:

Thank you, Shannon, for that. Sophia, any final thoughts or recommendations from you?


Sophia Park:

Yeah. Kind of jumping off of what Shannon just said, I shared a quote in our initial call by Toni Cade Bambara, the great, about how not all speed is movement. Like you said, Shannon, I think trying to hold onto this idea of not moving quickly, not treating ourselves as machines perhaps that can just do everything quickly, do everything well, do everything perfectly will perhaps help us in this long-term journey to ensure that we're switching our understanding of work around not just work, but care, right?


Sophia Park:

We're really shifting our mindset completely from what we've been taught so far and that will take a really long time. It's also I think very similarly to the reckonings that we have gone through the past year is related to how internally we do the work, what positions of power are we in, what power are we holding onto that maybe we don't need to hold onto, how are we moving forward with care at the forefront, and what is safety and how does safety relate to justice.


Sophia Park:

Because as we do the work every day and our every days are filled with emails and, I don't know, Google Docs and what have you, but the longer game and the larger work is something greater than that. I think for me personally, having that question in my head, what is justice and how do we get there, and thinking through difficult conversations around accountability and all the questions that we've been seeing pop up lately, which all directly relate to care, will help us move forward and maybe move the needle a little bit towards where we want to go.


Sophia Park:

That's something, kind of a larger vision thing, that I've been thinking about. Just one thing, I know we talked about something we could walk away with this is, if you don't have a tea time or some kind of social time with your co-workers, just build it in. 15 minutes can do a lot and there are also lots of cool platforms. I recommend using Ohyay as a way to build community. If we don't build community, there's no way that we can even take the step towards well-being, right? That's something to add.


Diane Ragsdale:

Thank you, Sophia. I did pop over and I didn't see any questions, except a question about the report I mentioned, which I can pop into the chat. Joann, I'll turn it over to you to just say any final recommendations or thoughts that you'd like to leave folks with today, and then we'll share some resources in the chat.


Joann Lee Wager:

Yeah. I mean, I think that for me, it goes back to this framing around the individual level, the interpersonal level, and the institutional level. I think that our figures here have just done a great job of sharing examples of how folks can engage with mental health and supporting employees and supporting their people at each of their levels. Quite frankly, some of these things are so easy, right? It just takes that time to just show up with care. At Common Future, we are working on an experiment around the four day workweek.


Joann Lee Wager:

But to get to this point where we're able to do this four day workweek experiment, it really didn't just start with us getting on the same page and saying like, "Hey, this is a really messed up moment we're finding ourselves in, and we need to do something for employees. We need to focus on what's essential, and then just reinforce that messaging in our one-on-ones." That's the place where we started. It's snowballed now into where we can put much more structure and infrastructure around it.


Joann Lee Wager:

That would be my advice or my final thoughts to those who are here with us today is like wherever you're finding yourself, there's always something that you can do and e need to do it.

Diane Ragsdale:


Thank you, Joann. That's a lovely place to start. I can't thank you enough. You've been such a terrific panel. I'm going to take a minute here and just type some resources into the chat and also just to mention, somebody asked about the report. It's put out by Project Include and it's called Remote work since COVID-19 is exacerbating harm. I'll try and look that up and throw it in the chat as well. Thank you all so much. I'm going to turn my attention to getting some of these resources, but thank you very much.


Joann Lee Wager:

Thank you.


Sophia Park:

Thanks, everyone.


Shannon Litzenberger:

Thanks for moderating, Diane.


Diane Ragsdale:

My pleasure.


Tim Cynova:

Find more about the Ethnical Re-Opening Summit, including speaker bios and session recaps at work shouldn’t suck dot c-o backslash ethical hyphen reopening hyphen summit hyphen 2021.


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