The Podcast

Tim Cynova 12/2/21 Tim Cynova 12/2/21

Liberating Workplaces (EP.50)

Co-host Lauren Ruffin facilitates a discussion with Vanessa Roanhorse and Syrus Marcus Ware on how organizations can center those most vulnerable to craft workplaces where everyone can thrive. Their discussion explores recently announced changes at Basecamp, and also the workplace re-opening survey conducted by Work Shouldn't Suck in Spring 2021.

Recorded

April 27, 2021

Last Updated

December 2, 2021

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

This past year saw the environmental impacts of the workplace shift dramatically. For many, travel for work was completely erased, both commuting and related business travel. Conferences that traditionally attracted hundreds or thousands of in-person attendees shifted to online offerings. As we consider how to reopen our workplaces, how can we do that in intentional ways that center our impact on planet and people?

Resources mentioned during episode:

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, Ejeris Dixon (Editor); Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Editor)
“Changes at Basecamp” by Jason Fried
“Basecamp's new etiquette regarding societal politics at work” by David Heinemeier Hansson

Guests: Vanessa Roanhorse & Syrus Marcus Ware

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guests

VANESSA ROANHORSE got her management chops working for 7 years at a Chicago-based nonprofit, the Delta Institute, focused throughout the Great Lakes region to build a resilient environment and economy through creative, sustainable, market-driven solutions. Vanessa oversaw many of Delta’s on-the-ground energy efficiency, green infrastructure, community engagement programs, and workforce development training. Vanessa is a 2019 Village Capital Money Matters Advisory Board Member, 2019 SXSW Pitch Advisor, sits on the local Living Cities leadership table, is a Startup Champions Network member, is an Advisor for emerging Navajo incubator, Change Labs, Advisor for Native Entrepreneurship in Residence Program, and is a board member for Native Community Capital, a native-led CDFI. She is a co-founder of Native Women Lead, an organization dedicated to growing native women into positions of leadership and business. Her academic education is in film from the University of Arizona but her professional education is from hands-on experience leading local, regional and national initiatives. Vanessa is Navajo living in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

SYRUS MARCUS WARE uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including in a solo show at Grunt Gallery, Vancouver (2068:Touch Change) and new work commissioned for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art and the Ryerson Image Centre (Antarctica and Ancestors, Do You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)) and in group shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Windsor and as part of the curated content at Nuit Blanche 2017 (The Stolen People; Wont Back Down). His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping The Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016, 2019), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015). // He is part of the PDA (Performance Disability Art) Collective and co-programmed Crip Your World: An Intergalactic Queer/POC Sick and Disabled Extravaganza as part of Mayworks 2014. Syrus' recent curatorial projects include That’s So Gay (Gladstone Hotel, 2016-2019), Re:Purpose (Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2014) and The Church Street Mural Project (Church-Wellesley Village, 2013). Syrus is also co-curator of The Cycle, a two-year disability arts performance initiative of the National Arts Centre. // Syrus is a core-team member of Black Lives Matter-Toronto. Syrus is a co-curator of Blackness Yes!/Blockorama. Syrus has won several awards, including the TD Diversity Award in 2017. Syrus was voted “Best Queer Activist” by NOW Magazine (2005) and was awarded the Steinert and Ferreiro Award (2012). Syrus is a facilitator/designer at the Banff Centre. Syrus is a PhD candidate at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.

Co-Host

LAUREN RUFFIN Lauren (she/her) is a thinker, designer, & leader interested in building strong, sustainable, anti-racist systems & organizations. She's into exploring how we can leverage new technologies to combat racial and economic injustice. As part of this work, she frequently participates in conversations on circular economies, social impact financing, solidarity movements, and innovative, non-extractive financing mechanisms. Lauren is a co-founder of CRUX, an immersive storytelling cooperative that collaborates with Black artists as they create content in virtual reality and augmented reality (XR). Lauren is currently the interim Chief Marketing Officer of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), where she focuses on amplifying the stories and activism of the YBCA community. Prior to joining YBCA, Lauren was co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, the largest association of independent artists in the United States. In 2017, she started Artist Campaign School, a new educational program that has trained 74 artists to run for political office to date. She has served on the governing board of Black Girls Code and Main Street Phoenix Cooperative, and on the advisory boards of ArtUp and Black Girl Ventures. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law.

Transcript

Syrus Marcus Ware:

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 the Summit's opening plenary titled A Year in the Life, Lauren Ruffin is joined by Vanessa Roanhorse and Syrus Marcus Ware as they discuss what we've learned this past year and how that knowledge and experience can help craft thriving workplaces. Lauren and I get things rolling, so let's jump over to the action.

Tim Cynova:

Before we launch into a conversation with Syrus and Vanessa, want to take a quick moment to share some of what we saw from our workplace survey. Thank you so much to everyone who provided feedback on the survey. We'll be sending this out as well, so if it's a little small on your screen, don't worry. Lauren is actually seeing this for the first time, so she's living the excitement with all of you. We had this five question survey, it was multiple choice and we asked people the slides here, how many days a week do you expect to work in the office as of the fall? And how many days do you prefer? Almost no one would prefer to be in the office five days a week, or even four days a week. Otherwise, these graphs are all over the place and I look forward to digging into what this might mean in our future conversations.

Tim Cynova:

Next we have, when is your organization planning to let more than a handful of employees back into the office? Shaving off the edges for that happened already and not before January 22. It looks like summer and fall. However, a third of respondents still don't know. And that's not an insignificant number, or sorry, not an insignificant number of companies went entirely virtual, entirely remote as a result of the past year. When do you expect to attend an in person indoor conference or performance of at least 100 people? Almost two thirds said not before January, our remaining third said the last quarter of this calendar year. So for those of us working in sectors where we convene people, for example, the cultural sector, people coming together for performances, we'll be diving in today what does that mean for us, and our organizations, and our missions?

Tim Cynova:

And lastly, when do you expect to fly again for work? Some people are already doing this. So people expect in the next month or so. Overwhelmingly, most people say not before the fall or next year. So again, we'll be sharing those. Sorry, I'm bringing Lauren back in here. We'll be sharing those in the email that goes out so you can dig into that. But we launched this summit with two amazing, amazing guests who we've had on our live stream and podcast before, Vanessa Roanhorse and Syrus Marcus Ware. To make the most of the rest of our time, without further ado, going to welcome in Vanessa, and bringing in Syrus here.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Hello.

Tim Cynova:

Hi everyone. And with that, I'm going to pull myself out of the feed so the three of you can have the conversation, and I'll be back at the very end. So I have a good one everyone.

Lauren Ruffin:

Live Streaming is such a sport. It really fulfills all of my adrenaline junkie needs. [crosstalk 00:07:11]. How are y'all today?

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I'm good. I mean, it's Tuesday. I can't believe it's Tuesday. It feels like it's Friday. Not because it feels like it's the weekend, but because it feels like so much has happened. But I'm good. I'm well. It's nice to be with you early in the morning.

Lauren Ruffin:

Vanessa, how are you doing?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

I'm good. I started off my day talking about finances, and that's its own cup of coffee.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, for sure.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

I'm good. I'm happy. I'm in Albuquerque, it's gray out, which never isn't really common here. So it's kind of nice to have weather happening.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, we're supposed to get some rain. And I know we've got wildfires. We've got wildfires South here already. It seems the season is already kicked off, unfortunately. So the rain that's coming will be really helpful. Well, I'm really excited to spend time with y'all this morning. And you two don't know each other, so I feel what's going to happen is that beautiful crackle when probably kindred souls meet for the first time. It could happen, we're going to record it, it's going to be really brilliant. But I really think it's important to kick off with y'all, because what we're really talking about today is, as people are rushing to reopen, how do we do so in a way that is more sustainable, both for the earth the planet, and for us as people, where perhaps we can build new systems and structures and ways of working. And I know the two of you do a lot of thinking and are sort of engaged in a radical transformation and radical imagination about what our world and life can be. So just super again, really excited that you're framing this for us.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'll give a brief intro of y'all and then we'll let you jump in and introduce yourselves because I feel like both of your work is so expansive that reading a bio doesn't do it justice. And I also know that when you're multifaceted, the things you're thinking about day to day and what you're doing changes day to day, week to week. So I want you all to talk about what's top of mind for you. Vanessa is a really, really good friend of mine, my heart. I think Vanessa was the second person I met several years ago when I moved to Albuquerque. We've been inseparable since then. Her work with Native Women Lead has been transformational. Working now with a lot of finance is just doing radical, radical things. I don't want to, what they say, spill the can of worms or something like that, spill the beans. I don't want to vomit it all over before you get to share.

Lauren Ruffin:

Syrus is based in Canada. Does amazing work with the Black Lives Matter movement up there. I know we've not been hearing a lot in the States. I know our friends, the North have been going through it with regard to racial justice over the last couple years and just as long as we have in the States, and their work as an artist, as an educator, as an activist is also multifaceted. So with that, maybe, Vanessa, you want to give your brief intro and a individual description for our audience?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Definitely. Yeah, it's A. Vanessa Roanhorse [inaudible 00:10:23]. I am Diné, Navajo from Navajo Nation. I live here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Tiwa lands. And I am a short indigenous woman who has mostly white hair, a little bit of black left, not very much anymore, wearing black glasses, black lipstick, black, I guess, my easy working in office blazer over my pajamas. And behind me in a room that's got a red wall with some images up there and some storage behind me. I'm really happy to be here. And thank you, Lauren. I honestly moved to Albuquerque almost six years ago. I had been living away from the Four Corners in my community for about 20 plus years. And upon getting back here, trying to reacquaint, build friendships. It's a lot harder in your 40s to make friends sometimes, because life is just so full. And just meeting you, it was magical, and it still continues to be. So I appreciate that. The love is there right back at you.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

I'm happy to say that I am my own agent, and so own my own company called Roanhorse Consulting. We are an indigenous women-led think tank, or at least that's what we kind of believe we do. We do a lot of work in capital access, economic development. We're using a lot of the evaluation methods lately to support people who are trying to build new, whether it's lending products or design more effective ways to understand economic data and why it matters, and what should we really be tracking. And so gratefully we use sort of our indigenous evaluation methodologies. And we think the plurality of those methodologies really are game changing, because they really focus on people and planet versus short term outcomes and job growth. So we're really trying to push on that side.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

And then on the capital access side, Lauren, you mentioned Native Women Lead, which is another piece of my heart work. And for me, Native Women Lead started because of my own journey to start a company as a brown indigenous woman, and how painful that was, and how lonely it was. And so Native Women Lead is now a fast global, globally growing organization focused on investing, lifting, scaling indigenous women into positions of CEO and leadership. All of this kind of balled up for me, because trying to start initiatives, companies, and access to resources was so non existent. I am now fully in the dreaming of new capital pathways for people and really looking at how do we innovate around underwriting, risk and evaluation. And then frankly, building the type of products that actually leapfrog and amplify what people are building. So it's been a good time. I hope that's a good introduction.

Lauren Ruffin:

It's beautiful. Syrus, tells about you and what you're thinking about lately.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Hey, everybody. Lauren, it's great to see you and it's so wonderful to meet. I want to hear more about this innovation hub and what you're doing. My name is Syrus Marcus Ware. I use he, him pronouns. I'm based in Tkaronto or Toronto, the part that was underwater at the time of the Toronto Purchase, so it's the unceded territory of the Mississauga of the Credit. I'm wearing a blue shirt with black polka dots. I have a long ostrich feather or Emu Feather earring that I'm wearing that I got when I was in Australia. I have blonde dreadlocks piled in a messy bun. I have a bunch of neon bracelets that my daughter made me on my wrists, and I'm in front of a very messy background of kids drawing and kids everything just sort of on every surface. And I have brown skin and I'm a black person. I'm a black trans, disabled, and mad artists, activist, and scholar. And that's what I look like. I have a short beard, too. I am an organizer, I've been organizing for about 25 years. I've also been an artist for about 25 years, and have been in the art sector working in large institutions and also working independently as a curator, and also as an artist.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

And I've spent 25 years really working within this milieu and trying to understand how to make sense of what it means to work in the arts. I'm trying to make sense of that. But at the same time, I've also spent the same 25 years as an organizer, as an activist. So to me, I've been really drawn to the possibility that the world could be different than it currently is. So I've been organizing around disability justice, and trans justice, and black liberation for 25 years. Most recently, I helped to co found Black Lives Matter Canada, which is the presence of the Black Lives Matter movement here in Northern tribal Ireland, and [inaudible 00:15:53]. And there are chapters in Montreal, and Vancouver, and Fredericktown, and all over, and growing. And so I helped sort of steward that organization and help to make sure that we are helping the chapters to do all the great work that they need to do.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

And then I also work as an educator, so I teach at McMaster University. I teach in the arts, but I also teach systems thinking and leadership at the Banff Centre. And I'm really interested in the possibility of creating workplaces where we all can thrive. I am so fascinated by that chart that many people were like, "I'd like to be in the office zero days of the week." Because I think that we can invent new ways of being, and now is the time to do it. So that's me. And it's great to be here.

Lauren Ruffin:

Awesome.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Wow. Wow.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. So that's a great segue into what I kind of wanted. It's manna from the heavens. I was like, "What brilliant thing am I going to ground us in today?" And then Luckily, Basecamp totally screwed the pooch yesterday.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

So I don't know if it's manna from the heavens, or just the usual shit show that rains down on us. Just naming the difference there.

Lauren Ruffin:

You're so right. So I just dropped a link to the changes at Basecamp post that came out yesterday. It happens, our whole audience has it. I want to ground our conversation here because I really can't think of a more textbook example of what not to do as a well respected company. And so for anyone who's not familiar with Basecamp, they are a company that makes project management software. I'd say millions of people use it every day. They've been really vocal about how they grew. They didn't take investment dollars, they really tried to pride themselves on building a good healthy corporate culture that I look to often as I was building Crux, as I'm having conversations about Work Shouldn't Suck, sort of moving slowly, not taking outside investment, really building things that as much as you need to build, not being sort of overly creative or overly complicated.

Lauren Ruffin:

And so they had this post yesterday, where they're like they're changing the way they operate. And number one is no more societal and political discussions on our company Facebook account, because the social and political waters are choppy. No more paternalistic benefits, like farmers market shares, fitness, wellness allowance, etc. It goes on and on. But I'm really curious, as y'all were reading this, what were your first... Because Vanessa, I know you and I are on the same Twitter. Syrus, I don't know what your Twitter feed looks like, but mine exploded yesterday over this. So what were your initial reactions to reading this post? What really stood out to you?

Syrus Marcus Ware:

It is absolutely outrageous. As you said, how did he get it wrong in a paragraph and a half? It is absolutely outrageous. I just want to pull out, I mean the point that I have... I believe there's a bit of an echo. The point that stands out to me the most, of course, is the no societal or political discussions on our company Facebook account. Because of course, what are you going to do, remove yourself from society? If you're not engaged in the social world, and you're not staying relevant, what the hell is the point? But I want to draw your attention to, I know this is a smaller thing, perhaps, but no paternalistic benefits. For years, we've offered a fitness benefit, a wellness allowance, a farmers market share, but we've had a change of heart. It's none of our business what you do outside of work, what a strange hill to die on.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

What a strange thing to think, all of the social benefits that we do that make us part of a community, because as organizations, wouldn't it be nice if we thought of these institutions as actually part of the communities that they're situated within. All of the things that make our workers come together, and make our workers thrive as workers, as human beings who are alive, not just workers, let's just cut all of those things. And to call them paternalistic is such a strange response to something that people have been pushing for decades in the workplaces, more live-work balance, more ability to be a human. It is such a strange thing to thrust forward. But of course, my biggest issue is of course with the no political discussions. Yeah, it's hard.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

No, thank you. Because that it's funny. I saw the Twitter blowing up, I skimmed the thing, and I just kind of rolled my eyes. And I was like, "Oh." And Lauren and I were talking earlier more white type bro bullshit, right? Let's just not deal with what's happening in the world. So this is the most clear example of white supremacy. Let's lean into our privilege and say, "We can't deal with these things, so therefore we won't." "And if we ignore them, they'll go away." Let's not acknowledge that people's actual living cells are politicized every day. Let's just not acknowledge that, that's something you walk out the door with, however, whoever you are, and it's a political statement, just for B. And then the final one is, for a company that's rested on these morals, talk about the complete opposite of what they've been talking about for so long.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

And more importantly, the use of paternalistic to me is the perfect example of the continuation of the lack of social contracts that were willing to hold on to anymore, that we are all connected, that we're all part of the same community, and when you thrive, I thrive. The belief that that's paternalistic, and also someone can give you that right, is part of the problem. Is part of the whole broken safety net situation in United States. The whole broken idea that people deserve quality and dignified lives. So I think it was the world's biggest eye roll, and then I just moved on. Because where are you supposed to focus your energy honestly, at this point? And you know what, there'll be some statement in probably a week or two, where there'll be like, "You don't understand what we were trying to say, you missed what we were talking about." And gas light, gas light, gas light, like textbook, textbook, textbook, textbook.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Thank you for saying gas light, because that's exactly the way this reads. It takes the things that we've been fighting for, that we've said are important, like the ability to review your manager as much as your manager is reviewing you, and they've turned that around and said, "No 360 reviews, because it's too much work for you." Well, no, I've asked for this. Hold on a minute, but it's gas lighting and it's a way of making it seem the bizarre choices in this memo are somehow our wishes, it's because it's what's best for us. When in fact everything that they're cutting are the things that would make it a work environment. I mean, I just want to draw your attention to this one sentence about the political, "You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit or wading into it means you're a target." I mean, I don't know what else to say. I mean, if this is the framing, and what it means to be socially engaged in the world is that you're either, quote unquote, complicit. In what? In white supremacy? Or you're a target.What are they even saying?

Syrus Marcus Ware:

So I don't know that there is a statement that could be made on Twitter or otherwise, that would make me forget this statement was put out. I don't know how they're going to come out of this. But I do think that unfortunately, there are a lot of people who probably applauded this Twitter manager, because we're reacting. My Twitter feeds are curated, perhaps in a way where a lot of people were reacting. I'm sure there are people who are thinking this is great, because now I don't have to address my white supremacy at my job. Now, I don't have to listen to my employee who's giving me feedback about how I've managed. Now I don't have to arrange to make sure that so and so has their farmers market info or whatever. And it's very bizarre.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I think it's so wow. And I can't keep. As I read it, I kept thinking about in your 20s when you're rocking in a really tight friend group, and then there's a couple that breaks up, and then everybody knows everybody's business all at once. And I remember sitting and talking to a friend and she said, I'm tired of doing the right thing for the right reasons about her partner and why they were breaking up. This feels like they've decided to absolutely do the wrong thing for the wrong reason on purpose. I don't know how you take a workplace culture that they were so vocal about. If they've been quiet about their workplace culture, nobody would have cared. They've written books and profited on this idea of their good place to work. And I see Courtney Hart brought up in the chat, I thought the same thing, the paternalism of what is wrong with a farmers market? Somebody hates organic food. You know what I mean? It's so specific. So anyway, what's your bet? What do you think happened? What did one of those founders get accused of that created this? Because this post is a reaction to something we don't know about, right?

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Oh, interesting.

Lauren Ruffin:

What do you think it is?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

That's a good question. I mean, who knows? The thing for me is someone got caught doing something and doesn't want to have that come to light. There's a deal on the table somewhere that is going to inform something for Basecamp forward, or three white people are just white people. They got scared. They got nervous about the current climate. They're looking at their other peers and wondering if... But also someone who comes from a place of privilege assumes that people get to pick and choose how politics plays out, and that you can opt out of these conversations. And so, I don't know. I mean, I hate to say that and mean it, but it's just I can't explain any other way. It's just a white male doing white male thinking.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I have a feeling that likely these values that are exposed in this, I don't even know what to call this, this info sheet, I think that these values are probably held dear by people in leadership and probably have been held dear for a while. I bet there's been a bit of a push pull about the direction, and for whatever reason, this is what went out. And we know that this whole reason went out because of white supremacy being dyed in the wool of our workplaces. And so that kind of dude-bro, white-sis hat kind of narrative, that we see in the writing of this. I mean, it's written like a textbook of neoliberal white supremacy, but in the business sort of an example of. Yeah, I think that probably these feelings have been held at the company for a while, and now it's just went out. So anyways, I'm so thankful that you brought this as an example, because of course, now, I've got my blood is sufficiently boiling to be ready for [inaudible 00:27:45]. Right, back on Twitter. I've got to tell you that.

Lauren Ruffin:

It's like a warm up, but I think focusing on David and Jason, the founders of Basecamp, and them feeling like it was their decision to make, right, which represents a level of hierarchy. And that in of itself is paternalistic in a company. So, I'm curious about that. But I'm also, I got to tell you, I woke up this morning thinking about the black and brown people who are in that organization. I mean, I'm guessing they're dusting off their resume. But this had to have been a hostile organization for them prior to the company shooting itself in the foot in this way, right?

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I mean, you would imagine that this is part and parcel. I mean, if anyone was at the helm is able to write what they've written here, it's so racist, and sexist, and violent, right? Because of course, it presupposes the people that don't have family, and presupposes the people that don't have self determination, or don't have disabilities. The way it's written is written with very few employees in mind being able to fit into this mold. So you can imagine that probably was a very difficult environment anyways for these racialized employees. I think what I would be thinking about would be, "Okay, so that black square that you put on your profile last June, that was just bullshit then?" I'm sorry to swear, but, "So that really meant nothing." We knew it meant nothing when a lot of these orgs put their square, but I don't know if Basecamp put a square, but once you write a statement that says we're no longer going to comment about political issues on our social media, you've put a nail in your coffin right there.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

And what that would mean to me as a racialized employee, it's that when racism happens to me in the workplace, where am I to go? That this is not an organization that's going to be able to help me through white supremacy if I experienced that on the job, anti blackness if I experienced that on the job. This doesn't create a feeling of safety or security for me as an employee to feel like I'm going to be supported when these things happen at my job. If an organization is going to go out of its way to say, "When we comment on politics." I'm sorry, there should be no two sides on the George Floyd killing. I mean, the man was killed and murdered by the police. That's not about, how do they say, wading into the waters and being a target or a complicit. I mean, it should actually be pretty straightforward. When we see violence and injustice such as that, you should be able to make a comment on that. And if you're not able to understand how to make that comment, that says lot more about where you're at in terms of your race politics. Yeah.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. And yeah, what about those employees, what are they going to do? And I think one of the things that I've been thinking about just as you were talking, is how these types of companies, institutions kind of continue with the ethos that the only purpose of business is to make money. The only purpose of business is to have this one single characteristic. But if you look at all of our communities and cultures before so much of this form of capitalism was the only option, we worked with each other, we relied on each other, whether it's for goods and services, we traded, we bartered, we understood that things were finite, and in that you paid for quality materials that were going to last. This just continues to be to me just that in stage capitalism that continues to claw its way up. But I hope that we're in a place now for those employees that the conversation has shifted, and that there are new social relationships being developed around these conversations, and we can have sessions like Work Shouldn't Suck. And it's actually a real thing.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

In that survey that Tim shared, where 0% of people want to work five days a week in an office is the perfect example. The question is, what are we going to do, though, to start to come back and create the better safety nets for our employees going forward, that isn't farmers markets, but it's healthcare. So in the United States, we have garbage health care. The ability to have health care, and so that when you get sick, you can continue working. The ability to have the flexibility if you're a single mom, or you just are a single person who needs time for mental space to not have to do a nine to five. And the agency we need as people to define how work can work for us is I think the work right now. So what are the social safety nets we have to focus on? And then how are we creating the process so that people can actually have a life outside of work?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

So I don't know. I think that's the moment that we're beginning to pause it. There's a whole lot that needs to happen on the policy side for us even get there. Because we've been thinking about it here in New Mexico. I'm a small business owner, I've got employees, and I can't offer meaningful benefits right now. So we are looking to history to say, how did people create cooperative forms of health insurance? What's the mass numbers we need to be able to get quality, particularly native American health care insurance. So those are the things I'm thinking about right now as we move forward. Because I don't know what we're going to do in terms of office either.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

It's so interesting, because at the same time as Basecamp was making this statement, you have other organizations reading books on transformative justice, reading books on abolition, thinking through how to have an abolitionist rooted organization, how to resolve conflict in your organization without relying on carceral logics and punishment. So you have these organizations making these massive conceptual leaps, they're going through a systems change, and they're trying to learn how to be better and more agile and respond in ways that tie into the abolitionist drive that we're seeing in the community. So I work at an institution, I work at a university, and my department chose to read collectively Beyond Survival, which is that incredible book by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in a jurisdiction that looks at transformative justice stories from the field, including in workplaces, and how to implement them. And so we collectively read that book together over a period of weeks and had a reading session to think about what would it mean to take a non punitive approach in our relationship to the university, in our relationship to our students, and their relationship to our colleagues.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

So you have organizations doing the work of trying to push forward into a new direction, and then you also have organizations taking 17 steps back, as we saw with Basecamp. So I think what's very interesting right now would be to figure out what kind of organization am I in, actually. Am I in the kind of organization that's taking 17 steps forward and meeting the challenge where we're at and say, "Okay, how do we live abolitionist lives?" "How do we create a community after capitalism falls?" "How does our organization last until 2030?" And then you had these organizations who are like, "Let's go back to 1983." And that's what we thought is Basecamp email, was let's go back to 1983, and we'll just live in that area for a while. I'd rather be in an organization that's moving forward and moving into these new directions that we're seeing in the social world. So to me, I think you're right, Lauren, they're dusting off their resumes. I mean, wouldn't you? I mean, I would be very hesitant to want to stay somewhere long term that was taking these kind of steps backwards.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder how much people reflect on the way they were taught to lead. An organization was really based on compliance and control instead of liberation. Because to me, to Vanessa's point about healthcare, the law says that we have to sort of offer certain things. There're a ceiling. I mean, there're a floor, and that floor is so far below the surface. But if we get to liberation, we get to the point where Vanessa started talking about what are the ways that we have historically operated to get people what they need? I know we have about 10 minutes left in this conversation, if there are any questions for Vanessa and Syrus, feel free to drop them in the chat, and I'll do my best to answer them, or have to ask them and then they can answer them. I'll make them do the work this morning.

Lauren Ruffin:

But what are some of the core tenants of a place where POC wouldn't be dusting off their resume? The political statements on Twitter is a good place to start, but what are the deeper sort of core values? Vanessa, I know that when you do events with Native Women Lead, there's always childcare there. And that, to me seems like a no brainer, but for some organizations, it seems an added expense, or an added level of coordination. How are y'all operating that sort of bringing the sense of imagination and liberation?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

We never question or negotiate people's time and what they tell us it costs. It is something we kind of try to work with, which is like, "You believe this is what you're worth, we're going to start there." So part of it is just recognizing. Because we work, almost not exclusively, because it's not an exclusive, it's just a lot of the folks we've been working with are women of color. And a lot of them within the Native Women Lead network are 35 to 45. So a lot of them are mothers, caretakers of young people and older people. And so we knew immediately, not only is childcare important, but access to quiet time for these women, and for people to be able to find space to just be alone to meditate, to think. If they needed access to spiritual materials, they were there. So this is just for all events that we tried to do. But additionally, we pay for every speaker and their time, we never not pay, we don't ask people to do us favors. And it's something that I didn't realize was such a big deal until I got in the conference circuit myself, and realized how much I had to fight for compensation for one hour. And how hard it was. And people were like, "Well, that's not what we do, we pay for the event." And it's just like, "How is that possible?" "How is it that we're not honoring?"

Vanessa Roanhorse:

So those are some of the things we've done. But in my company at Roanhorse Consulting, we basically have created the process forward where we will be an employee owned company over the next two years as we move forward that way, and that was my desire and gift to help build opportunity, and wealth, and assets for my team and my staff who've never had that before. And so in that building, they get to be a part of the decision making. We ultimately hope to move completely to team leaders similar to a law firm, where there's just lead folks who develop their portfolios. But honestly, it's just imagining a future in which people have agency, have self determination as you shared, Syrus, and also the ability to make choices on things we get to build and create. And it seems so simple, but turns out it's actually so antithetical to what most folks think of in terms of company, in terms of what matters. And I'll be honest, I've had to go to banks to get additional money and resources to help me grow this. And when I talk anything outside of traditional business practices, I become a risk to provide lending and resources to. So anyway, those are just some examples. I would love to hear yours, though, Syrus.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Yeah. I'll talk about Black Lives Matter Canada, because we're in the process. We've a small staff team. It's a national organization that provides support around black liberation nationally, and we have this small staff team. And we were determined from day one to be the kind of workplace where people want to be engaged, they want to stay connected. So it's rooted in black liberation, it's rooted in black justice, we have made sure that there are things like benefits, and sick days, and on all of the things that you would want, yoga classes. And all the things that Basecamp has just cut, we've made sure are available. But also, we wanted to make sure that we're building out the capacity for our team to grow and diversify in the future. So we've been doing ASL classes with all of our staff, because one of the things that I find outrageous is that we're still in a situation where we're completely segregated between hearing, and deaf, and hard of hearing communities. We've created a world where we're in different schools, different workplaces, different communities, and never the two should meet.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

And we wanted something better than that for our communities. We wanted black, deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing communities to be working together for the liberation of all of our people. So we've all been learning ASL, black ASL, actually, which is a specific dialogue, dialect. We've been learning black ASL since January, with the incredible black deaf instructor, And just doing these kinds of things that are kind of building us towards an organization where we could have deaf and hard of hearing people working with us, and we can all communicate with each other. So just starting to work from day one with the plan of becoming more and more and more reflective of the diversity of the country, rather than less and less and less, which is what we're seeing in this Basecamp's email.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

No, 100% it's values. What are your values? I think everything you're saying I just think about, so much of our work, we talk about we need to understand if our values aligned, what are the values of what we're creating? How do the values hold us accountable? And I will tell you most times most folks don't want to go there. It's just too much work. It requires too much time. But it's like, if you aren't willing to build a true relationship, which is going to be bound by values, it's going to be bound by trust, it's just not worth it. It's just ultimately long term not worth it. And I think that's exactly it. Also, by the way, I had no idea there was black ASL.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, because-

Vanessa Roanhorse:

It's so amazing.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:42:55] videos are amazing. You've got to check it out.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Yeah.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Oh my god, I got to find this. Yes.

Lauren Ruffin:

Tim's back, which means that we're running out of time.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Hi Tim.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Hi Tim.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm usually super happy to see Tim, but this time I'm not.

Tim Cynova:

I'm so happy I wasn't moderating, that I could just sit there and listen to this conversation. Oh, god, that was amazing. Syrus, Vanessa, thank you so much for starting the summit off with us. The panel was terrific, and I look forward to be able to go back and rewatch it.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Thank you so much.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Yes, thank you. I wasn't done. I want more time, but another time.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

We could literally talk about this all day. That's the thing, is there is... I mean, I'm glad it's a whole summit, because there is so much juicy stuff to talk about.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, well hang on to that, we'll get lots of time to talk later on.

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.

If you’ve enjoyed the conversation — or are just feeling generous today — please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or 5 stars, or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers.

Until next time, thanks for listening.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Tim Cynova 11/23/21 Tim Cynova 11/23/21

Employment Law and COVID (EP.49)

When it comes to providing a workplace free from COVID hazard, what's required and what's not? What's legal and what's not?

Recorded

April 27, 2021

Last Updated

November 23, 2021

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

Guest: Andrea Milano

Host: Tim Cynova

Episode Transcript

Guests

ANDREA MILANO focuses her practice on all aspects of employment litigation, counseling and traditional labor matters. She manages a diverse caseload of class, collective and representative actions, single plaintiff litigation, and traditional labor matters. She has significant experience drafting and arguing substantive motions, conducting discovery, and preparing for trial. Andrea regularly provides direct advice and counsel on a broad spectrum of labor and employment law matters, including conducting positive employee relations and sexual harassment avoidance trainings; investigating payroll and wage and hour audits; developing, drafting and revising handbooks and employment policies; and managing performance issues, terminations and reductions in force. While she has handled litigation and employment matters across many industries, her focus has been on technology, hospitality and health care.

Transcript

Andrea Milano:

I think you do have to think through it, and you have to be willing to have the conversation and meet employees where they are. An older employee, an employee with asthma, an employee who has another condition might be much more risk averse in terms of getting back on the subway or a bus than lower risk employee in terms of their basic demographic standing. I think the other thing you need to consider is income range and socioeconomic status, because this disease is not impacting everyone the same.

Andrea Milano:

And so if you have employees, like if the people at the top who are making the decisions park in the parking garage or can afford to take Uber or have drivers, that's very different than the people who have to take two buses or a subway to get to work. And those are realities that are hard to confront, but that you have to think through.

Tim Cynova:

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

In this session: Employment Law & COVID, I have the pleasure of chatting with Andrea Milano about the myriad ways employment law and its application have been changing and evolving amid the global pandemic. Note again, this conversation took place in April 2021. While there's a lot that still holds, this was before wide-reaching vaccine mandates. So, let's jump over to the conversation…

Tim Cynova:

Hi, everyone. And welcome to our session, employment law and COVID. I have been anxiously awaiting this session ever since our guest said yes to it. I'm Tim Cynova, I'm a white man with short to medium messy brown hair. I'm wearing blue rectangular glasses. I have like a salt and pepper stubble. I'm wearing a black zip-up sweater with a blue dress shirt and blue tie. And I'm sitting in front of a wood paneled wall.

Tim Cynova:

A reminder here, about the chat and the Q&A section, I'll be paying attention to that. And let's just dive in. I'm so excited for this session. I'm so excited to be joined by the awesome Andrea Milano, who is a special counsel of employment law at Pillsbury Law. Andrea, welcome to the summit.

Andrea Milano:

Thanks so much, Tim. I'm really excited to be here.

Tim Cynova:

Let's begin with, how are you doing and how do you typically introduce yourself?

Andrea Milano:

Sure. To start my name is Andrea Milano. I am a white female in her 30s. I have long dark Brown hair and dark rimmed glasses. I'm wearing a brown suede jacket and I'm sitting in my basement, my home office space. You can see behind me, I have a wall of gold maps, which is all the states I've lived in my whole life. That's where I am. Professionally, I introduce myself, so I'm special counsel at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. I am so happy to be part of their employment law team.

Andrea Milano:

I've been practicing employment law since 2011, so this is my 10 year anniversary of being in this field. I've really tried to maintain a diverse practice of employment law, counseling, litigation. I also do labor law, which includes union work. And this past year has been very focused on counseling because in the world of COVID, that took over. And so just always learning new things and growing and meeting our clients' needs however we can.

Tim Cynova:

Andrea, I haven't read your bio and in a while. And so I went to the website as I was prepping for our session, and your areas of practice include travel, leisure and hospitality, artificial intelligence, healthcare, technology, media and telecom, as well as employment law. And so these are all areas that don't seem to have been impacted at all during the past year, at least jokingly. What has this past year been like for you?

Andrea Milano:

I will say, one of my very favorite things about employment law that has always been the case is that everyone has employees, which means I have worked cross sector and cross industry, really my whole career. And I love that anytime I'm talking to someone, whether they're a nurse or a mechanic, or... I have had some wild clients, the cheese makers, all these different things. Everybody has employees, everybody can talk about being an employee or having employees.

Andrea Milano:

As diverse a set of issues as COVID has caused, I think the employment sector is something that we've all been able to feel and think about and have impact us. Yeah, we've been getting calls from clients throughout the firm, everybody has questions about what to do with their employees. And really one of the silver linings of this year has been, everyone is trying to do right by their employees. And so it's really, really... I've spent the past year focused so much on what do we do? How do we help? What can we do?

Andrea Milano:

It's been a year that feels really out of control. There has been some positive, tangible impacts that we've been able to have, and I'm proud of that, and grateful for that.

Tim Cynova:

I'd be curious if... my sense is that most of the organizations and people who are here are smaller, they might not have HR staffs. We saw it in the chat, Jessica said they don't have an HR person. My sense is that the group we're speaking with too, this might be a lot of DIY. You're an executive director or a deputy director, you don't have a formal background in HR, you don't have an HR person. It is felt in this past year, I've been fortunate to attend a lot of the webinars that Pillsbury's produced, also you and your colleagues in employment law group there have been publishing some great alerts.

Tim Cynova:

It feels like there was a day where employment law was changing every single day as it related to COVID. And as someone who enjoys HR, has a background in it, loves serving employment law, that was of interest to me. But first of all, how are you processing everything that's coming out where it feels like the ink on the law wasn't dry by the time people were having to figure out what was happening?

Tim Cynova:

And how do you counsel smaller organizations where they might not have anyone... the person who's doing HR is also doing marketing and also doing finance and operations. What's your typical response?

Andrea Milano:

I think that my initial responses acknowledged the hard. I think we all need to get better at doing that for ourselves, but it's been a challenge. And if you're doing this and even for HR and employment law professionals, this has been hard and challenging, and there aren't always clear answers, and it is a moving target. And it does feel like whack-a-mole a lot of times. And so, this is hard and it's something that we need to be really thoughtful about and pay attention to.

Andrea Milano:

So if you're not an HR professional and this HR was a much smaller part of your work-life before COVID happened, I think acknowledging that this is hard, and this is changing, and it is a challenge is important. And so there are a lot of really great resources out. Pillsbury, I have to plug my own firm. Pillsbury has been working really hard to stay on top of developments.

Andrea Milano:

I guess the other thing to note is that it's so state and city-specific. There's really different standards depending on where you live and where you have employees. Even within an area like I'm based out of D.C., between Virginia, D.C., and Maryland, the standards are different. So if you have an office in Virginia, you have to comply with certain very stringent guidelines that don't apply to other states. So it does feel like a moving target.

Andrea Milano:

I think it's just staying aware, asking for help when you need help, finding the resources that can help you, and being agile. I think being able to respond and say, "Okay, that's what we were doing and now we're going to pivot because we have to."

Tim Cynova:

Great. Let's pivot right into some real life questions here, and we'll let some more gather in the chat. We did a survey leading up to this, and there's been several that I've seen that have been asking people, "Come fall, how many days a week would you prefer to work in the office? How many days a week do you think you'll be expected to work in the office?" And the numbers are all over the place. But not that many people would prefer to be in the office more than three days a week or so, is roughly what's coming out of it.

Tim Cynova:

One of the questions I'm starting to hear with increased frequency and urgency, and I'm sure you are as well is, "What if my employer says, 'If I don't come back into the office five days a week, or as many days a week as they want me to be there. And for reasons I might fear for my safety, and my health, and those of my loved ones that I'll lose my job?'" There's two sides of this from the employee and employer side. I'm sure you're hearing this, what do you make of it? What's your counsel?

Andrea Milano:

It's a hard question. I think there's a lot of things that go into it and I think employees and employers are both really grappling with this decision. And being an employee and also someone who counsels employers, I feel both of this strongly. Depending on any specific job or return to work requirement, one, I think a lot of it is going to be tied to schools, because I don't think it's reasonable to expect a full workforce to be back five days a week if schools are not back five days a week.

Andrea Milano:

Because the realities of childcare are such that if your kids aren't back in school, what are you going to do? So I think for many reasons, getting schools up and running five days a week on a consistent, safe basis is a top priority. And my mom is a public school teacher, so I feel very strongly about that for many reasons. I think it will also depend a lot on what city and state mandates are an and how things progress.

Andrea Milano:

I expect that private companies will continue masking requirements, whether or not those are required by cities and states. I've seen that already as some states have rolled back those requirements. And I think employees should feel empowered to ask for details about what's being done to keep them safe, and employers should be welcoming those questions. Quite frankly, I'm counseling employers to be proactive, like, "Your employees should feel safe here."

Andrea Milano:

Returning to work should be a positive thing, nobody should be kept in the dark. And everyone should know what the protocols are, what we're doing, what to do if something goes wrong. See something, say something, and I think it needs to be a collaborative process.

Tim Cynova:

One of the very early things, it might've been in the very first session, your colleague Julia Judish started talking about the OSHA general duty clause that requires workplaces to provide a workplace-free of hazard, and that now COVID was a hazard. And it was this moment where I thought, I studied OSHA's general duty clause is like dangerous chemicals and sharp objects and stuff like that. But now this was like applying to everyone, workplaces that generally didn't have to think about it.

Tim Cynova:

So I got a question about what's OSHA general duty clause? And is this related to what I've been hearing about why Congress was or is trying to limit employer liability, if employees get sick and die from COVID. Can you break down the OSHA general duty clause and how workplaces should be approaching this?

Andrea Milano:

Sure. In general, a general duty clause is basically that you can't be negligent. You have to maintain your workplace in a way that a reasonable employer would to protect against things. And so nobody's expected to protect against everything. If there's some natural disaster and somebody gets hurt at work, OSHA isn't going to say, "Oh, you're on the hook for that." But if something happens and you don't have shatter-proof windows and you should have had shatter-proof windows because that's the standard of construction, then you would be on the hook for that.

Andrea Milano:

So the general duty clause is really tied to what's reasonable and what can be done. COVID is tricky, it's just different. And I think it is scary for employers to hear that they could be on the hook for it, and I think it comes from a lot of different ways. Are you requiring your customers and your employees to wear masks? Are you requiring social distancing? Do you have a lot of physical workplaces have tape on the floors, showing people how they stay apart.

Andrea Milano:

What do you do if someone comes in and refuses to wear a mask? How do you handle those situations? Is the boss wearing a mask. Those are the kinds of things where I think an employer could get in trouble if they're not meeting that reasonable person standard. And I think that that will be judged by what the mandates are. In D.C., the mandate is currently that if you're inside, you have to be wearing a mask, you have to be six feet apart. It doesn't matter if you've been vaccinated or not. Those are still the rules.

Andrea Milano:

And so if you are an employer and you are not requiring people to wear masks, if you're not social distancing, you're not meeting those basic thresholds, I think there could be liability there. That's the easiest way to think about it, but I think there's other concerns as well. Depending on your workforce, if you have a significant population that requires public transportation, is requiring employees to be in-person if public transportation hasn't made it to where it's a safe space.

Andrea Milano:

And then if somebody gets sick on public transportation, picks it up, brings it in, or even just gets sick themselves. I think that's more attenuated, but I do think we have to think through some of those other risk factors as well.

Tim Cynova:

How would you think through those risk factors? Because from New York, there's the subway, or buses, or you're walking. And so there's a lot of distance a lot of times between where you live and where you work. And so how as an employer, what would you be thinking about as it comes to that?

Andrea Milano:

There's so many considerations that go into it. I have a good friend who lives and works in Midtown and she's been walking into the office. And she feels in some ways an obligation to get New York city back up and running, like how many lunch places cater to in-person employees who aren't there? On the other hand, my sister lives in New York city and I don't want her to take a Metro really ever again.

Andrea Milano:

Tim Cynova:

Great. I'm going to pivot to some of these questions that are coming in before I lose them. Emily asks, "What does an employer do if an employee who has been vaccinated doesn't see the rationale for wearing a mask?"

Andrea Milano:

Until guidance changes, CDC and OSHA are both still saying that despite vaccination status, mask mandates are to remain as they are. If that changes, we can reassess, but for the time being, those are the rules, those are the rules as set forth likely by your mayor or whoever your governing authority is. There should be strong policies in your workplace that require masking. And someone who is not willing to comply with the law and company policy should be counseled and terminated if they won't comply, because they are still potentially putting other employees at risk.

Tim Cynova:

Great. Thank you now. Let just... Thank you, not great.

Andrea Milano:

Not great, but employers should feel enabled and empowered to do that and to make people follow the rules.

Tim Cynova:

The next question is about, "Our office suite is on the 18th floor of an office tower. One of our concerns is air filtration. What level of meeting OSHA requirement do we need to consider for risk?"

Andrea Milano:

Sure. A lot of the questions about shared office space would go to building management. And so someone within the company should be working with the building management company, elevators, the shared spaces, dealing with things in that regard. I think absolutely if it's a concern, have an air filtration company come out and do an assessment. I know that there are HVAC systems that can I think... I don't know what chemical it is, but there is a chemical that you can have in your HVAC system that really is killing COVID germs and it's really decreasing risk.

Andrea Milano:

If that's something that you have the means to do, absolutely do it. I think, the more steps we put in place to prevent things, the better. Absolutely.

Tim Cynova:

We have a question about regulations with vaccine reporting and testing, and it actually relates a bit to one of the questions that I received before. Beforehand, I was talking with someone who runs a dance company and said, "I know where our dancers are. I know that they've been quarantined or vaccinated. When we go on tour, we're in tight spaces in the backstage of venues. I don't know about those spaces and about the employees and contractors who might work there. What do I do?"

Tim Cynova:

And then maybe these are related, maybe they're not, quickly reading as they're coming. The question about, [inaudible 00:19:01] to learn more about regulations regarding vaccine reporting or testing for events and gatherings for staff intending. So sort of related here, I'm sourcing you this bucket, what do you make of it? What's your advice?

Andrea Milano:

Great. An employer can ask about vaccination status of its employees, that's fair game. That said, an employer has an obligation to protect the confidentiality of that information. That does fall within HIPAA and other medical employee privacy rights. An employer can have a mandatory... vaccines are required to be on site so long as they can justify that anyone who is not vaccinated would be posing a direct threat to the other employees.

Andrea Milano:

But if someone says that they are not willing to get vaccinated or can't get vaccinated, and that's related to a disability, you have to be willing to engage in the interactive process with that person the same as you would if they had any other disability. And this is in part because the vaccine is still under emergency use authorization, and also because... It's hard because there's so much going around with the vaccine, but there are certain categories of individuals who may be higher risk for a complication from a vaccine.

Andrea Milano:

And so if someone were not able to get it because their doctor had advised that they shouldn't based on another underlying condition, to the extent that that person could continue to work remotely or other accommodations could be made, you have to engage in that same interactive process. I've also been getting questions related to this, can employees share their vaccination status? Can you have an in-person meeting and say, "Don't worry, it's okay. Everyone here is vaccinated."

Andrea Milano:

No, don't do that. Everyone, quite frankly, I think employees will talk about it. I've talked about it with folks, there were folks sharing, "Oh, Hey, I found a spot that has appointments available, you should go. I think employees will talk among themselves. That's very different than the employer speaking on behalf of the employees. And to the extent that you have employees in your workforce who have a legitimate disability and reason for not getting it, you don't want to start a witch-hunt or in any way suggest that those employees should be outed or made to feel in any particular way because they didn't get the vaccine.

Andrea Milano:

So generally, you can require it. In the context of the dance company, I think it's absolutely fair to ask the company that you're visiting, what are their policies, what are they doing? And see what that is. I would stay away from any questions to the extent of, is XYZ person vaccinated? But they may offer it, they may say, "We have a mandatory onsite vaccination policy and that effectively communicates to you that someone has shown up, they have been vaccinated.

Tim Cynova:

This is one of those areas of HR verse like, before COVID is like, "Don't talk about anyone's medical condition, anyone's medical history." Now it's like, "We could take temperatures or ask about symptoms, but can you ask about the person they might live with, about their symptoms and where they've traveled?" And it feels really complicated in the potentially really challenging area to navigate this, especially as things are changing. What's your advice on this?

Andrea Milano:

It is complicated and I think it is changing. And I think the further we get from crisis point, the more we'll see things roll back. I have a friend who is a small business owner and she said, "I'm just going to have a policy forever that nobody with a fever can ever come in." And I said, "Okay, except that people with a lot of noncommunicable diseases can have fevers, and so can cancer patients who are undergoing chemo, and plenty of other people who you wouldn't want to exclude from your store."

Andrea Milano:

But right now, it's absolutely fair game to say, "If you have a fever, you are not allowed in the store because it's a public health crisis." So the things that we're seeing are being done because we're in a crisis. And I think that we should be careful about making any snap judgements as to what we'll do on a going forward basis. Because I do think that employee privacy has a place in work, but there has to be a balance. And the public health concerns here are outweighing the balance to an extent of what we normally see.

Tim Cynova:

Great. All right. I can see, I'm trying to cue these questions. I've been trying to order these questions in my mind as I see them here because there's some other ones. Let's just go with the last one that came in and then I'll swing back up. "Are there any differences in what can be required of staff working directly with children?"

Andrea Milano:

I have not seen that yet, but I can see where that would come. I think once the vaccines are no longer under emergency use authorization, once they have been formally approved by the FDA, I think we will see more mandatory vaccine requirements with school teachers, with daycare workers, things to that effect. And so then I think that the exceptions for individuals with disabilities will be much more few and far between, and there won't be room for exceptions for people who just don't want to get the vaccine, as opposed to who have a disabling condition that precludes them from getting it. But I haven't seen anything else dealing with children yet.

Tim Cynova:

Thanks. Also, you're doing awesome. You're just saying question after question, so kudos. I hope you're staying hydrated, if you have a PowerBar or something like that.

Andrea Milano:

I got my water, I'm doing well.

Tim Cynova:

All right, cool. Let's talk about travel a bit-

Andrea Milano:

Sure.

Tim Cynova:

... because actually the other session that is going on right now it relates to intentionality around environmental impacts. And right now, for many who used to travel a lot for work aren't doing it right now, haven't done it for a year. And so there's a question coming in that says, "If the job requires travel when travel resume, how to accommodate for employees that no longer want or are able to travel for work anymore?" What do you think of that one?

Andrea Milano:

I think that's a good question. I was someone who traveled a lot for my job before COVID and it's been a pro and a con to not be traveling. The first couple Zoom depositions were a challenge, but it was also really nice to not fly across country for a two-hour hearing, and I think a lot of people are feeling the same way. So I think going forward, we will be forced to reconcile what travel is actually necessary. I think COVID in general has forced us to think about what is actually necessary, how can we do things otherwise?

Andrea Milano:

I think certainly some things will be in-person, and to the extent that... I think an employer should feel empowered to have travel obligations. I think some things do have to be done in-person. But to the extent that you're trying to accommodate someone who has a disability, who has small children, who has other obligations, I think people will think harder about it because this past year has proven that things can be done in a lot of different ways and still be very effective.

Andrea Milano:

And so to the extent, with reasonable accommodation requests, I think it will be harder to prove if you're going to deny someone a job or promotion, something like that that something really is required. And we've already started to see that even in returning people to work. If somebody can continue doing their job remotely and has been doing that for the past year, let's wait it out, let's be cautious here. If they don't want to return yet, let's let them continue to work from home.

Tim Cynova:

Great. We have a couple of questions about communal spaces or if people have like plus one on communal spaces. It says, "What are we seeing as best practices around maintaining communal staff spaces, where even when not gathering like brief staff use of a break room, amenities like fridges, sinks, microwaves?" Can you speak to what we should be thinking about there?

Andrea Milano:

Sure. There are maximum occupancy reductions that have been in place, so I would start by checking any specific ordinances that are governing in-person use of physical spaces, and then posting signs to that effect. I think signs on the floor are very effective, showing where people should stand. I've seen companies moving to having single service food available so that there's not reaching into a communal space.

Andrea Milano:

I've heard about companies doing almost like delivery to offices so that employees don't have to go to the kitchen, which feels lonely, but is mitigating the risk. My sister works for a company that I'm often jealous of. They used to do bagel Friday, and now everyone gets a DoorDash gift card on Fridays saying, "Go buy your own bagel because we don't have those anymore." So there's a lot of different ways to handle it.

Andrea Milano:

But I do think making sure that you are reducing capacity, extra cleaning, to the extent that you can provide extra cleaning, to the extent that you can add things like sanitizing wipes, hand sanitizer stations, spacing any tables out so that employees just have to sit six feet apart, staggering break time, so that the use of the break room and communal spaces is... Instead of everyone going to lunch at the same time, people are going in a staggered group. So anything you can do like that to reduce overall capacity.

Tim Cynova:

We have a question, "I heard of incentives for vaccines like gift cards, but wonder if this is problematic. Can you speak to this?"

Andrea Milano:

It's a little problematic to the extent that you would have someone who had a legitimate disability or disabling reason for not getting the vaccine? I think it could also cause someone to be in a position to disclose something before they were ready to. Particularly, I think if someone were pregnant early on and were waiting to get the vaccine, something to that effect, they may not want to tell HR that they were pregnant yet. My other issue with giving gift cards to employees is that that is taxable income so I could do a whole separate session on that.

Andrea Milano:

But I've litigated one too many cases where no good deed goes unpunished in that sense, so I would caution that. But I think you could have... if you wanted to incentivize it, you could maybe do something that if we get to 80% vaccination, we'll have a pizza party for everyone. And that way nobody is singled out and pizza is not taxable, or whatever it is, but some sort of more communal incentive.

Tim Cynova:

Great. Let's pivot to remote work arrangements. I've got a couple of questions already about this and see one in the chat. One of the questions is, "With so many workplaces shifting to remote work arrangements last spring, I've heard things like, should my employer be providing me an allowance for my home office internet if they require me to be on Zoom calls all day?" How do you advise approaching this both from an employee perspective and employers perspective?

Andrea Milano:

From an employee perspective, if you are incurring costs, like legitimately incurring costs that can not be avoided, you should be telling your employer. That is not carte blanche to go refurnish your home office space, but I think we've seen it with IT folks who are working out of a call center. They have a requirement that they have very, very high bandwidth internet so that they can remote on and help assess IT issues, and you wouldn't have that at home. So if their employer is requiring them to up their Comcast bill, that is something that should be accounted for.

Andrea Milano:

I think another concern is if you're working from home with multiple people, and so you have multiple people on your WiFi, you as a family unit or household unit may decide to increase. I don't know that that would specifically go to your employer, but I do think that employers in many cases are affirmatively providing these allowances to employees because they realize that there are more costs associated with it. You are using more bandwidth, we are on Zoom all the time.

Andrea Milano:

So I think if you're an employer, you should absolutely be considering it. And as an employee, you should feel empowered to ask questions about it and to be honest. I will say, a lot of the employers who I've been working with on this, their question is, what's reasonable? And so I think to the extent that this can be a collaborative process, that's helpful for everyone because it seems to me that employers do want to do right on this issue. And so to the extent that they know what their employees are actually incurring, what their employees need, they've been, in my experience very willing to provide it.

Andrea Milano:

I've also seen a lot of employers doing office supply pickup and drop off days. And so on the first Wednesday or every other Wednesday, you can go and get any supplies you may need, you can drop off anything that needs to be shredded, things to that effect. And I think that's helpful as well.

Tim Cynova:

Last summer I heard a question about increased electric bills. When I used to go to the office, I didn't have to run my air conditioner throughout the summer. And so is that something that the employer should be paying for?

Andrea Milano:

I think that gets a little iffier. I'm sure we'll see plaintiff's counsel bringing those cases, but I think that gets a little iffier when it gets into anything such as a personal preference. Growing up with my mom, we never put the air conditioner on, so we never would have had that expense, but I can certainly see the argument there for it. And I think we may see some claims there. Again, if an employee is in a really specific situation where there's a hardship, I think if an employee, for example, didn't have internet access at home, something like that, that they should bring up.

Andrea Milano:

But I don't think utility bills will generally fall within an employer's scope of obligation. Especially once there's an option to safely return to work, those claims will go away.

Tim Cynova:

One of the topics that we've talked about a lot, very spirited conversations, and now that I'm debating your expertise in employment law, I just like having it, is the unlimited paid vacation day policy.

Andrea Milano:

We have lots of that... I was like, "What are you going to bring up?"

Tim Cynova:

Your colleague, Julia, I think doesn't want to have that conversation anymore. I guess, meaning like cap it, you can do more than 10 days, but to have an unlimited paid vacation day policy opens yourself up to a lot of risk and that if someone doesn't get it or someone else gets it, then that can be challenging. Your advice and Julia's advice is, you can have it at like 45 days. You can cap it at 60 days, but have some limit here.

Tim Cynova:

But it seems like, I'm going to use this as a pivot to on both is, things, I got unlimited paid vacation days are starting to gain speed as people are talking about, take the time that you need. We're living in a pandemic, we're not operating 100%. That's one thing. And then also the four-day workweek seems to have picked up velocity in recent weeks or months as organizations say, "Okay, so people don't want to be in five days a week. If we are working at 80%, let's just say we're working at 80% and close on one day."

Tim Cynova:

With both element of paid vacation days, I'm not an unemployment attorney, you should not take my legal advice, but Andrea's. If you're thinking about a four-day work week or a flex work week, what should you be thinking about as you approach this as an organization?

Andrea Milano:

That's a good question and I think we're thinking about that as well in going back. My group actually was big into working from home even before COVID, so we've been talking about how do we do setting a day every week that all the employment lawyers will go in, because if I go in and Julia's not there, and Rebecca's not there, then I may as well as stayed home because what's the benefit of being in-person? So setting the in-person days so that everyone can make the most use of being in-person, and then doing things remotely on other times.

Andrea Milano:

I think hoteling of office space will also come up as we move to reduced capacity. If different groups are using the office on different days, you might not need as much space as you currently have. Hoteling can lead to some concerns. I know some people really like it, I don't love it. I like having my ergonomic setup and it's my office, I have my pictures. But I think that's something that you can think about as long as you're meeting employees needs moving to hoteling.

Andrea Milano:

On the unlimited vacation point, I'll say one of the cons of unlimited vacation is that employees often don't take it. When you're empowered to take as much as you want, you often take none. And I think that's been something people are really feeling during COVID, everyone was so worried about what was coming next, is their job security that people not taking any time off. I've seen some pushes recently really forcing employees to take their time off and take the time they need because we're hitting burnout.

Andrea Milano:

I know there's at least one law firm that is giving billable credit to people for a week of vacation, which is unheard of in the big law world. It speaks to how bad it has to be that they're there. I think one of the ways around protecting a company if you want to do the unlimited time off and you want to be more flexible, is to just write in language that says, "Any leaves have more than five days needs to be approved ahead of time." Or, "Any time off taken for any of these reasons," and then you list jury duty, family medical leave act for disability because you're sick.

Andrea Milano:

Those don't fall under this policy. I'm trying to create the carve-outs, because one of the concerns that we have is that an employee has a medical condition, thinks they can manage it on their own, starts taking time off. By the time the employer gets involved, they've already taken six weeks and then you have to give them their FMLA time. You end up giving the employee a lot more than you're entitled to. But so if you manage your policy so that any of the time taken for those reasons falls under those other provisions anyway, that can help protect the company.

Tim Cynova:

I want to ask you about pay transparency and pay equity. We've talked about and in other sessions around equity and equality being... We'll be talking about it in several other sessions about strict fixed your comp and ways that we can align our pay and compensation with our values.

Tim Cynova:

Many of us hold anti-racism, anti-oppression values, and there's a lot of questions about, can we just list everyone's salary, and then all of a sudden we're transparent? Or what might we want to be thinking about from a legal perspective as we engage in more transparency around what people make, and especially if there's a lot of people who are making different amounts for the same job?

Andrea Milano:

I think step one is probably to do some sort of equity analysis internally before you go public with anything. That is the employment lawyer and me speaking, but to protect the company, I think there are a lot of great resources available, and even some online calculators where you can plug things in and it'll show you statistically speaking, you have an issue here. This comp is problematic because there's no chance this could have happened, but for disparate impact.

Andrea Milano:

So I think it's important to be running those studies. I think it's also important to be communicating proactively with your employees that you're doing it right. There is not pay a quality or equity right now, and so acknowledging that and acknowledging that you're fixing it is the right first step. If people are doing the same job, arguably, they should be making the same money, except for very specific circumstances that you can justify. And I think employers are often looking to justify when maybe they should just be looking to even things out.

Andrea Milano:

So I think getting an analysis done generally by an outside company can be really helpful and eye-opening because your employees are thinking about it. It's such a hot button issue, everyone's thinking about it, everyone's talking about it. So even if you don't address it, that you're not hiding from it. And I think it's better to get out ahead of it.

Tim Cynova:

Andrea, as expected, this has been an amazing 45 minutes with you. I really appreciate it. It's been wonderful and amazing to watch you as you started to fill all of these questions. Thank you to all the questions that were coming in and the chat. Really wonderful. But Andrea, sincerely, thank you so much for being a part of the summit.

Andrea Milano:

Thank you, Tim. This was a pleasure. I'm really happy I could participate. Thank you everyone who attended and asked great questions, and this was awesome.

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.

Until next time, thanks for listening.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Tim Cynova 11/11/21 Tim Cynova 11/11/21

Intentionality and Environmental Impacts (EP.48)

Recorded

April 27, 2021

Last Updated

November 11, 2021

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

Resources mentioned during session:

Howlround’s Climate Change resources
Carbon emissions calculator for streaming media
“A Producer’s Guide to Measuring, Budgeting, and Lowering the Carbon Emissions of Livestreams and Video Conferences” by Vijay Mathew
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World by Jason Hickel

Guests: Krista Bradley, Alexis Frasz, Vijay Mathew

Moderator: Erin Woods

Host: Tim Cynova

Episode Transcript

Guests

KRISTA BRADLEY is Director of Programs and Resources at the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP), the national service organization for the performing arts presenting industry. At APAP she’s responsible for the professional development programming for the annual conference as well as year-round programs, leadership development initiatives, regranting programs and resources that advance the skills, knowledge and capabilities of APAP's membership. Prior to APAP, she was Executive and Artistic Director of BlackRock Center for the Arts, a nonprofit multidisciplinary arts center in Maryland, and Program Officer of Performing Arts for Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She brings more than twenty years of experience working in the nonprofit, performing arts, and philanthropy sectors as a curator, funder, arts administrator and consultant for organizations such as the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, the Walker Arts Center, Houston Grand Opera and Opera America. Krista is also a practicing musician, a current member of the Thomas Circle Singers, a DC-based choral ensemble, and a former board member of APAP. She holds a B.A. degree in Literature and Society from Brown University.

ALEXIS FRASZ is a researcher, writer, strategic thinker, program designer, and advisor to partners in culture, philanthropy, and the environmental sector working for transformative change and a just transition. She is a co-director of Helicon Collaborative and leads their work at the intersection of culture and the environment. Her perspective on systems change draws on her artistic practices and diverse background in anthropology, Chinese Medicine, permaculture, and Buddhism. She believes in the need to build solidarity between artists and culture and broader movements working for racial, ecological, and economic justice. Alexis also teaches on creative civic leadership for artists and non-artists, and is faculty for the cultural leadership program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Julie’s Bicycle’s Creative Climate Leadership program. Her research on socially engaged artistic practice has informed artist training curriculums and philanthropic programs worldwide. She is actively engaged in Helicon’s ongoing work to address inequities in cultural philanthropy. Alexis graduated Summa cum Laude from Princeton University with a degree in Cultural Anthropology and has pursued Master’s level study in Chinese Medicine. She is an advisor of the Public Bank East Bay, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and The Artist’s Literacy’s Institute. She lives in Oakland, where she spends as much time as possible in her garden.

VIJAY MATHEW is the Cultural Strategist and a co-founder of HowlRound Theatre Commons, based at Emerson College, Boston, USA and is privileged to assist a talented team by leading HowlRound's development of commons-based online knowledge sharing platforms and the organization's notions of cultural innovation. Prior to his current position, he was the Coordinator for the National Endowment for the Arts (USA) New Play Development Program, as well as a Theater Communication Group (USA) New Generations Future Leader grant recipient in new work at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Vijay has a MFA from New School University, New York, a BA from University of Chicago, and an artistic background as an ensemble-based filmmaker and theatremaker. He is a board member of Double Edge Theatre located in rural Ashfield, Massachusetts, USA.

ERIN WOODS offers the enterprise equivalent of creative production, bridging strategy and execution for projects and organizations. Her work is focused on transformational, purposeful learning, sustainable travel and tourism, and arts, culture and community. She has an undergraduate degree in theatre from Colorado College, a Master’s in Communication from the University of Denver, and has participated in such systems-shifting programs as Getting to Maybe and Creative Climate Leadership. Whether on stage or backstage (though now mostly from the balcony), live theatre will always have her heart.

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

Alexis Frasz:

I think that we often, and I think this has been a miscalculation, actually, from the environmental movement initially where there was a lot of talk about sacrifice and what we need to give up, and I don't think that's untrue. I think there are things that we need to give up. But I'm one of those people that got a pandemic puppy. Okay? I want to say that I did give up a lot when I got my puppy and I gained a lot, and I think that that's the piece that's missing. So, it's like what if doing less is not actually a sacrifice? What if it actually gives us more?

One of the things, for example, that we've been told would really help the climate is actually working a four day work week. That also connects to worker wellbeing and having time to care for your family, and that means you spend less money on caring for your family. So, there's all sorts of proliferating effects that can happen from doing less. It's just not how our culture typically thinks about progress.

Tim Cynova:

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

In this session: Intentionality and Environmental Impacts, the panel discusses how we can approaching reopening in intentional ways that center our impact on planet and people. Panelists include Krista Bradley, Alexis Frasz, and Vijay Mathew, with this discussion moderated by the amazing Erin Woods. So, over to you Erin...

Erin Woods:

I'm going to kick this off. My name is Erin Woods and I am ... Thanks, Kate. See, I've got some supporters in the crowd. I love it. I am, for a matter of visual description, a White woman with dark blonde hair, I'm wearing a pink blouse, and I'm in front of some mixed media art in my background, and I will ask the speakers when they introduce themselves to introduce themselves that way as well. But I'm calling in from my office in my home in Banff, Alberta, which is in Treaty 7 territory, the traditional home of the Stony Dakota, Tsuut'ina, Blackfoot, and Métis Region 3 peoples who have historically and continue to call this place home.

Erin Woods:

Banff has always been a place for migrants and immigrants, and so there are many of us who are very fortunate to live here. I think as we talk about intentionality in the environment, it's great just to remember that what we're talking about is place. We're talking about where we are. So, and Diane [inaudible 00:01:10] from The Netherlands even. So, it would be great as we do this, and people already are, just to put in the chat where you're calling from just so that we get a sense of where our community is joining us from, and I will hand it over to Krista maybe to introduce yourself and then we'll just do brief, brief introductions around, and then we'll dive into the meat of the matter.

Krista Bradley:

Sounds great. Hi, everybody. I'm Krista Bradley. I'm Director of Programs and Resources at the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. I'm calling you from my home in Silver Spring, Maryland outside of DC, and it's the traditional land of the Piscataway and the Pamunkey peoples. My pronouns are she/her/hers and I'm a Black woman with a dark purple shirt on and a gray sweater, a bright blue headband, blue glasses, sitting in front of my Peloton and a window with lots of plants. It's good to be with you.

Erin Woods:

Great. Thank you. Alexis?

Alexis Frasz:

Sure. I am Alexis Frasz. I am calling in from unseated Ohlone territory in Oakland, California. I am a light skinned woman with short, bleached blonde hair, it's kind of a Mohawk, and I'm wearing a black sweater and sitting in front of a couple of posters by Shepard Fairey. I work at Helicon Collaborative, which is an organization that focuses on the intersection of culture and the environment. We do a lot of things in that space, which I will talk about later.

Erin Woods:

Thanks, Alexis. Vijay?

Vijay Mathew:

Hi, everyone. My name is Vijay Mathew and my pronouns are he/him. A visual description of myself is I have brown skin, short black hair, and a little gray stubble. I'm wearing a black short sleeve shirt with a collar and my background is a white wall, and I'm calling from the Boston Metro Area, which is the land of the Massachusett and Pawtucket people. I'm a co-founder of HowlRound Theatre Commons, which is based at Emerson College in Boston, and it's a media publisher of essays and live streams that are produced by and for the professional performing arts community.

Erin Woods:

Great. Thank you. I'm imagining that most of this, my hope is that most of this will really be more of just a conversation, a dialogue because Vijay and Krista and Alexis all know each other. Certainly, in the chat, feel free to, any comments, and then there is also a Q&A. As you can see, there's a Q&A tab. So, we will do a Q&A section at the end. So, as questions come up, if you would plop them in there, that would be great. I'll try to keep an eye on those. But I would love to, by way of introductions, have each of the panelists talk about who they are, their work, where their work and this idea of intentionality in the environment, where that starts to intersect.

Erin Woods:

So, just sort of a workplace overview, as well as maybe a couple little tidbits about you that aren't reflected in your job description or in your title, a little something that we might want to know about you, and I'd love to see that in the chat from individuals as well. Where do you work, or if you're comfortable, what organization do you work for, and some other little nuggets about do you love French fries or are you double jointed or whatever that might be. So, maybe Alexis, will you kick us off with just a little bit more about Helicon and your work and a couple tidbits about you that we might not know?

Alexis Frasz:

Sure. Okay. So, I'll start with the tidbits so I don't forget them. I probably would. Let's see. I have a garden that I'm pretty obsessed with and have learned a little bit of permaculture. So, I try to apply that as best I can. I am a rock climber and I am learning how to build things, and I built a shed in my backyard, which I'm very proud of. But as far as Helicon, a few, maybe five or six years ago, we started really venturing into the environmental space and climate change. We came out of the arts.

Alexis Frasz:

So, really, the work that we do is at the intersection of culture and the environment, and that means that we really think of the environmental issues that we face, including climate change, as cultural issues, not primarily technological or scientific issues. That is a growing kind of perspective, I think, in the environmental sector broadly that we actually know many of the technical things we need to do, but how to change human behavior, how to move in a completely new way as a society is more of a social issue and a cultural issue than a technical one. Granted, science plays a big part in it. I'm not denigrating that.

Alexis Frasz:

So, the other piece of it is that because we came out of the cultural sector, we're really interested in the role of the culture and artist creative practices can play in helping to make that transition to re-talk about a just transition. That's the language that we like because we've always had equity as a focus of our work. Really, that means that whatever we do, the solutions protect and prioritize the people who are most impacted and focuses on making a better world for everybody. So, I guess I'll stop there for now.

Erin Woods:

Great. Thank you. Vijay, do you want to jump in on that to talk about your work and where intentionality in the environment and your work intersect, and some tidbits?

Vijay Mathew:

All right. Okay. So, tidbits. Let's see. I'm a parent to a 12 year old, I'm addicted to spicy food and must have it every day, and I'm almost completely free of all social media platforms. Liberated. So, okay. Then intersection with the work, so HowlRound Theatre Commons, its editorial agenda is to amplify progressive ideas and conversation and perspectives from performing artists themselves who are producing the essays and live streams. Unfortunately still, the climate emergency is actually a progressive and disruptive topic.

Vijay Mathew:

We have been publishing for several years incredible essays written by artist from around the world about their work at that intersection of performing arts and climate change, both about actual pieces that address that, as well as production methods and different systems of how the work comes into being that is aligned with different paradigms, and yeah. So, I'm coming at it from that perspective, and similar to what Alexis said, really seeing it as a cultural issue. It's a culture that created the crisis and it's culture that will mitigate or transition us into a different form. Yeah. So, and I'll just throw a link in there to our tag on climate change where you'll find essays and videos that artists have made themselves.

Erin Woods:

Great. Thank you. Krista, of course, the work that you do and climate change, or the emissions in any rate, can't be separated. So, certainly, you've been thinking about this a lot. So, I'd love to hear about work that you're doing where that intentionality and the environment intersect and some juicy tidbits about you also. They don't have to be juicy.

Krista Bradley:

I don't know. Juicy tidbits. I have become a plant mom during this COVID time and I started with one plant and now I have 15. So, I'm really enjoying that. I love to cook and I have been a choral ensemble singer for probably 25, 30 years. So, that is my thing, making music with people that you can't create on your own. So, how am I connected to this work? APAP is the service organization for the presenting, touring, and booking industry in the performing arts, and by that, I mean we support the people, the artists, the agents and managers, and the venues that provide the infrastructure for artists to connect with communities around the country and around the globe.

Krista Bradley:

By nature of the work of the live performing arts touring industry, we spend most of our time moving people and our work and our arts across boundaries, across states, across oceans, across continents. That in its nature is all about connecting artists with audiences, but the way that we do it right now is fairly extractive. The model that we've built are work on means that artists have to tour enormously to make a living and venues have to position themselves as interesting spaces where only certain artists go to.

Krista Bradley:

So, there's lack of an incentive to sometimes be as thinking in partnership and ways that you can connect with other like-minded colleagues to bring artist to your communities and to do it in a way that's longterm and not for one night. The other piece of what APAP does is we're one of the largest conveners of the performing arts industry every year. We have our APAP conference in New York typically. It usually attracts three to 4,000 people coming into the city and it's an important piece in the industry, in terms of gathering the field.

Krista Bradley:

However, it's also gathering a lot of people, making people travel a great deal to come to one place, and it puts out a lot of waste. So, both as a service organization trying to be a couple of steps ahead of the field and provide information, resources, support on how to do our work better, how to be sustainable as a field, and how to be just and equitable and accessible, the whole idea of being or interested in environmentally sound practices is really critical, and how do we think about our work differently now that we've had 13 months to have to reimagine how we work? So, I'll stop there.

Erin Woods:

Great. Thank you. I think all of you touched on this idea that a lot of what we're talking about is how do we stay connected with our communities? How do we share, whether it's art, or a lot of the people in joining us may be from arts organizations or maybe nonprofits more generally. But often, those organizations, their fundamental reason for being is connecting with community and connecting now in different, maybe more creative ways. So, I'd love to just have maybe an informal chat, Vijay, Alexis, and Krista, just about that, about what are we learning about connecting with community now that the old ways, for 13 months, we couldn't do, and we're coming to a real understanding of how damaging those ways might be? So, unmute yourselves. Discuss.

Alexis Frasz:

I can jump in just to kick it off. I think to some of the things Krista was mentioning, many of us have discovered not that there ... I don't want to minimize the real pain and suffering that's happened with COVID and the things that have been really difficult. I think that there have been things that we've discovered that are really valuable about not traveling as much, having more time with our families, getting into plants and gardening, connecting to our bodies in different ways, and I think also recognizing what really matters and how we're connected to our communities, that if our community is not well, we're not well.

Alexis Frasz:

I think that the arts, especially that so many businesses are like this, have become very disembodied, actually, that there's this idea that it's very mental, it's very global, and I think the pandemic forced us to be more local. My hope would be that we ... I think we will be forced to be more local in the future, whether we like it or not. But I think that there's also great potential to see that as an opportunity and something really beautiful, especially because we have these platforms where we can actually connect more broadly, but then really go deep in our local place.

Erin Woods:

Yep. Vijay, your thoughts about that sort of the global and local, because I know a lot of the work that you're doing is really about this streaming. How do we connect virtually?

Vijay Mathew:

Yeah, right. So, I think the pandemic, in a sense, created an uncontrolled collapse of a lot of our arts field, especially the touring and international presenting parts of it. It was a cold turkey kind of quitting of the major tool we use for international touring and presenting, which is air travel, fast travel, which there's no "green alternative" to. The industry itself has said that they can't develop carbon-free technology in any kind of timeline that's going to avert total catastrophe. So, there's that one thing.

Vijay Mathew:

So, hopefully, there's going to go from uncontrolled collapse to now continuing a controlled collapse and putting creative limitations like, for example, an organization stepping out in a very difficult way to say, "We're not going to travel anymore using airplanes," and using that as a creative prompt to really rethink basically everything about their purpose. Who are they serving? So, that's one aspect. Another aspect is during this pandemic, speaking from the perspective of HowlRound and publishing and performing arts artists wanting to connect and share ideas with each other, this has been an incredible moment for artists from the global South and global North to be in the same virtual space together like never before.

Vijay Mathew:

So, there's been some really incredible, just this kind of cultural mobility that happens in this virtual space that had never happened before, as well as breaking down of the ongoing decades long silos of the deaf performing arts community, deaf theater makers with the hearing community. It's still very, like what we heard in the first session, very siloed communities, and again, this virtual platform, platforms being able to break that down. So, those are very promising little beginnings of new paths and creative ways that we can rethink what we're doing.

Krista Bradley:

Yeah. Yeah. Building on both Vijay and Alexis' points, we've seen presenting organizations connect to audiences that they didn't know that they had and to reach a much more, a browner audience than they thought they had because there's less of a barrier and it's also been inspirational for artists to create work to reach a specific audience that may look like them in a different way without intermediary, which I think has been really interesting and bodes well for how we will be connecting directly with our audiences as artists. I think that's been a really great innovation.

Krista Bradley:

I think that artists, we've heard, at least, that they think that they can have a better balance in terms of making a living, that they don't have to travel so much and they can spend more time with their family and they can find new ways to connect with each other and make work in a virtual kind of way, and that's super exciting. I think for people that work in the performing arts as administrators, it is not necessarily very people friendly. We seem to prize long hours, extreme work, being in the theater for 18, 20 hours, not taking time off, etc. So, for workers in this industry, I think we've all realized that that's not only unsustainable, but it's not something that we really want to do again.

Krista Bradley:

So, how do we reimagine and advocate for a different way of working for us working in the cultural sector? Maybe not making work, but certainly supporting the work that does get made and recalibrate what we think is a just way to work for us in the arts and cultural sector, which I think is long overdue. Then to your point, Vijay, about accessibility and equity, we at APAP discovered that even with the conference, that our conference is an expensive conference. People cannot access it to the extent that they would like to, and yet, we attracted so many more people on the SwapCard platform this year that would never have been able to come.

Krista Bradley:

In fact, the leaders of organizations who are usually the ones that come to our conference invited and were able to give all of their staff access to thinkers and doers and mavericks that were talking about innovation, which was amazing. So, we in our practice realize that we can be much more accessible and inclusive and equitable and should be by pursuing a more hybrid model. So, those are some things that I'm seeing.

Alexis Frasz:

Can I just jump in with one thing to build on that, which isKrista Bradley:

Exactly. Good point.

Vijay Mathew:

I want to add to the workplace and work organization and how that's structured and how that's related to actually climate crisis, where the idea of extraction or costs or hidden costs or the costs of doing business that we put aside and we just let them happen, that's related to the workplace in that in organizations that have less of a hierarchy in terms of a rentier class of people, people on top who, no matter what they're doing, no matter what value they're creating for their organization, are always somehow extracting more wealth, more resources, more longevity, more opportunities, more resources than people lower in the hierarchy who may, for example, be artists, who are freelance, contractor, paid very little, who are struggling to just make basic ends meet, basic needs met.

Vijay Mathew:

So, that mindset that there can actually be, and that we all collectively accept this as a norm or it's normal that there is a rentier class in our nonprofit arts organizations, that's the same mindset that is also capable of allowing a climate emergency to run away out of our control, even to the point where it's truly on the table whether or not we're going to survive as a species or that our complex civilization is going to actually be something we can keep onto that's truly on the table. So, there's that mind shift, that change of perspective and change of culture that has to also infiltrate, and talking just from the arts, nonprofit organizations, they truly need to look into maybe the worker cooperative model or some other kind of system that is not just based on cheap, free labor.

Erin Woods:

It would be great, I would love, actually, to have you all three maybe talk just a little bit more about that, that it's kind of a bunch of times, that this is really about a cultural shift. It's not a technological problem. It's not about the science. It's actually about who we are and how we want to be in the world, and that what we value and what we think about as sustainable, not only in terms of the environment, but in terms of our own lives and our own selves and our neighborhoods, all of those cultural things, especially in response to some of the conversations I know that happened this morning about base camp and reverting to 1983.

Erin Woods:

So, if there is this movement, there's a pull to 1983 and there's a pull towards these possible futures. I would just love your thoughts about how we might weight the scales one way. Then also, since I've got the floor, if anybody's got questions, please do start to populate the Q&A section and we will start to field questions from all of you as well. So, thanks. The brilliant, the pull towards the future. Or what have we seen that's worked? Maybe it's not a massive shift to the future. Maybe it's just small little changes that, as Alexis says, aren't necessarily sacrifices. They're just shifts.

Alexis Frasz:

Yeah, and I don't want to minimize the scale of change. I think the reality is we are in, and entering more so, a time of accelerating change, and I think that we just need to come to terms with that as a society. Really, this question of whether we want to change or we don't want to change. It's just not an option. It's not our choice. We do get to chose how we want to meet that moment and I think for our own survival, as Vijay said, but also especially for justice because there are people ... Climate change has been presented as if it's this far away thing and I think more and more of us are dealing with, we have flooding, we have fires where I am in California that are extreme impacts on our quality of life and our ability to work, as if that's not the primary concern that most of us have when those thing are going on is whether or not we can work.

Alexis Frasz:

But they do affect our ability to work and to participate in our industry, whatever that may be. But we know that those things are going to continue to accelerate, at this point, regardless of what we do for a while. It isn't to say that our actions don't matter. They actually do quite a lot. So, I think there's one of the things in our culture, that it's characteristic of a consumer culture is that there's an immaturity and an innocence. Right? This is being talked about a lot in the racial justice work that is also becoming to the fore in our culture. But it's like there's no excuse for not knowing what we should know at this point. So, the question is really how are we going to participate in that?

Alexis Frasz:

I think, I remember, actually, this happened at Banff, Erin, when we first met. There was an environmental guy. I was part of an environmental meeting. This was probably seven or eight years ago. I remember this guy who worked in the environmental sector and he was recounting this experience he had talking to one of his friends about what he did and thinking, yeah, we're really having this great dialogue about climate change, and after they finished the conversation, he said, "Well, good luck with that. I really hope you make some progress on that," and it's like it was his issue. I think that we need to recognize it's a context for all of our issues, no matter what you care about. It's a context in which we live.

Alexis Frasz:

I think that creates a lot of opportunity for empowerment, actually, around what we can do. We are both potentially leaders of organizations or staff members, we are consumers, we are voters, we are role models, we're parents. So, thinking much more broadly, [inaudible 00:28:42] just about ourselves as consumers, but as citizens really, not using the negative connotation for that term, but really participants in and responsible for the future of our society and our world. So, yeah.

Krista Bradley:

I'm really interested in leadership because it just keeps popping up, because this march that we're on is inevitable, as Vijay knows, and adaptation to the climate emergency and to a very different reality that's quickly approaching, I think, is going to be so critical. So, how are we leading from the middle? How are we leading cooperatively? Vijay, the comment you made about different work structures and flattened hierarchical work structures and thinking about cooperatives. I'm just wondering how those could play, or that model could play a role in leading change and moving away from that individual person that's, whatever, trying to drive change.

Krista Bradley:

Change, I think, comes from more mass movements of like-minded people who are making small or medium sized calls for change or just coming up with different guidelines or ways to work that even in their own small sector or small organization, and Kate, I have worked for a number of small organizations, so I totally see and appreciate that challenge about trying to maintain change, and I think what's helped me is being able to network and create a collaborative of people who are all working towards that as ways to learn from and to cheer on and continue to move things forward, because I do believe in the power of that kind of collective movement and cohort groups making change. So, I just wanted to raise that up in terms of the whole leadership piece.

Erin Woods:

No, I think that that's great. Vijay, you also, though, in addition to the individual, the smaller collective grassroots movements, you also have talked about radical operational changes. So, where do those play together perhaps?

Vijay Mathew:

Oh, yeah. Well, I think it, when we ... Let me get my thoughts together. There's something about how when we live in a specific system, whether it's our workplace or just in our greater economy, and we've been called as consumers, these systems really impact the way that we relate to each other. Despite our own personal intentions or values, these systems seem to always trump ... The ideology and the values embedded in these systems always seem to trump our individual of will. So, if we're able to live and create new structures in our workplaces and in the world outside of our workplaces, it will bring out better things in us as people, I think. So, that's an important aspect and that's incredibly related to the system, the capitalist consumer system, colonial system that has created the climate crisis. So, those are all very related.

Vijay Mathew:

The other thing is that, getting back to a point I think Krista made about disruptions, also Alexis, these disruptions that are going to be ongoing, continued crises that are localized or global, pandemic or whatever, that our impulses to collaborate and to take care, to really start to do the work of caring for each other is incredibly important, and the cultures and systems we inhabit will bring that out in us so that we can do that better. I think that's really on way the arts can go is to really see how they can actually be a caring entity in their community, both local and virtual. Then practically, what that means is if you're not, for example, doing accessibility practices for your online events, that's a good and quick place to start.

Alexis Frasz:

Yeah. I think that's a really ... So many points are so important that you're making, and there's a really great book that just came out recently called Less is More by this anthropologist called Jason Hickel, and one of things that they've found and that he writes about in that book is that democratic governance is always associated with better care for people and the environment when any group, it's not just democratic political systems, which we don't actually have and we know that, but when people are collectively able to make decisions together for the good of the whole, then make the right decision.

Alexis Frasz:

So, I think that really speaks to the point about changing structures, and it seems like it's not necessarily related to Kate's question. There may be things that don't seem like they're ... You may not be able to afford putting solar panels on the roof of your building. But you can practice more democratic decision making, and many small organizations already do. So, I think that also, if you do look through and do an audit of your activities and look for ways that you can minimize your harm, also look for ways that you might be able to maximize your benefit and places where maybe you already are. Like many artists, there are artists who fly all the time and go around the world and use a ton of carbon. But most artists that I know in my local community live pretty modest lives.

Alexis Frasz:

So, to ask them to really cut back more is probably not the best bang for the buck in terms of what we're looking at here, which is not to say everybody should do their part, and whatever you can do, great. But if you already take the subway, if you already live in a house with multiple people, you're ahead of the game in a lot of ways. So, I think that we also need to think about really looking at the places where there's the most bang for the buck, and in both those senses, in terms of reducing harm, but also human beings have this capacity to have an impact beyond our species size. We have an impact on everything else. So, a concept that I mentioned, permaculture, in the beginning, a concept that permaculture is maximize your impact, actually, not minimize it. But do it for good, not for evil, and with intentionality.

Krista Bradley:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Maximize your impact. I guess it could be misconstrued. But I really get in the context that you're using.

Erin Woods:

Do you have anything else along those lines, Krista, that you just ... Because I think there was a question in the Q&A about that that actually might relate to this maximizing your impact idea is that in organizations, do we have some thoughts, yes, on what we can do individually? How do we get more democratic decision making? Some of these big ... Do we just try to blow it up? Do we make incremental change? Do we have time for incremental change? What is a transformative process, a practical way to think about organizational shifts, if you've maybe seen some examples or have some ideas or some case studies?

Vijay Mathew:

Well, I think the quickest way for any shift to happen in the nonprofit arts is if funders actually make policies that actually mandate certain things. You literally can change the field overnight if that happens. That's the lever to pull.

Krista Bradley:

Agree more, Vijay. That's how our infrastructure is designed, that people need incentives to change, and I don't think it's incremental, frankly. I'm tired of incremental change. I'm tired of incremental change around racial justice, gender justice, disability justice, trans justice. It's like, we have all waited way too long and now you just need to blow it up, and the way to blow it up is to have the accomplices of our funding partners who are already taking major steps to take the corpus of their money and put it in a different place, and you see how that's shifting tons of ways that people are making decisions about who they're hiring or what organizations are thriving, or at least not failing because they've been under-resourced for so long and we now are beginning to get some just investments. So, yeah. Funders are really critical to this, and not incrementally. That's no how you make change, at least not right now, I don't think. We don't have time.

Alexis Frasz:

I have so many mixed feelings about this. I agree. I think that funders have outsized influence and can put pressure. In fact, many of you may know already of a group called Julie's Bicycle in the UK and they have been very successful at encouraging and working with organizations in the UK to develop sustainability plans because they had to as a condition of funding from The Arts Council of England, which funds everybody, whereas our funding system doesn't really work quite as ... I don't know enough about Canadian ... I know there's some Canadians on the call. I don't know enough about the system there to know whether that would work. But I think that pressure can be put.

Alexis Frasz:

I think one of the things that was really interesting to me about their work is that just developing the plan for sustainability, that was the requirement. You didn't have to deliver on it. You actually just had to develop the plan and submit it. Just doing that, people actually did start to do things, even though they didn't have to, and the wellbeing and sense of employee satisfaction in the organizations increased. There's a lot of ways that we could interpret why. To me, I think there's something about being in integrity with the truth of what we know. Some scientists have talked about there being this way that we're all operating in a sense of denial.

Alexis Frasz:

Those of us who believe in climate change are still operating in a sense of denial because we acknowledge it on the one hand and then we say, "Well, yeah, but I do need to fly to that really important conference because I've been invited to do the keynote," or whatever it is. Go visit my friend in Mexico or something like that. So, we make those kinds of compromises all the time and so it means that we don't take it as seriously as it actually is. So, I think there is something that feels really aligning and good on an inner level to be operating in alignment with the reality that we know is true.

Vijay Mathew:

One thing that I think would be a good partnership between organizations and funders is trying to solve this issue that Alexis, you bring up, of one's career advancement or progress in one's field is right now aligned with mobility and your ability to travel, an ability to be in places, the ability to take airplanes. There is a way. I don't know what it is, but we would be in the correct structure or a structure that is less harmful if we can figure out how to decouple career advancement from fast travel.

Krista Bradley:

That's really so insightful. I'd never even made those connections. But you're absolutely right. Right? How is that equitable, first of all, and access to movement and career advancement, it is limited to of the few that have the ability to do that. So, thanks for raising that. That's really insightful.

Erin Woods:

Yeah, and what's striking me too that's come out of this conversation is the lever to pull, the funder lever, the big lever, but there are also these smaller cracks in systems that maybe we can start to think about, well, okay, maybe we can just change our hiring practices or we don't make people go to conferences as often or are there smaller little shifts institutionally while we're also keeping an eye on the big things? But then just writing a sustainability plan actually leads to employee wellness is not a thing you would know, but it's the right thing to do.

Erin Woods:

So, I think that that also comes back to doing the right thing often leads to more right things, which is maybe a little bit fluffy, but also really quite practical. So, any other last questions in the group or thoughts about other practical approaches or maybe a few words of wisdom or resources that that panelists would like to leave? We've had a couple of URLs and the Less is More book mentioned already. Closing thoughts?

Alexis Frasz:

Yeah. I guess I would just say I think I would ... This is a really good question. I didn't see it from more about the practical approach and do we shut our organizations? As much as I do think some change can happen from above, it's both top down, but it's also bottom up, and I really think that we're seeing this with the racial justice work right now where it's become unacceptable to have certain people on your board, to say certain things. It's slower than any of us would like, but I do see this tide turning. So, I also think that artists, grassroots groups can put pressure on the above with setting the culture. So, I think that's possible.

Alexis Frasz:

But I also think that one really important thing, and I hate to leave on a down note, so someone else will have to fill in, is to plan for adaptation as well because just like with COVID, with the wildfires, there are going to be these things happening and for small groups and artists, really understanding what the issues are in your place and connecting with other people who can help to build resilience around those things.

Erin Woods:

Thanks, Alexis. I don't know if a famous person said this, but I did hear that art is adaptation plus imagination. I wrote that down somewhere. So, kind of an interesting idea. But Vijay, Krista, last thoughts?

Vijay Mathew:

Yeah. Just a quick little tiny project I've been working on that I'm very excited about. It's just, this is basically a carbon emissions calculator for streaming media. Just launched it, and it's basically an awareness tool, awareness tool about the costs of our activity and it masquerading as math and sciences. [inaudible 00:44:58]. But yeah. It's just a site that may be helpful. The intention there is for people in organizations who are thinking of tapering their travel, tapering their carbon emitting travel to use this kind of tool or some kind of tool to create a tapering budget of carbon emissions, alongside their actual financial budgets.

Erin Woods:

That's great. Thank you. Yeah. Another level, for sure, budgets. Definitely. Krista, your last word from [crosstalk 00:45:35].

Krista Bradley:

Oh, I think the glass is always half full because we work in a field with a lot of creative people who are passionate about caring for one another and for this Earth. So, I have no doubt that there will be change where it's need and I'm inspired by this conversation and my colleagues and really hope it's been useful for everybody else. I'm hoping that we can create more tools, like the tool that Vijay's talking about, the tools and structure that Julie's Bicycle created. I think we need language, we need tools in our field to help build that awareness and to give us steps for how we can make incremental and seismic change. So, I'm hopeful that will happen and look forward to partnering ways to make that happen.

Erin Woods:

Thank you all so much. Vijay, Krista, Alexis, thank you for joining me. Thank you for everyone else on the call, on the session.

Alexis Frasz:

Thank you, Erin.

Erin Woods:

Oh, you're welcome. I'm looking forward to-

Krista Bradley:

Yeah. Thanks, Erin.

Erin Woods:

... Work Shouldn't Suck and what they come up with next. This is going to be, this talk about a movement. Talk about some commitments. Yeah. Work Shouldn't Suck. It shouldn't be bad for the environment. It shouldn't be bad for its employees. So, I think this kind of movement is, we're part of it and it's exciting to be here. So, thank you all. Thanks for joining us.

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.

Until next time, thanks for listening.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Tim Cynova 11/4/21 Tim Cynova 11/4/21

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

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?

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:

Project Include’s Remote Work Report & Executive Summary
“What Does It Mean to Be a Manager Today?” by Brian Kropp, Alexia Cambon, and Sara Clark via Harvard Business Review
“Measuring Loss: The Inequities in Remembrance” by Sophia Park
“Prioritizing wellbeing in 2020” by Joann Lee Wagner
“Working While Grieving” Work Shouldn’t Suck podcast EP03
“My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies” by Resmaa Menakem
“Remote work since Covid-19 is exacerbating harm: What companies need to know and do” by Project Include
The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
“The Han Flowing Through My Veins” by Sophia Park via Womanly
“How to Keep Your Cool in High-Stress Situations” by Robert E. Quinn, David P. Fessell, and Stephen W. Porges via Harvard Business Review

Guests: Shannon Litzenberger, Sophia Park, Joann Lee Wagner

Moderator: Diane Ragsdale

Host: Tim Cynova

Episode Transcript

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

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.

Tim Cynova:

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

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:

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.

Until next time, thanks for listening.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

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Tim Cynova 10/24/21 Tim Cynova 10/24/21

New(ish) to Organizational Anti-Racism Work (EP.46)

Recorded

April 27, 2021

Last Updated

October 25, 2021

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

This unprecedented time has become a time of learning (and relearning) for many. But what is the process for turning knowledge into action in and out of our organizations? Thinking about organizational anti-racism work begins with a clear understanding of what “the work” is. Task forces, caucuses, book clubs, consultants? So many options. Our guests discuss different approaches to doing "the work" in our organizations.

Resources mentioned during episode:

Change.org’s Reflect & Reset
“What Does It Mean When We Say Doing ‘The Work’?” by Nina Berman
“Working Apart So We Can Work Together” by Courtney Harge & Tiffany Wilhelm
“Resources for White People to Learn and Talk About Race and Racism” by Nina Berman & Nicola Carpenter
The Nap Ministry on Instagram
artEquity & Carmen Morgan
Fractured Atlas’s negative interactions document

Guests: Ansa Edim, Courtney Harge, Tiffany Wilhelm

Host: Tim Cynova

Episode Transcript

Guests

ANSA EDIM (she/her) is the Vice President and Chair of the Staff Board at Change.org and sits on Change.org's C-team. With over a decade of experience in brand, marketing, and communications, Ansa is a proud member of Change.org’s Black community resource group, Change.Noire. Before joining Change.org, Ansa spent several years working in tech, government consulting, non-profit, and education industries and most recently ran her own brand consulting firm, working specifically with elderly-, women-, and minority-owned businesses. Ansa lives in Washington, D.C. with her two boxers, Big Mac and Kiss, and spends her time enjoying the city, traveling, and lifting heavy things.

COURTNEY HARGE (she/her) is a producer, director, and professional arts administrator originally from Saginaw, MI. She is the CEO of Of/By/For All, and is the Founder and Artistic Director of Colloquy Collective, a theater company based out of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She has worked for the Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center, Theater for the New City, The Public Theater, Gibney Dance, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and, most recently, Fractured Atlas where she led the design and implementation of anti-racist practices, like race-based caucusing and an equity-informed customer service strategy. She holds a Masters of Professional Studies, with Distinction, in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute and a Bachelors of Fine Arts with Honors from the University of Michigan in Theater Performance. Her credo (#HustlingKeepsYouSexy) is not merely a hashtag; it’s a way of life.

TIFFANY WILHELM (she/they) is a Program Officer at the Opportunity Fund in Pittsburgh, a foundation that supports the arts and social & economic justice. Previously, she was Deputy Director of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council where she raised funds, oversaw programming, and co-led initiatives on accessibility for people with disabilities and racial equity. Tiffany has been involved with several collectives focused on educating and organizing for racial justice, both in Pittsburgh and in the national arts field. Prior to Pittsburgh, she was Executive Director of the Central Wisconsin Children’s Museum and taught in an undergraduate arts management program. Tiffany is a facilitator for artEquity and Farsight, and previously facilitated with Keryl McCord’s Equity Quotient and the Fractured Atlas white caucus.

Host

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

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

In this session: New(ish) to Organizational Anti-Racism Work, I have the pleasure of chatting with Ansa Edim, Courtney Harge, and Tiffany Wilhelm about the different ways companies can approach the work towards becoming anti-racist organizations. So, let's jump over to the conversation...

Hi, and welcome to the session New-ish to organizational anti-racism work where we'll be diving into and discussing different approaches to doing the work in our organizations. I'm Tim Cynova. I'm a white man with short to medium messy brown hair. I'm wearing blue rectangular glasses. I have salt and pepper maybe stubble, I'm wearing a black sweater, a zip-up sweater with a blue dress shirt and blue tie. I'm sitting in front of a wood-paneled wall and I am really excited about this session, especially coming off the last session. I'm so excited.

I'm just excited for today and being able to spend time with all of you. A reminder about the Q&A in the chat here. If the chat starts filling up, throw your questions into the Q&A, and then as we're going along we don't lose them. I'm excited to be joined by three amazing people. Ansa Edim, vice-president staff board chair at change.org, Courtney Harge CEO of Bi For All and Tiffany Wilhelm, program officer of opportunity fund. Ansa, Courtney, Tiffany, welcome to The Summit.

Courtney Harge:

Yay. SO excited to be here.

Tiffany Wilhelm:

Thank you.

Ansa Edim:

Thank you for having us.

Tim Cynova:

I realized we didn't say what order we'd go in after I did that. So to kick things off, why don't we go around in that order, Ansa, Courtney and Tiffany. Have you typically introduce yourself and your work. And as you think about organizational anti-racism work, what does that look like and mean to you?

Ansa Edim:

All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Ansa Edim. My pronouns are she her. I'm in Washington DC and I am a black woman wearing a headscarf with my hair out, a white t-shirt and green overall. I'm in my home office with a blue and white background that I painted in a pandemic project. How do I think about organized organizational anti-racism work? Really I'm personally kind of new-ish to it as well as of change.org, and the way I think about it a lot is a lot about learning about what equity really means and spending a lot of time kind of parsing the difference between equality and equity and it's been a lot of education to...

I work in a white led tech company as change.org is generally a white led tech company and so it's been a lot of education and a lot of teaching and a lot of learning and a lot of energy put into kind of bringing people up to speed and getting people moving along in their anti-racism journey. I'll pass it to Courtney.

Courtney Harge:

Thanks, Ansa. My name is Courtney Harge, I am the CEO, of OF/BY/FOR ALL. I use she/her pronouns. I will preemptively offer that I have the best roommate ever who offers an occasional cello concerto which you might be hearing as I speak. I am also a black woman. I'm wearing a red shirt. I am in a favorite virtual space of mine, which is the library of the former fractured Atlas office. So you can see three chairs and a couch behind me not to mention a wall of library books and a gnome. I have a short Afro, I have some big round glasses and I'm wearing a headset.

And what brings me to institutional anti-racism work really was selfishly a matter of self preservation. Work was a place where I knew I could be successful just as a venue, and I am somebody who has had a success in "traditional spaces." I graduated from college with honors. I actually have strong relationships at institutions and I would get to jobs and not be able to thrive or succeed and it felt like there has to be something that is a problem. Something has to be hindering me in a way that isn't just about, "Can I work harder through it?" It's like, "What if the environment itself is a problem? And what are the ways in which I can engage with correcting that and allowing for people to be as much of themselves as they need to be, to be successful at work?”

And so that is where it grounds for me, and really more and more as I see how do we build environments that people can thrive in? For me, there's no way to do that without an anti-racism lens. And I'll pass it to Tiffany.

Tiffany Wilhelm:

Hi, everyone. It's great to see you. It's great to be with you Ansa and Courtney and Tim. Tiffany Wilhelm, she or they pronouns. I am currently a program officer at Opportunity Fund, which is in a land that's now known as Pittsburgh which is Seneca and Lenape and Mingo and Shawnee and hopeful, and many others land so glad to be with you from there. I am a white woman and really short hair, super short, buzzing it during the pandemic. I'm in my bedroom where my headboard of my bed is actually a fuzzy shagged carpet that I've tacked up on a green wall so you can see both of those behind me. I'm wearing a blue sweater, the sort of a V-neck and some big silver earrings. I'm glad to be with you all and I too have a lot of great poking into that somewhat darker short hair.

Yeah, I get to work in philanthropy and then I also do some work in organizations around racism work and part of the community that Courtney is part of too, our equity and others that as well. Gosh, how do I think about organizational anti racism work? One thing I was thinking about coming into this especially that framing of being newish to this, although I'm sure there are folks that are not newish to this in this space.

So welcome you all, I want you all to put your thoughts in the chat too. It's just how much more it probably is than anyone expects when they maybe are newish to it. It is full change, personal change, culture change, policy change, institutional change and that to me is just a fractal of what's happening in the whole society, right? And so that's kind of what I think of to start, but I'm really excited to talk more to you all about that.

Tim Cynova:

One of the questions that our colleague at Fractured Atlas, Nina Berman, prompted us a couple of months ago that created a podcast and a blog post, Nina is also here, so hello, so I hope I get this right, Nina. She said, "We talk about the work a lot, doing the work toward becoming an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization," she said, "But what do we mean when we say the work." For each of you, what does that mean when people say the work? Well period or quite, I guess that's the question mark.

Ansa Edim:

I can jump in here. At change.org, it meant for us what we called the Reset like with a capital R where we had a period of time after the murder of George Floyd where black staff at Change, we have a black affinity group called Change Norm where actually a community resource group and employee resource group. And we came together and said we have been doing a lot of work around this. We're exhausted, we're tired. There aren't very many of us, but that tech organizations in general, and because there are so few of us, we were not taking vacation, we were really just exhausted because somebody had to be on call to do the work of being black at change.org in this moment.

And that was a huge wake up call to all of us to say that the company needs to do the work of building itself as an anti-racist organization inside and out. So our leadership heard that, and we agreed as an organization to enter what we call the Reset, where we examined our values and policies, recruiting practices, everything you can name of for anti-racist principles and anti-oppression principles. And it continues today, you can check it out at change.org/reset. We've put together some of the information there to keep ourselves accountable. But the work really fell on the shoulders... of surprised me, it fell on the shoulders of our white leadership is that there was work they needed to do internally within themselves.

They needed to do a lot of training, and then they also needed to do the work of showing other staff how they could be held accountable. Doing the work, isn't just talking, it's building in practices that say, "For the longterm, here's how we're going to follow through. Here's what this looks like five years from now." It's not the work. I think looks like not just that change, but to me thinking through accountability, the work looks like accountability.

Courtney Harge:

This is Courtney and I agree. And I think for me, it's both simple and complicated in the sense of the work is interrupting oppressive systems whenever and wherever I see them and resource to do so. And resourced, I mean, particularly as a black woman, both financially resourced, emotionally resourced at the moment, something I often say to my team, and I say that pretty much anyone who will listen is the idea that oppressive systems both have a few 100 year headstart and 1000 fold the resources and energy. And so sacrificing yourself to it doesn't actually stop it to what you were talking about and to around people feeling like they weren't taking their vacation days, they weren't resting and/or taking care of themselves in service of fixing the problem.

But the problem is so big that it will be here beyond your level of exhaustion. It will be here after you've burned through. And so for me, the work is doing as much as I can and being really clear about what I cannot do so that I can do something else the next day or the next moment. So I can interrupt it again because these oppressive systems don't need any more martyrs in service of them. They've taken so much of our, our time, our energy, our resources that throwing my wellbeing and any of our well-beings, this isn't just about me, throwing any of our wellbeing at it to the point we both won't fix the problem and we'll just sacrifice you. So for me, doing the work is taking care of myself so that I can interrupt more things more often with more efficacy.

Tiffany Wilhelm:

Huge support for both of those, and for those of you who know me, just know that I feel so strongly that so much of the work has to happen among white folks and with white folks in that transformation that happens. So just to support what you both said, because that's where the catch-up needs to happen and where if we're going to collectively shift all of our organizations and society more broadly, the white folks have to be ready to do that. And so I had the honor to work a few years ago with Fresh Atlas and to really be part of that journey and both kind of in the kind of full staff teams that were doing that work and in the white caucus, which was doing some work that was important.

And way back when Tim, you might have this link handy, Courtney and I wrote a post about what the caucus spaces were doing and how that had to look really different to support the work of the organization. And the thing I always loved about that is the idea of the harder the white caucus works, the more everyone else is going to be able to resource themselves and rest and heal, and then collectively we can move the work forward. So yeah, so just I really am passionate about supporting those kinds of spaces.

We had a similar series of conversations like you were saying as it happened in Pittsburgh last year among the funding community where some folks that were starting to gain some awareness last summer said, "Hey, well some of our black colleagues, will you host sessions for us?" And folks said, "No." So we formed kind of a white caucus space for just anyone in the funding sector here in this region which is just now it's going to continue and it's just going to be part, hopefully, of whatever other journeys everyone is on because there's just as so many different things to be part of and to keep growing and learning.

So the work just looks like so many things, and I also just wanted to... If you're doing it in an organization, just think about it being emergent. Try different things, know it's got to be ongoing and longterm like our session descriptions book clubs and caucuses. Yes, try it all. See what works in the moment, see what your culture needs for the change at the moment, see if you need some outside help, or if you just have the folks in the space who can support that learning, all of it is important.

Tim Cynova:

I just shared a couple of links, including the piece that Tiffany... started with Courtney. And a piece that is based off of a list that Tiffany compiled years ago that one of our colleagues Nicola published and then another one of our colleagues, Nina, updated. It's called Resources for white people to learn and talk about race and racism. And we just looked at our blog numbers at Fractured Atlas, and it is the most read piece by tens of thousands of reads that we ever published. I think it's nearing 100,000 views and then maybe the next post is like 30,000. So those are two pieces that are there. What isn't the work?

Courtney Harge:

White feelings? Yeah, it isn't. That isn't the word at all. It really is... the work is decidedly not about making white people feel better about themselves. I have love for many people but I really do not care if you feel better about us going to the joyful revolutionary space. As much as I love wanting to change hearts and minds, I actually want people to just functionally be better. I actually don't care if you like being better, right. And I know that's not how everybody approaches it, but I don't need you to believe that I should be treated well, I would like that. I actually just need you to treat me well, right?

And then how you feel about it, you can take that home. That's your work to do. And so I think people get confused in talking about the work in quotes because they think the work is I need to believe and feel and trust that you, whoever you are, marginalized in any way deserve this treatment. And I'm like, "No, it's actually not up for you to arbitrate, you just need to do it. Just frankly, be better, and then you can figure out if you feel good about it." But yeah, managing my feelings is decidedly not the work.

Ansa Edim:

I want to plus one that 100% this is Ansa speaking. So the [inaudible 00:16:55] is that not just the feeling good about it, but managing white guilt was a huge stressor for me personally in the last year or so, is there are people who really want to be doing this work and they just feel so bad that we haven't achieved it yet and this is horrible, isn't it? And it's just a huge downer. And I as a black woman, I'm already experiencing this, having to ask someone to have empathy for you in your lived experience is hard enough, and then having to manage that person feeling guilty for not having already given it to you, it's just complicated. It over-complicates things. I 100% agree with you, Courtney and that just do it.

Let's just get there and just do it. I don't want to hold people feelings. And what I find really about the conversation about caucuses is just that we did some hours, dozens of hours of trainings at change.org and there were some questions around caucusing where we split up into caucuses and the group of us who were in the black caucus were like, "This isn't for us. We don't need to be here. We already know what we're here to do." And we had this strong feeling.

And so on one hand, we were pretty grateful for our break from really challenging conversations, and on the other hand, when we came back and talked to the group, I find myself being really grateful that there was a space where I didn't have to be the living example of why they needed to be in this training. So those people who needed that could go and talk amongst themselves. And I appreciated not having to do that work because doing diversity trainings and I'm putting some quotes diversity trainings at the huge broad spectrum of types of training and being a black person in a mixed group having people ask hard questions that aren't very easy for me to hear, or asking for me to give an example of a time someone was racist against me.

It's just very traumatic and it's difficult for me as a black person. And so I think that's where caucuses really made a huge difference, it is not putting the pressure on black and brown folks to have to hold for other people's feelings in those cases.

Tiffany Wilhelm:

Yeah. And knowing that those can have places and spaces. Tim, I'm sure [inaudible 00:19:26] is listening too much.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, the classic. Oh, crap, I'm supposed to be asking some questions.

Tiffany Wilhelm:

But it was sort of about what is not the work, right? And I think that's sort of the tricky space if I think about actually the work that does happen in white caucuses is just trying to hold all of that, letting it be a little bit of a process based, but not letting it get stuck there either because that can be just ridiculous and hard and not moving. Giving us tools to move through all of that is a lot of, I think the work of white caucus spaces. And the other thing I think about that's not the work either or it's only part of the work. It's not, not the work, but it's so much more embodied than we often realize we [inaudible 00:20:18] way out of any of this. And so any of the work happening in whatever space it is just has to go so far beyond that intellectualizing part of it because we will never get anywhere if that's where we stop really.

Tim Cynova:

Speaking of intellectualizing, Nina Berman who we've mentioned a couple of times already in the session asked the question how do you think about how much of your intellect time, energy emotions, should go into anti-racist work at your job versus in other aspects of your life?

Courtney Harge:

Ooh, I love this question. And I have my opinion is frankly, as much or as little as you want and/or need. And I'm going to rephrase that for POC and/or other marginalized people. White people, as much as you can spare and then a little extra. And yes, there are ways in which this binary around kind of white people and other is I don't like the language, I think there are ways in which as much as I enjoy BiPOC as an acronym, it does still center whiteness.

However, the history that we are trying to engage was perpetrated and created and connected to whiteness and so this is a moment where I'm not defining people as white centered and not white, it is more like this is a group of people who named themselves this to create harm. And then this is a group of people, the people of the global majority who were harmed by that behavior. And so in this case, I'm using white and BiPOC, again, not as wholly identifiers, but as saying these are people who harmed and named themselves to harm and these are the people who are recipients of that harm.

And so for BiPOC folks, it really is about what are your choices? What do you want to give? But you are in control of how much you give to an organization. And so if you show up and you clock in and you clock out and you're just here so you don't get fined, that is fine. You can go live your life however you want to do because survival and thriving while surviving to me are the best ways or one of the best ways to interrupt a system that is built to destroy us or make us hate ourselves.

And so if you can do what you can do while spreading joy and liking yourself, then do that. For white people, it is frankly, your primary responsibility to interrupt and break these systems that were built to serve and protect you. So how much intellect, time, energy? As much as you can give and then just a little bit more because to Tiffany's point, you all are in fact, the ones who are behind. You are the ones who have to catch up. And way too often, white people turn to their nearest person of color and say, "How do you help me catch up?" And the answer is I don't, you have to catch up on your own. You have to find community.

I promise you a bunch of people of color have already done the reading, have written a book for you, have engaged in a course for you. You have to go find that, it is not my responsibility to help you catch up. And I still want to be in community. I realized I promise you, I'm happy to support you catching up, but it is not my job. It is not my responsibility. And you are still responsible for catching up even without the assistance of your nearest black friend, I promise. So those are my answers BiPOC folks, give as little as you can spare white folks, give everything and a little bit more.

Ansa Edim:

And I can jump into Tiffany, I don't want to stump you if you have something to say. Okay. I agree with that. Of course, surprise, surprise. I was introduced to the Nap Ministry on Instagram last year and I've really stuck by the principle of rest as resistance. And I will nap in the middle of the day if I'm stressing about racism. I will just walk away.

And to the point I made earlier about last year black folks that change really struggling with the responsibility, the feeling of the responsibility to make sure that the company was fighting racism, and to Courtney's point, it's not our job, but you still feel this responsibility because if it's not our job, who's job is it. And if we don't do anything, then nothing happens and there's just constant pressure.

I started, I decided to me this question that at work, because it is a part of my job, I am paid to do this work. I am a staff representative at the executive level. It's the first, a new role, a change. I'm on the C-team, I'm in the C-suite and I represent staff at that level. And I'm the first black woman at change.org to be at that level. And it's comes with a lot of responsibility and pressure to be at that level and so I've decided to put my energy and intellect into it at work because I feel a responsibility, but in my personal life, I was very quick to just say, "Oh, nope, not going to deal with that, that's racist. Walking away from that.”

I'm not going to tell you it's racist. I'm not going to educate you about why it's racist. I'm just going to release myself from that. And I had this epiphany that something has to give in my anti-racism work and that it had to be dealing with anti-racism in my personal life, because at work, I am making an impact that I really value. I love the work that I do, I love my colleagues of all backgrounds, but in my personal life, the world is huge and I am one person and I don't owe it to every racist or sometimes racist or maybe racist to educate them and put my energy and intellect and time and emotion into making sure they see me as someone who's deserving of existing and thriving.

So yeah. And other aspects of my life, I put very little energy starting very recently into anti-racist work because that's not my job. And I released myself of having to educate other people.

Tiffany Wilhelm:

Full support and yeah, Courtney, just so you said, white folks, give as much as you can at your job and in other aspects of your life. And I just think about too, also have some discernment about yourself. We all deserve to have liberated cultures and all deserve to have our full humanity. So if you're at somewhere potentially like base camp that we heard about in the opening session, you might all want to leave. There might not be... Also like Carmen Morgan, who some of us know who's with [inaudible 00:27:45] just says, "Work with the willing and work with the folks that are wanting to do the change." And there might be some culture, some organizations tell it is so entrenched that no amount of how much you give is going to change it, so think about that.

And then I think too about especially now that I'm in a small foundation, but in philanthropy, how much power is there. And so how much influence, sort of anti-racist principles, moving into a space that holds so much power and so much complexity. And holding that too, holding the weight of knowing where real influence is going to make just ripple effects happen. So all of that, and then to your point, Tim and I especially think for white folks, I hope you're not in any spaces just feeling like this is professional development work, feeling like this is just happening at your job. This takes us all and especially white folks to transform completely and so do get involved in it.

I mean, it's everything else in my life that has not been outside of my jobs that has informed how I'm showing up. I've got involved in showing up for racial justice really early in my journey, all of that sort of just activism work happening in the community and that's what makes it possible to show up in all the ways so I hope I encourage everyone to do that too.

Tim Cynova:

Ansa, when you said, "Nope, I'm not going to do that," when we have this thing that Courtney held create called the negative interactions document protocol, that helps our program staff at Fractured Atlas and we published it so everyone can see if you're being racist and oppressive, someone has the full backing of the organization to just hang up the phone on you or not respond to your email. Courtney, do you want to give a bit of sketch into this? And I included the link in the chat so people can actually download and use it if you want.

Courtney Harge:

Certainly. For me it came as a response to staff, particularly POC staff, a feeling like they could not exit conversations where people were misbehaving. And it wasn't because of directive in higher ups, it was in essence just kind of generally understood that the customer is always right. And if a member or a Fractured Atlas kind of patron is calling and misbehaving, it is the program associate's or it's the staff member's job to kind of sit through it and reconcile and get them to kind of a better space which is a generic general understanding around what "customer service" is supposed to be.

And we were having more and more of those, particularly as Fractured Atlas as an org became more vocal about being an anti-racist org. People were calling and just saying just rude things unnecessarily and the staff. And I was like, "Why are you still talking to this person? Why are you taking on the responsibility?" Actually to what Ansa was saying, you are holding this responsibility for maintaining this relationship with the person who is in fact, and this working relationship with a person who is in fact, not doing anything to maintain a good working relationship with you. And you don't have to take that. That should not be the case.

And so in talking to people, the concern really was, well, what happens when we hang up on somebody? What happens if I just want to exit? Or is it my responsibility to kind of mediate and pivot them to a better space? How much of this, if it's abuse, how much do I have to take? When is the line? And so we created the document. Really, it was like these are all the ways you could respond. No one response is better because sometimes you're in for the fight, right? Sometimes you're like, "Oh, okay, you want to say this, I'm going to interrupt, we're going to do this." And sometimes you just can't, Ansa, again to your point. Around sometimes you're like, "You know what, you're doing a racism and I just will not.”

So what are the processes and what are the processes that don't just transfer this negative interaction to somebody who has equal power in the organization? So one of the things that I was just really proud of was like you can hang up, you don't have to ask permission, you don't have to go to a higher... Whatever line. If it was too much for you, it's too much and you hang up, right. And all you had to do to tell everybody was say... We had a hashtag, it was bad call. You could put it on Slack and say, "Bad call," and this phone number. And so that way, when it came back, if somebody decided to call back, everybody knew not to hang up or particularly those at the lowest not to hang up, sorry, not to pick up.

Anybody the lowest level of the organization was like, "Nope, we're going to let that ring." You're not going to get to yell at somebody and then try to go to somebody else and be like, "This person was rude to me." It's like, "Nope." They've already flagged that you misbehaved, and this is what's up. And then it was up to somebody with more institutional power to respond and address that person. They would call back or they would email them and say, "First, this is how you mistreated our staff, so before we resolve whatever you need resolved, I need you to know that that's not how you treat the people who work here, and once you agree to that, then we can talk about your issue.”

But it really became a series of steps that allowed people to feel empowered, to disconnect and know that they weren't going to be undermined later in the process by being like, "I know that the staff member was unreasonable, but I really care about you," and the way that I've seen other organizations do where they kind of say, "Well, that person just like... the staff member misbehaved, but we know you are right," just to maintain that relationship. It's like, "No, if you're going to work with us, you have to respect that we are people that we deserve that type of energy," and that's where the document came from.

Ansa Edim:

Really love that. I love that. I was just smiling the whole time you were speaking just thinking about all the times where I wish that I had that protocol somewhere I've worked. I've worked in teller research in college and a number of people are mean. I mean, we all know it was anonymity with phone calls or the internet, or if I could've just been like, click, "I'm just going to hang up here. Don't have time for you, nobody pick up the phone," I love that as kind of conditioning for other people as well, which is something that I had to learn in my own anti-racism journey.

My family is Nigerian. They came here in the '80s. I was born here in the US and I learned about my own blackness in a different way as a first-generation American. And Dean [inaudible 00:35:03], he talks about, or he talked about when kids are... And this is his quote so I'm going to put it in air quotes, "But when kids are playing Cowboys and Indians and that they're rooting for the cowboy, they love John Wayne, that's super great. Everyone wants to be John Wayne until you grow up to realize there's a minute when you were about six years old and you realize that you are the Indian in the called Cowboys and Indians games, you're not John Wayne. That there's a select few that are John Wayne.”

And I had that realization sort of around that age and later and it was only until the last several years of my life that I had this kind of awakening that I could just talk back to people and just say, "No, that's not nice. That's not right. That's not how you talk to people," or, "Hey, that's racist." And I had this awakening, you could tell people they're being racist. And so I really love bringing that into the workplace because it's difficult and it's a huge burden on HR systems for black, brown or indigenous staff to have to go to HR and make such a report which I have had to do several times in my life, make a report, "This person was racist to me." They do an investigation. The investigation comes out this way.

It's all very clinical and I would love to take some lessons from this to my current workplace to just say, "Hey, I think this is something that we can start to implement," just empower people to shut stuff down. I love it.

Courtney Harge:

So basically like this imbalance works and I know we're short on time, but I'll be quick, is that there's an assumption that responding negatively to negative behavior is the first, in essence, the first shot fired in this conflict. This person said something terrible to me and if I respond in kind, I'm the problem. And it's like, no, violence has already occurred. The violence has happened. Somebody has said a violent thing, has an acted something that is an attempt to limit and undermine my own humanity, right? How I respond to them is a reaction, is not the inciting incident.

And so to what you're saying, one of the ways in which part of my comfort around interrupting that is one, recognizing this violence has occurred and I am responding. Two, I am not responsible for how you feel about me. I am responsible for interrupting what is happening and for not just letting you harm me, right? So I'd much rather if you think I'm angry black woman or whatever, that means okay, that's on you. But this person said something real foul to me, and I'm going to respond in a way that names this is what just happened. And that is not a violent act. It's not even about meeting violence with violence, but it is naming violence is not the same as enacting violence.

Ansa Edim:

Just unmuting. So you can hear my snaps.

Courtney Harge:

Yes, I appreciate it.

Tiffany Wilhelm:

I love that. And I'm excited to for funders to the point where they say, "Hey, we see anti-blackness happening, we see people getting harmed. We're not going to fund you anymore." It really could be kind of that simple too.

Courtney Harge:

It could. It could be so easy.

Tim Cynova:

So we have about five minutes left in our conversation today, if there's other questions that you have, please put them in either the chat or the Q&A. I've been taking a look at them. Maybe let's take a look at the question. I was scrolling up, I saw Sarah posted, "I want to learn how to encourage our workplace to turn apathy and concern into action." And maybe a related question that I often hear is like what if I work for an organization and they're not going to do anything about it?

What if they're, like we heard in the first session, maybe they put a black square on Instagram and they're like, "All right, well, so what are we going to do?" And what if you work in that organization that's not showing that actually, they're truly committed to the work. What should you do? What can you do?

Ansa Edim:

I don't remember if it was Tiffany or Courtney who said this earlier, so forgive me, but I believe we were talking about kind of the power of your own labor, really at the end of the day. And it is a privilege to be employed. It's a privilege to be able to leave a job and I totally understand that. But similarly to what Tiffany just said about funders being able to say, "I hear it but you're not committed to anti-racism, so we're not going to fund you." I am a serious believer in people doing that with their labor, their dollars, with whatever power you have to take away from an organization that isn't committing to helping us build an anti-racist world to say, "Oh, well, this isn't the place for me then.”

And they'll start to see recruiting staffer and turnaround and all of that. And we as workers have an enormous power to make demands. And we saw that change, like I said earlier, with black staff stepping up and saying, "You're not doing enough. We see that you're doing something, and we see that our mission is connected to anti-oppression and we're seeing that. We just believe it could be done more better in bigger ways.

And we made demands. We straight up made demands and it worked. And so if more workers can do that and just band together as a staff who want to see your organization succeed, you believe in your mission, you believe in the organization and you really want to be there and you want to help say so. And eventually these organizations will get the pictures that they need to either step it up or large flocks of staff.

Courtney Harge:

Audience is a gift to any place you chose to give it and they are giving you dollars in exchange which is not more valuable than your brilliance and talent. And even if they are paying you what you feel you are worth or what you deserve, you are still giving them more than they are giving you. I recognize capitalism has taught us that capital and dollars are the most important than that is not true. That capital is a necessary resource to survive capitalism, but it is not a determinant on who you are. And so whatever gift you are giving to any org which your talent, your attention, your time take to a place that recognizes that they are still making out better than you are in the deal, frankly.

I always like to say pull a LeBron, take your talents to South Beach. Go way where you can be appreciated and where people are willing to work with you. Because if they're expecting you to come in and do the work for them, one, it'll fall apart. Two, like I said earlier, you will fail before the systems fail. And three, the second you do go, it will not be sustained. And so you have an essence out on a treadmill that nobody's going to see, and not create a better world. It's not just about being seen doing the work, it's about can we make impact. And the people and orgs and institutions who are not willing to grow and adapt and change deserve to collapse, do not save them.

Somebody, they have boards, they have CEOs, they have staff who are paid and compensated and supported and keeping the organization going. And if people are not making choices to do that where they are losing staff, let it go, let it fail and build something new in its place. Give those resources to other people fully. And I realize I feel like I'm coming from a very kind of nihilistic place, but this is out of love. This is about building a joyful space. And if other spaces do not want to be at the joy of liberation with me, then they can go, they can be elsewhere. They can hate from outside of the club because we will be in a joyful, loving, chosen community.

Tim Cynova:

And with that, the clock has hit 45. Cut. So amazing to be with the three of you today and our great participants who have been lively in the chat. Ansa, Courtney, Tiffany, truly thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your insight and your time with us today. Thank you for being at the summit.

Ansa Edim:

Thank you so much for having us.

Tiffany Wilhelm:

Yeah, it was so great. Thank you. Thank you all.

Ansa Edim:

Thank you everyone for attending.

Courtney Harge:

For sure. Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

Thank you so much, everyone. Truly amazing. Take care.

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.

Until next time, thanks for listening.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Tim Cynova 10/9/21 Tim Cynova 10/9/21

Inclusive Hiring Practices (EP.45)

Three members of the Toronto-based company Generator discuss their approach to inclusive hiring practices as recently demonstrated during their call for new organizational leadership.

Last Updated

October 9, 2021

Three members of the Toronto-based company Generator discuss their approach to inclusive hiring practices as recently demonstrated during their call for new organizational leadership.

While the search has concluded with their recent appointment, you can still check out the archived position posting here. Two consultants mentioned during the episode: Zainab Amadahy and Angela Sun.

Guests: Sedina Fiati, Kristina Lemieux & ted witzel

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guests

SEDINA FIATI is a Toronto based performer, producer, director, creator and activist for stage and screen. Proudly Black and queer, Sedina is deeply invested in artistic work that explores the intersection between art and activism, either in form or structure or ideally both. Sedina is currently Artist-Activist in Residence at Nightwood Theatre and proud founding member of the Black Pledge Collective. Sedina was the co-chair of ACTRA Toronto’s Diversity Committee and 2nd VP of council for Canadian Actors’ Equity Association. Sedina has worked with Generator since 2018, focusing on providing mentorship, program development and coordination for the Artist Producer Training Program. Upcoming projects: Switching Queen(s) (devised street performance), Last Dance (a web series).

KRISTINA LEMIEUX (she/her) is an accomplished arts manager with more than 20 years of professional experience. She is also a contemporary dancer. Raised in Treaty 6 territory (rural Alberta), Kristina lived in Edmonton, attending the University of Alberta, for 10 years before heading to Vancouver where her passion for the arts has driven collaboration, creation, and innovation in the Vancouver arts scene for over a decade. After working with Generator in a freelance capacity for several years, Kristina made the move to Toronto in January 2017 to take on the role of Lead Producer of Generator. Kristina has worked with many of Vancouver's leading art organizations: Brief Encounters, Arts Umbrella, New Works, Out On Screen (Queer Film Festival), Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration, PTC Playwrights Theatre Centre, Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists/West Chapter (CADA/West), Tara Cheyenne Performance, Made in BC - Dance on Tour, Theatre Replacement, Progress Lab 1422, The Post at 750 (110 Arts Cooperative), Vancouver International Dance Festival (VIDF), Up in the Air Theatre (rEvolver Festival), Music on Main, and Vancouver Art Gallery. She co-founded Polymer Dance, a group dedicated to bringing dance experiences to non-professional dancers. Kristina remains tied to Vancouver through her project Scaffold, a coaching and skill development service designed to support performing artists and groups. She is the co-founder and Creative Producer of F-O-R-M (Festival of Recorded Movement) and works frequently with the Dancers of Damelahamid and Coastal Dance Festival. Kristina is passionate about generating dialogue in the arts and, to this end, earned a certificate in Dialogue and Civic Engagement from Simon Fraser University. In all that she does she works to support independent artists across performing disciplines in finding ways to make art outside of the currently prescribed modes.

TED WITZEL (he/him) is a queer theatre-maker and arts leader based in toronto / tkaròn:to. primarily a director, ted is also variously a dramaturg, curator, teacher, writer, translator, designer, and performer. he has worked in theatres in vancouver, montreal, stratford, ottawa, london, berlin, milan, palermo, stuttgart, ingolstadt, baden-baden and bad hersfeld. ted is currently the artistic associate for the stratford festival lab, overseeing the company’s research and development programs. these include a broad portfolio of new works in development, systems-change initiatives, creative residencies, and a collection of artistic explorations and programs that aim to help imagine the future orientation of the company. in 2018, he was selected as an artistic leadership resident at the national theatre school, and was a member of the banff centre’s 2019 cultural leadership cohort. ted was in the inaugural cohort of the york university/canadian stage MFA in directing, and has been artist-in-residence at harbourfront centre, buddies in bad times (toronto) and institut für alles mögliche (berlin). ted also runs an independent theatre collective called the red light district and is the board chair at generator performance. recent directing credits include: susanna fournier’s what happens to you happens to me (canadian stage), elizabeth rex (theatre@york), the scavenger’s daughter (buddies/paradigm) and LULU v.7 // aspects of a femme fatale (buddies/red light district).

Co-Hosts

LAUREN RUFFIN (she/her) is a thinker, designer, & leader interested in building strong, sustainable, anti-racist systems & organizations. She's into exploring how we can leverage new technologies to combat racial and economic injustice. As part of this work, she frequently participates in conversations on circular economies, social impact financing, solidarity movements, and innovative, non-extractive financing mechanisms. Lauren is a co-founder of CRUX, an immersive storytelling cooperative that collaborates with Black artists as they create content in virtual reality and augmented reality (XR). Lauren is currently the interim Chief Marketing Officer of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), where she focuses on amplifying the stories and activism of the YBCA community. Prior to joining YBCA, Lauren was co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, the largest association of independent artists in the United States. In 2017, she started Artist Campaign School, a new educational program that has trained 74 artists to run for political office to date. She has served on the governing board of Black Girls Code and Main Street Phoenix Cooperative, and on the advisory boards of ArtUp and Black Girl Ventures. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck, a podcast about, well, back a few months ago, my colleague Kate Stadel and I were chatting about alternative hiring practices. I forwarded her information about Greyston Bakery's Open Hiring Institute. And in return, she emailed me a link to a job posting that blew me away. The posting was like none I'd ever seen before. It included a multitude of options for people to learn more about the position and the organization, including an audio version of the application packet and various treatments of the text for different learning modalities and screen readers. It included office hours for interested candidates to speak with members of the hiring committee, a timeline that detailed each stage of the search, and even a section at the close that credited those on the team who created the post. I found that post to be truly inspiring and such a breath of fresh air.

Tim Cynova:

Many workplaces these days are looking for candidates who bring diverse experiences to be part of what they hope are inclusive, equitable anti-racist and anti-oppressive processes and teams. Yet most organizations post and conduct searches as if it were still 1994. Over the intervening months, I forwarded that posting to countless people as an inspirational example of what a posting and search can and should be. And in turn those people forwarded the postings to even more people. The most frequent question people have asked in return is, "I wonder how the search went." Well, on today's episode, we get to find out. I'm joined by three members of the Toronto based organization Generator. Kristina Lemieux, Sedina Fiati and ted witzel.

Tim Cynova:

You can find the organization online at generatorto.com. In May, 2021. The search committee posted that description as a call seeking new leadership for the organization. And like many of you, I can't wait to hear how it all went. Then later in the episode, we'll chat with podcasting's favorite co-host Lauren Ruffin to get her take on the topic, but first Kristina, Sedina and Ted, welcome to the podcast.

Kristina Lemieux:

Thanks so much for having us. I'm Kristina Lemieux, she, her. I'm the current lead producer of Generator, although I'm on my way out, which is what has led to this job posting being circulated. I have a 20 year career that has spanned coast to coast of so-called Canada, working primarily in the performing arts, dance, theater, opera, and those sorts of things.

Tim Cynova:

Well, to ground in the conversation, Sedina and Ted, how do you introduce yourselves and the various work that you do?

Sedina Fiati:

Hi, my name is Sedina, I am the outgoing artist producer training program facilitator at Generator. I'm also a member of the strategic advisor committee and I was on the hiring committee for this job posting. Otherwise have over 20 years experience as a performer, producer, creator director, activist, facilitator in theater and in film. And my career has mainly been based in Toronto. It's been a real pleasure to be on this particular journey through Generator for the last three years and where we've gone and where we started. So, yeah, I'm excited to talk about this job posting and how it really sprung out of our organizational culture. Yeah. Over to you, Ted.

ted witzel:

Hi, I'm ted witzel, I pronouns are he, him. I am the board chair at Generator, and I guess I kind of chaired the hiring committee, but that more felt like just wrangling the hiring committee or holding the meetings. It was a fairly democratic process and thankfully we didn't disagree a whole lot. I don't really feel like I chaired it. I am an artist I'm primarily a theater director and performance maker. I am also sometimes a writer, a video designer, producer, the many hats of making very strange performance. And my grown-up job at the moment is that I'm the artistic associate for R&D and the director of the laboratory at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.

Tim Cynova:

For those who might be unfamiliar with Generator and its work. Can you give us an overview?

Kristina Lemieux:

Yeah. So Generator is a mentoring teaching and innovation incubator that works with performing artists and into any sector to increase their skills and competencies around producing their own work. So what that looks like for those of you who are listening from outside of Canada is that our sector is primarily funded through public grants given to us by the federal provincial and municipal levels. So a lot of our work is helping artists understand how to receive funding from those institutions, what to do when that money comes into your bank account and how to manage that as well as how do you make a show happen from idea through to sharing with an audience and beyond. Yet, we run a variety of programs all around that aim. But the other thing that's really important to understand about what we do is we work with a very small number of people each year, because we're building years long mentoring relationships with folks working towards helping them achieve what they'd like to get out of their career or what kind of life they'd like to have alongside their artistic practices.

Tim Cynova:

As I mentioned in the opening colleague, Kate Stadel forwarded your posting a couple of months back when we were talking about different hiring approaches, alternative hiring practices. And I had shared the Open Hiring Institute at Greyston Bakery that famously hires anyone who applies for a job. And then the next thing to send your job posting, your position posting for the leadership search. Can you walk us through what the search was for and how you all approached it?

ted witzel:

The search was for near leadership and someone with the vision to rethink our model. So in Kristina, when she decided to leave her current position, gave us a very long runway, but transition work has been underway since last summer. So we've had about a year to plan for the transition, which has made this a lot easier. And Kristina has been very active in that process, which has been very helpful. And inside those conversations that we were having after Kristina decided to move on from the role, we asked ourselves initially as a board and in conversation with the Generator staff, "What did we want generator to be moving forward?" Generator itself evolved out of at prior organization, the small theater administrative facility. And that main transition was in moving from being producers for hire to training artists, to produce their own work and take the means of production into their own hands.

ted witzel:

And then Kristina came into finalize and build that new iteration of that has been called Generator. And in rethinking or in thinking about our future, we were very open to another phase of evolution. And I think as a board, we err on the side of risk prone or had they been risk averse. So we really wanted the conversation around this transition to be wide open. And we did a bit of a value setting together with Kristina and the Generator team and felt that we were committed to who we currently serve, which is independent artists, generally working without organizational, like year over year funding, working off of project grants and on a project by project basis. And with small teams, we knew that that is the sector of our community, that we still want it to be supporting, but we were really open to a transformation in how that looked.

ted witzel:

Also last year in response to some calls for accountability, we conducted an equity injustice organizational review, which was led by Zainab Amadahy who offered up a report with some findings from interviews from our various community members, alum of our programs, staff and board members that she had spoken to.

ted witzel:

And so we wanted to integrate a lot of that feedback there. And in spite of the relatively small scale of the organization, we're working with an annual budget of about 150,000 Canadian a year and a staff that is one full-time and three part-time. There was a real desire for decentralizing the leadership structure or looking at collaborative models and having community involvement in the search. It wasn't just Kristina who was deciding to transition out of her role. We also had several staff Sedina included, feeling like it was time to take their next steps as well. So it left the landscape pretty wide open for us to invite proposals for what Generator could be and how it could be staffed and organized and structured and how it could meet the needs of those communities. Sedina, do you want to jump in and fill in any blanks?

Sedina Fiati:

I think it's important to say that the job posting grew out of the overall culture of Generator, which is a space where we're really questioning and trying to re-imagine the live performance sector. We're all activists who work at Generator, just like blatantly. We have very blatant and cone of silence, types of conversations about what we want to change in the sector. And a big part of that is definitely about accessibility. So anything that we do is going to have that lens of how can we do better to make sure that when we are recruiting, which we do a lot actually, a lot of the work that I've done too, in my role as artist producer training facilitator was just like, we had a very wide recruitment process to try to find the six people who would be a part of that cohort that we would support for the year.

Sedina Fiati:

And then also support throughout. Even though they finished the ABT program, we still kept supporting them, with an eye on equity. So really looking at trying to attract people from equity seeking groups, it's really important that when we put stuff out there that we're trying to model the kind of culture that we're trying to create. So I would love it if it just like this came out of nowhere, but clearly it did not like it really does reflect how we work and the ways that we're trying to think. And also just trying to even put forth to the industry, what is possible as you said, why do we keep recruiting like it's 1994? We have other options and we know what those are, so let's keep doing them. And let's not even just talk about doing them. Let's give examples, let us be the change.

ted witzel:

I think Kristina has been really great about establishing that anything the organization does needs to be a learning opportunity for the whole sector while we are working very one to one with the mentees and then Kristina put a lot of energy into maintaining those relationships. The next circle of our teaching is by trying to develop wise practices that are public domain are able to be borrowed, emulated, plagiarized outright by the community to know that this posting has been forwarded and forwarded by those who received those four words is exactly what we want. We want anything we do, if it is useful or relevant or applicable to another corner of the sector, steal it, please.

Kristina Lemieux:

We do work with a small number of people, but to that end, we have a resource called artistproducerresource.com, which is a wiki of all of our information that we have and teach in our programs around how to make all kinds of things happen. And in this year in the pandemic, we have over a fairly active blog where as much as our capacity allows, we've been writing about board governance and the various pieces that we're working on, we have a great intention. I just want to promise that we are going to write a blog post about this process. And talk to some of the people who are not on this call right now and ask them to contribute. So yeah, always looking at ways to lay bare what we're thinking.

Kristina Lemieux:

And we're also a very unusual organization inside the arts because we don't produce work and we are tired. So it also allows us to be an instigator of new ideas that allows us to push a boundary that other people have different consequences for pushing. So I feel in that an obligation to also say the things that everybody's whispering about in the corners that nobody feels like they can say out loud, and this call is part of that. And all part of that.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. That's what I find so amazing. That we're speaking specifically about the posting is still alive. You might've filled the position. We may or may not find out later in this call, but as a resource, Ted, as you said to borrow plagiarize, whatever Sed, as you're talking, I was thinking about organizations who see this posting or see your work. And it doesn't align with theirs. And like, "Let's just copy and paste this and put it out." How might that manifest itself differently when it's not aligned with someone's values, but it's like wishful thinking?

Sedina Fiati:

A wish can be a thing. Dare I say this. And I will admit to really being a person who is about self-help and about woo. But like as I look at my crystals on my window, so. I'm that kind of person. But I will say this, even if they copied and pasted some aspects of this and this didn't align with our organizational culture. And then they ended up hiring somebody who did align more with the job posting than the organizational culture, then they would have a conflict wouldn't they? And it would either turn out well, or wouldn't by attracting folks who align with what you want to be. Maybe that's just one step closer to getting there. But oftentimes what we have seen the flip side of that, with everything that's happening in the world and this real focus on hiring people from equity seeking groups as in leadership positions, my question is always, are they going to stay if your organizational culture hasn't shifted?

Sedina Fiati:

But if people are really open to it, I think they have an opportunity to shift the culture. So there's nothing to be lost. There's nothing to be lost because if you even just make a small shift in that way, you will feel what will happen when you attract candidates who maybe are more in line with where at least some people in the organization wanted to go.

ted witzel:

Being inside of institutions that are both scrappy and small, like this one, and also very large institutions. I'm a big advocate for large institutions taking brave steps that they may not be ready for yet because they will hurry up and get ready in the best case. Of course, like I said, as alluding to there are risks involved in that. And I haven't really thought through what would happen if a large institution whose values were disaligned with this ended up with a candidate who felt like a posting like this over promised a workplace culture that was not somewhere where they could thrive. I would hope that along the way` in the interview process, thinking about an interview process as a reciprocal relationship, you are both discovering whether this is a place you can work and whether this place wants you in there. I would hope that, that would act as a sort of filter, but I don't necessarily have a rigorous safety net that I can put out there.

Tim Cynova:

Well, let's talk about the process. How do you all feel that it went?

Kristina Lemieux:

I could see that. I mean, I just think it's just a very difficult question to answer. I wouldn't say I found issues that we didn't get what we expected. In that we thought we would get team applications coming forward, who were looking at taking on the wide variety of the things that were in there. And instead we got everyone interested in being a part of a team, but no one coming forward with a team in place. We had to shift and reconsider what our interviewing process is going to be like once we saw the applications were, because the plan we had envisioned wasn't going to work anymore because there wasn't a team to test or a vision to test. There was a piece of what the final team would look like coming forward.

Tim Cynova:

Can we dig into that a little bit more? Because you all mentioned the wide open search, we'll share the link to the post in the description for the podcast. So people can read this, you said in the post, really anything, any model that people coming together, people want to be a part of it. So I'm really curious to, you mentioned you had to change how you were going to approach this. If someone said, "Yeah, I have a three person leadership team coming in." What was that going to look like? How are you going to take that through the process? And then what did you need to retool about it?

ted witzel:

I mean, we had mapped out a pathway, which would be phase one of the interview process was going to be just checking in with values and alignment and skillsets and making sure that the people we were considering were people we really felt could do the job in a way that would be exciting and surprising to us. And then phase two of that process was going to be offering us up a business model, which we were going to pay them for their time to develop that Generator's consulting rate. And as we realized that we had a lot of someone offered up the metaphor of like, "I would like to be an avenger, but I don't know how to build the whole avengers." As we got a lot of single avengers looking for their super hero squad.

ted witzel:

We realized that the idea of asking for a full business plan didn't make sense because these people didn't have their collaborators chosen. And I was really surprised because the way I collaborate tends to be so relational and it requires a lot of trust on the front end for me. I was surprised to have so many people who were interested in being matched made, and that kind of threw me for a loop. And I think through many of us for a loop or it exposed that the assumption in the hiring pathway we had designed was based around that, which just comes from my own bias and how I conduct my own relationships. And I think I wasn't the sole author of this thing, but that I was part of building that pathway. And I think that bias manifested inside of that pathway.

ted witzel:

And so our pivot was to ask for the people who had applied to offer us a program design and to think about how to administer that program. So we were really getting them to dig deep in a specific creative impulse or intervention into the community that they wanted to make and present us with that as a way of manifesting their values, allowing us to see what their program design skills were, allowing us some insight in how they were thinking of staffing structure and from there to tease out what their leadership would look like and how it would be oriented within the communities that we try to serve.

Sedina Fiati:

Dare I say, maybe the sector wasn't quite ready for this. I think everybody was ready to talk about it.

ted witzel:

You dare.

Sedina Fiati:

I dare. And I will say it, I think everyone's ready.

ted witzel:

You dare.

Sedina Fiati:

Okay. So qualify that a little bit, everybody was ready to talk about these kinds of models and to put forth that this would be a good way to do it. And then we said, "Okay, do it." And everyone's kind of like, "Oh, I actually don't know how quite yet." So yeah, Ted, I completely agree with you. It really just tested our assumption that there was maybe one, two, three people, two or three people who are out there who wanted to get together as a team and say, "We have an idea of where Generator wants to go." And I don't think that that group of people existed or if they did, they decided not to apply.

Sedina Fiati:

I do feel like, and I'll say something controversial. And this is a hard thing to say as somebody who works as a known equity consultant. Change is longer than we think it is. And oftentimes people are like, "That magical person is out there." And they are. But they may not be out there right away to fill that position. I think there's a real feeling with Generator that we've done a lot of work with the APT program. And it's been around for six years to cultivate a wonderful generation of arts, leaders and our managers. And some of them are out there slaying the game, but I don't know that they were ready quite yet to take on the leadership of Generator as an individual or as a team.

Sedina Fiati:

But I have a lot of hope that they will be, I feel like the next round of Generator leadership will really yield the vision that we have now. I think we were just a little ahead of the game of taking the temperature of the industry right now. People are still thinking singular leadership, even as much as they want it to be a part of the team.

ted witzel:

With all of this, I should qualify it with, we are really excited about the candidate that we found. We were really lucky to be in many ways, our process, as it became responsive, was responding to the conversations that we had in that first round of interviews. And we carried a few candidates forward to the second round of interviews, and we were really trying to create conditions where those first conversations could manifest in a clearer articulation of the first interview and actually make that concrete and the candidate that we landed on, we did not land on a full co-leadership team yet. We landed on someone to begin to build a team around, somebody who wants to lead collaboratively and brought a really compelling vision for some of the program design that generator could offer and who we really feel will be a great mentor to the community that we aspire to continue serving, especially in the way that Generator bridges a couple of performing arts.

ted witzel:

We've had alum come through who are based in music as well as in theater, as well as in dance and lots of interdisciplinary practices that weave around and in between those standard categories. And I think that who we've got is going to be a great mentor to anchor that community there. The reality is with this scale of organization, this is not anyone's endpoint. The leadership of Generator is not like, "Ah, ha I have arrived. This is my whole career fulfilled." We are a scrappy small organization, and we hope that people are building their capacity with us and going on to lead in different arenas afterwards.

ted witzel:

And so it'll be interesting when we do that next search eventually. We hope that this current team stays awhile, but when we do move on to that next search to see that's when as Sedina says, I think we'll really see the impact of Generator's intervention into the sector in terms of the kind of arts leaders that gather around the organization and that are building their skills and capacities and will continue to, and will continue to support the organization in this reciprocal way as they go out and multiply the ideas that are being incubated with us.

Kristina Lemieux:

Look, the salary budget we put in the post is like $96,000. We're 18 months into a global pandemic. And the way that I had structured the staff team at Generator was that I was a full-time employee with three part-time employees who were very specifically hired part-time so that they could have active artists and producing practices outside of their work and along with their work at Generator. So now it's not the time maybe when people are really interested in jobs that pay $25,000 a year, because they have other concerns. And those other side practices are at are continuing to be uncertain about what they're going to look like as we move through the continuing or recovering pandemic, depending on what angle you're looking at it from on what day it is. So I think it was just a lot to ask of imagination for folks after a year and a half of having the rug pulled out. Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

How do you want to support artists, producers when they can't produce anything?

Kristina Lemieux:

Exactly.

Sedina Fiati:

But despite that, we still got such great people coming forward.

Kristina Lemieux:

Of course we did, there's so many great people.

Sedina Fiati:

Yeah. The candidates that did come forward were wonderful and we're really excited to announce the person who will be stepping up. But yeah, it's a tough time in the industry. And I think because of that, it's a time where we all can and have been imagining what it could be, but that's as much energy as most people have now. Is that imagining that ideation space, we've heard from people too because we did major outreach, it was a few people who took on that task to be fair. But there was a very long list of people who we reached out to one-on-one and some folks were just expressing overall exhaustion. They were just like, "I'm tired. And I can't really envision myself in this position at this time." We're combating that. And that's not something that we have control over.

ted witzel:

I also think that as a very activist little organization, we exist in many ways opposition, like we exist in opposition to the status quo of this horrible work-life imbalance of the perpetual burnout of the industry when it's active. And so I questioned whether our invitation was maybe too vast. It had too few parameters on it because opposition is a creative state and resistance is a creative state. And in our call it was like the only limiting factor was that we're a really small organization without much money, but there was not an active sector to say like, oh, this isn't working and this is inequitable and this is the thing that I want to fix and solve right now. There is a vacuum where an industry used to be. And there is a lot of questions about how it's going to materialize. So to design an oppositional vision without an object to oppose is a really hard thought experiment in a time when Tuesday is a thought experiment.

Tim Cynova:

I imagine you received resumes and cover letters. Maybe that's not true. So I guess, did you receive the traditional resumes and cover letters and, or, I mean, what other forms of expression did people or expressions of interest did candidates submit?

Sedina Fiati:

It was wonderful. We definitely got resumes, but we didn't necessarily get cover letters in stead of, or in place of a cover letter. We got video, we got voice memos, we got really a little mini essay because I think that was in direct response of course, to the style of the job posting was that please do respond to this in the way that is right for you and people really to take that to heart and they did that. So yeah, our review of that was like, okay, I'm putting my headphones on now. And listening to someone talk about what it is that they want to bring to Generator. So it was very refreshing. I think having those options, people use to them. And so that for me, what was one of the things that was surprising and wonderful at the same time.

Tim Cynova:

Can you talk through what the final process looked like? Because you detailed it on the website, here's the stages of the process. Can you detail expressions of interest? Did you then a review as a group, did multiple interviews, you mentioned the program development project that you compensated people for. What did the whole process tactically, I guess look like?

ted witzel:

Step one was put an extraordinary amount of labor and consultation into developing the posting. We had laid out the whole process. Step one was developing the posting and then actually pushed our staff capacity right to the edge. It took up a lot of energy and we can get into that a little bit more later because that I'm supposed to just overview the process. But I should emphasize that part took a lot of work. So we developed the posting and then with our strategic advisors and the board and some of our community partners, did a whole lot of outreach trying to get the posting in front of the right people. We extended the call to continue intaking. And we did approach several candidates who we thought would be interesting as well. We did a first round of interviews that was conducted. Oh, and then the review of those first application materials was done formally by the hiring committee, which was made up of board staff and strategic advisors.

ted witzel:

But also the rest of the people who were not on the hiring committee had an opportunity to offer feedback. They were available to be read by the rest of the board and the strategic advisors. We did interviews with the hiring committee and it was after that first round of interviews, which were really the values and competencies interviews that we said to each of the candidates at the end of those interviews. We thought the shape of this was going to look one way. We've got a lot of solo vendors, but no one coming to us with a full team. So we're going to have to reconsider what this next assignment is. And that's when we did the redesign of the second round interview assignment, it was initially going to be the business plan and ended up being the program design project. The candidates who were in that second round were invited to provide any materials they wanted to in advance, or they could do their presentation in a number of formats.

ted witzel:

They could do it just live on Zoom. They could do it prerecorded audio, they could do a prerecorded video. They could give us a slide deck. They could do any combination of those. They could give us a text document. And then after they had given us that plan, however they wanted to outline it. We had a second conversation to interrogate the plan a little bit. We didn't have set interview questions for that round. We had a Google Doc open that we were all in and jamming and questions and I was moderating and throwing those questions to the people who wanted to ask them because they were really meant to respond to the proposals that were being offered to us. And then from there, we went into deliberations and the deliberations did not take very long. That final project was really, really, it ended up being really, really helpful because it gave us a very clear sense of our candidate.

Sedina Fiati:

I just want to add something that we haven't discussed a lot. That is the strategic advisor committee. So as a result of what came out of the report that Zainab did, one of the things that was important was to come up with a strategic advisory committee to help lead Generator to the next step. A group of people, including mostly board members and an advisor, interview people to be on the strategic advisor committee. I am a staff member, but I submitted to be, and I was interviewed by that committee too. And then from the strategic advisor committee, we had a few meetings and from that committee folks said, "Okay, I want to on the hiring committee." And so all of those folks were instrumental in putting together the job posting, but most of which the Generator staff and Annie and Kristina really putting all of that work together.

Sedina Fiati:

But I think that, that pre-step is important. And a lot of places are doing this as we work in arts nonprofits. So having a hiring committee is nothing, that's not an innovative idea, but I think it's important to look at the composition of the hiring committee that those who are on there are oriented to where the organization wants to go. But yeah, that was basically our process. I've been involved this year with about three hiring processes for arts nonprofits. And they've all been pretty similar in that way, where we have a hiring committee put together an initial call, goes out, we respond to that and then surprising things happen. We're always surprised as to what happens after that first interview. And then from there, we're like, "Okay, this is how we want to proceed to the second interview." And then from there, it becomes very clear who should be the person.

Sedina Fiati:

And there ends up being some time. Things are always longer than we think it's going to be. We say, it's going to be a month, it'll probably be two. It might even be three. As we collect all the information and figure it out, Generator's wasn't that long. But I have been in another process that's been taking like about four or five months to do. That's just not unusual, but it's right. It's right to take the time to find the right person and to do things by committee, to do things as a group, it just takes longer to do.

ted witzel:

What Sedina is gesturing towards is that this is part of a longer process of organizational evolution. I don't know if it's necessarily a full-on transformation the way the move from small theater admin facility to generator was, but it's certainly a moment of evolution for the organization. So if I had to rip it out into three steps of that process, the first was to gather the strategic advisors. And that was really because the conversations that Kristina and the board have been having are that the board system is broken. The non-for-profit board system does not end up reflecting the communities that arts nonprofits serve. And often the people whose voices that you need in determining organizational direction, don't have the time to volunteer and not-for-profit boards in Canada must be volunteer. We wanted to create a paid body where people's labor was being acknowledged, that would allow more members of the community to have a say in Generator's future.

ted witzel:

The second stage of that is this leadership transition. And then the third stage of it is actually doing a governance review, looking at alternative governance models. And that's been a project that Kristina has been leading and offering provocations towards. And we're speaking with a lot of consultants and community members about how we might restructure and reinvision governance for the organization. We, as a board are trying to make ourselves barely relevant and to turn governance over a little bit more to the community, through paid bodies, that actually recognize what that work of organizational direction is.

Tim Cynova:

It's such a crucial piece that comes up a lot. Oftentimes when we're talking to staff of organizations around anti-racism anti-oppression commitments, and the next question is, "How can I get my board to buy into this? Or how can I convince my board, or how can I convince my board to be more risk prone when it comes to how we approach hiring leadership and thinking about multiple people coming in." So I'm excited for that research and piece to start coming out. Kristina, what's top of mind, as for people who have that question about how do I X with my board when they might be risk averse?

Kristina Lemieux:

Generator has a long history of having a board that has always been willing to come along on interesting journeys and try new things and put whatever things forward. But I think one piece that I coach a lot of small nonprofits with that we spend much time talking about is that you create your organizational structure and what happens in your rehearsal hall, or what's happening around your table at the office is a culture you love. And then you get to your board. That's a different world. And I guess my question, or what I ask people is like, "Why is that so? Why are you putting on a different clothes when you walk into that room? So there's a way in which what I work with the board and when I'm working with the board and orienting the new people that were oriented in the culture of the organization. And that we tell the stories of taking risks and iteration and trying new things and keeping it loose so that there's the opportunity to shift when you need to.

Kristina Lemieux:

And that just becomes part of the conversation always, so that they're ready and comfortable when you're like, all right, great. So we're going to take a year to do this gigantic shift and go to the community, and we're going to do this. We're going to do that. And it's a continuation of the story of how we've always talked about how we shift our programs. And we're always asking the question of what's working well, what's not working well, what's changeable, what's not changeable? How urgently does it need to happen? The idea that a board is a different place in the your organization is by design. And if we want to break those systems down, then we need to bring that culture forward into the board.

Sedina Fiati:

I would also add that Generator's board, I think in many ways is reflective of the community in the sense that they are independent producers or were independent producers for the most part of the arts. So they're really understanding and involved with the people that Generator serves in the work that they're doing. So they're not coming at it simply just as volunteers, which is nothing wrong with that, who care and who liked the arts maybe? They are folks who are deeply invested in what the sector is doing and how it can be better and deeply invested in serving independent artists.

Sedina Fiati:

So I think that that's what made it easier for us to embark upon this like strategic process, which I also will give kudos to Kristina for actually writing a grant last year in order to be able to fund this work. And that's one of the things, right? It's how do you, how, how has this work funded? The funding of recruitment and strategic change needs? It does need money and resources. So last year there was a grant put in that was successful for us to be able to embark upon this so that we were able to have additional funds to pay for the strategic advisor committee and the hiring committee as well. So when we're in a space of having resources to do things, it does make things easier on some level

Tim Cynova:

We're coming up on time. I feel like barely scratched the surface on all of the things we've talked about. But as we prepare to land the plane here, what's resonating for each of you as you think about this process that you engaged in, and created?

Kristina Lemieux:

There's a couple of things I want to just add or make sure that we say one thing we haven't mentioned is that knowing how unique of an organization Generator is, we've been planning for my departure in terms of creating a reserve fund for several years now. Basically the second I started, we started to create a reserve fund. So we had, by the time I gave my notice about $10,000 in reserve that we were able to use in conjunction with the funding that Sedina is speaking about to support this kind of thinking. So I think that there has to be an interesting in investment over the long time, knowing that this is going to take time in talking to peer leaders, the way I've described this process is that we were running a program.

Kristina Lemieux:

We are actively not working on other things because the amount of time that it has taken the staff and I to do this process is the equivalent of running a giant public program. And everyone's inspired, we're working with some other companies to do it, and I'm like, "Do you have time to run another program right now? And if you don't, then I don't know that I want to encourage you to do this process because it's that labor intensive." Especially the call creation portion of it, as Ted alluded an incredible amount of work.

ted witzel:

And I think what that points to is in terms of the expense, the expense here has been people and all of this has been a really human centered process and a labor intensive process. And it was really important to have a lot of people weigh in, in different directions on this. We consulted with an artist named Angela Sun on the accessibility components of this application, and she gave us some really important feedback to move forward with. And we continued to have her involved as a consultant through the various stages, as we were designing them to weigh in on accessibility for the interviews and for the program design assignment.

ted witzel:

There was also a lot of work that Annie Clark, our communications manager put into to building this call and then between the strategic advisors and the board, I would say there were probably about 15 people working actively on this program and on moving it out into the community on doing outreach around it, on building the timelines, on structuring it. And we also really built in from the beginning that it needed to be... It's like when you're directing a show, like one of the biggest, most important things is casting and building your collaborative team. You don't know what's going to happen when you put those people together. They're probably going to have better ideas than you. And so you have to allow for the time for that collaboration to actually impact the direction of where you are taking this program or process.

Sedina Fiati:

I think it's really important, a value that Generator has. And one that I'm working on it also at Nightwood that they also have is just around embedding relationship building into your organizational process. That's just something that we always do actually like when we think of recruiting for APT or recruiting for this, I always see a job posting as an opportunity to strengthen relationships and also build relationships with teacher, candidates and employees. I don't believe that anybody is a magic bullet of a person that is going to come and transform your organization with the magic wand. That's not going to happen. And you're not necessarily just going to find that person just because you snap your fingers or offer a bunch of money. It has to be an ongoing thing with every program you do. And with all of your outfacing communications to really be thinking how do we center care? How do we center people as Ted said in the work that we do?

Sedina Fiati:

That's where I'm at having gone through a few of these now, I'm just like it really is all about those relationships. And I'll also say coming from a place of somebody who's done executive search. If you have the funds, you can outsource this work to an executive search firm, because basically all the work that we did is exactly what an executive search firm does, full time they will do that outreach. They'll come up with the strategies, they'll help you pivot. But knowing that Generator didn't necessarily have that. And we also wanted to include the community in a very particular way. It basically needs the same amount of time. It's either you're going to outsource it to somebody else. If you're going to do it yourself, know that it's a significant amount of time and labor, but it's worth it. Because I mean, if you don't have a people-centered organization, then what do you have? If you don't invest in your people? I don't know what to say, where are you?

Tim Cynova:

And with that, our time has come to a close, Kristina, Sedina and ted, thank you so much for sharing your insights about this crucial component of crafting thriving organizations, and for being on the podcast.

Sedina Fiati:

Thank you for having us.

ted witzel:

Yeah. Thank you so much. Nice to chat.

Tim Cynova:

And now to reflect a bit on the topic, it's always a pleasure to welcome podcasting's favorite cohost, Lauren Ruffin. Hey Lauren, how's it going?

Lauren Ruffin:

Hey Tim, it's good to be back in the studio with you.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, very much so. And we're recording this on your birthday Eve.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

So how are plans, how the celebrating in festivity is going?

Lauren Ruffin:

Everything's going well, we got off to Chama New Mexico for the first time yesterday. Beautiful. Just the landscape is spectacular. So that was good. Everything else is rickety though. My body's breaking down. I'm 40 tomorrow. My body's like, "I'm going to make you feel every minute of that. Every minute of the 40 years you've been on this earth."

Tim Cynova:

Well, your pictures were wonderful from the time away. Although I must say with the new phone, the pictures are a little bit too good because I miss the Nokia.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean, I feel like a professional photographer. I'm an awful photographer, but I'm cranking out pictures now. They're just amazing.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. They're beautiful. The pleasure of sitting down with members from Generator, and I mentioned to the team that when their leadership search posting landed in my inbox, you were one of the people that I almost immediately forwarded along to. I mean, like you got to take a look at this both because of the structure and the format and what was included in different modalities for candidates. And also because it was for a leadership transition where they just threw wide open possibilities. They're like, "We're looking for leadership. You can put your name in as part of wanting to be a part of shared leadership team, or you already have a team. You could be a solo, whatever it might be." They described it as being risk prone, as opposed to risk averse-

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I love it.

Tim Cynova:

... just wide open search. See what happens. What were some of your thought initial thoughts when you first saw the posting?

Lauren Ruffin:

I mean, you and I have talked about this. I think people forget that the job posting is people's first introduction to your organization, and they did such a great job, introduced people to their organizations. For me that was the thing that stood out the most. And the level of thoughtfulness that they put into how the job description was structured, the timeline, everything that you would want to know. There's nothing more awkward than being in a job interview. And at the end of like, "Do you have any questions?" It's like, "Well, no, that questions, because you haven't really told me anything." But they've got the timeline, the process, who's going to be in the room? I just thought the whole thing was really dope.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Down to, we will pay you this amount of money for this project, which is, as we know, is typically not the case. It's you do all of this for free on your own time. And sometimes the organizations end up using that work product. Without hiring the person, without crediting them, without paying them. So the fact that Generator said, "We're going to give you $500 to do this project. It should take about this much time. This is our contractor rate for X amount of time. And you'll get it." I found really uplifting.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

It's a great example of how you could incorporate that into a posting process.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. So you just finished talking to them, what do they like? Are they like angels on earth? Tell me about, what'd you learn?

Tim Cynova:

They're amazing. They're a lot of fun. We set aside an hour for a conversation and could have easily run two hours. I talked to three of the people who are on the committee in the organization. And so they know each other, so there's a rapport there. And so that is obviously great. We talked about so many things. They mentioned their equity and justice review that pre-seated this, that led to the creation of a strategic advisory group. And then they talked about having to pivot during the process because some of their assumptions weren't playing out the way that they thought. One of them being that people would come as a prepackaged leadership team, they receive a lot of people who said, "I would be happy to be a part of this, but it's not like if the two of us poly, we're a three person team we're coming in. And this is our vision for the organization."

Tim Cynova:

So they had to sort of retool that process once they saw that they had a lot of interested individuals, but no one coming as a group. And then how that changed the project that they were going to work on. And some of the assumptions that they had about it being artists and having collaborators already. So you're surrounded by people versus that assumption that, oh, people are surrounded by there's the two of us that we're already packaged deal and you could drop in and think about what does that mean? Mm-Hmm Is it the times which we're living, where people are just exhausted? And they want to be a part of it, but it takes that extra energy that people don't have right now to piece this together or do people think about leadership teams in a different way than maybe artistic collaborations? So that was it really interesting to hear them start to unpack. And it really was. We flew was so much stuff. So whatever is in this podcast, there was a lot left. There could be easily be a second episode or even cooler if Generator just started their own podcast-

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, yeah.

Tim Cynova:

... I just want to talk about it.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's really cool. I mean, I'm always just fascinated by folks who lean into new models of working. Work so stagnant right now. And even in the midst of what you and I have talked about, what a great opportunity in some ways, "Great opportunity." The pandemic was to really reshape work. And I feel like we're still having conversations about how do we get back into an office?

Tim Cynova:

I'm just noticing too in the news, the articles are starting to repurpose themselves in weird ways it's like they're pulling things back from four months ago and then putting back, like, "Maybe we won't be going into the office or what does it look like with different vaccine mandates and the uncertainty that's still uncertain as people are returning to the office." Yeah, being able to talk with the group. They're really open and they're like, "We want to share what we're doing so people can use it, plagiarize it, whatever. But part of our process is that we're creating something that hopefully could be of use to other people and other organizations," which is really inspirational.

Lauren Ruffin:

I had drinks last night with Katie who obviously was doing coms for not obviously to people who listening, they don't remember. But is doing coms with Poly Education Department here in New Mexico. And then the guy who I guess runs Sandia National Labs, COVID website, and then someone else who's moved out here from New York, but still runs ops for an agency in Midtown. And so we were all talking about just COVID protocols and how convoluted, just trying to figure out what day to day and what to tell people because they're all just to communicate that out. And I was like, God, like, I'm so glad [inaudible 00:51:36] closed their office in October of 2019. Because something we did not have to think about at all.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Thankful to this day.

Lauren Ruffin:

It'll be, I think when I reach those pearl gates of heaven or maybe the red gates of hell, I'll sit back and yeah. Reminisce on my life and be like, I made one good decision, Tim was there for it.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. The challenges that just keep evolving are real and I think about like that the psychic income or the psychic bandwidth, that things take that you can't be using elsewhere. A lot of times in the nonprofit sector, you talk about resource scarcity and research goes into resource scarcity. If you're all always thinking about having to make payroll, you start to make worse decisions in other areas. And I wonder about this psychic burden of the uncertainty around COVID and how that is impacting decisions that otherwise would be easier to make or clear to make. But because we're in this constant air area of things are changing, and laws are changing, and mandates are changing and then they're coming back and you got to brush off your masks again, or whatever might be happening. How does this actually play out in a people-centric organizational design workplace where everyone can thrive?

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm really curious. I wish I had sat in on that conversation with the Generator people. It just sounds like it was super cool. Did they talk about their Q and As?

Tim Cynova:

One of the things they said was that the staff capacity was really pushed to the edge in this process.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh yeah. Let's talk about that.

Tim Cynova:

And it's one of the cautions or heads up that they gave to other organizations who might be interested in approach like they took, if you are not going to outsource it to a search firm or something like the amount of time that it took them to craft the process, but just to get it posted to work through their advisory group, to work through the various team members so that people felt like they had a voice in it and then to get it posted and really get it out to the networks was a lot. And they have a relative small team. And so they ended with a really great candidate. So the end of the story is, and I believe they're announcing this week who the candidate is. So they found someone which was great, because there's another one of those questions where like-

Lauren Ruffin:

Did it work.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Cool process. But did this work?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

So they did find someone that they're really excited about, but they said looking back, it was a lot, lot of work. I mean, I think it's part of any process that's really intentional. If like you can easily post some generic posting and just take whoever comes in and then throw them some random questions and then give them a laptop or password when they walk in the door, and then let them be, or how do you structure it so that you're really searching for people of the knowledge, skills and abilities for that specific role? And into your earlier point, really showing them before they join the organization, what it's like to be a part of the organization? And then that last crucial step that often gets to aside, during searches, onboarding the person. It's usually the afterthought, as we both know, but to actually bring someone in to set them up for success is a really crucial, often thrown away piece.

Lauren Ruffin:

As you're talking, I started thinking about what, maybe the exact opposite of that intent I shouldn't say that open hire is intentional training, not an intentional hiring process. Do you know what I mean? What's the combination between where they were with finding that person that... and there's no such thing as a perfect person. But that candidate that really fits, versus open hire where you're essentially just bringing someone in committing to training them until they become a perfect fit. I mean, I'm dying to have a reason to do open higher at some point. I'm just fascinated by it.

Tim Cynova:

The model popularized by Greyston Bakery. We talked a little bit about that, where everyone gets a job who puts their name on the sheet. I've been fascinated by that for years.

Lauren Ruffin:

We've got to talk to them.

Tim Cynova:

I've spoken with their CEO during a conscious capitalism event, but not in depth. It's one of those examples where that organization got so many questions about their open hiring. That they created their open hiring institute for people to dive into open hiring. And figure out what pieces of it were right for their organization.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh man. That's so stoked. I'm excited to listen that whole conversation.

Tim Cynova:

It was a good one. Yeah. I was excited to dust the podcast microphones off and chat with the team. I hope we have the opportunity to record some more tracks. It feels like there's more conversations that are coming up about hiring. I'd really love to dive into equity audits.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Talking to a lot of people about equity audits, a lot of people are asking who does equity audits? And I found it really interesting that in asking organizations who've done equity audits, not many recommend the people that they worked with.

Lauren Ruffin:

And does that mean the person's done a good job and it made everybody uncomfortable or they just were actually awful?

Tim Cynova:

I think that's the question that we need to dive into.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh yeah.

Tim Cynova:

There's something really meaty there that I think would be useful to unpack.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Because I don't know the answer to that question, but that's what I'm being met with.

Lauren Ruffin:

So we should just have people on and say so was this actually a bad audit or are you suffering from what fragility?

Tim Cynova:

Was it a really good audit?

Lauren Ruffin:

Well, yeah. Was it really awesome or it made you super uncomfortable?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. So I think that's who we should start looking for people who have been through audits, who are willing to chat with us about it, because I think that's a question that's coming up now.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. So that's cool. Work. Shouldn't. Suck survivor series.

Tim Cynova:

You had another mini series that were running here on the Work. Shouldn't. Suck podcast. One of the other things I'm curious to dive into is I saw something, I believe it was produced in May or June of last year. It was. And I don't know if the chart was updated, but it's about organizations who provide or who don't provide was really they're highlighting sick leave amid the pandemic. Did you see that?

Lauren Ruffin:

No, I didn't see it, but Katie and I were talking yesterday about bereavement leave and organizations that require you to state who passed away in your relationship to them and to show proof they actually died. You all can't see me, but I have my wow face on.

Tim Cynova:

Right. At the point when you are grieving that person's loss and you're required to get documentation, that oftentimes doesn't even exist doesn't yet.

Lauren Ruffin:

Doesn't exist yet. Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

I mean, thinking about the timing, I don't think when my parents passed away, it was probably two days, three days before it even ended up in the paper. And then death certificates, you don't get those from the funeral home for a while. So like, yeah. That's one of those places where you can be an asshole employer or you can be human and humane and trusting.

Lauren Ruffin:

Well, why have you created an environment where your employees have to fake a death to get time off? What are we doing?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. There's an underlying issue here. That would be interesting to explore. I was chatting with an employment attorney a couple years ago because I was curious where the three days came from. And it's not universal, but a lot of places have around three days for bereavement leave. And so I was asking her where did that come from? We know where the five day work week and 40 hour work week comes from more or less, but she's like, "I'm not quite sure," but she was positing that it could have to do with travel, one day to travel, one day for a funeral, one day to come back. She said there could be some roots in Judaism where it is period of morning. The time you have to bury someone, but more or less, it's just something that took hold. It's probably a copy and paste from employee handbooks. I'm not sure why we do it, but we copied it from this employee handbook and you just keep doing it and we don't give any thought to it.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I also don't know many organizations who really hold to that three days. I should say I've been blessed to never work for one, I've always worked with... It says three days on paper, but it's kind of been like take as much time as you need. And people typically come back pretty quickly or the three days doesn't happen into session. I need a day here. I need a day there. I've got to go clean out this house. It's a parent. Or it seems to be pretty flexible, but there is something there about strict bereavement leaves that I think we should dive into. Especially as we're dealing with a country that's lost how many people in the last year, over and above our normal death toll.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Another topic, I think that'd be great. I think there's also something, there's inner locking Venn diagrams or circles on the Venn diagram of companies that don't provide sick leave amid a pandemic that probably overlap a lot with companies that can't, "Find people to work for them." Because they are shitty places to work or don't people enough to live. So yeah. I think we've got plenty of material for the podcast to keep going into season, I don't know, 18 at this point?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. It's the Simpsons, General Hospital, and Work Shouldn't Suck.

Tim Cynova:

Inclusivity, open hiring, really exciting stuff coming out of organizations right now, especially as a lot of organizations are hiring and could be thinking about how to do it differently than maybe they were doing it last year, years before, how the book says you're supposed to do it. So Lauren as always enjoyable to start the day with you. Thanks so much for being part of the conversation.

Lauren Ruffin:

Best way to start my birthday ever [inaudible 01:02:01].

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation, or you're just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others might be interested in topic, can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or a five stars or a phone or friend, whatever your podcasting platform for choice offers, until next time. Thanks for listening.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Tim Cynova 9/20/21 Tim Cynova 9/20/21

Race-based Caucusing in the Workplace (EP.44)

This is the first in a mini-series of episodes where host Tim Cynova in joined by other white male leaders to discuss their personal and professional journeys as their companies engage in the work to become anti-racist organizations.

Last Updated

September 20, 2021

Courtney Harge (CEO, OF/BY/FOR ALL) and Nicola Carpenter (Director of People Operations, Fractured Atlas) sit down with Tim Cynova to answer the 30 questions they most frequently receive when speaking with individuals and organizations about race-based caucusing in the workplace.

Want to learn more? Join them for their brand new course "Race-Based Caucusing in the Workplace: The Why & How" taking place in October 2021. To find out more visit.

Guests: Nicola Carpenter & Courtney Harge

Host: Tim Cynova

Episode Transcript

Guests

NICOLA CARPENTER works on the People team at Fractured Atlas, where she finds ways for tools and processes to better align with the organization’s purpose. She believes in tools so much that she sets personal OKRs every quarter. Prior to joining Fractured Atlas, Nicola worked for a variety of arts organizations including MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center, and Heidelberger Kunstverein, and she still has a particular love for museums. Originally from Minneapolis, she received a BFA in Art from the University of Minnesota and continues to stay creative through knitting and sewing clothes. She is currently in too many book clubs, but still somehow finds time to read books about organizational culture for fun. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter at @colacarp.

COURTNEY HARGE is an arts administrator, director, and writer originally from Saginaw, MI who has been working in the service of artists for the last fifteen years. She is the founder and Producing Artistic Director of Colloquy Collective, an emerging theater company in Brooklyn, NY. Courtney is also a proud member of Women of Color in the Arts, and a 2016 alum of both APAP’s Emerging Leaders Institute and artEquity’s Facilitator Training. She holds a Masters of Professional Studies, with Distinction, in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute. You can find more information about her at www.courtneyharge.com and find her on Instagram and Twitter at @Arts_Courtney. Her credo (#HustlingKeepsYouSexy) is not merely a hashtag; it’s a way of life.

Host

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

Tim Cynova:

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

On this episode, we explore 30 frequently asked questions about race-based caucusing in the workplace. How do I know they’re frequently asked? Because my guests have had hundreds of conversations with individuals and organizations over the years interested in learning more about the caucus process, and they’ve told me that these are some of the questions at the top of most people’s lists.

For this episode, it's a pleasure to welcome back on the podcast the always awesome Courtney Harge and Nicola Carpenter. And I’m excited to announce that if you want to dig into this topic further with them, they’re co-teaching a brand new four-week course online this fall: Race-Based Caucusing in the Workplace: The Why & How. Head over to work shouldn’t suck dot c-o backslash courses to find more information about the course and to register.

As a preview to this upcoming course, I thought it would be fun to ask them about -- in a kind of 73 Questions with Vogue -- some of the questions they frequently receive when people ask them about race-based caucusing workplace.

We don’t have 73 questions, but what we do have are two incredibly knowledgeable people whose answers are chocked full of expertise and insights. And even with these 30 questions, we’lll just start to scratch the surface -- which is why they created the course to dive deeper into the content -- so let’s get going…

Courtney and Nicola, welcome to the podcast!

Courtney Harge:

Thanks Tim. Happy to be here.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah. Same. I'm excited.

Tim Cynova:

What is anti-racism, anti-oppression work, and in particular, anti-racism, anti-oppression work in the workplace?

Courtney Harge:

Anti-racism, anti-oppression work is in all spaces the act of interrupting and redirecting oppressive systems. Oppressive systems are at play at work. Capitalism is imbued with oppressive systems. And so the work of anti-racism and anti-oppression at work is interrupting how those systems are laid on top of how we do our jobs.

Tim Cynova:

What does accountability look like for anti-racism, anti-oppression work in the workplace?

Courtney Harge:

Accountability looks different than it looks I think in other aspects of work. It's difficult to measure that we are 30% less racist than we were last week or that we have improved our anti-racism by 20% over last quarter. Like it's less measurable than one would seem. It's more about the workplace feels less hostile, there's less tension. There are ways in which you can be more productive because people are more willing to be honest and open in the work that they're doing. So accountability actually looks like a healthy, thriving, happy workplace in ways that may not be measurable, but are definitely tangible.

Nicola Carpenter:

And I think that accountability looks different depending on what you're talking about. And I think that we talk about this more with caucusing. There are very specific ways that we talk about accountability related to caucusing. I think that there are different ways that we talk about accountability related to, you know, with smaller things. I think it's harder to talk about accountability in a large way and easier when talking about accountability in smaller ways. How are you accountable in your specific job? How are you accountable in smaller little chunks? So I think it's hard to talk about accountability in a huge chunk, but it's way easier to talk about accountability in tinier little pieces. So how are you accountable in this one decision, how are you accountable in this one smaller way I think is a much easier way to approach this. And I think later we can talk more about accountability within the caucus structure and building accountability in the workplace through caucusing. I think that it becomes a lot easier to answer these big hard questions when you start breaking them up into smaller pieces.

Tim Cynova:

What is race-based caucusing?

Nicola Carpenter:

So when we talk about race-based caucusing, I think that there are different ways of talking about it. But when we're talking about race-based caucusing at work is splitting up into a people of color caucus and a white caucus and meeting regularly. We're specifically talking about meeting monthly and having spaces to understand that there are different things that need to happen in these two spaces and understanding that these need to happen separately, that we can't have these conversations all together without having these conversations separately. So that is what we are talking about when we're talking about race-based caucusing.

Courtney Harge:

I like to think of caucusing as working out as somebody who doesn't always work out, but in the same way that you don't train for a marathon at the marathon, many people like or at least attempt to have really complex conversations around race and relationships when the stakes are super high in the course of their kind of day-to-day work interactions. One way to view caucusing is the workout before the event. It is a space where you are going to work on different things based on where you identify, but to work on them in spaces that are contained that are supportive and that are there to do the workout. Caucuses at their most simple are leg day, make you stronger for the rest of your encounters.

Tim Cynova:

Is a caucus an affinity group and an Employee Resource Group the same thing?

Courtney Harge:

Caucuses, affinity groups and Employee Resource Groups can frequently be used to describe the same activity, but they are different. And frankly, in the same way that sometimes people name things and do the same thing, it can depend on place to place. I think for any one of these groups, it's very important to understand what the intention behind it was, what was started, what is the culture of the org and if you're going to have multiple or if you're going to have just one, knowing what its purpose is is actually more important than what it's called.

Nicola Carpenter:

And I think that sometimes organizations hold up and say, we have an affinity group or we have an Employee Research Group and say we're done. You know, like stamp of approval, done. We don't have to do anything. And I don't think that that's a great approach and oftentimes it can do more harm than good. There are lots of organizations that view Employer Research Groups or affinity groups as groups to do free labor. They don't necessarily have, you know, they might have a group of Black employees, not necessarily have a group of white employees, doing the group, doing the work that white people need to do which is not beneficial. So I think that there are organizations that are trying to do things, but might be doing it from a place of we wanna look good instead of from a place of we wanna actually make our organization a better place to work. And we want to actually fix things from a structural level and do the things that need to happen and have these conversations on a regular level and make changes that need to happen from those conversations. So whatever you call it, I don't think it necessarily matters as long as you are doing the things that need to happen.

Tim Cynova:

Why should companies provide space for caucusing in the workplace?

Courtney Harge:

My quickest response to that is if you don't provide the space, employees will take it. It's very much like a release valve in the sense of people are having these conversations that are grounded in people's social location, grounded in their identity, grounded in race, class, any other oppressive system and they're having these conversations in spaces that you don't necessarily want them to be having them or you know, it becomes a conversation around, like an email actually becomes a conversation around race. Or if you look at some companies in the news, like sometimes that Slack channel that you think is for fun turns into the space where people are having these conversations. And so the best answer I can provide for why companies should provide a container for these conversations is if they don't have a container, they will show up everywhere.

Tim Cynova:

Who should be caucusing?

Nicola Carpenter:

I think that any organization that wants to further their anti-racism work and put words into practice should be caucusing.

Tim Cynova:

Why would someone be a part of a caucus?

Courtney Harge:

People approach caucusing and their participation in caucusing for a variety of reasons. Some people want a safe space to be able to work through some of the things that they need to work through at work with people who look like them or with a support that is familiar to them. Some people frankly feel like they just should participate and don't even know how to articulate what their participation would do for them. Socially, the organization will change as you caucus. People who are doing the work will find that they are having deeper conversations or people may feel a greater sense of psychological safety. And while peer pressure is never the strongest motivator, sometimes watching your colleagues change and watching relationships deepen because they are doing the work is an excellent motivator to get people to participate. People want to be connected to other people and seeing growth and change and honesty emerge becomes a great reason for somebody to participate in a caucus.

Tim Cynova:

What do companies need to do before they introduce race-based caucusing in the workplace?

Nicola Carpenter:

So I think there's some things that can be helpful. I think that it could be helpful to become clear on why organizations are doing this and have some shared vocabulary. Having some kind of organization-wide anti-racism, anti-oppression training can be helpful to do this. Without some kind of shared language around it, there can be some misunderstandings without this because caucusing exists within the current culture and it's helpful to know that. Any kind of mistrust within the organization, any kind of conflict that arises within the organization will happen inside of caucusing. But that being said, caucusing can be a helpful container to work through some of these difficult conversations. So while it is helpful to have some of these things when start caucusing, it doesn't, you don't have to be a perfect organization to start caucusing. You can have caucusing as a way, as a container to work through some of these things. You know, you don't have to be a perfect organization before you start caucusing. If that's the case, you'd never caucus. I mean there is no such thing. There's no such thing as a perfect organization. You would never, it's impossible.

Courtney Harge:

I wanna echo that and I also wanna offer having a difficult conversation I think, leadership should have a difficult conversation with itself about how they are willing to change because caucusing as a process isn't necessarily linear. It's not like we're gonna meet this often and at the end we're gonna have these deliverables. It is a means, a growth. It is an experience. And one of the downsides to people getting more comfortable at work is they will also share more about what is harming them or what is unhelpful for them. And leadership should be in a space to receive that, that they actually may not know everything that is wrong or harmful in their organization and caucusing provides a space for that which means that before you start caucusing, leadership needs to be prepared, not with a plan to fix everything, but to understand that you may hear or receive things that are happening that you didn't know.

Tim Cynova:

What do employees need to do before they start caucusing?

Courtney Harge:

I think one of the hardest things for employees to do is really recognize that the way for change in this space is kind of embracing vulnerability. And so doing whatever an employee needs to do to kind of understand that, you have to be willing to show up to the caucus and you don't have to bare your soul every day, but you do have to be willing to say like this space was harmful or I don't understand this thing or I'm not even sure why we're here. Like the vulnerability of questioning. Caucusing is not a webinar, it's not you sit and receive a bunch of information. It is kind of the active generating of the future you wanna exist in. And that is a vulnerable position to be because you are in essence letting folks know like what is working, what isn't working and what could change. And I recognize that a lot of employees, particularly employees of color, spend a lot of time building a protective and necessary wall from being vulnerable at work for a variety of reasons that are historically informed and being willing to let a bit of that go to go and participate and generate change is I think something that all of the employees need to do while particularly empathizing as a person of color with what it means to do that as a person of color and be willing to do it anyway.

Tim Cynova:

How do people determine which caucus to attend?

Courtney Harge:

Caucusing participation should be based on how people self-identify. There's no way that the organization should assign folks necessarily because there are so many things you can never really know. For anyone who could participate in either caucus or who wants to engage with caucusing as a multiracial person, first choose a caucus. The only kind of "unacceptable option" is trying to participate in both caucuses because the separation is a part of what feeds the process. But for those who are unsure where they wanna participate, it's very much about what is the type of work you would like to be doing. If you will need to examine your relationship to whiteness and you want to see and like kind of see what that works like on you, how you are connecting with that, then I would suggest the white caucus. If you very much want to build community and connection with POC, then you can choose the POC caucus. This can get murky because you know, people are like well, I wanna participate in this or I want to create space or maybe I'm a white person who feels like I wanna create community with POC. And the problem with that is the POC caucus at its core should be a place that is absent and removed from whiteness as a concept. That's one of the things that makes it a safe space. It is taking this however designated time to be able to step away from whiteness. And if in any of your engagement, you want to engage with your whiteness, your relationship to white supremacy, your relationship to whiteness as a construct, that work should be done in the white caucus, not with POC, not in the POC caucus.

Tim Cynova:

How do you get people to attend race-based caucusing in the workplace if it's not mandatory?

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah, I think that this is a question that people ask us sometimes without realizing that there is lots of things at work that people do without it being mandatory. And I think this comes down to with how do, how do you get people to do anything at work if it's not mandatory. What are the ways that you get people to do work in your workplace currently? And you know, how do you set those things up? Is it conversations with your manager? How are those things set up now? And maybe you can use those currently which I think is how we've done it at Fractured Atlas in caucusing. And I think that those things can be successful. Is it those conversations with managers? Is it a conversation with someone else on the caucus? You know, oh, I noticed that you weren't... Someone within one of the caucuses noticing that someone isn't showing up having conversation, hey, I noticed that you weren't at this caucus. If they already know that this person is participating in one of the caucuses, having that conversation with the person and seeing why that person wasn't there. I think there's lots of different ways to have those conversations with people to see if it's a discomfort having those conversations. If it's something that the organization is doing that's fully new and that person joined the organization not thinking that caucusing was part of their organizational, part of something that they was gonna do with the job. That's one reason why they might not be joining. You know, maybe they have too much work that they're doing. There's so many different reasons why someone might not be joining. But I think that it is really organization dependent and I guess I would ask the question to the organization of how are you encouraging people to do anything within the organization.

Courtney Harge:

I also wanna offer that, as I said earlier, people have these conversations. You'd be surprised at the number of people who want to participate. Reluctance to participate frankly is frequently a leadership driven question and team members rarely ask it, like people who are not in leadership. Leadership, how do I make people do that? And that's almost never a problem. And I know it can be and people will have different levels of participation and some people may have distrust. There may be a variety of valid reasons why people don't participate. But if you get to a point where you are kind of set up and are discussing caucusing, rarely do people not show up or not participate or just say, you know what, now we're not gonna do that. They very rarely just kind of wither.

Tim Cynova:

How often do caucuses meet?

Courtney Harge:

We've done an hour once a month. Each caucus should be allotted the same amount of time and resources. It also shouldn't be considered like time off. Like it shouldn't be like a lunch break. It is in fact a meeting. Sometimes caucus can take place over lunch, but it should be considered work. It is a working meeting. So yes, but once a month for about an hour.

Tim Cynova:

Is there an ideal number of people to be in a caucus?

Courtney Harge:

The ideal number is everyone who is ready and able to participate. It may take plenty of time and some more trust building to get what is a critical mass of participation, but they should be frankly, a diagonal in that across your organization and at all levels of leadership. Everyone can benefit from community and conversation frankly. And so I think the ideal number is everybody who wants to be there and is willing to engage. If people are not engaging or actively sabotaging the space, it is less than that. Less people not have to participate or not participate if they are undermining the process. But yeah, the number of people who are ready and willing and able to engage is the ideal number.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah, I would say more than two and anything more than 15 people can get slightly unwieldy and at that point, particularly for white caucus which tends to be more structured which we can talk about a little bit further and you might want to engage more tools like breakout groups to have more in depth conversations if you start to have a larger group than say 15 people. It might start to get a little bit unwieldy to have full group conversations at that size.

Tim Cynova:

What happens during a caucus? How are they structured?

Courtney Harge:

I'll speak for the POC caucus and we've chosen to structure it really with the guiding principle as I've said earlier of this is an hour outside of the white gaze and were one can disengage from whiteness and white supremacy culture as a construct. And so it is a space, during the caucus we focus on what are the people who are gathered there in need of. Is it a check-in where everybody's just like this is how I'm feeling, this is what's going on. Is it like I have this problem? Is it I have this success that I wanna celebrate in this space. What are the people who are present able to offer and what do they need? And that is, that hour is focused on the people who are present in the caucus without centering or even engaging in whiteness, white supremacy culture or what white people may need or feel.

Nicola Carpenter:

And white caucus, it is very structured. There's always a facilitator. That usually rotates of someone in the group. And it is very focused on learning. Oftentimes there's homework and really is talking about you know, whiteness, white supremacy and how does it show up kind of in the workplace, in the lives and kind of interrupting that.

Tim Cynova:

What happens after a caucus meeting?

Nicola Carpenter:

So we talked a little bit about accountability earlier and something that is important in the caucus structure is accountability within caucusing. So there's a few ways of building in accountability within caucusing, but we think it's very important that the people of color within the organization understand what the white people are talking about within caucusing. So in white caucus, notes are always taken and the notes are always shared with the people of color caucus. This can be done in a few different ways. We've tried a few different things. We've had people of color liaison and a white caucus liaison that have met in person. And then we've also tried out sharing those notes via something like a Slack channel or something virtually and both of those have worked. It depends on, you know, organizational capacity, what you wanna try out. You could have those liaisons switch up. It depends on different things, but just as long as we make sure that our, we make sure that those notes are taken every month and that those notes are shared so that the white people aren't just sitting in a room every month and talking without that just being shared because what we don't want to happen is to have that meeting turn into a staff meeting which would be the white people making decisions without people of color in the room which would be not what we would want to get out of caucusing because that would be white people making decisions excluding people of color from the room which is a terrible, terrible decision. It's just not what we want from caucusing. It would be the opposite of accountability.

Courtney Harge:

For the POC caucus after really depends on again on what the folks present in the caucus needed. So sometimes it's follow up. Sometimes there are questions that go to the white caucus or sometimes they are just broader questions or things to be planned or determined or followed up on. But ultimately it really depends on what do the people need in that meeting and then what can be followed up on, what can be done next.

Tim Cynova:

Who's responsible for managing the caucus process?

Nicola Carpenter:

So everyone really is responsible for managing the caucus process which can get a little bit overwhelming because sometimes if everyone is responsible, it means that it can fall into no one being responsible. So that's where it becomes really important to finding ways of structuring this process which I mentioned there are different ways to structuring this process. You can set up things like caucus liaisons, a POC caucus liaison or white caucus liaison for set periods of time or that rotates or just making sure that you have structures set up to make sure that you understand kind of what the responsibilities are so that you know who is responsible and for what period of time and so you know that they happen.

Tim Cynova:

Do you need a facilitator to get caucusing started? Or keep caucusing going?

Courtney Harge:

I think a facilitator is a great resource to kick start the process and generate excitement if things feel a bit stagnant. The only caveat around facilitators is be sure to hire facilitators that could participate in the caucus they will facilitate. So white folks in the white caucus, POC folks in the POC caucus.

Tim Cynova:

Can't we just all be in the same room to talk about this? How is this supposed to help address racism and oppression if it's just white people talking in a room together?

Courtney Harge:

So I like to share a very common metaphor in this space and we talk about, many people talk about, particularly in the American context, they talk about the context of the melting pot, right? That America is just all these different things thrown in together to make soup, but it is an inherently violent metaphor. It is, in the making of the melting pot you are literally burning, consuming things to form this one amalgamation of this thing, this ideal "thing where we are all the same." But everything gets burned away in that process. And that is what can happen when we have this all the same room conversation where traditionally people of color have done a lot of burning and removing the things that make them "different" from the dominant culture to exist in that space. Caucusing embraces what I think is a better metaphor of the mosaic where these individual pieces come together and they are still whole. They are still their own pieces coming together to form a cohesive unit. Caucusing allows for the individual pieces to mold and support and stay whole together so that nothing has to be lost or burned away for the group to become cohesive or for everybody to exist together.

Nicola Carpenter:

I really appreciate that the burning up. So I mean a lot of people have heard about this concept of white fragility. I appreciate Sun Yung Shin wrote about this concept of white flammability which I feel like Kat said this idea of burning up, but also white fragility feels like you have to coddle whiteness, but white flammability seems more constructive to the harm that white people can cause when in mixed pieces. So I think that that is something that can happen when that is not always seen by white people in spaces that are all together that really happen on a day-to-day basis within workspaces.

Tim Cynova:

Won't caucusing lead to further division and segregation? Doesn't this just amplify racism?

Courtney Harge:

I always like to take this question and understand what does further division or segregation actually look like. What does that mean? Does it just amplify racism? Racism and oppressive systems are in the paint. They're in everything, they're in everything we deal with. So what would an amplified version of that look like. To Nicola's point it's also an hour a month. Like when has any one hour in an org completely altered the culture of an organization? But mostly, to go to something I said earlier, these conversations are already happening. These conflicts, racism is already present in your organization. It's there. What this does is provide the safe space or this container or this release valve so that these conflicts aren't showing up in every space unexpectedly. This becomes a container to hold some of the things that again are in your organization. They are there.

Nicola Carpenter:

And I think that something that comes up when I hear this question also is that sure, there are oftentimes, especially in workplaces when there are groups of only white people in the workplace. Yes, there is not that often when there are groups of white people in the workplace talking about whiteness and the impact of whiteness at work. And I think that that is the, one of the differences that when people are asking this question don't necessarily, aren't necessarily... I think that this question comes from a fear of seeing a group of white people in a room without necessarily looking at like the intent of it and what the conversations are that are happening and the structure of it.

Tim Cynova:

If caucusing is working apart, working separately, when do we all come together to talk?

Nicola Carpenter:

Every other meeting, simply. I mean, yes, it's more complicated than that, but caucusing really is just one container. You know, if you think of the organization as being like a pantry and you have a whole lot of different containers, of jars and of all of your different lovely containers, caucusing is just one of the containers. All of the other containers are different other kinds of meetings. So all the other meetings is when you come together and those are all of the other meetings. Those might take other forms depending on your organization. Those are all of the other times you come together and that really depends on your organization. And what those other containers holds is up to you and what comes from caucusing might determine what those other containers are and what you need. You might need to have conversations in other forms. You might need to increase anti-racism trainings. You might find that you need that. You might need more conversations about how to have healthy conflict. You might find that you need that. You might find that you need more containers related to, I don't know, I'm failing at coming up with hypothetical containers that an organization might come up with, but you can fill that in with any other meetings or structures that you already have in place. Those are all the other times that you come together within your organization.

Courtney Harge:

I will offer that in the time we've been doing this, that question is only ever asked by white identifying people. The POC who I've worked within our org and outside of the org never ask when are we all going to have this conversation together. Never.

Tim Cynova:

What are the people of color saying about us white people when they caucus? It doesn't seem fair that they don't also have to report to the white people about what they talk about.

Courtney Harge:

Oppression, specifically racism is a white person's problem. Whiteness, white supremacy are the tools that we are addressing and in race-based caucusing. It doesn't have to be fair and the POC probably aren't talking about you.

Nicola Carpenter:

This is specifically why it's set up that the people of color do not have to report back to the white people. It makes it so that we have to practice this kind of report out and the imbalance in that report out. It makes some white people a little bit uncomfortable and that should be the case. It's uncomfortable for white people not to know what's being talked about. That's fine. It should be that the white people in an organization, that we should not know what's happening in POC caucus. But we're invited to every single other conversation. Why do we think that we should be invited to this one hour a month? We should not. We should not. What gives us the right to know what happens in this one hour? Nothing.

Tim Cynova:

Can we also caucus by gender identity, sexual orientation and a class?

Nicola Carpenter:

Sure. I mean you can caucus about whatever you want to. But it's also helpful to know that racism will show up in any space and we often get this question asked by white people. We've often gotten this question asked by white women and we wanna make sure that this is not a deflection to, by specifically white people to hold on to other forms of oppression to avoid dealing with racism. So yes, you can caucus about everything. Sure. Of course. But don't use that to avoid race-based caucusing. You know, keep race-based caucusing. Do that and make sure that you want it, you know what you're getting out of these spaces and keep coming back to asking yourself what you need in these spaces and what you're trying to get of those spaces.

Tim Cynova:

What does it mean to have these conversations in the workplace? And what are companies losing by not caucusing?

Courtney Harge:

These conversations are already happening in the workplace, always already. And there's no way around that. What it does in this case is give resources and support so that these conversations can be more healthy or less secretive. It gives a means for people to actually name things that they are experiencing because frankly, as I said, these conversations happen and they happen in ways that can be very harmful, very destructive. And simply, organizations may never know that these conversations are being had or what's happening in them. Yeah, they may never know without caucusing to give a safe space and a healthy space. One of the benefits of caucusing as I think I mentioned earlier which is kind of surprising is you actually may hear, not necessarily complaints, but you may hear about more harm that's happened. You may actually hear more negative things and that is a win because those things still happened before. People just didn't name them. They didn't say them. You couldn't correct them. So having a space for these conversations to emerge for people to be able to name some of their experiences, for people to be able to name some of their behaviors that we wanna interrupt means that you can actually impact, correct and improve them where if these conversations are in the shadows, harm is happening and you just don't know.

Tim Cynova:

What if their organization's leadership, board of directors, et cetera, doesn't want a caucus, either for themselves or for the organization to offer it?

Nicola Carpenter:

Whenever we get this question, I like to remind people of what the organization is losing by not caucusing. Bringing it back to what Courtney was talking about earlier and also bringing it to the organization's mission or purpose, how does doing this further impact what the purpose and mission of the organization is and how can this kind of impact what the organization is trying to do.

Courtney Harge:

I will also offer that they don't have to. The liberation is not for everybody. Not everybody wants to go there. And if people who are responsible for the future of an organization, leadership, boards of directors, they are compensated and supported with all the institutional power given to them by the institution, if they do not want to go to the future we all long for, they don't have to go. It is up to anybody who's working with or for them to determine if that is how they want to engage. But frankly, if somebody does not want that future, they do not have to build it and everybody who works with or for them can make choices accordingly.

Tim Cynova:

How is the purpose of a caucus different for privileged and oppressor identities versus marginalized and oppressed identities?

Courtney Harge:

My answer is for privileged or oppressor identities, the goal of caucusing is to dismantle the systems that actually support and uplift you. It is frankly, to tear down the ladder you may be standing on. For marginalized and oppressed identities, the purpose is to take the resources from that broken ladder and build your own. And it doesn't have to be a ladder on top of people. It is frankly dismantling the systems that keep some people at the bottom and some people at the top. And if you're at the top, your job is to start taking it down. And if you're at the bottom, your job is to start taking it down from the top so that we can meet in a place that is equitable where everybody can be seen, valued, loved and supported and what people need at those different positions is different. It's not gonna look the same, but ultimately the job for everyone is to build a future, a better future for us all.

Tim Cynova:

What are common reasons people of color may be reluctant to join affinity spaces?

Courtney Harge:

I love this question. So many reasons that all start from the workplace is a site of both great harm and great resource. Capitalism has made it so that we have to work to live and people of color frequently have been harmed at those workplaces without spaces to exit because they need to work to live. And anything that risks the work to live is dangerous and so sometimes people of color are reluctant to join affinity spaces or caucusing because it creates a different site for harm maybe. It also, as I mentioned, creates vulnerability where you have to open up and say, hey, I don't like these things. And that can invite for some retaliation. It can invite discomfort. It may also be having to admit that you were harmed in ways that you may not wanna deal with. So it becomes a lot of, there are a lot of barriers to address it. Something I think that is particularly relevant and that actually shows this is a recent statistic that says only 97% of Black workers do not want to return to the office if they open. Only 3% of Black workers wish to go back into an office building. And I think that level of, I don't know that that momentum, that level, that critical mass of folks are saying in essence, the office is a space that does not work for us. And that, as Nicola said earlier, everything that exists in your organization exists in caucusing. And so the same reluctance that people want to go back into the building may also show up in people not wanting to join caucuses.

Tim Cynova:

What are common reasons white people may be reluctant to join affinity spaces?

Nicola Carpenter:

So I think there's a variety of reasons. If at the start of this journey in an organization, I think that there are some white people that join your organization that confronting privilege might not be what they thought as part of what they thought they'd be doing at their workplace. You know, I mean it can be uncomfortable to think, oh, this is something that I didn't think I'd be doing at work. This is uncomfortable. So I think that that is one thing that can make people uncomfortable. Once in a caucus space, all of the other points of privilege within an organization, I mean yes, everyone is white within the space, but you might be in the space with your manager. And I think that that can be uncomfortable if there's a question of well will saying something in this space make me lose my job. I think there are other things that can become uncomfortable in that space that unless you kind of have those conversations about what does it mean to be in a caucus space and kind of fears around how do I show up in this space at work, I think that people can have fears around kind of what does it mean to show up in this space at work within the work context.

Tim Cynova:

How long do you need to caucus? When are you done?

Nicola Carpenter:

It's not done until racism is gone which I don't think will happen in our lifetimes.

Courtney Harge:

I'll even give people a break. The day before racism is done, you can stop caucus.

Nicola Carpenter:

The day before. I enjoy that.

Courtney Harge:

Yes. So the day before, we're like you know what? I think racism is finished tomorrow. You can take that day off. But no, it is. These systems are hundreds of years old and we keep emphasizing one hour a month. It really is that. You are definitely going step-by-step. It will always evolve. You will always get closer and closer to building a better existence, but it will never be done because there's always improvements. You also find more things as you correct something or as you will adjust behavior as people have safer spaces. They start to say more of what is wrong. Again, this is the counterintuitive measure of success where people are like, oh yeah, that thing also happened. Or yeah, this doesn't work or it feels like a never-ending cascade and it's worth it to acknowledge that the more things you see, the more things you can address and the more things people are sharing, that actually means the more trust they have so.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah.

Courtney Harge:

It is...

Nicola Carpenter:

And I think that's true that the more you caucus, the more conversations, the more work you see that you have to do. So I think that that's totally true within organizations that it might feel like the longer you caucus, the more work it feels like you have to do. But yeah, I think that you're totally right that that is a good thing.

Courtney Harge:

That work was always there. You just now get to see it and it is a gift to be able to address it.

Tim Cynova:

Courtney and Nicola, thanks so much for being on the podcast!

Tim Cynova:

If you want to dive into these questions and more, register to join us for Race-Based Caucusing in the Workplace: The Why & How where we’ll be exploring in more detail how to introduce and structure caucusing in your workplace, including sample agendas, frameworks, and a whole host of other resources. Plus, by being a part of the course you’ll be joining a community of other people interested in this work who you can connect with and learn from as the work evolves in your life and workplace.

To find out more about the course and to register visit us at workshouldntsuck.co/courses.

If you've enjoyed the conversation or are just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes, so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up, or a five stars, or a phone-a-friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Tim Cynova 8/24/21 Tim Cynova 8/24/21

Journey Towards Anti-Racism EP2: Conversation with David Devan (EP.43)

In episode two of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews David Devan, General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Last Updated

August 24, 2021

In episode two of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews David Devan, General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia

Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Explore the other episodes in this series with guests:

Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG
Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent
Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods
Jared Fishman, Founding Executive Director, Justice Innovation Lab
Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21
Kit Hughes, Co-Founder & CEO, Look Listen
Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools
John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach
David Reuter, Partner, LLR
Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown UniversityWant to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films.

Guest: David B. Devan

Host: Tim Cynova

Episode Transcript

Guest

DAVID B. DEVAN (he/him) joined Opera Philadelphia in January 2006 and was appointed General Director of the company in 2011. Since his arrival, David has worked closely with board and administration on strategic planning initiatives and building partnerships within the community and the opera world.

David guided the company through a transformative period of innovation that led Opera News to describe it as “one of the leading instigators of new work in the country” and the New York Times to describe Opera Philadelphia as "a hotbed of operatic innovation." Under his leadership and artistic vision, Opera Philadelphia has grown to become a company of international stature and a favorite co-producing partner with companies all over the globe, developing fresh productions of classic works as well as premieres written by today’s leading composers. The company has engaged and energized both established and emerging artists, providing opportunities for important role debuts for singers like Lawrence Brownlee, Eric Owens, Nathan Gunn, Stephanie Blythe, Christine Goerke, Leah Crocetto, and Lisette Oropesa. As The Daily Beast recently commented, “Opera Philadelphia has been at the forefront of commissioning new operas with contemporary subject matter and an innovative, genre-blending sensibility to snare a younger audience and revitalize opera for the 21st century.”

Key achievements include the establishment of the Aurora Series for Chamber Opera at the Perelman Theater, an extremely popular and highly-subscribed opera series at the Kimmel Center's intimate 550-seat Perelman Theater; the establishment of the nation's first ever collaborative Composer in Residence Program with New York partner Music-Theatre Group, a comprehensive program supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, designed to foster the growth of tomorrow's great operatic composers; the creation of the American Repertoire Program in 2011, solidifying Opera Philadelphia’s role as a national leader in the creation of new works; and the creation of the site-specific Opera in the City series. Under David's leadership, the company established the annual Festival O in 2017, launching each season with an immersive, 12-day festival featuring multiple operatic happenings in venues throughout the city. Opera Philadelphia also presents additional productions each spring, making it the first U.S. opera company to open a year-round season with a dynamic festival.

Under David’s leadership, Opera Philadelphia has commissioned or co-commissioned eight new operas, including Charlie Parker’s YARDBIRD by Daniel Schnyder and Bridgette Wimberly, and starring Lawrence Brownlee, which has since been staged at The Apollo Theater in New York and Hackney Empire in London; Cold Mountain, based on the best-selling novel by Charles Frazier and written by Jennifer Higdon and Gene Scheer, and co-commissioned with The Santa Fe Opera; and Breaking the Waves by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, based on the film by Lars von Trier, which has since been staged at Beth Morrison Projects' PROTOTYPE Festival and was named Best New Opera of 2016 by the Music Critics Association of North America.

As immediate past Chair of the Board of Directors for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and a member of the Opera America board, David is privileged to serve in a city with rich and diverse cultural roots. He continues to work tirelessly to make opera as an important part of our community.

Host

Transcript

David Devan:

But basically, I'm a good guy. And I believe in equality and I believe in everybody is important. And that's what I've been taught my whole life. And the big aha is none of that is true. Not a single thing of it is true.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova. Welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck., a podcast about, well, that. At Work. Shouldn't. Suck., we spend much of our time focused on the how organizations could become anti-racist, anti-oppressive workplaces. With this in mind, we thought, why don't we do a mini-series as part of this podcast, where we take a deeper look into different organizations and their journeys? And in particular, why don't we take a look at organizations led by white men? I know this might seem a bit strange. Organizations with white male leaders engaged in anti-racism work, why focus on them?

As a white man, who for a number of years has been on a personal and professional journey towards understanding my own privilege, my role as a leader in positions that can either help or hinder the creation of workplaces where people can thrive, workplaces that have commitments to become anti-racist and anti-oppressive, I spent a lot of my time talking with other white men who similarly are at various stages of this personal and professional journey. So I thought, why don't we record some of these conversations and create a series that might be of service to other white male leaders or members of organizations led by white male leaders?

While anyone who is interested can certainly give these episodes a listen, the stories are shared with other white men in mind who might benefit from this sharing of stories and journeys as they themselves are embarking on a similar path. These conversations are definitely not meant to replace the deep, personal learning and introspection required of leaders, but more are a supplement to that work.

One theme we'll hear from these organizations is that this journey, both personally and professionally, hasn't been perfect. The reason we're spending time with this topic is not to highlight organizations and leaders who have it all figured out. I mean, I've yet to find anyone who's genuinely engaged in this work who will admit that they have. But in that sharing our stories with each other, the hope is that it can help inform the work we're all doing.

Taking a quick moment here to say, if you're interested in learning more about our approach to human-centered workplace design, including the brand new Hire with Confidence course we launched, I invite you to visit workshouldntsuck.co, where you'll find a wealth of materials and resources covering everything from shared leadership team models to virtual workplace arrangements to today's subject, organizational journeys towards anti-racism. Now, onto today's conversation.

Today, I'm joined by David Devan, general director and president of Opera Philadelphia. You can find David's bio linked in the description of this episode, so in the interest of time, let's get going. David, welcome to the podcast.

David Devan:

Thanks, Tim. It's great to be here. I'm happy to be with you.

Tim Cynova:

How do you typically introduce yourself, and how do you typically introduce Opera Philadelphia?

David Devan:

I introduce myself as David. My pronouns are he and him. I am the general director and president of Opera Philadelphia. Opera Philadelphia is a dynamic evolving place where opera finds a voice, hopefully in a contemporary sense, and is part of the future of the form. And that's kind of who we are or we're trying to be.

Tim Cynova:

Well, it has certainly been a challenge the past 18 months to two years. We're recording this episode in August 2021, still amidst a global pandemic. How has this been for you and the organization? What has it been like?

David Devan:

I'll say that the last 18 months have been challenging, but they were challenging before that, it was just a different kind of challenging. And certainly, the intensity of some of our work and the uncertainties have increased. But as arts organizations that are very Euro-centered and were built on a subscription model in the last 50 years, which is largely effort and exclusion, we've been on a journey and it's been challenging.

The last 18 months in particular, the uncertainties are great. Opera singers are super spreaders. Our droplets travel over 12 feet. And so being able to care for artists, care for community in a time of great uncertainty and health risk, it's really required us to really look at what has been working and what hasn't been working, and how to make good bets on our activities in the future.

Tim Cynova:

So where do you currently find yourself?

David Devan:

We find ourselves in what I'll call pivot number three. Way back in 2015, we did some seminal research and introspection into our work and we reinvented our season, and we created a contemporary, forward, progressive fall festival as part of our season that really did have a wider aperture on who was invited to participate and who got to create work. That was pivot number one.

Then the pandemic hit and we were into pivot number two. And we started doing heavy digital work, not taking what we've done and just putting it, archives on screen, but actually creating artistic vital work for screen.

And now we're in pivot three, extended pandemic. What do we do now? We used to have two product lines. Now we have three. We've been in big dialogue with members of historically marginalized identities and communities over the last two years. And that's changing, continuing to change that product mix. And so what do we do now? And we are right in the middle of this week, in the middle of interrogating that and what pivot number three may look like with great amounts of flexibility.

Tim Cynova:

A while back, we connected around the conversation around an equity inclusion conversation and what this means for organizations, in particular opera organizations that traditionally haven't been at the forefront of inclusion, equity, diversity, anti-racism, anti-oppression. What does this journey look like for the organization, and then for you personally?

David Devan:

It's hard to find words, to be honest, because it's been a deep, is very much a journey and every day is learning. So to put it in a CEO nice bite-size sound bite response is going to be difficult slash impossible.

I think the biggest thing for me, as it has altered my leadership, our leadership team's work and is about to, or in the process of changing the scope of the leadership and the nature of the leadership of our board of directors. What does all that mean? You know, we early on started looking at the 11 characteristics of white supremacist organizations and started interrogating that and thinking about belonging and creating distributed leadership and giving voices. And so as a leader in chief, I started being the active listener in chief, which was really hard. I come from doing a number of turnarounds at opera companies. And you have a big idea, you get everyone behind your idea and you move forward. And that's not what this work's about.

I actually went and engaged with a coaching organization that both helped us institutionally and me personally with leadership attributes and how to distribute leadership. And we have a particular model that seems to be working for us in that journey.

The other thing I've learned is, is that our industry, the performing arts industry, suffers from great performative wokeness and checking diversity boxes to demonstrate progress, but it's still serving the same power and the same people. So interrogating that has been the big part of the work and learning to be quiet about the work and not in a marketing sense being public about it, that's what it feels like.

Tim Cynova:

I remember at Fractured Atlas, as we were starting work toward understanding racism and oppression and how it was built into our organization and the characteristics of white supremacy culture, as you mentioned, and then wrestling with, if we should say anything, because we are doing the work internally and didn't want to put out a statement about we're doing this work or felt weird about doing the work because we were a predominantly white organization.

And then one of the facilitators we were working with said, "You should talk about it because other organizations are in your exact place and wondering what people are doing, what's working and what's not." And that really led us to start to publish and just to sharing, here's what we're doing. This didn't work well, we wouldn't do it again that way. From that, we've dug into more organizations who were doing the work and that shared the shared experience. Also, the hope with this series here is lending another lens to the work.

David Devan:

That's going to be the next chapter for us, talking about it. But our employees of color felt very strongly that we just really focus on the internal work and we create a place of trust within the organization first. That's taken a year and a half.

And our journey started before the spring of 2020. We had a production in one of our festivals that had some choices in the production and by the director that were going to be harmful and how we managed that was not well. And that led us to opening up a conversation with our employees of color. And that started the learning about harm and that process. And then the tragic George Floyd incident escalated the thought, but it was there.

And what we did learn is we're actually just finished, one of my colleagues and I, just finished a chronology of E and I work that the company has done since 2006. And what we did was we measured initiatives and programs since 2006 that were invitational to historically marginalized communities and artists. We filled up a whole giant timeline, but the learning there was is that again, the performative wokeness checky box, is we weren't intentional about asking who the audiences were, what they wanted, what they needed, who the artists were.

And so while we have this body of work, it hasn't had the impact because it didn't have an authentic intention that was rooted in anti-racism and removing white power from the activity. And so we're actually using that as a dialogue point with our board coming up to make the point that this work is who we are. We just have to be better at it, and we have to be intentional about it. We need to let others share power in doing it, but it's not starting from scratch, in our particular case.

And I think that our industry and a lot of performing arts organizations have done things in the past that they've just done them for the, not the right reasons. So we have to interrogate that. And as a white leader, really learning how to share power or give power away more importantly to others to make those decisions is a big step. And that wasn't in place since 2006. Everything was tightly controlled as they tend to be in these multimillion dollar arts organizations.

Tim Cynova:

You include a number of threads that I want to pull on. The first is around, you talk about E and I, equity and inclusion, and don't often include the D that a lot of organizations talk about or the EDI and DEI. Why is that?

David Devan:

Yeah, we had a conversation about it internally. And again, a number of my colleagues of color in the organization made the case that diversity is that performative checkbox and the real work of changing and being anti-racist lives in inclusion and equity. So we decided to focus on that side of the equation. If you're doing equity and inclusion, you'll get diversity. It's really easy to do diversity and not get equity and inclusion.

I was sent on an errand by the group to define equity. I did a literature search. I talked to people. And I came back with, "This is really hard. This is maybe what it is, but this is maybe what it isn't." And we decided to work through that together. But I think if we'd had the diversity bin that we were trying to fill, we wouldn't have gotten to that richness of understanding.

And really, our understanding is, is that we have to first be inclusive and that's about belonging and trust and safety. And you have that as a prerequisite to getting to something that could be equitable. So that's the answer why, because it's just too easy to check the D boxes through demographics.

Tim Cynova:

What did you come up with for the definition of equity?

David Devan:

Again and less than perfect, but equity is about creating space for where people are at and giving them agency to move forward from their starting point and the institute and adapting to what their realities are and helping them, the organization being open and inclusive and accepting their realities.

Tim Cynova:

I'm often struck by, with my HR had an on and employment law, the difference between equality and equity.

David Devan:

Equity is not equality.

Tim Cynova:

Exactly. But employment law at best strives for equality, not equity. How does this show up in organizations when you're actually living true equity that might run counter to what employment law says everyone is able to have?

David Devan:

My understanding of labor law is, I would call it, its faux veneer of equality precludes equitable actions in many ways. It doesn't allow you to compensate people differently. It doesn't allow you, based on life experience, bring things outside the professional realm that they are bringing. It lays the burden of racism on the people of color, because you're not allowed to create different space and different compensation for people of color. So that's why I call it faux equality, that I think there is a real tension.

And you and I have talked about the tension between HR compliance and equity and inclusion work or anti-racism work. You know that I have, I share, one of your colleagues opinions about chief diversity officers and positions of that nature in terms of really being there to make white people feel better about things. And how I think one of the things as leaders we need to be open to thinking about how we don't keep those things as competing bins in our organization and how we bring in that tension in whatever way we choose for us to work through it.

Tim Cynova:

Let's talk a bit about the people who are in your community, and in particular the board of directors of your community and how they are engaged in this work.

And you mentioned, we've been talking about legal risk, which is usually something that boards of directors are pretty attuned to, what their risk tolerance is. So there is that, but there is also a change, I would assume, for many of your boards, board of directors who have been a part of the organization, and now things like racism are coming into the conversation and oppression and white supremacy culture. What have those conversations been like as you're talking with your board and how is that playing out?

David Devan:

We're the same as most organizations I think is that there is a big discrepancy about the depth of this work with the staff and the board. There is a different life experience, there is different age and there is different financial resource experience.

With our board, we have, our conversations have been focused on training to get language and understanding of some basic concepts. Board leadership and the Equity and Inclusion Committee, which has board members on it, decided the best thing we needed to do is to do an audit. Boards, their governance is about measurement, measuring and ensuring mission fulfillment. And so we needed to do an equity and inclusion audit, so that we could have facts in front of us about what we're doing well and what we're not doing well. And that, that should be the springboard for the board to lean in and do the work.

So the past year has been about doing some training and introducing some, the concepts that you just outlined. And at the end of August, we will receive our audit from an outside firm. And that will be the basis of a dedicated two hour board meeting on accepting that audit, understanding the context of where that audit lands and coming up with agreements on what we're going to do about that.

And along that way, I mean everybody is on different parts of the journey. We have board members that show up to weekly Equity and Inclusion Committee meetings every Thursday for 90 minutes and have done for 15 months. And then we have some board members that don't want to talk about it, "Go ahead, do it, but I don't want to talk about." So we're trying to create a space with data that we can have a leveling conversation and come to some agreements about actions.

Tim Cynova:

Can you talk a little bit more about your equity and inclusion committee? Because it's one of those questions that a lot of... I'm sure you get it a lot of times with organizations who are starting the work like, "Should we hire a facilitator? Should we start a taskforce? Should we start a committee? Should we start caucusing?"

David Devan:

Yes, yes and yes. So we started with a facilitator having a conversation with our employees of color, as well as our artistic, some of our artistic leaders coming out of this production I talked about earlier, that there had been some harm done in terms of how we managed racial identities in the production. We fix it, but how we fixed it was really not great. And that led to the idea of creating a committee.

And we decided that it needed to be a board and staff committee because you didn't want those two existences to drive further apart. And we also wanted to make sure that it had employees of color. It also had to have representatives through the different authorities of the organization and representing each department.

And we brought a facilitator in to help us decide how we were going to govern ourselves. And that facilitator brought in the 11 principles of white supremacy culture. And so we wanted to make sure that our committee was not emphasizing or rallied around any of those characteristics, so that led us to no chair. So consensus, agendas, consensus work. I sit on that committee, not as a C... with no CEO power. I sit there as the CEO who can learn and take direction and take actions that the committee wants to do.

We also identified that trust was paramount. And so trust comes through frequent, often transparency and frequency. And so we decided that weekly meetings needed to be the way to go. It had some community, came up with some community agreements that would govern how we acted.

I would say the first five months was nothing but trust building. I mean, we were working on things, but we didn't really hit a trust stride until, I would say honestly, really eight months. It's because there was a lot of microaggressions and there was a lot of good guy, white, exclusively white-centered power in the Zoom room. We need to leave time for that to become un-assembled.

Tim Cynova:

And on the topic of white guys in positions of leadership-

David Devan:

Ta-da.

Tim Cynova:

... yeah, who have relative privilege and power here, what has this been like personally for you? What's resonated most? What learning have you done? Where do you still struggle personally and professionally in this?

David Devan:

I am a white, gay, Canadian living in Philadelphia. And so through that identity had always thought of myself as well, I'm Canadian, I'm one of the good guys. Canada is a pluralistic society. It's a mosaic, not a melting pot. And as a gay man, I know of some level of marginalization. I knew I could hide it. And I know it's different than being marginalized because of a cultural identity or color, but basically I'm a good guy and I believe in equality and I believe in everybody is important. That's what I've been taught my whole life. And the big aha is none of that is true. Not a single thing of it is true.

And in my nice white guy-ness, I was centering my experience and advancing what I wanted to advance. And I was bringing people as I could along with that, but it was always on my terms. That's how you get stuff done, I was taught. And as a gay man, I can choose, in many ways, my identity and how people react to me and others can't.

And I come from a lot of privilege, because I had access to serious high-grade education. I did not come from financial privilege, but education privilege. And that shaped also how I accepted people. So if you came from that education experience, I listened to you more. So it's been deep. I have utilized executive coaching as a way to make sure that I am individually interrogating me, so that I can bring the right version of me or a better version of me into the work.

I think the other thing I learned is that I need to stop trying to prove myself. We're put into these positions, and I was very fortunate to be put into a leadership position at a young age. And you get on the urgency and perfection proof wagon. And I think you've got nothing to prove, for me was a very important white guy give up that I needed to do in order to create space for others.

And then finally, you know this, I'm pretty committed to a RACI distribution. And I needed a system to give people authority and responsibility [a way 00:25:15]. And that was part of the institutional coaching stuff. We found something that worked for us. I'm not selling it to anybody, because it doesn't work for a lot of people, but to find your own system, your own vocabulary and way to distribute responsibility and authority.

Tim Cynova:

And for those listening here, RACI, R-A-C-I, it's aa structure similar to [DARCI 00:25:40] or MOCHA. And so if you want to dig into it a bit more, it's an acronym.

David Devan:

And for us, the letters stand for approval, responsibility, consultation, and information.

Tim Cynova:

It's a helpful framework. I mean, as you said, it doesn't work for everyone, but trying it out, seeing what fits as you look to create transparency, accountability, and alignment, it could be useful, just to articulate that those are different things in a group when you're showing up to do work.

David Devan:

Where am I going to share the A? Where am I going to give the A away? Who's got the responsibilities for doing things? And by that means you got to let them do it and they get to make, call the shots.

Tim Cynova:

So right now, Opera Philadelphia is in the process of hiring a vice president of HR and Inclusion. I will say full disclosure. I know this because Opera Philadelphia has contracted Work. Shouldn't. Suck. to be involved in this really exciting process. This is a new role for the organization. Can you unpack how the role came to be and what the hopes are for it?

David Devan:

This is a big, important hire and investment for us. As we've worked through the last 18 months, the welfare of our human resources is very important. It's critical to the future and us building on our greatest asset, which is our people is imperative to doing work that's meaningful.

We decided that we needed to add to our leadership team, we call it the management team, with a vice president. Through that dialogue, we got to the point that there are tensions between HR compliance and equity and inclusion work. And the thought was is that we would hire somebody that would be able to deal with those tensions as part of their practice.

We also wanted to widen the census of what this position would be responsible for, helping us manage and meeting our people goals. Typically, these positions are about administrative structures, but we added all W2's. So that's our orchestra and our chorus and our stagehands. So craftspeople and the artists that are part of our organization is to have a wider census because those issues of compliance and equity inclusion meet or are important to all of those people.

We also, with your great advice, made a choice that we wanted to demonstrate anti-racist behaviors in how we conducted the search. And so it's not only a move in terms of the hire, but it's a real opportunity to put behaviors after a lot of discourse and thought. We can't wait to see what happens.

Tim, you've talked to more employees about it as part of the process, but it did receive full endorsement by our full staff in terms of this hire. We've been very transparent about how we want to go about doing it. Can't wait.

Tim Cynova:

As you think this role, the work that you're doing around equity and inclusion, in three years, what do you hope it looks and feels like to work at Opera Philadelphia? And I'll include, I was chatting with a colleague last week and they mentioned wanting to have a quote unquote, "shared futures contract," as part of their approach to people operations. And that phrase just really resonated with me, responsibilities for an organization as it creates places where people can thrive.

So I'm curious, as you think about these things, you think about the new role that's going to be coming in, the work that you're doing amid a pandemic, what's resonating for you in all of that right now?

David Devan:

I think by connecting to the past, by past opera, we can do so in a way that is about now. And in that spirit, we can look forward to a future. How we do that is the big question. And in three years, I hope the how we're doing that, whether it's commissioning contemporary works, we do a lot of that or the canon, our channel, or our festival, that we really are a community focused organization that has national and international impact.

And by that, I mean, we've been very artist-centered and I think we need to be artist and community-centered, and we need to be able to bring that community in, in a shared responsibility way. And that would be the contract that we are intentional about being here for our full community. And that means we need to create space for belonging and for them to be a part of this, not from just a transactional consumption point of view, but actually what we do.

As an example, there is a lot of troubled work in the canon of opera that deals with identities that have been harmed in the past. And one of those that is a very debated opera is Madama Butterfly.

A number of years ago, we talked to the AAPI community and based on what they told us, we went away and we cast Asian artists in all the Asian principal roles. We found a production that wasn't about Japanese exoticism. It was more about anti-American. There was no yellow face used in it, and it was supposed to happen this coming year. And in the context of all the Asian hatred that is so prevalent in this country, our staff, not me, our staff, because we were practicing transparency in conversations said, "Hold up, this doesn't feel right."

And so we went and created, had a conversation with the AAPI community. And we agreed that we would do what that community told us to do. And they said, "Don't do it right now." So we didn't. And what that meant was is that we ended up choosing another opera and all the Asian artists got roles in this other opera, roles for the first time. Many of them hadn't been cast outside of their cultural identity in four years, because they just, they're the Madama Butterfly people. We didn't have a role for the lead soprano and that changed things, so we are creating a one-woman show for her of her curation and her design in our festival the following year.

And then through discussion with the AAPI community, they said, "Listen, we'd like to be a part of deciding how you're doing. We're not saying don't do it. We just want to be a part. And while you listened the last time, you listened and then you went away and made all the decisions without us."

We're about to propose to them a way that can work together to come to those share conclusions. And that's only going to be better for everybody. And so I just use that as an example. If we can embrace that kind of work and thinking across the spectrum of our activities and that's what it looks like in three years, in my mind that's a home run.

But when I think about the future of Opera Philadelphia, I've said this earlier, but our greatest asset is our people. And I think the person that occupies this VP of HRI is going to be on the ground floor of figuring out what that looks like. They're going to have a committed team that's ready to listen and walk beside on that journey.

Tim Cynova:

Thank you so much, David, for your openness, your insights around the work, where you're struggling, what's resonated and that this is a very long journey that we're on. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

David Devan:

Well, Tim, thanks so much for having me and thank you for all your great work. As another white leader, you have demonstrated great inspirational behavior for others to follow such as myself, so thanks.

Tim Cynova:

To learn more about Opera Philadelphia and to check out their online channel that's been dubbed, "The HBO of opera," by The New York Times, visit them at operaphila.org. That's O-P-E-R-A-P-H-I-L-A.org.

If you know of anyone who might be interested in applying for Opera Philadelphia's new vice president of HR and Inclusion role, find out more about the opportunity under the executive assert section on workshouldntsuck.co.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Tim Cynova 4/22/21 Tim Cynova 4/22/21

Ethical Re-Opening Summit (EP.42)

In this episode, co-hosts Lauren and Tim discuss the upcoming Ethical Re-Opening Summit that they're producing on April 27, 2021. They'll be previewing some of the speakers and sessions, as well as discussing their hopes for the convening.

Last Updated

April 22, 2021

A year ago, many organizations flipped the switch to being entirely virtual workplaces almost overnight. As the world begins to re-open, we can't simply un-flip that switch. We're still living through the uncertainty of a global pandemic.

In this episode, co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova discuss the upcoming Ethical Re-Opening Summit that they're producing on April 27, 2021. They'll be previewing some of the speakers and sessions, as well as discussing their hopes for the convening.

The summit brings together people who for years have been actively thinking and designing organizations to create inclusive and equitable workplaces. Speakers and panels will be discussion how we craft our workplaces that are unique to each of us, our values, our resources, our communities, and our missions. This time together gives attendees a moment to learn, share, and iterate on our own ideas and practices.

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Co-Hosts

TIM CYNOVA wears a multitude of hats, all in service of creating anti-racist workplaces where people can thrive. He currently is Co-CEO of the U.S.-based non-profit Fractured Atlas, a 20-year-old organization that in 2013 committed to becoming anti-racist in its work and operations. Relatedly, he is a Principal of the consulting group Work. Shouldn't. Suck. that assists organizations of all sizes and sectors with the “how” of creating anti-racist workplaces. Tim serves on the faculty of Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and New York's The New School teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design; he's a trained mediator, and a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR). He also co-hosts a popular podcast under the Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. moniker. 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.

LAUREN RUFFIN is a thinker, designer, & leader interested in building strong, sustainable, anti-racist systems & organizations. She frequently explores how we can leverage new technologies to combat racial and economic injustice. Lauren is the co-founder of Crux, an international network & for-profit cooperative of Black artists creating stories in XR that hosts an online community & will launch VR distribution platform in 2020. Since 2016, she has served as Co-CEO & Chief External Relations Officer for Fractured Atlas, the nation's largest association of artists & creators. She is also the founder of Artist Campaign School, an educational program that has trained more than 70 artists to run for political office. Lauren graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science & obtained a J.D. from Howard University. She has served on the governing board of Black Girls Code & is on the advisory boards of ArtUp & Black Girl Ventures.

Transcript

[In production]

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Guest User 10/21/20 Guest User 10/21/20

The Work Towards Anti-Racism (EP.41)

In the journey towards creating anti-racist organizations, what exactly is included in “the work” we talk about so much?

Last Updated

October 21, 2020

In the journey towards becoming an anti-racist organization, the team at Fractured Atlas talk a lot about doing the work. But what exactly do they mean by "the work?" Is reading part of the work? Are workshops in diversity, equity, and inclusion part of the work?

In this episode we sit down with three members of the team who are deeply engaged in the work personally and professional to discuss this question. We're joined by Nina Berman, Courtney Harge, and everyone's favorite podcasting co-host, Lauren Ruffin. Read more about Fractured Atlas's journey towards anti-racism.

Guests: Nina Berman & Courtney Harge

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guests

NINA BERMAN lives in New York City and holds an MA in English from Loyola University Chicago. Before joining Fractured Atlas, she covered the publishing industry for an audience of publishers at NetGalley Insights. When she's not interviewing artists or sharing tips for navigating the art world on the Fractured Atlas blog, Nina makes ceramics at Center Point Ceramics Studio, hosts Planet Clambake on Newtown Radio, and is a member of the New Sanctuary Coalition pro-se legal clinic. Find her on Instagram at @nnbrmn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. On this episode, The Work, there's a lot of talk these days about “doing the work” when we discuss social progress, in particular anti-racism efforts at our organizations. There are platitudes about how the work is ongoing, a lifelong commitment, et cetera, et cetera. But what exactly is the work? Today, I'm joined by some of my favorite people, Nina Berman, Courtney Harge, and podcasting favorite cohost, Lauren Ruffin. They each are deeply involved in the work, both personally and professionally, and we currently all have the privilege of working together at Fractured Atlas.

Tim Cynova:

Taking a quick moment here to say, if you're interested in learning more about our human-centered workplace design, I invite you to visit workshouldntsuck.co, where you'll find a wealth of materials and resources covering everything from shared leadership team models to virtual workplace arrangements, to today's subject our ongoing organizational journey toward anti-racism. You can find all of our bios linked in the description for this episode. So in the interest of time, let's get going. Courtney, Nina, and Lauren, welcome to the podcast.

Courtney Harge:

It's great to be here.

Nina Berman:

Great to be here.

Lauren Ruffin:

Hey, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

Nina, you were the person who tipped us off to tackling the topic in this way. In your role at Fractured Atlas, you've been quite active in recent months as we publish more about our organizational journey toward anti-racism, and in about every piece, we talk about the work. A while back you said, "I think we should try and define what we mean by this." What does "the work" mean to you? What's included in the work and what isn't? What's your current thinking on the topic?

Nina Berman:

So for me, we're now seeing all of these companies and organizations that had that very tasteful sand [inaudible 00:01:52] block of texts about listening and learning, and we're a few months after that. Now I think is a time to check in and say, "Okay, so where are we? Where are our colleagues across organizations? How are we thinking about making change?" And the language that we use to chart that is doing the work, and it's clear that it's something that's amorphous in a lot of ways, that's both internal and personal but also tangible and material and policy-based, both your work policies and larger government policies and things like that. So for me, it feels important to articulate what the work is because that's ultimately how we hold ourselves accountable to living our values.

Nina Berman:

My personal frustration, I suppose that sort of prompted this, is ... and I think you folks might feel a little bit differently, but I think sometimes people will consider posting on social media or reading an article, doing the work of anti-racism and I am not convinced that's true. So I wanted to think through originally what we could set up as some guidelines for thinking about what it means to do the work. So I enlisted all of you and we didn't come ... I don't think we're going to come to an answer, but it feels important to use this big and confusing term with a little bit more specificity to hold ourselves as people and as institutions accountable to our own politics.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean, I think that whole ... I mean, when you prompted us with that question a couple of weeks ago, I've definitely been in my head about it because for some people posting on social media is a big deal and it can feel like doing the work. I'm actually wondering if, because we've ... So many of us have been isolated for the last few months, posting online is the thing that you can do to push people, and I'm not sure if I'm arguing for or against that being the work, but I'm just adding. I'm adding a point of complexity to muddy the waters further.

Nina Berman:

That's exactly what we want.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, exactly.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I thought you'd get a better idea of what the work is. Well, this isn't the podcast for you. You're going to be more confused about all the options.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, exactly. From social media posting to we went to book clubs, of course because everybody knows I'm a big fan of telling people to read a damn book, before you talk to me. But is that the work? I mean, up until we started asking this question, I was pretty convinced that it was, and now I'm flip-flopped again in the last couple of days, be like, "Maybe it isn't the work. Maybe I'm being too easy on people."

Tim Cynova:

Well Courtney, where are you with that? Because so we have posting on social media, we have book clubs, we also get throw into the mix diversity, equity and inclusion trainings. Is that part of the work? Or maybe is that a preface to doing the work? What are your thoughts on this right now?

Courtney Harge:

I think all of those things can be the work. Recently listening to this podcast, Brene Brown's podcast, and in it she was talking to Sonya Renee Taylor of the The Body Is Not an Apology, and they were talking particularly about radical self love, and particularly as it relates to diet culture and a few things. But something that really stuck with me was this idea of the alignment of the how you're doing something with the why you're doing something. That means any of those things or anything you're doing can be the work, can be something that is moving the needle toward a more radical and equitable future. But it very much depends on why you're doing whatever it is that you're doing. So if, Ruffin's point, you're posting on social media because you know that your audience, even if it's not huge, will be impacted by it, and because this is where you feel empowered to do something, that can be the work.

Courtney Harge:

You can be having conversations that are prompting or supporting other people to have conversations, or sometimes it could be saying, if you know your particular social positioning, simply saying something can connect people to who you are. So if you are a CIS person posting positively about trans rights, in a space [inaudible 00:05:52], a trans person may not feel safe. You are using your power to basically take some of the "negativity" that people may throw away from a trans person and providing some space, providing a space to amplify a valued voice. That can be the work. It can also not be the work if you're doing that to silence or take up room from trans people.

Courtney Harge:

I think because there is no grade the work actually is never done, there's no moment where you turn in. It's like say I literally did the work and here's your response because that doesn't happen. You have to, in essence, question and consider everything you're choosing to do. Some things you're just doing because you feel like doing them and some things you're doing because you think, again, it's going to get us to what I would hope is a better more equitable place, but there is no ... I don't think there is one right answer. I think there has to be an alignment of how you are moving the needle and why you are choosing this tactic to do so.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean, you raise the issue of safety, and as a person who is on the record in several instances saying that protesting is not my ministry, being out in the streets with large crowds is just ... that's not the way I'm going to get saved. I've got this whole point, which is with all this work that I feel like I'm doing is the work, is there an element of because I'm not often risking my physical safety, does that mean I'm not doing the work? Is that a metric that we should measure by because people talk about it that way?

Nina Berman:

I think that in some ways, that talk, for me it really privileges ... It privileges able-bodiedness for one thing, and it privileges also a real kind of machismo, in my opinion. The like, I'm going to be at the front lines, this real soldieriness. I think it's important to consider that there is really important and powerful work that doesn't happen at the barricades or something like that. But on the other hand, I feel like sometimes people do let themselves maybe off the hook in some way where people are like, "Well, I have posted on Instagram and I have purchased a memoir. I have now completed my anti-racism work of the day. Back to the rest of my life." I think there has to be a balance, that when we consider what counts as "real work," how does that end up reifying norms about what is brave, what is important, what is good? But how do we also still push ourselves to engage in meaningful and real ways?

Courtney Harge:

I also want to add that. I think there are multiple ways to do the work. This is a war on many fronts, and so doing the work is like are you in a room and is a racism happening in that room and are you interrupting it? That can be it. But yes, protests are helpful and valuable, but you can also ... You can be in a meeting and somebody said a thing and interrupting whatever that is is also part of doing the work. I think where you show up and actively interrupt the systems of oppression in a variety of ways is also doing the work, but do have to be accountable for it. There is no one way to do the work. There is definitely a serious way to not do the work, which is to not interrupt the systems when you see them. But yeah, Ruffin is somebody who ... I love crowds, but I can't. All of the energy in a protest actually makes me ineffective. I go and would just receive the intensity of the moment and not actually be able to interrupt or engage thoughtfully.

Courtney Harge:

I also don't protest because I can't be effective there. But there are many places where I can be effective in interrupting the status quo, and so I try to make it a point to, if I'm in that room and I see a thing or I'm experiencing something or even if just asking the question to interrupt what we accept as the system, like that feels just as valid or maybe valid in a different way. But if racism or oppression is happening somewhere and you are interrupting it, you are contributing to doing the work. If you're in a room and no oppressive systems are present, and then you're just performing, that's different. But if racism has made it to any space, if racism can make it to fricking soap dispensers because of light sensors and all of that, then any place you are interrupting, it is valuable.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Until we had this conversation, my personal take on why I didn't protest was almost that it was too easy. There are other skills that ... And that's not to say it's easy for everybody, but for me, where I'm located with my able body privilege and everything else, it's too easy. But the things I can do really think about strategy around legislation, and those things that are probably a better use of my skillset than I think is relatively unique. Then I went down the talented 10th route. Are you being elitist by thinking that's your position? And in the revolution is to write legislation, is that even valuable? I don't know. I mean, that's just the personal struggle.

Nina Berman:

I feel that. In some kinds of organizing spaces when a lot of stuff is happening a Catholic way, I'm like, "Oh, I can help streamline this and I can help give us a structure." Then part of me is like, "Oh, I'm not using my white collar creative class job to import those values into a space. But ultimately I do think that a big part of figuring out what the work is also means figuring out what your skills are, what you're good at.

Tim Cynova:

Much in the same way, if you're trying to achieve massive change any other way, you look to who has what kind of skills, what kind of resources and pull those together in the best configuration to give you the best chance to achieve that. Some of those things are our default, some of those things push us out of our comfort zone, but it's a mix of these things that I think informed the conversation, informed the work and ultimately lead to change and successful change. I want to spend a minute on is reading the work? Because we split, or at least we initially split, in a lot of different ways, and as we see a lot of books about anti-racism that have been back-ordered, people are doing a lot of reading right now, or have been doing a lot of reading during the summer, especially following the murder of George Floyd. Where do you stand on reading as part of the work? Yes, no, maybe, sometimes?

Lauren Ruffin:

So I'll give him my rationale for why right now at this second reading is the work, and it lies at the intersection of my own process of educating myself over the last decade or so, in particular around how the government has treated black and indigenous peoples throughout this history with extreme hostility and persecution. The need for people to read about that, or the fact that it happened, coupled with it's knowledge that you're not going to get in 99.9% of curricula at any educational level. So the City of Chicago recently started a police brutality curriculum because of the torture case they lost when they have police officers literally torturing people in projects in Chicago. But above and beyond that, we don't have any type of public school curriculum. It's not just the dedicated work of maybe one or two individuals in a school district, probably against the will of many, many more people in a school district.

Lauren Ruffin:

So that's why I think reading about specific points in history is the topic, because my approach to doing the work is so deeply rooted in the education that I've given myself in that space, which is part of why it's so firm and part of why it's so direct and harsh because we've not really framed [inaudible 00:13:14] books as a persecuted minority class, that's happened at the hands of the state. I think that's a really important distinction that I don't know that we talk about enough, and most certainly we get into disagreements with people who don't know that the City of Philadelphia dropped a bomb in a neighborhood, who really don't know about COINTELPRO and how the federal government murdered Fred Hampton in bed next to his pregnant wife. When we go throughout history and think about these things, we don't know that police departments grew out of state patrols 400 years ago. So to me, that's why I think the reading is the work because I don't know if we can have a conversation without people understanding that.

Courtney Harge:

I think the reading is the beginning of the work. What I get frustrated about with that, because one, I agree that reading in that path for education is helpful, at least a foundation for understanding. I find an inherent anti-blackness in having to read it to understand it. The lack of empathy frustrates me. When I both logically get that reading is fine, but there are some things that people are just telling you. We are saying this is what's happening, this is a pattern of persecution by the state, this is not the first time, and to look people in the face, to watch these videos of harm being enacted on black people over and over again, and we're like, "This is the status quo, this is not new, and this is what we need to address," and to hear, "Yeah, but is it ... Did somebody else write about it? Did somebody I respect wrote about it? Did they use the language that makes me feel comfortable to understand it?"

Courtney Harge:

I get frustrated, is the only word I can think about, to really cover that because it's like I still feel an essence of debate for my humanity. I could be in tears in front of you saying, "This is my reality," and you're like, "That's super cool, but where's my book club? So that me and my friends can discuss your pain with a glass of Chardonnay while a woman of color is probably watching my children." I get that whole process irks me in a deep spiritual place.

Lauren Ruffin:

Exactly, Courtney. I can't agree with you more which is why I'm at the point, for the last three years, when I'm about to talk to a white person about this, I say, "What have you read?" Because I'm not doing that shit anymore.

Courtney Harge:

Word.

Lauren Ruffin:

I agree 100%, and if we can't agree on what happened ... And to a certain extent, that's me having to do ... Again, that's back to my own education. There's a lot of shit that I didn't know about. It was never that I thought it wasn't happening because I grew up in a black family who grew up in the hood, from the hood of Baltimore. So I know about police brutality. I know how we've been tracked and how we've been treated. I just needed a litmus test because I wasn't going to engage in those conversations anymore because I get angry and I got a little bit of a ... When I get angry, it's hard talking me down. We don't even talk so much.

Courtney Harge:

Fully relate. I used to joke the way my mouth is set up, I would say a thing and then we'd get there, and the way my mouth is set up, it's not going to end up well, so let's ... We're going to go back to the space where it doesn't trigger that. Yes.

Nina Berman:

I think that this question of is reading the work, I originally was really firm on the side of reading is not the work, because I think that it is so often considered to be like an end in itself, you check it off your list. You order the book, you order it from an independent bookshop, from black-owned bookshop, and then you're like, "Great. I did it," and then according to your point, you discuss it and have a glass of Chardonnay. But if the reading is ... if you're reading as part of your political education, as part of what will truly shape you and shake you and change the way you move in the world, if it has material consequences for how you think, how you work, how you engage with other people, then maybe I'm softening a little bit because often you're absolutely right.

Nina Berman:

We are not taught these histories at all. I was taught that the Civil War was about states' rights and the North was way better [inaudible 00:17:18] like, boy howdy, not true on both counts. So being able to learn more and read more and listen more has been really crucial. But I guess I just don't want to give people too easy an out. If people are going to read books and really let them shake them, then good. But if you're just going to read and be like, "Huh, interesting," then I'm not into it.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's a good point because I'm over-educated. We have a country that has for generations been actively miseducated, and so we've got to spend some time ... Eight-hour diversity training's not going to fix that. The building's on fire. So some people got to read a book, some people ... There's a lot of strategies, and I don't know. For me and where I am in my engagement, you got to read something.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Well, let's flip right there because you brought up the eight-hour training. So are eight-hour trainings the work?

Lauren Ruffin:

At the outset, we say let's not put any of our friends out of business. Right?

Courtney Harge:

Right. Word.

Lauren Ruffin:

Let's just be mindful.

Tim Cynova:

That's right. That was the last time they had a podcast.

Lauren Ruffin:

I mean there are other people who are actively trying to preference out of business, like the government, but ...

Courtney Harge:

One, I'm going to say, yes, they are the work with the caveat that I don't think anything is unequivocally the work. I think it is the collection of behaviors with an aligned how and why. My yeses are mostly yeses. Even my nos might just be mostly nos. So I think diversity trainings, these eight-hour trainings, are the work for a few reasons. One, I think the shared conversation, the shared experience of people who have to work in a place, being able to have this conversations. I will say this, even if the trainings aren't the best, are valuable experiences. In discussing these dynamics, you frequently also get to see the dynamics play out in real time because you're dealing with what is very difficult for a lot of people to be able to engage with. A lot of the power dynamics and a lot of the microaggressions and a lot of the stuff shows up in those spaces in ways that can be named as they are happening frequently.

Courtney Harge:

Two, I think the shared experience of being able to normalize around language about what we mean when we say this, whatever this is, racism, oppression, just creating some shared definitions in space, create value for conversations, posts those trainings. Third, I think that these create a space for questions where things frequently have been resting on people's spirit, and there has not been a space to really say them, and so being able to pull them into this shared experience frequently creates value. I think those three things are true, regardless of the quality of the trainers, I've been in a few, I've facilitated some, I believe in the power of the work. But I think having the space to ask questions, having the shared experience for definitions and getting to watch some of these dynamics play out in real time in ways that allow people to name them creates value inherently, which is why I do think they are the work.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean, I land on the side of they are the work primarily because I haven't ever been to one where I haven't learned something, and that goes back to the value that I place on learning, whether it's a new framework or an approach, or just an actual nugget of this is something that happened. I do worry because white supremacy demands that we come away from things with a checklist or a clear pathway. I don't know if any sector I've worked in has a conversation about this is one framework and then there's another framework, and then there's you can pull in stuff from ...

Lauren Ruffin:

In the art sector, we spend a lot of time thinking about arts civic diversity and equity training, which is often rooted in live performance in large institutions, the impressive damage they've done, and then with some folks like Equity Quotient and Keryl McCord focusing on the narratives, like the responsibility of graders to have focus on first voice in narratives. But I often think we walk away feeling like this is the way in the light. It's one option. I've been thinking a lot about how do we get people a smorgasbord of options with approach that you can pick and choose to find your own way forward. That might look a lot different than someone else's way forward.

Nina Berman:

I've never actually been a part of any of these workshops, maybe telling about my employment history or something or places I've worked. But I wonder any time you're bringing people together for a very intense and time-limited experience where people might engage really intensely with one another with themselves, and then you go out and you feel transformed, but then without anywhere for that to go, I worry that you end up just feeling like good about yourself for having sat through the workshop. But I also wonder if being in that space, it creates those grooves for those questions, those thoughts, those frameworks to sit so that the next time it gets brought up, that groove is easier to find a again, so that you're not completely reinventing the wheel. I guess I think that this ... I mean, this is a big question. Is there a limit to the amount of anti-racism work that you can do in a workplace when you're always and much more explicitly engaged in the framework of capitalism, which is built on the exploitation of black indigenous people? Is that a ceiling for us?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Well, we talked about that at our board retreat last year. Tim, I don't know if you remember that. We were doing the latter with Carol and it became pretty clear that just by nature of the work we're doing in financial systems, that we're probably never going to get to that, I think it was a level six, or whatever it was, and we were always going to be a little bit short because we do participate so heavily in the capitalistic financial system. To me, the question remains, we've not moved the needle on this, but what can we do in our role to impact that system?

Tim Cynova:

Well, yeah, Lauren, I think your point about financial systems and oftentimes doing the work on covering instances that are stumbling blocks, but maybe really baked into how the organization works and operates allows you to start to identify or talk about how you can untangle those things or what you could do about it. A lot of our colleagues in the foundation sector right now are talking about where their portfolios are invested, and are they invested in ways that are maybe actively working against multiple times over the work that they're trying to do by funding through program initiatives as organizations look at who manages their financials. Are you working with organizations who might have different values than you do and value other things?

Tim Cynova:

I guess spoiler alert, way after the fact, I view trainings as part of the work, within mind, to what end and where's intentionality. I also view reading as the work, especially I think reading as the work for white cisgender men. That is something that, because I view this as both personal and professional journey, I think that has to be part of it, especially in order to not further oppress, further burden people who are not white cisgendered, heterosexual men, that's part of the work. When you hear something, you have to go look it up, you have to read about it, learn about it so that you understand the context in which, particularly if you're leading an organization in the space that that organization works and operates how you understand what policies and procedures, what kind of effect they have on the team, and ultimately how you can be a part of co-creating that next thing, while understanding all the different dynamics at play.

Tim Cynova:

That's why it's a lifelong journey because white guys have a lot of time ... We have a lot to make up here. That's why I consider that part of the work, whether you drink Chardonnay while you're reading or not, but it's to what end and the intentionality that goes into that I think for me is foundational to be able to do everything else, to be able to pull apart an organization, look at all of the different component parts and then rebuild the hiring process and look at all of your different policies and how people work, which I think is more ... that is the work and I think the more impactful work. But I would say early on, trainings, reading, I would consider that part of the work as well.

Courtney Harge:

I also want to offer that ... I think that's a great question. I also think it is not quite the right question, and I say that because I frequently see people addressing anti-racism anti-oppression work and they're looking for the ... they're getting ahead of themselves, in that the systems ... Yes, if any industry hit a wall and the wall is probably capitalism and or American imperialism and or a few other things, there will be a limit. We have so much work to do before that wall. Don't even worry about it right now, and I say that because ... Be aware that it's there, but I have seen organizations be like, "Because we are still embedded in financial systems, we won't even ever be able to do it. So I'm going to not do the things that I can do."

Courtney Harge:

Part of the way the system works, the system builds things that make it convenient to continue to feed it, and if you start interrupting the things that feed it, if you make harder and harder to rely on the system to get to the ends that you want, then we can start addressing the system. COVID and the kind of subsequent fall of American democracy that we're witnessing as a result, all of a sudden, all of the things that fed the system are actually taking so much more energy and effort to maintain right now. It's still there, but people not working, all of a sudden they don't have the money to feed the thing, and all of a sudden the beast has to break so many other pieces to get fed that people are starting to question capitalism casually. But that is because the things that feed it, all of a sudden those systems, those chutes and ladders, aren't operating with the same efficiency they were operating before.

Courtney Harge:

So I agree that, yes, in any system, because all the things we have are built on, again, capitalism and American imperialism, all the fun things, everything is built to serve that, we have to start creating ways that interrupt in the levels and under our purviews that we can manage, that will interrupt it and make feeding the system as it stands, both inconvenient and inefficient, which will then prompt people to start adjusting the system or start questioning and interrupting the bigger broader system as it works.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's so spot on, Courtney. As you were talking and Tim was talking, I kept thinking power. Man, Tim and I spend a fair amount of time and need to spend more time interrogating how do we begin to see power throughout the organization? What does that look like? Because I think for me personally, anyway, when we leave Fractured Atlas at whatever point that might be, and we've not done anything to really rethink the hierarchy, which probably isn't necessary. It just is. Perhaps to me, the highest part of the work is when people start thinking about succession planning with urgency and how do we really begin to see power to black and brown people to run these organizations and to hold onto the power that's really been accumulated throughout the arts sector by white people in particular.

Tim Cynova:

Lauren, you're pushing down the work to what I believe is the work. How does this show up in organizations? Courtney, you're one of our rare return guests to the Work Shouldn't Suck Podcast. You previously joined us for episode four. This is episode 41. So somehow that happened. In that episode, you and our coworker, Nicola Carpenter were discussing a bit about the Fractured Atlas' journey and anti-racism, and more recently we were chatting about the work and things that organizations can do. You offered a helpful distinction for people to keep in mind that I found really useful. You said, "I think people confuse tangible with impactful, and impactful with visible. Adding pronouns to emails' signatures is tangible. Adding gender discrimination is impactful. Increasing in gender diversity at an organization is visible." First, thank you for articulating it that way, and secondly, what else do you have to offer about this distinction that you put forward?

Courtney Harge:

Well, thank you for reading it because I definitely forgot exactly how I made those distinctions together. So I'll support that. For it is people confuse what they want to happen, and those distinctions are important to me because a lot of times, particularly people who have not been marginalized and so this can be white people, this can be CIS people, this can be straight people, this can be able-bodied people, they tend to want visibility. They're like, "See, I did X and you can see the results." Frequently, marginalized people are asking for either tangible or impactful before visible. Visible is helpful, and so it feels that there are moments where you get into these conversations where somebody is like, "What can I do?" And it's like, "Well, what you can do in fact is talk to your racist uncle who may or may not be [inaudible 00:30:24] in charge of a school board and tell him to not be racist and create those policies." And be like, "Fix. You can have that. Maybe you can have that conversation."

Courtney Harge:

They're like, "Yeah, but what else?" It's yeah but what else, is almost always the things like you don't like the thing I told you because nobody's going to see it, nobody's going to know it, nobody's going to ... There's not going to be no plaque, no award, no ticker tape parade. It's like, these are things that would be impactful. Ending gender discrimination would be impactful, and there are many ways where you could just not. You could just not discriminate based on gender. That is actually surprisingly easy, in quotes, to do. But instead, we get the diversity stats of this is the number of women on staff and these are the number of women in these leadership positions or these are the number of gender nonconforming folks in these spaces. It's like, okay, that's visible, but one are those folks in fact agents of gender discrimination? Because women are in fact some of the biggest agents of the patriarchy. We can talk about that, but that's visible.

Courtney Harge:

You've put all these people here. It's like, "What is actually happening? What is the impact of what they're doing?" For me, those distinctions are like ... there's some stuff you can do that's just ... you can just make a change right now. Changing your email signature almost never really requires permission. You can just do it. That is a tangible thing that can make people feel safer and being able to converse and share their pronouns with you. Ending gender discrimination would be the most impactful if you could just stop doing that. People don't. But then again, people tend to go toward the visible. What is the thing that I can see? That is, again, as I said, a lot frustrating to encounter, but also I think people should be really honest with what they want to do. Do you want something that is visible because you need to feel better, because you need to be absolved?

Courtney Harge:

Because that's not fine, but that is real. I can engage with you. I can engage with you there. Somebody who started a theater company based on telling the stories of black women, I used to jokingly say I'm happy to take somebody's white guilt dollars. If you need to be visible, if that makes you feel better, because I know I'm actually going to do the work with it. I'm going to tell the stories, I'm going to empower people of color, I'm going to do some really impactful things, if you want to be visible and write me a big check because that makes you feel better, no, I don't think it's the work, but I will take that dollar. I will take the money. I will do that. But let's be honest with what you want, what you want is to be seen being helpful because the ways you can be seen being helpful can often be very different from the way that you are actually helpful.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean, I feel like whenever people are like what can I do question, I want to be like, "You're not going to be happy unless I tell you to recreate Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech on the National Mall. Well, that's what you want me to say, but you can't do that. So [inaudible 00:33:13] you can't figure out the steps that it took to get there because all you see is the radical individual heroism that you think was that Civil Rights Movement at that particular time when it wasn't. It was actually thousands of primarily brown women doing things like handwriting flyers and cooking food and making sure people were taken care of during the movement that made that possible. But you want to jump right to the National Mall.

Tim Cynova:

Our conversations, there's always more to talk about than we have time, and this is no exception to that as we're starting to come up on time here. Let's start to land the plane by going with our closing thoughts on the topic for now. Nina, since you prompted us to have the conversation, maybe let's start with you.

Nina Berman:

All right. I think for me, I'm much less settled at the end of these few conversations we've had that I was when I came in and I think that's a good thing. I think broadly, one of the things that I'm taking away is when we're talking about terms like the work or other things that feel vague and important, we need to talk about what those words mean. I think that helps us become more clear about the features that we want to build with each other and where we see our roles in that building. I think for me, I'm thinking a lot about Courtney's suggestion that intent has a lot to do with whether or not something is the work.

Nina Berman:

Are you doing it for absolution? Are you doing it to tick a box? Are you doing it because you know that this is for a better future? I'm softening on whether or not reading is the work. So I'm grateful. I'm grateful for this conversation. But I think for me, it's more continuing to really ask what do we mean when we say whatever it is we're saying, and that you're not going to end up with something ... you're not going to end up necessarily with a really neat soundbite.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean, language matters, for sure. The two words that always tie me up are, the two phrases are the work and the journey, or our journey. But no, and then power. We never seem to spend enough time on power in our conversations, and you and I actually ended up talking about power in a number of different ways in our conversations, Tim. So I always walk away thinking, what can we be doing, and how quickly can we do it to the see power throughout every community that we're in, including the Fractured Atlas community. That's where I'm at. Courtney, your turn.

Courtney Harge:

My final thoughts around this are it is a marathon. I don't want to say never, but we may not see whatever the end of this process is because, well, the opposition has a 400 year headstart, and so we're catching up even if we're all throwing everything at it. At the risk of sounding like I'm letting people off the hook, it is important to take care of yourself. But as people, it's almost like exercise, and I say this is not necessarily an exercise fanatic, but everybody talks about the January, the New Year's resolution, gym time, where he's like can't get in there, and people ... everybody is running the gym in January because they are so excited and like, "I'm going to do this," and they can injure themselves or they can not do things that take care of themselves and end up burning out and they disappear.

Courtney Harge:

So the gym is a very different place in January than it is from May. Fighting racism is like that. A bunch of people get really into I'm going to read everything and I'm going to do all of this work, and then three weeks later, or in this case, if you look at the difference between July and now and October, people disappear, they peter out. They're like, "It's too hard. I don't understand it. I can't." They just disappear, and it's like, you have to take care of yourself as you are doing this challenging necessary work. It is critical to our collective survival that we fix this. Knowing that this marathon means that you're going to have to take breaks, you can't actually fight it at every front all day. Being real with yourself, that maybe today I did not do what I needed to do, maybe today I did not do the work but I'm going to re-engage tomorrow is enough because it is continuous, it is everywhere, and we can make significant change, we just have to be willing to keep going.

Tim Cynova:

On that note, always amazing to be with each of you. Such a packed episode of information. For those of you who want to learn more about the things we've been discussing, Workshouldntsuck.co has a wealth of information and resources. Terrific insights, Courtney and Nina. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and for being on the show.

Courtney Harge:

Thank you for having us.

Nina Berman:

Yeah, this is great.

Tim Cynova:

And Lauren, always a pleasure, my friend.

Lauren Ruffin:

Hey, always. Can't wait to do it again.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation, or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fund 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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Guest User 7/3/20 Guest User 7/3/20

Live with Ashara Ekundayo, Esteban Kelly & Syrus Marcus Ware! (EP.40)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Ashara Ekundayo, Esteban Kelly & Syrus Marcus Ware. [Live show recorded: June 8, 2020.]

Last Updated

July 1, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Ashara Ekundayo, Esteban Kelly & Syrus Marcus Ware. [Live show recorded: June 8, 2020.]

Guests: Ashara Ekundayo, Esteban Kelly & Syrus Marcus Ware

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guests

ASHARA EKUNDAYO is a Detroit-born independent curator, creative industries entrepreneur, cultural strategist, and founder working across arts, community, government, and social innovation spaces. Through her consulting company AECreative Consulting Partners, LLC she designs and manages multidimensional international projects and fosters collaborative relationships through the use of mindfulness and permaculture principles to bring vision to life and create opportunities “in the deep end,” often with unlikely allies. Her creative arts practice epistemology requires an embodied commitment to recognizing joy in the midst of struggle. // In 2012 Ashara co-founded Impact Hub Oakland and Omi Arts and served as the Co-Director, Curator, and the Chief Creative Officer who designed and bottom-lined the brand messaging and creative practice programming of the entire company. In December 2017, she launched Ashara Ekundayo Gallery as a pilot-project social practice platform centering and exclusively exhibiting the artwork of Black womxn and women of the African Diaspora to investigate and inspire social and spiritual inquiry at the nexus of fact, the Black feminist imaginary, and Afrofuturism through visual and performance installation. // She currently holds Advisory Board positions with VSCO.co, Black Girls Code and the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, and has served as a Fellow with the U.S. Dept. of State Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs, Green For All, Emerging Arts Professionals, Schools Without Borders, and Institute For The Future. Ashara is also a Certified Permaculture Designer, Certified Foresight Practitioner, and a Graduate of Thousand Currents Leadership Academy and Rockwood Leadership – LeadNOW: California. Additionally, she holds an “Embodied Justice” Residency at Auburn Seminary in NYC, and an M.A. in Gender & Social Change from the Korbel School of International Affairs at the University of Denver. // Ashara’s commitment to social transformation is informed by an intersectional framework that aims to expand the influence and impact of arts and culture on racial equity, gender + justice, and environmental literacy. She is a womanist, a meditator, a mentor, and the mother of two sons and three granddaughters. T/IG @blublakwomyn

ESTEBAN KELLY is a visionary leader and compassionate strategist who inspires organizers by drawing on science fiction, social theory, and collective liberation. Uniting close friends and long-time co-organizers, Esteban was inspired to co-create AORTA culling together his creative energy and organizational skills for expanding food sovereignty, solidarity economy & cooperative business, gender justice & queer liberation, and movements for racial justice. // Esteban’s work is vast. In addition to working for AORTA, he is the Co-Executive Director for the US Federation of Worker Co-ops (USFWC), and a co-founder and current board President of the cross-sector Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance (PACA). // Internationally, Esteban has advocated for workplace democracy through the ICA (International Cooperative Alliance) and CICOPA (the international worker co-op federation), and for land reform and other social movements from Canada to Brazil. // After many years as a PhD student of Marxist Geographers at the CUNY Graduate Center, Esteban has left academia with a Masters in Anthropology. Most recently, Esteban worked as Development Director and then Staff Director for the New Economy Coalition. From 2009-2011, Esteban served as Vice President of the USFWC, and a board member of the Democracy At Work Institute (DAWI) and the US Solidarity Economy Network. He is also a previous Director of Education & Training and Board President of NASCO (North American Students for Cooperation) where he was inducted into their Cooperative Hall of Fame in 2011. He currently serves on the boards of the Cooperative Development Foundation (CDF) and the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA–CLUSA), and is an advisor to the network of artist-activist trainers, Beautiful Trouble. // Firmly rooted in West Philly, Esteban’s skills and analysis of transformative justice stem from his decade-plus of organizing with the Philly Stands Up collective. Similarly, Esteban worked through a major food co-op transition as a worker–owner at Mariposa Food Co-op, where he co-founded its Food Justice & Anti-Racism working group (FJAR) and labored to institutionalize the Mariposa Staff Collective. In light of these efforts, Esteban became a Mayoral appointee to the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council (FPAC), and works to advance education, systemic thinking, and anti-oppression organizing into all of his food advocacy work. // You can contact Esteban at: esteban(at)aorta(dot)coop and follow him on Twitter: @estebantitos

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to part two of our special two part series of Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by Ashara Ekundayo, Esteban Kelly, and Syrus Marcus Ware. Let's waste no time getting into the conversation. Ashara, Esteban, and Syrus, welcome to the show. Morning.

Lauren Ruffin:

It's good to see all of your faces. I'm going to kick it off with the question we've been asking people just to check in, which is, how are you doing right now? We've got a pandemic happening, in addition to, it's not even a resurgence because the movement for Black lives never went away, however we've been thrust back into the forefront. Really curious just to check in and see, how are y'all doing? Whoever wants to go first. It's hard to navigate on the screen.

Ashara Ekundayo:

I'll go first. My name is Ashara Ekundayo, and I'm really clear that it is morning, it's heck of early for me, how am I? I'm living right now, on the land called Oakland, California, which is the unceded land of the [inaudible 00:01:12] Nation, here in Northern California. We've been in the streets all weekend. When I think about how am I, I'm rejuvenated, and exhausted, and still angry. I'm still mad about the level of injustice that we're taking in right now, and consuming. But so inspired, by the artists and the creativity, and the brilliance of Black people right now. [crosstalk 00:01:38]

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay, good [inaudible 00:01:39], thanks.

Esteban Kelly:

So yeah, I'm Esteban and I'm based in Philadelphia on the Lenape people's land, and I feel I've been yo-yo-ing a lot the last week, not even [inaudible 00:01:54], within a given day, but really just at any point I can go from feeling really hopeful and inspired, and called to action, or to believe in a possibility that things can really change. And other moments, really sitting with grief for exactly those reasons that you were starting to say, that there's this layering of all the different things that we're living through.

Esteban Kelly:

It's not coincidental. Some of those conditions are agitating and exasperating, or heightening the intensity of some of the other ones, particularly as experienced by Black people. Not just in Philadelphia, or in the US, but around the world. I think where I land is, I think today I feel pretty good, I'm feeling very connected to my people all over the world, by which I mean my very close friends who happen to be a mini diaspora themselves, but also to Black people all over the world, and to that I aspire.

Esteban Kelly:

Just seeing, as far away as New Zealand, and in Bristol, and in Berlin, just all over, [inaudible 00:02:57] where part of my diaspora community is of friends. Just seeing how many people are leaning into this question of what it means to love Black people, and to show up for us, and to reckon with the conditions of how we're treated, not just voyeuristically, in Minneapolis, but Black people are everywhere, and we are suffering in similar ways all over the world.

Esteban Kelly:

I'm just sitting with all that.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Hey everybody, I'm Syrus Marcus Ware, I am... How am I? I'm exhausted. I'm overjoyed by this moment of activism because I feel like activism is life giving, and quite joyful even when we're in the streets, even when we're raging, even when we're sobbing, the act of activism can be very life giving for me. On the one hand, I feel exhausted because as an organizer with Black Lives Matter Toronto, it's been non-stop. But on the other hand, it's when we come to the streets, when we resist from our homes, when we say, "Enough is enough." When we say that Black Lives Matter, when we do this organizing and fighting, it's a beautiful, beautiful, magical thing, and to have human beings coming together and screaming in unison a chorus of voices standing up for Black lives. That's a beautiful thing.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I'm feeling tired, but energized from this moment. I also have been involved in a lot of direct action, and there's more to come. There was a police killing here in Toronto that we've been organizing around. These are heartbreaking times too, but also my heart is so full of listening to family members, listening to people tell stories about the anti-Blackness they experienced in their day to day life. We've heard a lot of that over the last week, and it's heartbreaking. It's so much to hold all of that.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I'm just sitting here with a lot of complex emotions, but in general, I'm energized by this conversation being such a public one, and I'm energized by the fact that the conversation has shifted from bandaid reform to all out revolution. I'm here for it.

Lauren Ruffin:

Awesome. All three of you hinted, and I should say y'all are our first triad of guests, so moderating is a little different. You hinted at doing different work, or your work has shifted a little bit during this time, can you tell us a little bit, just basically about what you're doing right now, and where your focus is. And a background bio if you're interested in doing so. Again, whoever wants to go first can. I feel like y'all are staring each other down. [crosstalk 00:05:26]

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I think we're just kind of in awe of each other. I'm like, "Wow."

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm just so excited for y'all to hear this bit, and then really spend time together and fellowship a little bit.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I can start, I just was speaking, I might as well just keep going. I'll say, I'm an artist and an activist, and an organizer. Oh my Gosh, I'm blanking on the question. I just totally lost it.

Lauren Ruffin:

You started, it was an I am, where do you work, what are you thinking on how you shifted your [inaudible 00:05:56], if it shifted at all.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Yeah, I'm an artist, and an activist, and an organizer, I'm also just finishing a PhD specifically in prison abolition, and disability justice. My work shifted from everyday making art, working on my PhD a little bit, and doing some activism, to being full on 24/7, all hours of the day, responding to media requests, responding to the needs of the moment, supporting family members. It's just shifted dramatically, and that's what happens when these things ramp up, is that suddenly the demands become around the clock, and there's just so much.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

So, right now my work day shifted from being sort of a pandemic-ish 11 to 7, to now being 24/7. That's what I've been working on a lot, we're very involved in this conversation around defunding the police, and prison abolition, and trying to make justice for Black people by finally ending this system of police violence control, that extends from slave labor camps. We've been really engaged in this conversation around defunding the police. That's what I'm spending a lot of my day, that's my work right now.

Ashara Ekundayo:

I just said that, because I'm feeling all that and I'm really thinking about what it means to be a curator right now. My work is art curation and cultural strategy work and being a body, a person who's in a Black body, in a body that identifies as she, as well as they. My work as generally been about research, documentation, and archiving the stories of Black people through organizing work, art-ivism, if you will, and I would say in this shelter in place, in this time of this COVID pandemic, in this time of this uprising.

Ashara Ekundayo:

First of all, my mind has been blown so quickly into the reality that we are living in the future, that we have been looking forward to, for some of us. Reading about, watching, experiencing through literature, through film, through stories from our grandmothers. All of that spoke to we always thought, "We're not going to see that in our lifetime." And so, I've gone I think, from being someone who is directly organizing exhibition, to someone who has had to expand, and decentralize the so called power inside the, I wouldn't say the mainstream art sector, but inside the independent art sector, to looking at power. And to pulling this thread on a platform that I'm often called artist as first responder.

Ashara Ekundayo:

To see our work, and to know, and to understand that even the people who do not identify as artists, are pulling from their most creative divine self, to do this work. Also, this destination, this designation, this experience, and this platform really pulls the thread on amplifying the light, and the creative labor that has often gone unspoken, unthanked, unnoticed, by putting it right, and centering in the front. Putting it right in the front of our face. That is the artist that shows up first, when there's a catastrophe, a situation, any kind of idea that is operating the way we are right now, in a rupture, there is an absolute shift that has happened, that the artists are the ones who make it right for us, and speak for us, and redesign, and help us reimagine.

Ashara Ekundayo:

What I know is that my work has become pushed into the forefront of documenting and amplifying that work right now.

Lauren Ruffin:

Esteban?

Esteban Kelly:

Yeah, I can pick up from there. One of the things I've been noticing, especially in the last week is how my work and the different organizations, and communities, and the different spaces that I occupy are all starting to come together around this. In so many ways it's a relief to not have to pivot and be like, "Now I'm doing policy work. Now I'm doing transforming justice political education. Now I'm doing work around supporting labor organizers," which I mostly do through cooperatives with the US Federation of Workers Co-ops.

Esteban Kelly:

To see all these efforts coalescing, and it becomes easier to be who I am, and draw upon the stuff that I've been working on for a long time in community. I think that, above all else, is what is animating the moment. It's that, there's all this stuff that we've just been preparing for, but we knew this was coming, we knew the contradictions. It's been really interesting to see people who aren't part of my organizing life, get an opportunity or a window into things, this bread crumb trail that I've been leaving for years, and years, and years. I'm like, "Oh, look at this toolkit around anti Black racism, that my worker cooperative developed three years ago, that was just sitting in the wings." It's been hanging out on our website, some of you are downloading it, but people who are like, "Oh, I didn't even know that you guys created that, and I follow some of what you guys are doing." [inaudible 00:10:59]

Esteban Kelly:

Show and tell, is the book called Beyond Survival that actually just came out earlier this year, the subtitle is, "Strategies and stories from the transformative justice movement." And it goes back to organizing that I started doing 15 years ago, with a group called Philly Stands Up Collective. We have a couple chapters in here, but it's got contributions from this multi racial, mostly queer movement of people who have been experimenting, and testing out what a world looks like without prisons, without policing, because [inaudible 00:11:34] it's not just to insist upon, "Hey, we don't like this whole thing with the criminal legal system."

Esteban Kelly:

Knowing that that's going to hit a wall at some point, that it's going to have a crisis moment, what are the things that we can propose and explore, and say we recommend or test out? This starts to highlight some of those things, it just came out earlier this year. I think in terms of what I'm up to, it is straddling the political education, the resource sharing, be a cheerleader for people who are doing different kinds of organizing, and making sure that they're feeling replenished and encouraged. Especially for Black organizers to share their voice, and to lift up the white people in multi racial movements, who've been instructive, who've actually done their homework, who aren't like, "I got woke because I saw a meme two weeks ago."

Esteban Kelly:

But who actually are there to be a resource so that my phone isn't blowing up, because I've got a frontier to be pushing forward and I'm like, "You know what? Y'all can be connecting with these folks." Kind of making sure we're connecting those dots is an important piece of the organizing.

Lauren Ruffin:

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot, in particular over this weekend, is around just the rapid change in being the only person in rooms talking about, I grew up in a town without police, and people will be like, "What? Huh?" And I'm like, "So everybody should do that," [inaudible 00:12:53] all over the United States where there actually aren't police, where they straight up... you might have on police officer. I think there were, my township had none, the town itself had like two or three, maybe. And now everyone's talking about it, and what I think is so interesting that you all touched on is this is actually work that folks have been doing for so long, and we're at this perfect moment where white people who have never gone out to a protest, are going out to a peaceful protest with their kids, and finding themselves being tear gassed.

Lauren Ruffin:

Which immediately debunks the idea that Black people do something to deserve policing, and then there's this whole, you can immediately quickly plug into Twitter threads, or resources that movement workers have been building up over decades, to academic journals, there's a whole breadth of academic research, and it just seems like this watershed moment in terms of being able to rapidly radicalize a white population. Which is just crazy to me.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Yeah, this is such an interesting time. Similarly, I've been a prison abolitionist for 25 years, I've been literally working on the ground, doing abolition work for 25 years. Now, to see articles in Cosmo about defunding the police, and about prison abolition, I wake up sometimes and I don't quite know what world I've woken up into. Except I know that I think I like it.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Thinking about what it means right now, for this to be the [inaudible 00:14:25], for this to be the push that we've all been talking about. Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about, and Julia [inaudible 00:14:30], so many scholars have talked about how the abolition of the police and prison system is just finishing the work of our ancestors, abolishing slavery. This is just a continuation of that work. Che Gosset made this beautiful Tweet yesterday that said, "Yes, pull down all of the monuments to slavery, starting with police and prisons." Recognize that those are monuments to slavery.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I'm really interested in how this is being taken up. What I think about as an activist, of course, is that we know our messaging can be co-opted. We know our messaging can be watered down. We know our messaging can be shifted. What I don't want to see, is a reduction of the police budget by 10% for example, and then consider it done. That is not what we are fighting for, if we are in the streets right now in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a pandemic, we are going to fight for the entire percent, 100% of that budget.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

We're going to make sure that Black people are able to be in the streets, and be free. When we look at what's happening, Black people, in particular Black mad people, are just not safe in the streets because of policing. This is a system that is not working, it is not keeping our community safer and more secure. It is not creating a sense of justice for a whole bunch of people, it's instead brutalizing particular communities.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

The only way to live on this planet at this moment, with any human dignity at the moment, is to struggle against these systems of violence that are brutalizing Black and indigenous communities in particular ways. I'm here for this conversation, I am here for this moment, and I'm watching and seeing it unfold while also trying to push to make sure that it doesn't get watered down.

Esteban Kelly:

I think one of the dangers that I'm noticing, that I started seeing in real time last week over social media primarily, around that watering down, is around holding up on the one hand, the most extreme manifestation of these systems, that's very visible and that's very front of mind. Attendancy, particularly from white voices, to reduce things and say, "All we're asking for is to just stop murdering Black people."

Esteban Kelly:

Y'all, there's a whole system, there's a whole apparatus behind that, and this is what's happening on camera, of course it's errogenous that they're arresting CNN correspondents on live television for all the suburban moms to see. But that is not all we're asking for. Holding the line, making sure that the very people who are outraged about that, that we're bringing them along. That we're not necessarily alienating them, but that we're continuing to do the political education to say, "No, it's actually not enough to have the police be gentler, or to shrink their budgets a little."

Esteban Kelly:

Their budgets have tripled just in the last decade, so even a reduction of 75% is not adequate. What we need to talk about is the more fundamental structures of what is powering the systems, what are our models of justice? To make sure that every time we're saying, "Actually, it's about abolition," that everyday that gets de centered. It's almost like mindfulness meditation. We're like, "No, this thing," and they're like, "Totally, totally." And then [inaudible 00:17:28] like, "No, no, no. Come back, this thing. This is our intention, please return to it. And here's also why, here's some [inaudible 00:17:35] understand about why more surveillance and body cameras, and larger budgets is not the solution, it is not what's working.

Esteban Kelly:

It's also not about how we shrink an incarceral system, or how we make it friendlier, or gentler, that actually from the roots of the system itself, it is all messed up. In fact, the criminalization of Black bodies has everything to do with our economic system. Black people don't have wealth, don't have means, and this pandemic has only heightened the desperation of that. This can't be reduced to just being about the most egregious thing that you saw that woke you out of your stupor of being comfortable with the white supremacy system, it needs to be about actually reckoning with what is going on with Black people?

Esteban Kelly:

There is not going back to normal, normal was dispossessing Black and Indigenous people for centuries. What we need to do is come out of this reorganizing a lot of things. I'm so here for that journey, I'm not here to help educate white ladies about how to conduct themselves in their non profits.

Ashara Ekundayo:

Say that friend. Say it.

Esteban Kelly:

[crosstalk 00:18:38]

Ashara Ekundayo:

I am so done.

Esteban Kelly:

[inaudible 00:18:42] system. I will have those conversations with white people, totally. I am here for that.

Ashara Ekundayo:

I'm here for you. I'm here for you, I'm here for you. There's a meme going around, defund the police as a strategy, abolish the police is the goal, and fuck the police as an attitude. Okay, I resonate with that. That works for me.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Could you say that again? Could you say that again?

Ashara Ekundayo:

Defund the police as a strategy, abolish the police is the goal, and fuck the police is an attitude, it's thee attitude. That's what we're thinking about, that's what we're moving through, and my comrades in New Zealand, [inaudible 00:19:20] brilliant art-ivist, poet, and author, was on her IG the other day, was talking about the slumber of white folks. Just slumber is not free, it came at the cost of Black lives. That's the truth.

Ashara Ekundayo:

What you're saying is really like, "Okay, y'all got here and now you want us to be embraced," it's like they're going out to some activity, like you said, take your babies to it, let's go and raise our fists. They're not able to really understand the intersectional oppression and systems that are interpersonal, intergenerational, internal, all of these things are at play. It's a trip.

Ashara Ekundayo:

My work is really about bringing back to the center, the lives, the creative labor of Black women, specifically. Who was at the center of queer women? Who is at the center? Who's ideas, and work is fueling this, and continuing to keep us afloat? We're able to be buoyant, and take a rest and come back, because Black women are always working. As they said, "Mama's always on stage," that old Arrested Development joint, and it's on all of the time. There has to be an on read of that, there has to be something in terms of creative labor, and artistic labor that centers our stories, Black people telling our stories.

Ashara Ekundayo:

One of the situations that's unfolded here in the Bay area, maybe some other places as well, is white artists, white creative collectives getting paid money to write Black Lives Matter, to actually put Black bodied art on all of the boarded up windows in downtown Oakland. I see you holding your face, because it's really something to behold. Over the weekend, one of the things that happened is that the strip in downtown Broadway in Oakland became a walking gallery. It's kind of glorious. You see a lot of white artists outside, and you have organizations and artists who went to those organizations and said, "Hey, can I get somebody to do some mural art?" They're putting up flowers, and fairies, and gnomes, and it's like, "No, this is an opportunity, we must center the radical imagination of Black lives right now. You being up here with one brown body, and 22 white folks painting.

Ashara Ekundayo:

There's a sister who has been championing this over the weekend names [Sequoyah 00:21:38] and I'll have to find her Instagram so that we can share it in the chat. Looking at this, it's called Paint the Void, this organization Paint the Void as though there was some void here in the Bay area. There's no void in our communities. Our communities are vibrant and rich in centering our creative labor. This idea, "Let's show this pain over," we just want y'all to stop killing Black people, there is a conversation that has to happen around power and privilege, and fear, and rage, and what that means for all of us who have some modicum of privilege, even being able to sit in front of a screen for an hour and talk about this.

Ashara Ekundayo:

What are we willing to give up? What does that mean to actually decentralize the power, and what does it mean to be in revolution? Not actually white culture, mainstream capitalist extractive culture in the sense of, "Oh, that's the dream," but actually not have that in Black face, but actually have a true evolution. What does that mean for us? Make a plan and lay it bare, because it's been laid bare.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I think all of you are touching on between the watering down, and movements being co-opted, just how easy it is for a general population to drift away from a mission, it's like, "Oh, shiny thing over there," and sometimes the calls coming from inside the house. Can we talk about 8 Can't Wait? Can we explain the problems in that proposal that's being put forth, which is it seems at it's face to not be diametrically opposed to I think, what all of us are aligned with, which is prison abolition and police abolition work.

Esteban Kelly:

Maybe I'll start with just a tiny piece of that which is one, I think that part of what is important about the role of artists, organizers, poets, creative people, is making sure, and it's not your responsibility if you're a creative, do your thing. That's your role as an artist. You're not charged with doing this, but I think what it helps us do, is pop open our capacity to expand and imagine so that when my folks are proposing these mind blowing things, ideas that we can de center white supremacy, that we can live in a world without prisons, that workers can own their own jobs and workplaces, that all different bodies, body types can be liberated, that disability injustice can be at the center of how we reconstruct our society.

Esteban Kelly:

That all has a place to land, that it's like tilling the soil so that when those seeds sprinkle in and land, all we're waiting for is that nice little rain to come in, and be the thing to help to catalyze the growth of those seeds. Artists help to make that case, including within our own communities. Including for Black people who have internalized, as a survival strategy, there's no way to get through your day to day without being like, "What are my strategies to just get through, and to get by?"

Esteban Kelly:

Some of that needs to be having some sort of faith in the education system as it is, in our public spaces as they are, and all the different forms of, at least in the US, a lot of elective Democratic officials, under who's watched this is all happening, this is happening in places like Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, so don't try to turn this into a Trump thing or a red state thing. All of those things need to be taken into consideration when we're strategizing not just about who we're calling in in a multi racial movement, but how internal to ourselves? We have to do this work for each other even within movements. That's what accountability is, is being accountable to our ancestors, and finishing that work as you were saying, that Dr. Gilmore pushes us in some of the most, I think, powerful ways.

Esteban Kelly:

To insist upon, we're not just saying, "A world without prisons because of minor drug offenses," and blah, blah, blah. Ruth Wilson Gilmore insists upon us saying that we got to start with rapists and murderers and think about, "What are our strategies for solving those problems around domestic violence?" A lot of my work in this area comes from working with sexual assault situations within my community, without in any way, relying on police and systems. Kind of experimenting with community accountability.

Esteban Kelly:

I think that's part of what artists are able to do, is to keep us open to that world of possibilities, and I think we then train that on these moments where some reformance moves start to come, because of course they're going to come. Someone always wants to say what is quick and easy. When you have mass global mobilization, we're all conditioned to have something that's cathartic. Something that feels good, that feels like a win.

Esteban Kelly:

I think that's an important lesson to our movements. Are we setting people up to feel disappointed because the thing that we're telling everyone we're fighting for, is so unattainable, and therefore everyone is right to be scooped into, "Hey, we painted Black Lives Matter on the street, so we're all good now." Actually training people, whether it's Instagram influencers, or well meaning multi racial people, training them that we need to listen to the right voices. That we can't be tokenizing just any Black people. We can't be tokenizing any political platform that seems like it's achievable in a win therefore, but that we actually need to...

Esteban Kelly:

In fact, this past weekend, the statement that I made on Instagram, that I think was reposted the most, especially by white people, was one where I was saying, "Listen, you're not going to know, something is going to feel cathartic in your body, and you're going to be like, 'Great, this thing feels great. I see a cop kneeling,' or whatever." You're not going to know what Black liberation looks like, so just trust. Retrain yourself to start listening to us, and not in a tokenizing way, start listening to movement leaders, who've been doing this work and this organizing for decades.

Esteban Kelly:

We will tell you. Trust that we will tell you. We will tell you when things are helpful and are winning. What's happening in Minneapolis with their city council saying, "Actually, we've done a full hard look at re accessing law [inaudible 00:27:33], 8 Can't Wait style policies," and we're like, "No. The only way to actually do business is to defund the police." That is really helpful and important.

Esteban Kelly:

When we look at cities that have three out of four, six out of eight of those platforms that have been put forward from 8 Can't Wait campaign, and still extreme police brutality and impunity from police unions especially, allows for the murder and the violation of the rights, and the bodies of Black people in those communities, than we know that that's not what's going to get us free. That it needs to be something that is more fundamental.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I'm so picking up on what you're putting down, I've been really moved by that Tony [inaudible 00:28:10] quote that the role of the artists from a repressed community is to make revolution irresistible. To literally make revolution irresistible. I'm an artist, and that's been my driving goal is, "How do we use our creative practice to make revolution irresistible?" I think that's what we're seeing, we're seeing creative activism right now that are helping us.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I think as you say, it helps to break down a very complex idea, into a digestible format, because people are able to take it in in a different way through an artistic media. I'm very, very interested in that, and that action of making revolution irresistible. I think right now what we're seeing, we need to take leadership, just turn to any of the incredible Black artists who are making... when we think of the work of Emery Douglas, and what he was doing for the Black Panther party, as a revolutionary artist for the movement, he was putting out work weekly, daily, posting it in the streets, trying to address the social issues that were happening to people in their communities.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

I think we're seeing artists doing that now. Creating a massive amount of things, even, yes, painting on the streets as a creative activism. It's a way of sharing a message in a way, rather than giving a lecture, or hosting another webinar, it's a direct way to do it. I'm very, very interested in the activism arts that's coming out of this movement, and this movement.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

When we think about abolition, I think it's so important to recognize, yes, I think you touched on that, there are literally ancestors, generations that have been working towards abolition. We need not reinvent the wheel, we don't need white people to co-opt this, and say, "Here's what we need to do." We've already laid the foundations, turn to the amazing and incredible work, of again, Dr. Gilmore, [inaudible 00:29:54] The amazing work of Vivian Salama, and Giselle Diaz coming out of Canada. There's incredible writing and art, and music and stuff about abolition that we can turn to right now.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Artists have been monumental and influential in shaping this movement for decades. We need just to turn to them and say, "Hey, how do we amplify your message right now?

Ashara Ekundayo:

That's right, listen to artists. There isn't any movement on the planet that hasn't been led, and fueled by artists. There's always going to be a chant, a song, a movement piece, there's going to be a poem that empowers this move. It's how we remember ourselves, our humanity starts in that place. We all come out as artists, and [inaudible 00:30:35] all who can feel a genuine dance to it before they can walk. Any child who can make sound, will sing before they can form sentences, and speak, and communicate. We all come out this way.

Ashara Ekundayo:

This whole idea that, "Let's be artistic and cool. Let's all learn how to make murals, and do art." That's good, and there's actually strategy behind that, there's actually process behind that. It's not like, "Oh, I'm feeling really angry, I'm going to go paint up the wall, tag the wall," there is actual strategy to graffiti art. As you say, I'm picking up what you're putting down, and appreciating that, and calling the names, organizers, Dr.Gilmore, Dr. [Opara 00:31:18], folks here in the Bay area. Shout out to [inaudible 00:31:21] who provost here at Mills College in East Oakland.

Ashara Ekundayo:

But also shout out to the revolutionary artists, you mentioned our beloved baba, Emery Douglas, but also Joan Tarika Lewis who was the first artist of the Black Panther party, a Black woman who's work was not co-opted and not amplified in the way in which Emery's work was. But that she is still alive, and living, and is also a musician who put down her instrument, and picked up a pen, and picked up a paintbrush, and picked up desk work, and then put it back down so she could be on the front lines of the revolution with the other women who were leading the Black Panther party, and this legacy that we have that they laid out for us of love, of radical revolutionary love, and how to take care of each other. How to take care of ourselves, throughout the communities, throughout the United States, and throughout the world.

Ashara Ekundayo:

Those models are what we're picking up right now. Just want to honor her work, and honor the work, see Black women, protect Black women, trust Black women, hear Black women, and pay Black women. I don't want us to lose this opportunity to really center the economic implications of being a cultural worker, and being an artist. Sometimes they are not the same thing, but right now there is an opportunity for those of us who are cultural workers, and who are cultural activistic organizers to actually be able to participate at a high level in economic security, and sustainability of our communities, of this movement.

Ashara Ekundayo:

There isn't any movement that happens on this planet without money. That has to be part of this conversation as well.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

The Combahee River Collective in the 1970's, they said if we make the world safer for Black women, we are necessarily making the world safer for everybody. I would expand that to a 2020 imagining and say, "If we make the world safer for Black trans women with disabilities, honey, this world would look radically, radically different, if the world was actually safe for those people."

Syrus Marcus Ware:

Thank you so much for bringing in the incredible amount of underfunded, unfunded labor of Black women in this movement, in this organizing for decades. Thank you.

Lauren Ruffin:

My last question before we land the plane is, we talked a bit about sustainability and movement work, like how do we sustain ourselves to do this work? As I said earlier, the thing that has been front of my mind all weekend is how long people have been doing this work. How do we sustain people's activism over a long hot summer, into a fall election, in the states anyway? Without having them get distracted. What are some concrete strategies that we can use? That's something that's been top of my mind.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

So much of my artistic practice is about sustainability of activist lives, I write love letters to activists, I draw giant portraits of activists, I do things to try to help make sure that they can continue the work. One of the things I would say as an artist but also as an activist who's been on the front lines, is we need to remember that we need breaks. We need lots of breaks. I've been following the NAT Ministry, that Black account on Instagram that reminds us that [inaudible 00:34:21] are part of our reparations, part of our justice [inaudible 00:34:25].

Syrus Marcus Ware:

So making sure that activists are taking times for breaks, and for rejuvenation, having people that they can check in with on a regular basis, maybe a weekly basis, maybe a standing call where you can just be like, "Oh, by the way. Here, this is what happened this week, this is what I need to process, this is what I need to age with." Making sure that they have supports around them to be able to continue doing the work.

Syrus Marcus Ware:

There's an activist here in Toronto named Tooker Gomberg who passed away, who just before he did wrote an open letter to all activists, and in it he says, "You have to build up networks of care and support while you're well, around your activism so that then if things get too much, if you start to get pulled down, you have supports ready to help you in that moment." Take care of yourself, we take care of each other.

Esteban Kelly:

Yeah, I think it's also recognizing that there's a diversity of tactics, and there are certain tactics that are more sustainable or easier to sustain than others. It is very difficult to sustain tens of thousands of people on the street, all summer long, year after year. We know that we're in crisis, we know that our movements will call for that level of turnout, and much more frequently than in recent US history. That's good. We do need moments of that, but in between...

Esteban Kelly:

First of all, on an individual level, assess where you're at, and sit it out if you need to sit it out. But in between, it's actually really easy to sustain things like political education. It's really easy to stay plugged into listening, to Black leadership, and Black voices. To educate yourself, there's reading lists all over the place, especially nowadays. And even for people who have the privilege of being able to work remotely, or be part of workplaces that they can return to safely with PPE, some of what we've done at [inaudible 00:36:08] my worker co-opt that does political education and training, are around toolkits and trainings, and curriculums for designing sustainable workplaces. So that, it is not one set of work to create a just feminist, work environment with workplace democracy and a separate set of work to work on your mission.

Esteban Kelly:

You can bring those things together, the work itself should not be draining. You don't need to figure it out all on your own. That's there, and it includes things like, "Here are some suggested readings for non Black people of color to be in solidarity, and to be engaging with movements." You can always learn about history, I'm constantly having my mind blown about just recovering our own political histories that have been lost to me because of the cultural particularity of being a historical United States all the time. Just being like, "Reconstruction? What?" Or like, "The Civil Rights movement in the 20's and 30's did what? Ella Baker, what?"

Esteban Kelly:

There's a lot, just find whatever you are passionate about, there's something that will not be boring to you, particularly, but that is still an important contribution in your own consciousness elevation in the movement, and I think that's something we can do to sustain ourselves in between these moments of things popping off.

Ashara Ekundayo:

I would add, some of the sustaining work that has been going on, is around relational aid, also called mutual aid. I believe that that is something that we can continue to do in different ways for each other. We take care of each other, as we have all said. I've had the experience as a cultural worker who works as a consultant most of the time, I've had the gift of other artists, actually Black women artists say, "Hey, I sold a piece of art, and I got a check, if I have money, then you have money as a curator." You create space, that's your superpower, and we are relational in how we sustain our financial well being.

Ashara Ekundayo:

Taking care of each other, when you see somebody put up their Cash App, or their PayPal or whatever, cash them out. It doesn't have to be a lot of money, it can be a little bit of money, it's like, "Hey, I've got $100, I can give you 10, maybe that 10 will buy you a meal this week." Thinking about how to share our resources that are financial as well as you have a circle of folks that you can touch, maybe you all give each other foot rubs. Whether you need to ping your homie, your comrade and say, "Hey, did you take a nap today? Can I bring you some greens from my box garden outside my window? What can I do?"

Ashara Ekundayo:

Those kinds of things I think help to sustain our humanity with each other, and it's really about showing love to one another, showing each other that we care, that we're listening deeply, and that small is all. As our comrade Adrienne Maree Brown has gifted us, with emergent strategies and remembering that everything does not have to be big, and grand eous, it doesn't have to be a giant mural on the street. It might just be a little tag on the bus stop, that I saw walking by on my way, with my fist in the air, and my sign in the hand. I have the opportunity to notice those small things, and see beauty. And to be able to remember that there is joy and pleasure that is also necessary and part of this movement making, part of this revolutionary body, part of us understanding and knowing each other.

Ashara Ekundayo:

That joy has to be part of this movement.

Lauren Ruffin:

That was beautiful. We're going to close on that, that was just really... Thank you, thank all of you for your time today.

Tim Cynova:

This concludes our special two part series of the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE. Morning(ish) Show. If you're new to the podcast, you can download all 25 season one episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice, and re watch 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 on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too.

Tim Cynova:

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.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

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Guest User 7/2/20 Guest User 7/2/20

Live with Oscar Abello & Vanessa Roanhorse! (EP.39)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Oscar Abello & Vanessa Roanhorse. [Live show recorded: June 5, 2020.]

Last Updated

July 1, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Oscar Abello & Vanessa Roanhorse. [Live show recorded: June 5, 2020.]

Guests: Oscar Abello & Vanessa Roanhorse

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guests

OSCAR PERRY ABELLO is Next City's senior economics correspondent. He previously served as Next City’s editor from 2018-2019, and was a Next City Equitable Cities Fellow from 2015-2016. Since 2011, Oscar has covered community development finance, community banking, impact investing, economic development, housing and more for media outlets such as Shelterforce, B Magazine, Impact Alpha, and Fast Company.

VANESSA ROANHORSE is an inclusive solutions-driven problem solver committed to liberating all peoples and delivering impactful mechanisms for social, environmental and economic change. She launched Roanhorse Consulting (RCLLC) in 2016, an indigenous women-led think tank. RCLLC works with unheralded communities, businesses, organizations, and individuals to achieve and aspire their self-determination through forging communities of practice, strengthening indigenous evaluation methods, creating equity through entrepreneurship, and encouraging economic empowerment from within. RCLLC co-designs wealth and power building efforts that directly invest in our leaders, support meaningful data collection informed by indigenous research approaches, and helps build thoughtful community-led projects that enforce values that put people at the center. Vanessa is a 2020 Conscious Company Media’s World Changing Women in Sustainable Business awardee and is a 2020 Boston Impact Initiative Fund-Building Cohort fellow. She is a retired member of the ABQ Living Cities leadership table and is a Startup Champions Network member. She sits on the boards of Native Community Capital, Zebras Unite and the New Mexico Association of Grantmakers. Vanessa is one of 8 co-founders of Native Women Lead, an organization dedicated to growing Native women into positions of leadership and business. She is a mom of one, living with her family in Albuquerque, NM. Vanessa is a citizen of the Navajo Nation.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to part one of our special two-part series of the Work Shouldn't Suck Live Morning(ish) Show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by Oscar Abello and Vanessa Roanhorse. Let's just jump right into the action. Oscar and Vanessa, welcome to the show.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Thanks.

Oscar Abello:

Thanks [inaudible 00:00:24] Good morning.

Lauren Ruffin:

Good morning. When we first started this show we were really talking about work and leadership among the pandemic. The pandemic continues to drag on, and now we have the additional burden of carrying and speaking out about how black lives matter, police brutality, and it feels like people are really, really feeling all of this pressure. With all of that being said, how are you doing, both of you?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

I'm okay. I'm okay this morning. It's like, it depends, right? How do you wake up... I think that waking up, side of the bed thing really matters. Today is a good day, it's Friday, it's beautiful, some good stuff happened this week, some sad stuff happened this week, with work and family and... I don't know, I guess it's just overall exhaustion, just general tiredness, trying to do all of that. But also just really happy to have this opportunity to just be in this group of four, to get to catch up with Oscar, who has been killing it with articles lately, and then get to see your face, Lauren, and just kind of have a different way of waking up, which I'm grateful for, or else I would just be still in my room working my way at the computer, nicely showered and dressed, like back in the day when we used to do that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. And Oscar, how are you doing?

Oscar Abello:

I am also excited to be with you all this morning, and talking with Vanessa. I'm also, I guess, focused in terms of what I have to do today, just because generally speaking journalists are always on deadlines. And so today I have to be writing about the first worker-owned holding cooperative, that recently made it's first acquisition as a holding cooperative. It's based in Baltimore, and it started out with a bunch of formerly incarcerated workers who created a staffing company. There's a whole story, you can read it on Tuesday or Thursday. But, I'm really fortunate, or privileged in some sense, that those are the kinds of stories I generally write about. So, in this time, I don't have to shift my focus, it just becomes even more urgent, and the context becomes even more powerful. And these folks with these ideas are pushing forwards. Even that, everything that's happened.

Lauren Ruffin:

During this time, I keep saying this time, we all kind of know what that means, we didn't share your bios with the audience, because I think it's important for you to talk about the work you're doing right now, and if that work has shifted. I know, Vanessa, you and I stay in touch a little bit more closely, but I know the work that you've been doing with Roanhorse Consulting has shifted in a number of different ways. Do you want to share a little bit about your bio, your background, and the types of work that you'll typically do?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Yeah. So, Vanessa Roanhorse, I'm [inaudible 00:03:18] from the Nation, the Navajo Nation, grew up here. Live here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So, we have a small, indigenous women led consulting company, and we've been really trying to push at the boundaries around creating products, programs, supports to help move and curate meaningful, relevant resources to communities of color. We have a pretty strong focus in Indian country, and that work, for us, has been a variety of things, from policy to working with folks to systems map where they fit in the problem that they're looking to solve, to working with the State of New Mexico to really ensure that we get our census count for urban natives. Oscar and I have actually had a number of conversations around Co-op Capital, which is a character-based lending initiative for under banked entrepreneurs, particularly [inaudible 00:04:12] entrepreneurs.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

So, we do a lot of interesting things, but because we work at such a hyper-localized way, and still kind of can pull up to that 30,000 foot systems view, when Covid happened, just naturally, because the team is native, all of us are Navajo, we knew immediately that it was going to get bad. We saw it with the Hantavirus virus when that came in and happened. We lived it, right? I grew up on the reservation, I know what that's like. So, our team completely... Almost 50 percent of our time went full-volunteer, essentially trying to map what was happening. A lot of it was like, who's on the ground working, what [inaudible 00:04:57] organizations are moving forward, how have they shifted their original work to now just be Covid relief, which was making sure there was PPE, people had food, they were delivering water, medicine, diapers, tampons, people were actually out there paving the damn roads themselves so that we could make sure supplies were going through. And so that was our charge, was we immediately went in, and then the last part was trying to make sure we could connect it to people with money, who had money to give. That's really a huge lift that we've been taking on since Covid started, really.

Oscar Abello:

Yeah, so for me, I'm the senior economics correspondent at Next City, which is a non-profit publication founded in 2003. The CliffsNotes version is, back in 2003, the narrative about cities was still very much, there's so much crime and drugs, and all the problems were because of cities. Smog, and all those older narratives about cities, generally. And our founders said, we don't want to create a publication that would look at cities as the places where solutions would come from, and we would go out and find folks in cities, living in cities, who are trying to solve problems.

Oscar Abello:

Over time, as the narrative shifted around cities to become, now cities are the cool place to be, now we shifted our focus, narrowed our focus even more on those neighborhoods, those parts of cities that, again, are still seen as the places where there's crime, there's drugs, all of the problems in society, the violence. We looked at those neighborhoods and we say, what are they doing about economic development? What are they doing about housing? What are they doing about education? And what models are they using? What allies are they bringing to the table? And, what work are they getting done? Those are the typical kinds of stories that we'll cover in any given sphere, and as the economics correspondent, I'm using writing about access to capital or access to jobs, and different business models or programs or policies that are effecting the economies of those neighborhoods. Who is driving access to capital, access to jobs, and how is it happening? For me, the systems piece that has come to it in terms of, there's no... I have to write a story. Someone has to have an idea, it's usually a group of people, that have an idea, and they have to bring other people [inaudible 00:07:27] that idea, and build something. And the more that happens, the more I get to write. And so, I've written 400 stories since 2015 about that.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

I just have to say, if anyone doesn't follow Oscar on Twitter, they need to. Because there's literally history threads that Oscar will put down, where he'll be like, here's what we think the problem is, now I'm going to take you on a journey in 140 characters, and we're going to go through in the Twitter thread. I have learned more in the Twitter threads on the history of certain things than I have, probably if I tried to read the whole, like, any kind of book. So, I just have to say, Oscar-

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I check in with Oscar every day, and Micheal Harriett. Those are my-

Vanessa Roanhorse:

I do too. No, I'm like, what's happening, what do I need to be focused on, or what not. Oscar is one of those threads I go to.

Tim Cynova:

And Oscar, your Twitter handle is @oscarthinks, right?

Oscar Abello:

Yeah, it's Oscarthinks. I really appreciate you sharing that, because as a journalist, we're supposed to think of ourselves as serving the public in some way, and not enough of us think enough about what does that mean. Who is the public, and what service are we providing? And, yeah, I think about Vanessa, I think about Lauren, I think about Jessica Norwood, or [inaudible 00:08:50] or Camille Kerr, or a lot of the folks that I end up writing about. Next to the aims of being sort of a trade publication in a sense that, the people it writes about tend to also be part of it's audience. Because we're trying to either transfer knowledge from one place to another, or at least transfer some kind of inspiration. I know that the fact that Vanessa is kicking ass in Albuquerque and Navajo Nation and other tribal nations, I know that that brings a lot of inspiration to others in different situations, but facing a lot of the same systemic barriers. Because, let's face it, if you don't look a certain way, if you're not a certain gender, in this country, we're all fighting that same, that beef with supremacy. And they have different contexts and different experiences of what it means, and that's why I end up having the opportunity to write all these stories, is because everyone's got their own way of responding and trying to tackle the beast that's in front of them.

Tim Cynova:

Oh yeah, when you said 400 pieces, Oscar, Lauren and I are just trying to write one. It's like four weeks on-

Lauren Ruffin:

I fail every day at writing the one thing I'm supposed to write. That's one of my few guarantees in life.

Tim Cynova:

We even teamed up to make it easier, and it's like, twice as slow.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, exactly. I think most of us woke up this morning to alerts on our phones saying that the unemployment rate had dropped to 13 percent. Is that what... Have you seen that yet?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

So, I have so many thoughts around data and our unemployment numbers in the United States, but would love to hear your two particular reflections on, perhaps, who is now employed again, and how in the middle of a pandemic and massive, massive street protests of unemployed people who are being brutalized by the police every day, how is it possible that we get an alert like that on our phones? I love that that's like, "Gotcha." It's not... I'm just like, how did this happen? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Oscar Abello:

Well, it makes perfect sense.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yes, it does. It makes perfect sense.

Oscar Abello:

The billing reserve balance sheet went from less than three trillion to almost eight trillion in about a month. So, that's six trillion dollars, literally out of nowhere, that went somewhere. Where does it go? Well, you can take three guesses, and I'll give you one guess, where does it go? It goes to the places that... To the default. What is the default? We know what the default is. And those are the companies that are suddenly able to start employing folks again, and we know who they employ. We know what it was like the last time, 10 years ago, we know what it was like the recession 10 years before that, we know what it was like the financial crisis 10 years before that, we know what it was like in the oil crisis 10 years before that. We can go all the way back 400 years in time and know what the pattern is, who gets the benefit first. And when I hear... When I think about an employment specific number like that, how it went down, I'm like, well, shit, someone had to get [inaudible 00:12:15] that's six trillion dollars out of nowhere, that had to go somewhere. And I'm not surprised that that's where it's going.

Lauren Ruffin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). V, anything to add?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Nope. Just how much that bit of information is so not reflective of what we're seeing, and so not like what's happening. It's just, it's all made up. At some point we just kind of laugh, and just kind of say this is not for me. This is not useful for me, this is not about me. I don't know, there's just a certain manner of like, mystical wizardry [inaudible 00:13:03] It's just sometimes, listening to Oscar, and trying to not get angry. I don't need more blood pressure issues. I don't need more... But it's just like these hits keep coming, and it's about, for me at least, trying to survive information. Trying to survive information, and pick what I can do within my hands around this stuff. And when I think about unemployment, I think about what we're seeing for our community members. It's bigger than just a job, at this point. We're just sitting here trying to figure out how do we make sure we get some money to pretend to try to put together water infrastructure? I mean, that is six trillion dollars itself, right there, just to do water infrastructure. So, I've just got to keep remembering, I am the prize, you know?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I feel like it took me a long time to understand what my grandmother used to say, which was, "Don't be somebody who's always working but not employed." And we would look around neighborhoods in Baltimore, where there were people working hard, who were never actually employed. And I just keep thinking about the number of people that I know, who haven't had a job in 15 years. Like, have not had a stable full-time job, since I've known them. And it's just, whenever I see those unemployment numbers, I think about just who is not being counted, and whose voices, and whose numbers just aren't even there any more because they've been trying to get a job for so long they no longer count as being unemployed, which is just this wild thing that our government does.

Lauren Ruffin:

V, you talking about water infrastructure makes me realize that a lot of the folks on either coast probably aren't aware of the unique situation. I shouldn't say... It's not. It is a situation that is shared by communities all over the US. You've got Flint, which is not far from a huge source of fresh water, which is just mind-boggling, and then Newark, which is also close to a fair amount of water, but a lot of folks don't know about the Navajo Nation's water infrastructure issues. Can you talk about that a bit?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Yeah. Definitely can share. I'm not an expert, but I can be an expert because I grew up with water issues. So, Navajo Nation is, in terms of size, is close to the same square footage as the state of West Virginia. It's a sovereign nation, which means it has a relationship with the federal government, which is nation to nation. The states in which it sits on, which is the State of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah, actually don't have any rights to tell that nation how and what to do. Through treaties, we are to be supported and cared for as needed, as other folks in the country should have access to certain things. But if you can imagine, when Covid-19 hit, one of the statistics that people really freaked out about was, for that size, for close to 150,000 Navajo folks living on the nation, there was 13 hospitals, in total.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

And most of those hospitals were small hospitals, most of them were clinics, and there was just no way they could actually serve. We also have a police department that has to serve the State of West Virginia, and it's less than a hundred people, I believe. And those are just some of the human infrastructure pieces that we don't have. But when you get down to it, a lot of our community members have been hauling water, have been reliant on wells, and have to go and get their water to shower, to bathe, to clean, to wash their hands. And so when Covid-19 hit, we saw such a quick acceleration of cases, really because people have to go somewhere common to get water, and you have to use that... That water is so fricking precious, to have to wash your hands 500 times a day doesn't make any sense.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Additionally, on top of that, we're a multi generational living community. Which means you're living with your great-grandmother, your grandmother, your mother, your aunt, your niece, your daughter, your granddaughters. And so we were seeing this challenge of, how do we still support this multi generational living? How are we going to help our community members who are the most rural be able to deal with trying to stay and use the stay at home orders, and be able to wash your hands and all of those things, when the other part that we were fighting is because we also lack internet infrastructure. People weren't able to get up to date information. There was a period in which there was a lot of people in Navajo Nation who had no idea there was a pandemic going on.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

And so between healthcare infrastructure, public health infrastructure, water infrastructure, internet infrastructure, road infrastructure, the thing that sucks is we have been living like this since we signed our treaties over 200 years ago. We have been demanding water probably since the time we started having to live on the reservation. And as everyone is just like, "Wow, that's so terrible. Why don't those folks wash their hands? Oh my god, how is that possible?" I'm sorry, America, but you all need to wake up. We have developing world conditions in our backyards, and we've always had them. And we need to stop denying and assuming that we are the most wealthy, the most cared for country, because we're not.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

And so that's been the big struggle for me, is having to keep having that conversation with people who are trying to blame us for the pandemic, who are trying to say, "Well, you guys should know better. You just need to do this, this and that." And it's just like, well, you haul water.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. It's wild to me that when I talk to people who've never really given much thought to what it's like to be disenfranchised, it's like they feel like the water pipes haven't gotten there yet, instead of realizing that they're not there on purpose. There was a system that made that the last place to get water infrastructure, or internet infrastructure. No, this is all happening on purpose. So I think flipping that paradigm is going to be really... It's so important.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

It is. And the last thing for me that I'm struggling with is, so we have Covid-19, I think we as indigenous people are trying to make sure we figure out how to show up for our black relatives, also our black indigenous relatives, and working, doing the internal work with us on our own people, and then this morning I wake up and Trump is moving forward to continue doing the fracking around Chaco, which is one of our sacred sites. So that's continuing. And it's just like, god damn. You can't hold it all up all the time.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I did not see that.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Yeah. They're open to a public period right now, but they're moving so... 91 percent of the San Juan Basin has already... Have gas oil leases. There's nine percent left, and this nine percent is what people are trying to save and protect right now. It sucks.

Tim Cynova:

Get Oscar in the green room, to Lauren's point that this is on purpose. We were talking about The Power Broker, New York City, LaGuardia, and how cities, New York city, where we both live, there are certain things that happen on purpose. And now even that is changing a bit. Can you talk a bit for the audience as to recommendation there, for those who haven't read The Power Broker, that maybe Chapter 18 is just the one chapter to read, since the book is more than a thousand pages long, there's a pro tip from Oscar.

Oscar Abello:

I'm going to make sure I give credit to Cea Weaver, the head of our board. What some remember as the [inaudible 00:20:39] State Housing coalition, now it's Housing Justice For All, Cea Weaver is the head organizer that basically put back rent regulation from the real estate industry last year. This tenant coalition, the state-wide tenant coalition eliminating some loopholes in New York State's rent regulation laws that allowed 200,000 or more rent-regulated units to be regulated out of rent regulations, so they became market rate. That's like a third of what... We have, like, two million rent regulated units, I think, in the city, and a third of them were lost since the mid-90s when those loopholes were put in place. So, Cea Weaver recommends, I think it's chapter 18, she recommends to read, in The Power Broker.

Oscar Abello:

And the reason she recommends it is, I'm not actually sure what is in the chapter, but the whole book Power Broker, which has been flying around circles in urban policy for years, and for some reason, I guess everyone has their book... I have my bookcase behind me over here, everyone else seems to have a copy of The Power Broker on their bookcase in my world of urban policy, yes. [inaudible 00:21:46] It's about Robert Moses, and who is Robert Moses? Robert Moses, let's say, he... Let me sum it up this way. Robert Moses in the 50's had many titles in New York City, one of which was the Chairperson of the Title 1 Slum Clearance Committee. And this committee primarily-

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Hell of a name for a committee.

Oscar Abello:

Hell of a name for a committee. And they summarily picked areas of the city and just said, these are the areas we consider slums, and we're going to provide federally subsidized capital to developers to bulldoze these neighborhoods and build all kinds of things. A lot of it was public housing, but some of it was Lincoln Center, some of it were highways. They bulldozed, was the Savoy Ballroom, where Harlem's rock community invented the Lindy Hopp. They bulldozed that neighborhood and put in a massive housing complex that today is privately owned, and recently was rebranded as Savoy Towers, like some sort of sick joke on Harlem. That's who Robert Moses was.

Oscar Abello:

If you want to read a story that lifts up Robert Moses as a hero of urban policy, you can read the Power book, but if you want to read a story of Robert Moses decimating communities of color and [inaudible 00:23:11] communities in New York, you can walk down the street in Harlem and ask people about Robert Moses. Or you can read The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jane Jacobs talks about it too. Why is that perspective in Jane Jacobs book? People don't realize, I mean, Jane Jacobs being a white woman, wrote this book about this white man, or about white men, architects and urban planning. Here's one takeaway I take from Jane Jacobs book, she walked around Harlem and she talked to people about what it was like. The book is basically a reflection of, yeah, you know what, all these other people have the same thoughts I did. This Robert Moses is a piece of shit that we've...

Oscar Abello:

And the first couple of chapters of The Death and Life of Great American Cities is, yeah, you know, I walked around uptown, I walked around in these black neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and, yeah, everyone was saying the same thing I was thinking. How about that?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

You know, what's so funny about that book for me is, when I was living in Chicago, I had a colleague, I worked in a sustainability company, was a bunch of planners. They kind of approached sustainability through very much from an urban planner lens, and it was a very white organization. And I remember a colleague decided to have a lunch and learn, and he did a lunch and learn presentation on that book, and actually the book I have is from him, because he's like, "You have to read this. This is..." He gave it to me because he said he was so inspired by this guy, and he was like, "There are so many good tenets on how we should all think about power and leadership."

Vanessa Roanhorse:

And I've never read it, it's just been sitting there because it was a gift from him, and I will never read it now. And I'm so glad, because his version of this is everything that book was trying to do. I'm going to have to send this clip of this podcast to him, actually.

Lauren Ruffin:

Little moments of resistance, I love it. Oscar, you recently did a thread that educated me, of course, around the economic justice struggle in black communities, and how black communities have been innovating their own capital for a really long time. Can you talk a bit about that, because I just love how you put together... And again, how do we begin to shift the narrative around how black and brown people survive economically in the United States, because there is this idea that we aren't innovating, that we're not struggling, that we're lazy, and that people like me, who are able to be successful here are sort of a one-off, as opposed to the fact that I'm able to swim up-stream in white water. Just the sheer effort it takes. But I really appreciated that thread, and shared it pretty widely, so can you talk a bit about it?

Oscar Abello:

Yeah. It was Saturday, and I woke up thinking about the scale at which the uprisings had reached nationally. And I was seeing on Twitter, on... But mostly on Twitter. I'm a journalist, and we spend all day on Twitter. The headlines about the destruction going on, and some of the shade thrown at people, you know, some people were saying, "Oh, why don't they just protest peacefully?" And like, first of all, they have been protesting peacefully. Some folks were saying, "Well, if there's problems in the community, why don't they do something about it?" I'm like, they have. They've been protesting peacefully, and they're doing so much more.

Oscar Abello:

And how do I know that? Because I keep the receipts, and I have stories, and I check the demographics of every source I quote in my stories. I started doing that in 2015, and so I can tell you that I wouldn't... As of the end of 2019... I haven't redone the totals yet, but at the end of 2019, I had written 392 stories for Next City, and 180 of those stories quoted at least one black person. I had interviewed 897 people by the end of 2019, or quoted 897 people, and 279 of those people were black. I have it also broken down by gender, so if you want to know, 897 people total, 144 black women, 133 black men, two black gender non-conforming individuals.

Oscar Abello:

I started keeping those demographics because I just wanted to know as a journalist, was I contributing to the continued stereotype of white saviors, or would I be able to look back and say, no, I'm lifting up stories and sources and leaders and communities that look like the studies that I was writing about. Over time, it's... I had read a little bit about red-lining in college, but when you talk to 279 black people about economic development in their cities, you learn a lot about [crosstalk 00:28:26] and you learn a lot about how they view themselves in their communities as carrying on the tradition, sometimes spiritually, the tradition of resistance and rebuilding and regeneration, sometimes it's literally the family tradition. There are black CDFI leaders, black leaders of Community Development and Financial Solutions. Their parents worked for HUD in their early days. They might not have been so proud of the work they'd done for HUD, but they were working in community development in the 60s, they had kids, and now their kids are working in community development. They're trying to fix a lot of the problems left over from before.

Oscar Abello:

Then there's generations, examples of black community or black urban real-estate developers who's parents were in real-estate, or maybe they were a banker or something. For me, I'm drawn to stories about access to capital and managing capital, capital flows and how historically marginalized communities retaking power over capital. And so it was very powerful for me, to come across Collective Courage, the book by Jessica Gordon Nembhard a few years ago. And this was the book of the history of black cooperatives, written about black women, who herself was like, I didn't even know until someone flagged it for me when I was doing some research, and when I started reading about all these stories in the crisis, edited by W.V.[inaudible 00:29:52] about black cooperatives. And she started doing the research and she wrote a book about it. And one of the things that resonated for me was, what was one of the first, earliest examples of a cooperatively owned black institution? Insurance company. It was a cooperatively owned insurance company in Richmond Virginia.

Oscar Abello:

So to me, the tradition of black communities trying to regain power over capital, not to replace what has been stolen but just to survive. Because that's always the temptation to think about, if you're a historically marginalized community and you're retaking power over capital in some way, is that all you need? No, it's not. You had capital stolen, extracted. You've had oil, as well as capital, you've had that extracted from... You've had land taken away from you.

Lauren Ruffin:

I mean, yeah, I think about how Shirley Sherard and certain black farming coops, and literally having white people using capital systems to take land from black farmers.

Oscar Abello:

Yeah. And what it amounts to is, like, sometimes the response of policy makers or the ivory tower researchers is like, "Well, you know, we've got to teach black people, we've got to teach the native communities how to manage land and money." No. No, you don't.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Or it's like, "Let's do another research. Do we have enough data?" Do we know this is what they need? Let's ask that question again. And between that and them moving capital to do more research, to make sure our numbers are right-

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I feel like the funder who's funding research right now for anthropological or societal studies of where they could direct their money should get pilloried in their community.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

They should be. I am a hundred percent with that.

Lauren Ruffin:

[inaudible 00:31:34] go there. When the world opens up let's take tomatoes to their office and throw them.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

I'm going to give them paper cuts and squeeze tomatoes on top of them.

Lauren Ruffin:

Paper cuts and lemons for you.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Paper cuts and lemons for you, that's where we're going with this. Absolutely. I mean, I recently had someone say, "Can you put an assessment together for me on what we think the Covid-19 impact has been for native Americans?" I just sent them the death toll and presented per capita, and I was like, "There's your report."

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. That's it. What else do you need?

Oscar Abello:

Did you bill for that? Please tell me you billed for that?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

I did not, it was just a simple quick email. I cut and pasted it and I just responded and said there you go. And they've not returned my email.

Lauren Ruffin:

Well, good. Good. You didn't need them anyway. That's the beautiful thing.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

"What would this look like Vanessa", and I was... And they even suggested a three-phased approach.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh no. Oh god. That's embarrassing.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Anyways-

Lauren Ruffin:

Another clip to send to somebody, V. Oscar, when you share your demographics about the number of non-white men that you talk to, do you get the pipeline question? Like, where do you find all these people to talk to [inaudible 00:32:47] like that?

Oscar Abello:

Oh, I see them. Which I do.

Lauren Ruffin:

I know you do. Where do you find them?

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Like, god, yeah, Oscar, where do you find all of these great people?

Oscar Abello:

Well, I met both of you at one of those places. Sometimes I'm hesitant to say specifically where, because then I'm like, well, I've got a [inaudible 00:33:05] to protect. But [inaudible 00:33:08] I can't... But then I also flick back and I think, wait a minute, even though I need to keep my own pipeline of stories going, there's always more in those spaces than I'm able to cover. There's always more happening. Like, coming out of... I met Lauren and Vanessa at COCAP, [inaudible 00:33:26] organized by Common Future in a space in West Oakland that they've recently changed it's name, but it will forever in my heart be known as Impact [inaudible 00:33:35]

Oscar Abello:

It was a convening held by Common Future, led by a black male, Rodney Foxworth, with women of color were a majority of people who work at Common Future, and the convening, it must have been the fourth or fifth time for this convening, I can't remember how many times. But people of color like to gather in spaces too. If you want to find them and you want to listen to them, they're out there. They're going to community meetings, they're going to the city council meeting and testifying, they're having open meetings in their own neighborhood about, like, here's what's fucked up right now, and what we're trying to do about it. And it is not that hard.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I feel like those spaces, Vanessa and I both, I think that we did the, let me go to SOCAP and be in this really white space, and feel depleted, and then let me go back across the bay to Oakland to just have my soul replenished again. I feel like that week is always a bit of, like, just whiplash.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Yeah. I would agree with that. It was also that last round of SOCAP, COCAP, well, SOCAP, not COCAP, oh my god it's a mouthful, it was also the 40th year for the taking over of Alcatraz by the American Indian movement was that same week. Because it was 40 years that week when that happened. And you're in that SOCAP weird space, and you get to see Alcatraz, it's just a surreal experience. But I think a lot about, for me, the folks who are doing the coolest and the baddest work, thank god for the internet, you can find them. They're there. That's the other part that's so frustrating, is how many times people reach out to me, and I'm like, am I literally the only native person you know?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yes.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Probably.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm the only black person people know. That's why they call me.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

And we're just like, come on now. There's so many ways to do research, there's so many ways to find out what people are doing, and I think that's the part, is you know it's just laziness.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Well, I also-

Vanessa Roanhorse:

It's just lazy.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I also feel like I can't give you permission to access my community. I feel like inherent in that is this... And it's like, you actually have to go do that, and I can invite you into communities that I've created, but I can't give you access to all black people that I know, because they might not want you, or they might not want you today, and at a later time you're welcome. But I do think that's such a... The pipeline question, and how... I've also been thinking a lot about the work both of you... There's something different happening, by the way, right now, around this uprising. Because it's the first time that I've...

Lauren Ruffin:

And just what I'm saying on Twitter is white people aren't necessarily asking us to make ourselves legible to them, like ourselves, our history, our... And I felt like in a lot of the work in the organizations that I've been involved with, it's always us trying to figure out how do we have our narrative be legible to white people, how can we say what we do in a language they understand, or connect it to an experience they understand. And I feel like I'm now seeing white people to a certain extent start to pick up history, whether it's written history or oral history, and they're starting to process it and try to understand it for themselves, and then other white people are serving as translators. Which is just, it's a really interesting moment for, like, how is American history being rewritten in real-time right now?

Oscar Abello:

One of the headlines I woke up to this morning was apparently anti-racist books are selling out [inaudible 00:37:16]

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. It's a weird time. The number of white people who don't know about Fred Hampton, if you don't know about the MOVE bombing, who just don't... If you have not been paying attention, it's your own fault, but I'm kind of glad you're waking up now.

Oscar Abello:

Yeah. Every year it's an annual... The incarceration every year... It's about a month ago, right? It was the anniversary. They did this story in 2014, I think, and they said why don't more people in Philly know about the MOVE bombing? And they tweet it out on the anniversary every year, and every year there's a bunch of people responding like, "Yeah, why didn't I know about the MOVE bomb in Philly?" I didn't know until college. You know how I found out? This is another thing [inaudible 00:37:56]

Lauren Ruffin:

How did you... First, where did you go to college?

Oscar Abello:

Oh, it was just funny. I went to a predominantly white institution in suburban Philadelphia. It's nickname is Vanillanova. [inaudible 00:38:08] University.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yep, you did.

Oscar Abello:

Even there, you will find about eight black professors who are like, you know what, we're going to be here and educate these white folks about our history. I had five of those eight professors, by the way.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh good.

Oscar Abello:

But it was a white professor who had a class, a liberation theology class, that she taught in conjunction with prisoners, at the time, life inmates, at [inaudible 00:38:35] State Prison, further out in the suburbs. So we got to go take classes with them in [inaudible 00:38:43] State Prison. One of those classmates was Michael [inaudible 00:38:46] who was [inaudible 00:38:49] was let out recently, but passed away or had a fa- I believe he was let out in... There was a loss in the family, might have been... Oh, I'm blanking out right now on the story [inaudible 00:39:03] but anyway, that's how I found out about the MOVE bombing. I was in class, I was in the liberation theology class, [inaudible 00:39:10] I was a kid at the time-

Lauren Ruffin:

One of the kids, yeah. Yeah. The article for this year that I read that stayed with me was someone posting, the MOVE bombing happened when a bomb fell out of a military helicopter. And I'm like, it didn't fall out of a... How are we giving the bomb more agency than people? What happened? Yeah, just wild. So much, so, so much in my head. Vanessa, are you going to say something? Now?

Tim Cynova:

I think for those white people who are unable to get print copies of the anti-racist books, Audible and eBooks, there's so many out there that are available in electronic format, but buy them out, because they'll get reprinted, and that's a good problem to have.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. This has been really, really good for my soul in a real way, and I think it's a really good starting point. Well, actually, it shouldn't be a starting point for anyone in our audience, they should already be doing the work, but I think this is just a really important wrinkle to add to the conversations that are happening right now, from both of you. So, I guess we'll start to land the plane, and I'll land it with the suitcase question, which is, throughout your life you've been carrying around a suitcase, backpack, something like that with you, with a whole bunch of behaviors and beliefs and thoughts and actions that you did regularly, and the question is, what's one thing that's been in your backpack for a really long time that's never going back in post-pandemic, post... If there is a post-pandemic. If there is ever an end to the sort of uprising that's currently happening as well, at the same time. And what's one new thing that you found that you're going to hold onto forever?

Oscar Abello:

I'll go first and give Vanessa time to think about it.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's kind. That is so kind.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Thanks Oscar.

Oscar Abello:

I was talking about this yesterday with my sister actually, and it was the first time I have actually vocalized this. The thing that I am leaving out is, being a journalist, I do worry or think about... I used to worry about how many people are going to read my work. I think the impact of my work is limited if not enough people read it, if it's not good enough, if it doesn't reach enough of an audience. I used to worry about that. But yesterday, talking with my sister, something came up both that I've never vocalized before, but it didn't feel like an epiphany, I just had never said it. And the thing that I realized and I said for the first time yesterday was, I shouldn't worry about if my work is popular in this culture that is so toxic with racism and patriarchy and heteronormativism. I shouldn't worry about it because in some sense, what is popular is what appeals to what is the dominant culture, and I shouldn't worry about that anymore. I still want to be a better writer, and I still feel like I'm getting better every day or week thanks to my editors and thanks to feedback I get from lots of different folks, including Vanessa and Lauren and others, be it, sometimes, the feedback comes from Twitter, sometimes it comes from my DMs on Facebook or Twitter, or Instagram sometimes, even.

Oscar Abello:

So, I'm taking out permanently the idea that my work needs to be super popular in order to have an impact. And I guess what I'm putting into that, back to my backpack, is, maybe leave more from others to support me in material ways, because as a journalist you don't get to, it's shit. And it's hard. I was one of those folks, I'm a firstborn child of a Filipino mother, which means you don't ask for help, it just happens to you. So I don't know how to ask for help, and that's something that... I don't know if it's in my backpack yet, but I'm trying to find an asking for help tool and trying to get that into my backpack.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Well, I know that you weren't fishing for a compliment, but your work has been tremendously impactful on my work, and most certainly I felt like I have spent a lot of time learning all the history I didn't learn in Catholic schools, and all the history I didn't learn in public schools that are predominantly white institutions. And your work has greatly accelerated my process of unlearning a number of the things that I have learned. So, thank you for that.

Oscar Abello:

You're very kind, and thank you for that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Vanessa, how about you. You've had plenty of time to think, so this better be dazzling in it's brilliance.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

I will greatly disappoint. I just have double down on what Lauren said, Oscar. I mean, your feed is the go-to feed, and damn it, I want you to get more work. So, I'm going to sit on that in my head for a little bit. So, what I think I'm going to be leaving behind, which is a whole lot of decolonization of myself, I went to an all pretty, white, very white girl boarding school in Connecticut that kind of messed me up for a really long time. But I think what I took from that was, I cared more for my white peers feelings, and I've carried that with me. I'm leaving that shit behind, because I can't do that any more.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

And my putting in, I'm trying to put into my bag care for myself. Someone who I have great esteem for who, she recently shared that she had had a stroke, and she wrote this beautiful piece, just about how her heart was literally and figuratively broken, and a whole piece about self care.

Oscar Abello:

I read that as well. And actually, that's a good... There are two people that I wanted to shout out in this space, one is Melissa Bradley who wrote the article that Vanessa just spoke about, who has done so much amazing work, and wrote a beautiful piece, you can find it on Medium. And then Rodney Foxworth, who this week put out a call for... announced at Common Futures, was immediately distributed $750,000 to communities in need, and called on other funders to do so. So, those are two Medium posts, as well, to leave people with as we close on this episode, which has been exactly what I needed to... Selfishly, again, but I don't hide the fact that I am a grabber of brilliance. I'm greedy for brilliant people.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, if we can't do this for their own livestream, then when can we do this? So, Oscar and Vanessa, thank you so much for being with us today.

Oscar Abello:

Thank you Lauren, thank you Tim.

Vanessa Roanhorse:

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.

Tim Cynova:

Continue the Work Shouldn't Suck Live adventure with us on part two of our special series, when we're joined by Ashara Ekundayo, Esteban Kelly, and Syrus Marcus Ware. Miss us in the mean time? You can download more Work Shouldn't Suck Live 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 just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on 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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Live with Elizabeth Streb! (EP.38)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Elizabeth Streb. [Live show recorded: May 12, 2020.]

Last Updated

May 14, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Elizabeth Streb. [Live show recorded: May 12, 2020.]

Guest: Elizabeth Streb

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guest

MacArthur “Genius” Award-winner, Elizabeth Streb has dived through glass, allowed a ton of dirt to fall on her head, walked down (the outside of) London’s City Hall, and set herself on fire, among other feats of extreme action. Her popular book, STREB: How to Become an Extreme Action Hero, was made into a hit documentary, Born to Fly directed by Catherine Gund (Aubin Pictures), which premiered at SXSW and received an extended run at The Film Forum in New York City in 2014. Streb founded the STREB Extreme Action Company in 1979. In 2003, she established SLAM, the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. SLAM’s garage doors are always open: anyone and everyone can come in, watch rehearsals, take classes, and learn to fly.

Elizabeth Streb was invited to present a TED Talk (‘My Quest To Defy Gravity and Fly’) at TED 2018: THE AGE OF AMAZEMENT. She has been a featured speaker presenting her keynote lectures at such places as the Rubin Museum of Art (in conversation with Dr. John W. Krakauer), TEDxMET, the Institute for Technology and Education (ISTE), POPTECH, the Institute of Contemporary Art (in conversation with physicist, Brain Greene), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (in conversation with author A.M. Homes), the National Performing Arts Convention, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), the Penny Stamps Speaker Series at the University of Michigan, Chorus America, the University of Utah, and as a Caroline Werner Gannett Project speaker in Rochester NY, among others.

"Rough and Tumble," Alec Wilkinson’s profile of Elizabeth Streb, appeared in The New Yorker magazine in June, 2015.

Streb received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Award in 1997. She holds a Master of Arts in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, a Bachelor of Science in Modern Dance from SUNY Brockport, and honorary doctorates from SUNY Brockport, Rhode Island College and Otis College of Art and Design. Streb has received numerous other awards and fellowships including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987; a Brandeis Creative Arts Award in 1991; two New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessie Awards), in 1988 and 1999 for her “sustained investigation of movement;” a Doris Duke Artist Award in 2013; and over 30 years of on-going support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In 2009, Streb was the Danspace Project Honoree. She served on Mayor Bloomberg’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission and is a member of the board of the Jerome Foundation.

Major commissions for choreography include: Lincoln Center Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center, MOCA, LA Temporary Contemporary, the Whitney Museum of Art, Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, the Park Avenue Armory, London 2012, the Cultural Olympiad for the Summer Games, CityLab Paris 2018, the opening of Bloomberg’s new headquarters in London, Musée D’Orsay, the re-opening of the Théâtre du Châtelet, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Born to Fly aired on PBS on May 11, 2014 and is currently available on iTunes. OXD, directed by Craig Lowy, which follows STREB at the 2012 London Olympics, premiered at the IFC theater in New York City on February 2, 2016. Streb and her company have also been featured in PopAction by Michael Blackwood, on PBS’s In The Life and Great Performances, The David Letterman Show, BBC World News, CBS Sunday Morning, CBS This Morning, Business Insider, CNN’s Weekend Today, MTV, on the National Public Radio shows Studio 360 and Science Friday, and on Larry King Live.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to the season one finale of Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live! The Morning(ish) Show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by the super amazing human, Elizabeth Streb. It's impossible for me to distill Elizabeth's bio into just a few sentences, but I'll try. She's a MacArthur "Genius" Award recipient. She dove through glass, allowed a ton of dirt to fall on her head, walked down the outside of London's City Hall, and set herself on fire; although we learned that setting herself on fire was actually an accident. And these are just a few of the things among Elizabeth's long list of feats of extreme action.

Tim Cynova:

The 2014 documentary, Born to Fly is a must see. It chronicles her company of extreme action mechanics as they prepare for and perform literally breathtaking moments as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad of the Olympic Summer Games in London. We are so happy she's able to join us for the season finale. Without further ado, Elizabeth, welcome to the show.

Lauren Ruffin:

So really excited to have this conversation with you, Elizabeth. Our first question, for all of our guests and in particular, knowing that it's the night after your first virtual gala, how are you doing personally and how is your community doing during the pandemic?

Elizabeth Streb:

Well, I think that the community at large, my small community, which is Drive Extreme Action, our dance company, and also our SLAM lab STREB LAB for ACTION MECHANICS, where everything happens, including, 600 kids a week in an afterschool program, ordinarily, normally, rehearsals, flying trapeze, STREB rehearsals, shows. That's closed. We closed it middle, early March, like everyone else, trying to figure out how do we keep operating? We did get a PPP, so we're continuing to pay the dancers. I think I and my executive director, Christine Chen, we're dedicated to keeping our promise to the dancers and our employees, even though the income from the SLAM shows and one of the trans-migrations of our operation lie with the brilliant leadership of Christine Chen, our executive director, was to put all of the training online.

Elizabeth Streb:

So we had a whole semester, for instance, of KIDS ACTION and we'd already gotten the tuition. The dancers band together with the leadership of Christine and starting to send classes to the KIDS at home. Even the parents, because they were stuck at home too, would take these classes for KIDS ACTION and the kids were known to run off to the screen, kiss their teachers, and apparently the parents did that too.

Elizabeth Streb:

Things that they could do. We had very few people ask for the tuition back. We are trying to like grab the income we can. We knew that the shows weren't going to go on. All of the work that we were doing with the Kennedy Center, like River Run that they were doing with all around surrounding Tomanek and their opening of the new building and Brookfield Properties and the tape bridge. We went online, did all these other things online that had been posted on Instagram. And it's just an unknown. I'm not worrying about money. I think Christine, we always worry about money, but what can we do?

Elizabeth Streb:

You know, I think my attitude is we're doing the best we can. We're going to pay everybody for as long as the money holds up. So mostly we've gone up virtually as uniquely as good can do, being that I am a physical company. I made a piece for Zoom for the gala last night. They just really don't like Zoom. I don't see how they can't get timing right. And I thought work, how would you do it? But nothing was edited because I refused to do that. But the [inaudible 00:03:50], like I wanted them flying all around the nine boxes that was not going to happen.

Elizabeth Streb:

I'm adjusting, trying not to have an attitude about...My obsession is...our content is in the rhythm of action. Not words. We're not music and it's gone, gone, gone, gone. You know, so get humble. I guess those are the details. I think everybody's trying to make adjustments and dance companies are particularly hard because you're paying humans to do physical things outside or inside, and that's gone, but I can keep the paying humans for as long as we can.

Lauren Ruffin:

That made me think of the conversation we had on Friday with Lisa Yancey and Bamuthi Joseph where he talked about being a dancer and his work being his body. I'm wondering if you're rethinking or reframing your work during this time?

Elizabeth Streb:

In terms of the work, being their bodies?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Streb:

As humbly as possible. You know, I think that the dancers... We've had four-hour Zoom rehearsals to make this piece, horizon line. They're in their little rooms or rooms somewhere around Manhattan, the Bronx, and it's physically difficult, mentally difficult, spiritually difficult. Would we do it anyway? I don't get into regret or cope. You know, I expunged them from my vocabulary many decades ago. It's a present tense idea and philosophically, it's also a present tense idea. So there are things, a little detritus on the ground that we have that we can harness. And that's what we're trying to do. And the cheery attitude, no swearing at SLAM, because we mic our staff and the kids will hear you. And also you can increase your vocabulary if you promise not to swear. Anytime someone swears at SLAM, you have to give me a quarter.

Tim Cynova:

Just a bunch of people carrying quarters around in their pockets, just on the off chance that that might happen.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'd have to pay up front. Put me on layaway.

Elizabeth Streb:

Wow. I'm telling you about I've started swearing again, which my partner, Laura Flanders, is like, I can't believe you're like a sailor, a drunken sailor. What's happened? To not do that. And I think it really increases your vocabulary if you don't swear, but I'm hopefully not on the air.

Tim Cynova:

Research shows that people who curse are more likely telling you the truth, so whenever I actually say something, I usually follow up with a research, but...

Elizabeth Streb:

I never heard that. I think you're making an excuse.

Tim Cynova:

That's true. Yeah. I've never seen the research. I've just read the article that references it. Yeah.

Elizabeth Streb:

We're just gaining rumors.

Tim Cynova:

It's true, Elizabeth, that's exactly what's happening. When you talk about regret and hope. And we were in a meeting a couple of weeks ago and one of our coworkers remarked that this is the first time in their life when their faced, or we're faced with the uncertainty of a global pandemic, when they've sat to contemplate, the only thing you have to fear is fear itself. It took on new meaning for them. You are someone who I know does things that I could never do. Walk down outside of a building, jump through plates of glass, set yourself on fire. I imagine you have a relationship with fear that you've given a far more thought, or not, to what fear is. During this pandemic, I'm wondering what comes to mind as you think about that.

Elizabeth Streb:

Lighting myself on fire was for my girlfriend, my partner now. We recently got married after 29 years or something, but that was, I don't know; lesbians don't get married for God's sake or death to all. But for her 40th birthday, and that was probably almost 18 years ago, I set a fire. My dancers set a fire and I was supposed to land on it and put it out. It was called blaze away, trying to demonstrate to Melissa Etheridge. I'm the only one to walk across the earth. When I stood up, I'd been using sternal. I was on fire. So it wasn't like I'm going to set myself on fire. My character got set on fire. I think that here is a class thing, in my opinion, because then I got brought up in a very working class family. Then I went, I sort of snuck into the higher art world by default, by stubbornness.

Elizabeth Streb:

And I can see those girls, women, that were in rehearsal and go out to dinner and I would go to restaurants and cook. I was a chef. Then I even researched the famous choreographers in New York, their parents. One's a judge, one's a lawyer. My father laid bricks. I think that fear...what we consider fear in the dance world, especially because it's what you do to train your body to do things that are supposed to be new vocabularies, to you increase the profundity and the vocabulary and the language, the grammar of action; not just to perform the techniques you learn in ballet class, which is what they do. Why would I want to see around the job? What the hell is that? The idea that action has [inaudible 00:09:15] rather than experience has to be in terms of transference. So I always disagreed with everything the dance world promulgated.

Elizabeth Streb:

Fear for me was I noticed that people of higher class, higher fences, larger yards, they keep harm away way away from them. And I'm thinking, well, how bad could it be? And you just started moving closer and closer to the incident of disaster and you know about millisecond timing. And you know, you can get out of there, but if you don't go there or you're so worried about your own precious little speck in the universe that you just don't do things if we're going to arrest the attention of the viewers.

Elizabeth Streb:

I feel that fear is just a detail. It's something we learn and little girls do. Be careful, be careful, don't get hurt. I'll carry that heavy thing for you. I'm probably one of the few teenagers... I looked very, very straight as a young woman all the way to when I hit 40 and then the guys stopped bugging me, thank God. That's probably because they figured out I couldn't have their baby or something like that. But I mean, I have this really crazy attitude. I think that my fear thing is that in that zone, which is certainly not a zone you're ever going to meet catastrophe if you're paying utter and rabbit attention, you figure out techniques to move in a millisecond manner. You make a decision when everything goes to heck and a hand basket. You make a decision to save yourself. That's where the stuff of the action erupts from, not exercising your training and such.

Tim Cynova:

Thank you for that.

Lauren Ruffin:

It strikes me in this whole thing about fear. One of the most interesting things about the pandemic, for me, is how few people I know think about sort of the reality of death and people are really panicking about that. I feel like I've made my peace with the idea of my demise, which is inevitable in a way that a lot of my colleagues have it as the pandemic made you reframe your thoughts on your own mortality or do you feel like you've always had a pretty good sense of that and a pretty good understanding of that?

Elizabeth Streb:

I'm not so worried about myself, I guess.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Yeah.

Elizabeth Streb:

I did get COVID. We just got tested and I had COVID. We have a little cabin up in Smallwood, New York by where the real Woodstock happened. I was careless when we left New York- went to a restaurant, went go party, went to the movies, and I got slapped with it. I actually had that thought, Hmm, I'm 70. Uh-oh, I'm going to go out with a stupid thing. I'd rather be falling off a tall building or something. Not to get me with this damn [inaudible 00:12:02], or whatever the heck it is.

Elizabeth Streb:

I guess I understand people being afraid, but I think the whole other thing, Laura, is this thing about what it's bringing out about race. Like what the heck. Or class and poverty. And for me, if there's anything that's going to switch the lens on fairness in this world, and certainly in this country, maybe it's this. Maybe the good thing out of this is just to figure out how to have empathy for everybody. I'm working on trying to have my attitude about wealthy people, have a way a little. I think they're stingy, but what else can I say?

Tim Cynova:

Well, before we get to a comment from Andrew Taylor who was just live chatting, in this moment, it feels like we have an opportunity to do things that we might not have been able to do in our lives. The globe essentially shut-down, and to get to a future where everyone can thrive, what do you think it will take that we need to do now before maybe it just falls right back into what it's been for generations?

Elizabeth Streb:

That's a very complicated question, because mostly, I don't know. I don't think it will go back. I just don't see how it can go back. We live in New York city. You guys probably do too. We have a loft in SoHo that I had in the seventies. It's devastated, and it's as high of real estate monitoring and you know, people just hanging on to things and seeing how much they can get. It just was destroying businesses here and certainly all over New York for quite a while before COVID hit.

Elizabeth Streb:

Laurie Garrett, who I was mentioning, is an amazing health political activist doctor said, it'll be 36 months. It'll be three years before they get a vaccine. That's what she thinks. She was very involved in the AIDS crisis, also; although it wasn't a pandemic. I just don't see. Then, because this keeps mutating, this virus with the children's story the other day, that 73 children, who knows. It could be like the dinosaurs and the asteroid and no more anything. It could be that. I don't know. Also, climate change and nobody was paying any attention to that. So do people learn their lessons? I don't think it'll ever go back to normal, though. I don't think people change past the age of 20. Not really.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Well, we have a question from someone who's watching, Andrew Taylor. Andrew was a guest on our show last Friday. Yeah. Two weeks ago. I think he's all running together, but he says your work refuses the premise of human constraint, of gravity, of the horizontal, of the human body. How are you considering and questioning our current constraints of home space and the Zoom screen?

Elizabeth Streb:

Well, Andrew, we did, we put this out. I've got to get you on my mailing list. Again, you are, we've had great exchanges over the years, Andrew and I have you know, about education and about the arts and about life. What I think that the screen... I'm not comfortable with it, as you could see how long it took me, but Andrew, I am.

Elizabeth Streb:

I found myself getting fascinated by it. When I was making the horizon line dance for our gala, our Action Maverick's gala, it's missing everything I care about- physicality, danger, time. I sort of blame it on the physicists, because they've still never defined time. Not even defined it. It's based on the same thing. I asked Lisa Randall once, she's a physicist at Harvard, and I said, well, what's your definition of time? Well, no, one's been able to really define it because well there's a problem with a minus sign. I go, really? ...Where you can go backwards in time, it's a theoretical particle, but I guess Andrew, I'm just a curmudgeon and I'm going to do it. I'm going to get into Zoom or Chrome. One of the things that is nine squares and we were not editing and it was two minutes long. And all I could do is positional things and images. We go faster than what images would provoke. They lasted about a half a millisecond. So it's everything I don't like. You know, someone's handed me this pale and I'm going to have to just get into it.

Tim Cynova:

Elizabeth it's going to be exciting to see what you come up with, because if anybody can make this work, I'm excited to see what comes out of that. I have recommended that I've lost track at how many people need to watch Born to Fly, the documentary I was fortunate to see it in New York when you were there about the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Lauren and I have talked about her love of the Olympics and how typically she would shut down every summer and winter for years. What's your relationship with the Olympics, Elizabeth? Do you usually watch it? Do you not? Do you have favorite sports? Where you're like, I'm going to just slide people down the spokes of the London Eye and that's going to be far, far more interesting than anything else?

Elizabeth Streb:

Well, I was really pretty cool. You've got to admit. I have a rigger named Robin Alliance with unusual rigors in London, and he created these gizmos that snapped onto the spokes, all 32 of them. I choreograph this whole dance on the spokes. Profundity is it kept changing...the slope changed its relationship to gravity and every little movement on that thing. They could fly; go 200 feet down the radius. It's 600 feet in the air. Once you're off the ground, 65 feet. It was a new vocabulary. His relationship with gravity was different than I was in trans. We walked down city hall, but we were tied somewhere up in the roof.

Elizabeth Streb:

I remember it stopped and Leonardo had to go over and unwrap a cable and there was like this thing, right? And I was at the top of the roof of the city hall in London, getting ready to go. And there was this, a rigger was up there, Robin was. I went, I think there's a problem there. It's all this tangle. I think it's not correct. No, no don't worry. You know how, how hard we're [inaudible 00:18:21]. Fair enough. We get a third of the way down and there's a round well.

Elizabeth Streb:

But Olympiad was a once in a lifetime bungee jumping off the millennium bridge. Anyway, in reference to the Olympics. I watch every Olympics. My favorite sport is downhill skiing with the women. And you know, this is like in the wind. This is the other thing. Talk about time. You win by a quarter, right? It's a hundred thousandth of a second. And all you can do to be that good is have guts and just be skiing your home like Lindsey Vaughn. I mean, it was just like cracking all of her falls. I don't like it that people fall and get hurt, but I love watching how they survive those falls going at that speed, 70 miles an hour. Is that right, Lauren? Something like 70 miles an hour?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Streb:

What other sport do you like, Lauren?

Lauren Ruffin:

So I always forget the name of the sport. I didn't know it existed until a couple of years ago.

Tim Cynova:

Biathlon, right?

Lauren Ruffin:

Biathlon. When these, I mean, white people invent the most amazing sports. You're skiing, long distance, and then you have to lay down in the snow and shoot at targets. It is amazing! And if I had known that sport existed, when I was a kid, I would have like thrown my basketball into the wind and become a bi-athlete.

Elizabeth Streb:

See, that's like, we're fast Twitch people like anerobic. I don't like it. I want it to be over in two minutes and then suffer all the way. But not an hour or whatever the heck goes.

Lauren Ruffin:

As I've gotten older, I've become a more patient athlete.

Elizabeth Streb:

You have?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I was always a sprinter and a basketball player, and now I can do things for 45 minutes an hour that are not me chasing a ball, which is very strange.

Elizabeth Streb:

That's amazing. I'm very impressed by that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Streb:

I love surfing, but it's not an Olympic. Where's my book. Oh, I have this great book called Sharks. That's perfect. Very hard book to find. Yeah. It's not Natalie Jackson, but it's my Bible. I can't even held it up as a gala last night. I go get this book. But I think physical ideas like that, like surfing. I also love sports that go on for generations, but they get no notice whatsoever. And like when people surf the mavericks, those are the waves that are like 60 feet high, 40 feet high. And you fall off of that and you just die. So I like things that have death as the other edge of them, I guess.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I do want to get it. Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Meanwhile, I went cross country skiing for the first time on a totally flat land or broke my ankle. So, you know. [crosstalk 00:21:11].

Elizabeth Streb:

You're not even attached to the ski, and you're not going to cry real cute for that.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Clearly I'm not pushing the envelope hard enough.

Elizabeth Streb:

Well you just decided to bail out and didn't want to do it anymore.

Tim Cynova:

I have an aversion to what I would call low friction, sports, ice skating skiing. I am more of a cyclist and runner where there's some traction there, but I don't know. I was in Canada a couple months ago. Everyone was so encouraging about how easy cross country skiing is. I thought might as well try it. And then first time out ever in my life, a mile, broke my leg.

Elizabeth Streb:

That's terrible.

Tim Cynova:

Good story. That's the only time I'm going to go skiing. And we're coming up on time though. I think it's time for the suitcase question, Lauren.

Lauren Ruffin:

Elizabeth, I'm going to miss talking to you. It's good that someone else can give Tim a hard time besides me.

Elizabeth Streb:

It's my job, Tim. And I love [inaudible 00:22:11]

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, thank you. So throughout your life, you've been carrying a figurative suitcase with you. Habits and beliefs and things you love that have been in the suitcase for a long time. Now we're in a pandemic. So what's one thing that's been in your suitcase for a long time that you're tossing out, never to go back in again. What's one new habit or belief or love that you were going to put into the suitcase forever.

Elizabeth Streb:

This is really a quintessential impossible to answer question. I won't take any of the books out. That's why my suitcases are so... I know on my iPad, but not, not reading on a virtual machine. Now we're saying this right as I've got this huge suitcase. We're in New York, and we're going back tonight or tomorrow. I have packed a million other things in there. So I know it's a mess. Or maybe I take body lotion out, which is bad for a seven year old to do, but it's wrinkling. Anyway, what can I do then? I think that exercise equipment I take out. I've got to get back to exercising, but I'm not in the mood. So that goes out. I think that what I would leave in or put in?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, something new that you're going to put in.

Elizabeth Streb:

Well, what I've been putting in is certain types of books. I almost got the Rome prize, but then I was rejected. I was going to take a year off and go and just be. The thing that I'm putting in is time that I wanted to go back to when I was just, nobody, sitting on a curb on Canal street. Reading, studying. That kind of time you need to read a book that's philosophical. So it would be philosophy, mathematics, and science. I have time to like read a page and then run. Like I've noticed also a lot of the quotes I used to just say this, this, this and Feinstein said, this guy said John Page, and woman said. Now I want to go back there and it's giving me time.

Elizabeth Streb:

So I'm putting time for study back in my suitcase. And the COVID is really the only implementer. I think that could have forced that on me. And even though in my mind, I wanted to go back to be able to see, could I come up with a new idea or am I done inventing? Does the world need another modern dance or perfection dance? Does it need it? Or are the 99 or a hundred I've made enough? What would be the next version of me giving back before I... The idea is that I would just burst into dust. That's my idea to die. I'm not going to take a lot of time dying. I just want to explode. I've used every single part of my microbes. I think that those are the things that I would do.

Lauren Ruffin:

Amazing.

Tim Cynova:

That is amazing. Elizabeth, you are a wonderful person and it's an honor to get to know you; to have known you for these years and to close our season one with this conversation. I can't imagine two other people that would rather have making fun of me for my inability cross country skiing than the two of you lovingly doing that. I assume it's lovingly. I'm going to take that as lovingly. Thank you so much for being on the show with us today.

Elizabeth Streb:

A real pleasure.

Tim Cynova:

And with that, we sadly and excitedly end with an immense amount of gratitude to all of our guests and viewers. We have reached the end of an amazing Season One of the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live morning show. Never fear, we have more audio only podcast episodes in the queue while we plan our next live season. You can also download all of the previous Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and re-watch Work. Shouldn't. Suck. live episodes over on www.workshouldntsuck.co.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on 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 photo 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.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

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Live with Darren Walker! (EP.37)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Darren Walker. [Live show recorded: May 11, 2020.]

Last Updated

May 13, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Darren Walker. [Live show recorded: May 11, 2020.]

Guest: Darren Walker

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guest

Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, an international social justice philanthropy with a $13 billion endowment and $600 million in annual grant making. He chaired the philanthropy committee that brought a resolution to the city of Detroit’s historic bankruptcy and is co-founder and chair of the US Impact Investing Alliance.

Before joining Ford, Darren was vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, overseeing global and domestic programs including the Rebuild New Orleans initiative after Hurricane Katrina. In the 1990s, as COO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation—Harlem’s largest community development organization—he oversaw a comprehensive revitalization strategy, including building over 1,000 units of affordable housing and the first major commercial development in Harlem since the 1960s. Earlier, he had a decade-long career in international law and finance at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and UBS.

Darren co-chairs New York City’s Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, and serves on the Commission on the Future of Rikers Island Correctional Institution and the UN International Labor Organization Commission on the Future of Work. He also serves on the boards of Carnegie Hall, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Gallery of Art, Art Bridges, the High Line, VOW to End Child Marriage, the HOW Institute for Society, the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of 13 honorary degrees and university awards, including the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University.

Educated exclusively in public schools, Darren was a member of the first class of Head Start in 1965 and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, which in 2009 recognized him with its Distinguished Alumnus Award—its highest alumni honor. He has been included on numerous annual media lists, including Time’s annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, Rolling Stone’s 25 People Shaping the Future, Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative People, and Out magazine’s Power 50.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hey, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Workshop. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE! The Morning(ish) Show, even more so today. We are so excited for our episode. Today we're joined by Darren Walker. Darren is the President of the Ford Foundation and as a genuinely awesome person. Fun little story: As I was just sharing with Darren in the green room, when he agreed to be on the show through our mutual friend. Our mutual friend, she said, "yeah, good news, tonight Darren is going to be on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah." And it was immediately this moment of like, Oh dear God, what have we gotten ourselves into? Uh, so, so we'll see. Most of you know, Darren and the terrific work that he and the Ford Foundation do. If you have any questions about bios, links, they're all in the description to this. So let's just get going. Without further ado, Darren, welcome to the show.

Darren Walker:

Thank you for having me.

Lauren Ruffin:

So Darren, the first question that we always ask our guests are, how are you and how is your community doing?

Darren Walker:

Well, I am fine, all things considered. When I'm asked that question, it has to be in consideration of all the things going on around me. I'm doing fine, but the world is not. And I recognize my privilege and the level of security I have, which insulates me in some ways from what every day people have to deal with, which is how to make enough money to pay rent. And I have a decent livelihood so that you and your family can live with dignity. That today is a real challenge in this city and in this country as a result of this horrific pandemic, that is wrecking havoc on the lives of the people who are always most vulnerable, Black folks, Brown folks, Queer folks, people who have been marginalized historically. And in this increasingly unequal world, the inequality that is revealed as a result of this calamity is, I think it brings into stark relief of what we always know.

Darren Walker:

And we know who is going to be harmed the most, what communities are going to be discriminated against the most. This is not a new phenomenon, it is a recurring nightmare for some folks. And so Darren Walker is doing fine. All things considered

Tim Cynova:

Darren, what does it look like right now? Just from a practical standpoint for work at the foundation, I assume you all are working remotely or from various places. Have you done that before? Is that actually the case? How are you coordinating with the team?

Darren Walker:

Well, we are working remotely and it's actually been pretty seamless because we had in place a very robust business continuity plan. So in case there was some shock we could very quickly pivot and work remotely. We have the equipment and the resources. So relative to our grantees, this has been a very easy transition. Now that's not to say that people aren't emotionally traumatized, that people are not feeling the various roller coaster of emotions that one feels. But relative to our grantees, relative to the nonprofits who are out there operating without endowment, without wealthy boards, without the equipment, we made the transition quite easily. But we are concerned about the state of the field, particularly in the areas where we work with the lens of racial equity. And a concern about the organizations and institutions that serve our community and how resilient they will be in the face of what will be a, not a sprint, but a marathon of challenges of postponed fundraisers, of canceled seasons, of a revenue source that evaporates, how are these organizations going to survive?

Darren Walker:

It's essential that they survive because without them, we have no culture in America. We have no justice. The nonprofit sector has been the one leg of the stool that consistently fought for justice, have fought for the rights of those who are most forgotten and left behind. And then the art, it is those organizations who have often provided the creativity, ingenuity innovation, that has made possible the larger American, creative, artistic experiment. So without these organizations and the communities they are embedded in and represent, it's hard to imagine how we're even going to have something called American culture.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. And so you just mentioned organizational resilience and how fluent we can support that, but how are you approaching your own resilience and self care while you're in quarantine and during this time?

Darren Walker:

That's a great question, especially for an admitted, acknowledged, extreme extrovert. For those of us who have had enough coaching and Myers-Briggs testing and all other sorts of personality disorder testing, I can tell you that it is very challenging to live in an apartment and basically not have any social engagement for two months and counting. I am a person who thrives, who desperately needs engagement with other human beings and to be denied that is very challenging for my own emotional health. And I have thought through the technology and the genius of Zoom and FaceTime to find proxies for what I need and it simply isn't possible. Because you go from one Zoom to the next Zoom and by the end of the day, you are spiffed and you don't feel like you've had any real human engagement.

Tim Cynova:

One of our previous guests, Caroline Woolard described every day as blurs day and every hour as Zoom o'clock, as it feels like you're going from one to the next. And speaking of Zoom recently Hannah Drake published a piece on ArtPlace America, their blog titled, We Will Not Zoom Our Way Out of This Crisis. And one of the memorable quotes from her piece that I found was, America, as we knew it has changed and similar to the USB port on my Mac book, it's not coming back.

Darren Walker:

That's right.

Tim Cynova:

And this got me to think about systemic change, systems change. And before the pandemic, it feels like probably for a lot of people, that there was a fairly abstract concept. Even if you talked about systems change and systemic change, but the pandemic, the surface for a lot of people, I think the systems and the systems in particular, as they're not working and they're falling apart. As you think about systems change in the current context, what comes to mind?

Darren Walker:

What comes to mind is the design of these systems. So the systems that are failing us were designed, choices were made, these systems don't exist in isolation. We made choices to have an economy that delivers far too much inequality and far too little opportunities. We made a choice to have a criminal justice system that disproportionately locks up Brown and Black people and poor White people. We made a choice to have a housing system that places, Black folks, Brown folks, people who have historically been discriminated against, in disadvantaged geography, this place far from opportunity. So these systems that we have designed, we now need in this PC world to redesign them, not renew them. I heard someone quite prominent say on television, we need to renew our American dream and we need to renew our economy. I do not want to renew our economy. The dictionary defines renew as restart something that was interrupted. I actually don't want to restart that economy. I want to reimagine the economy in a way that delivers more shared prosperity.

Darren Walker:

And so how do we design that economic system is the question that I believe is a critical question. Before we dive in the deep end of the pool and just bring forward the old tools that did not work for most of us.

Lauren Ruffin:

I can't agree more. I spend so much time thinking about how capital flows through our economic system. And one of the things that's really been sitting with me for the last two or three weeks as we saw the paycheck protection program rollout and EIDL loan come out. Some of the data suggests that 95% of Black businesses were locked out of those funds, 91% of Latin Mexicans businesses, these small businesses that are the engine of Black and Brown communities in terms of training apprenticeship, just community building. And I've been thinking about that and also in the longer term context of traditional loans drying up, CDFIs not giving and banks not lending to Black and Brown small businesses. It strikes me that philanthropy has all of a sudden become perhaps the one place that Black and Brown businesses and ideas and innovation can be funded. I don't think we talk about the sector in terms of the importance, it is in writing capital for these businesses ideas.

Lauren Ruffin:

Are you in Ford thinking about work in that lens and looking at your work as being a critical underpinning of funds for these businesses and for these ideas?

Darren Walker:

Well, first of all, that's a great observation. And the question about what Ford is doing, let's just go back in history. So the fourth foundation helped to create America's first community development financial institution, the CDFIs the emerged out of the 1960s, and an effort at what was then called urban renewal. And a number of interventions that the foundation played a role in that thought to mitigate and redress, the red lining that had occurred that made it impossible for Black businesses to receive loans or Black homeowners to get mortgages, et cetera. So there are a number of things, including the community reinvestment act and the local initiative support corporation, the affordable housing movement that the foundation was involved in. But what we have been stymied in is scaling these challenges, scaling these opportunities. And the challenge is that you fast forward, as you just were describing very well, what happened with the PPP program and the Cares Act B for B Black businesses.

Darren Walker:

And of course, as you probably noticed in the most recent round of PPP, there was an acknowledgement that in a first round Black businesses and CDFIs had been ignored. And so there was an effort that was driven in part by the Congressional Black Caucus who heard from Bayer constituencies, what was actually going down in their communities. And they insisted that there'll be some recognition that this needed to be righted, and so there is now a recognition of that. Now, whether it will actually flow to our communities and our businesses remains to be seen. And this is why a number of us are funding accountability efforts to follow the money and to measure and assess and survey Black businesses to understand whether or not any of those funds are actually flowing into our communities. I think the foundation, you are right, when you say philanthropy could, that's right, philanthropy could do a whole lot of the things, but will philanthropy do it?

Darren Walker:

So you asked the right question. I would say, the jury is out. Are we willing to pay out more at a time of an existential threat, when it is no longer defensible to simply say, we pay out our 5% because that's what the government requires us to do? Is it defensible to say, we are looking at our investments strictly from the standpoint of maximizing returns? I don't believe it is acceptable. And I believe that in this PC world, some of the things that we in philanthropy were able to sustain in the BC world they're going to be reckonings. And people are going to expect and should expect in this moment to not have the answer be what the answer was in the BC world.

Tim Cynova:

Darren, what do you think is going to take? Getting ready for this interview, I meditated and reflected a lot of, if I were in your position or one of your colleagues positions running a foundation, would I increase the payout? Would I just go bigger, go home? Be like, if our commitment to social justice is this, and this is the time, would there be a plan that would cause me to say, let's just cash it all out and go big and, Oh, we're going to do our best right now. Thankfully you and your colleagues are far smarter in mortality than I am, so I'm not having to make those decisions but I wonder what it would take for the community to say, well, this is our moment. This is why we've been around forever or for however long, let's make the most of it.

Darren Walker:

Well, I think you are right, that it will take prayer and meditation and more to actually get the sector to fully embrace all of the leverage capability our institutions have individually and we as a sector. So I do believe that philanthropy is filled with thoughtful, committed, passionate people who want justice, who want to fight poverty, but there's also this thing called the market and we allow the market to trump the imperative to do what is best. And so what I say to our fellow legacy foundations, who like the Ford Foundation are charged with transitioning into the future and future generations and preserving the endowment, all of those very important, but do share a responsibility, is that there may not be a future for our endowment. There may not be a future for this democracy if we let slip away from us the one opportunity we have to actually begin to get things right in this country and in the world.

Darren Walker:

And so, while I appreciate as a former banker, the importance of fiduciary responsibility, I think that the four foundations endowments will be better served in the long run if we have a healthy flourishing democracy. I believe that we have to go beyond the 5% and look for ways to substantially increase, certainly in this year and probably next year, most definitely the level of giving, the level of investing.

Tim Cynova:

We're coming up on time and want to make sure we get the suitcase question in, because it's just a fun question to ask. Before we get to that last question, you co-authored a piece in the Chronicle Philanthropy about a week or two ago, titled, In Covid-19 Crisis, Philanthropy's Attention Must Focus on People With Disabilities. In previous episodes, we've had the amazing opportunity to chat with Deana Haggag at United States Artists and stylists Marcus Ware. And wanted to have an opportunity for you to maybe encapsulate or what resonates from you about this moment in time. And one of the things I think we're hearing is, how can this not just be a short-lived trend?

Darren Walker:

Well, I think we have come to understand the long standing prejudice, discrimination and bias against people with disabilities and the invisibility of them in our quote unquote "strategy". Our are strategies that were designed to broaden the circle and bring more justice and we forgot people with disabilities. That reflects our ableism that reflects our bias and we need to, we progressives, we foundation people, need to own our culpability in marginalizing this critically important community. And even more important is our mission, of our justice, our reducing poverty and inequality. How will we have more justice in this country if people with disabilities remain discriminated against? In seeking employment, housing, the right to live independent dignified lives. We've got to take on those costs of it and make sure we support them with the bigger, that we support LGBTQ and African American and Latino and native, et cetera.

Darren Walker:

This community cannot be left behind. In fact, we can't have justice without this community being at the center of our work. And so for me, it's been liberating to be liberated from my own ignorance and my own sense of myths that we progressives have about feeling that we know what's right and what's wrong. And right in front of us fits a community that defines and knows what it feels like to be left out and left behind. And they have been invisible to large foundations. And only recently have we large foundations come to understand how critical addressing the issues that affect people with disabilities is to our mission.

Lauren Ruffin:

Thank you for that. I feel like I was in church for a second. I might've been saying, Oh, a little too loud.

Darren Walker:

That's right. I need you to stand up and do it [crosstalk 00:00:19:45].

Lauren Ruffin:

I was, I had that moment. So I guess we should go to our last question. I know we're out of time.

Darren Walker:

What is the last question? I hear it's a famous one.

Lauren Ruffin:

The last question is getting famous. Both of our viewers there [crosstalk 00:19:57]. So throughout your life Darren, you've been carrying a figurative suitcase with you, of behaviors, habits, things you really love. The pandemics maybe made us question all of these things. My question is, what's one thing that you've been carrying around in your life suitcase for a long time that you're throwing out and you're never doing it again? And what's one thing that you're putting in your suitcase, one behavior, habits, this thing that you've never really done before that you've started to do that you think you're going to carry with you for the long haul?

Darren Walker:

I think the one thing that I'm going to leave behind is this notion of the critical importance of working in an office and the need to be face to face. I fought tooth and nail about telecommuting and working remotely, because I said that we needed to build a community at Ford and to build that community and culture, people had to see each other face to face every day in the office. I have been disabused of that ideology and so I now understand that we can have an organization where people work remotely some of the time, not all of the time, but that they can work remotely effectively. If there is something that I want to do that I don't do enough, I think it is making sure that I own my right to be at the table. I have found that I, for my entire life as a Black man a Queer man, a man with my economic origin, I have often felt humbled to be at the table, to be included.

Darren Walker:

And I find that among a lot of people of color and women in rooms of power and influence to be grateful to be in the room. And I now have come to understand that we're in the room for a reason. And that is not to be grateful. That is to make sure that we are speaking truth to power and that we are interrogating our own beliefs and our own biases and prejudices and ideologies that get in the way. And so I am going to hopefully be more assertive about being in the room and doing the work that I'm there to do.

Tim Cynova:

Amazing. Darren, it has been an absolute pleasure getting to spend time with you. Thanks for going long on this interview. It's been a true pleasure. Thank you so much.

Darren Walker:

Thank you guys. This was great fun for me. Let's do it again.

Tim Cynova:

That's good. Take care. Thank you.

Darren Walker:

Bye. Bye.

Tim Cynova:

Continue the Work. Shouldn't. Suck live adventure, with us on our final episode of season one, when we're joined by Elizabeth Streb. Miss us in the meantime, you can download more Work. Shouldn't. Suck episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and re-watch Work. Shouldn't. Suck live episodes over on workshouldntsuck.co. If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on 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.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Guest User 5/10/20 Guest User 5/10/20

Live with Bamuthi & Lisa Yancey! (EP.36)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Lisa Yancey. [Live show recorded: May 8, 2020.]

Last Updated

May 10, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Lisa Yancey. [Live show recorded: May 8, 2020.]

Guests: Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Lisa Yancey

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guests

LISA YANCEY is a strategist, social impact entrepreneur, community builder, and visionary who believes that people build legacies in a lifetime. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Lisa Yancey is the president Yancey Consulting (YC) and co-founder of SorsaMED and The We’s Match. With 18 years of practice, YC has served over 100 nonprofit organizations, grantmakers, and individuals. Advising across arts and culture, public space, and justice-based sectors, YC specializes in strategic organizational development, economic modeling, evaluation and assessments, board development, leadership coaching, and executive transition support. SorsaMED is a biotechnology company engineering cannabinoids infused with nutrient-enriched microalgae for therapeutic pain management, with a specific concern for sickle cell anemia sufferers, especially youth. The We’s Match is dedicated to the wealth, scale, and wellness of Black women entrepreneurs. We match these entrepreneurs with resources and capital for business growth and success. Lisa’s dedication to supporting equitable outcomes for systemically disenfranchised people is the seamless thread that binds these companies. Three essential philosophies drive Lisa’s work. One, we must disrupt patterns that either sustain or are complicit to inequities that challenge any person’s or group’s ability to be their full selves. Two, we will never accomplish sustainable goals looking solely in the short-term. She touts, “It is imperative to assess and set generational impact goals (20-25 years from now) that connect to present-day efforts.” The third is best captured in Lilla Watson’s declaration, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you are here because your liberation is bound with mine, then let us work together.” Lisa believes, “I am one of WE.” Lisa matriculated from Boston College Law School and Emory University. She is a former dancer and choreographer. She is also a member of the New York State Bar Association. Lisa currently lives in Mount Vernon, New York, and serves on the board of Fractured Atlas.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. He is also the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In pursuit of affirmations of black life in the public realm, he co-founded the Life is Living Festival for Youth Speaks, and created the installation “Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos” for Creative Time. Joseph’s opera libretto, We Shall Not Be Moved, was named one of 2017’s “Best Classical Music Performances” by The New York Times. His evening length work, /peh-LO-tah/, successfully toured across North America for three years, including at BAM’s Harvey Theater as a part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival. His piece, “The Just and the Blind” investigates the crisis of over-sentencing in the prison industrial complex, and premiered at a sold out performance at Carnegie Hall in March 2019. Bamuthi is currently at work on commissions for the Perelman Center, Yale University, and the Washington National Opera as well as a new collaboration with NYC Ballet Artistic Director Wendy Whelan. Formerly the Chief of Program and Pedagogy at YBCA in San Francisco, Bamuthi currently serves as the Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at The Kennedy Center.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Works Shouldn't Suck Live, the morning-ish show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by another amazing duo of humans, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Lisa Yancey. Lisa is a strategist, social impact entrepreneur, community builder and visionary who believes that people build legacies in lifetime. She is the president of Yancey Consulting and co-founder of SorsaMED and The We's Match, and is one of the most incredible people that I know.

Tim Cynova:

Bamuthi is a 2017 TED global fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice Initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. While managing a successful artistic career. Bamuthi also proudly serves as vice president and Artistic Director of Social Impact at Washington DC's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Without further ado, Bamuthi and Lisa, welcome to the show.

Bamuthi:

Hey.

Lisa Yancey:

Hey.

Bamuthi:

[inaudible 00:01:01]. Good morning, ish.

Lauren Ruffin:

Good morning. So it's so good to see both of your faces here this morning. Our first question to our guests is always, how are you and how is your community doing during this pandemic?

Lisa Yancey:

I'll start on that one. I am wonderfully well. I'm just grateful for health, let's start there. The fact that I can be here and have this conversation with each of you. My community and my communities because they're plural, grateful are well. My family is primarily in Atlanta with the crazy governor, I can just say that. They're actually doing well, so I'm happy about that. And I'm happy to be in New York with, I feel like one of the best governors that's showing up in that state and showing what to do. So all is good here.

Bamuthi:

I'm in Oakland, California, so my geographical community is also benefiting from progressive political leadership. I would say that when I think about community in terms of racial demographics specifically, I would say that our community is reeling. Just given the proportion of infection in the black community, the impact of COVID on the prison population, and of course the trauma of Ahmaud Arbery's killings and murdering in Georgia. So these are complex times, for sure but all of these factors of ... and the intersectionality don't stop.

Lauren Ruffin:

I've been thinking a lot about the racial timeline of this pandemic because it does seem to me that the reactions ... and I'm holding two things at once. One is that we have very, very little data about this virus, real tangible data, but the data that we have says that it's obviously just killing black and brown people primarily because of poor health opportunities and preexisting conditions.

Lauren Ruffin:

As people are realizing that black people are dying, it's like, let's open this thing back up and just let them continue to die, and the lack of value on black lives even during a pandemic seems to really be coming to the fore right now.

Bamuthi:

Beautifully said. I don't want to be reductive and I don't want to say that I speak for the entire black community but-

Lauren Ruffin:

You don't?

Bamuthi:

[crosstalk 00:03:07] direct response.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's why we invited you here, to speak for all of us.

Bamuthi:

Thanks. Normally, that's what I do. That's part of the gig of being a black intellectual of the arts. [inaudible 00:03:20].

Lisa Yancey:

I think that in this piece of the conversation is that the fact that it didn't just start with this pandemic. I'm very mindful in all of our conversations that this Black Lives Matter, this is pre and unfortunately it is pre. And so, what we expect, so Lauren, you're surprised, people are still devaluing lives. It's not a surprise for me because this isn't necessarily the kind of disruptor that's going to create a-ha in human value and equity.

Lisa Yancey:

I know that where I am, I don't like to lose hope because hopes not strategy. But for lack of a better word, where I'm hoping that we do the work for enhance mindfulness of our preexisting conditions and the results of that enhanced mindfulness, of staying present to the inequities that consistently exist. The weaponization that happens simply to support the enhance mindfulness that just because we start seeing where we are work globally, we can all be impacted by a virus that the inequities still exist and continue to and that what we're going to do about it. So, not leave it at COVID cause it didn't start with COVID.

Lauren Ruffin:

So Lisa, I know that you run a number of organizations that are remote and dispersed, but mostly I know less about how you work. But I am curious about as folks who manage, has the pandemic shifted your style of work or your leadership style?

Lisa Yancey:

I thought the pandemic has done ... because as you know, I've worked remotely before COVID-19. Yancy consulting is 19 years old this year and so there's this notion of being mobile in the part of work. What the pandemic has done, it's like now everyone is remote. So at least there were moments where you had meetings in place in different places and so it created a different rhythm of how much time I spend in front of a computer talking to people, the energetic exchange. That is a part of the communication that happens when you're facilitating and provoking and opening up and ideating together. We have to find how to find that energy in this modality, that's changed. I feel like my day starts on Mondays and don't end until that day [inaudible 00:05:42]It just starts and I'm like, okay. After I opened up our conversation, like it ends. And so I'm feeling that and density of engagement that's different

Lauren Ruffin:

What about you Bamuthi?

Bamuthi:

As a performing artist so much of my value, so much of my currency is in my body. I spent the better part of really the last 20 years moving from space to space because what I do hopefully is transformed space with word or with movement. Chemistry and just kind of the chemical transformation of sweat of idea launched into intimate spaces. So part of my work is gathering people, but the work where I feel probably most fulfilled is in embodying ideas and transformation. So without my physical body present, with gigs canceled because my physical labor and my physical presence has been my currency in the marketplace. Not only have I had to practically reevaluate, but also philosophically reevaluate just what the value of my body is.

Bamuthi:

Which given the earlier part of the conversation is itself a charged concept. But it's true. So I think that's been the thing. It's just working with presenters, with producers, with organizers to try to figure out if I'm not going to be physically on your stage, how much are these same words worth? We're all trying to figure out the economy of that together. Then COVID is impacted me specifically in terms of administrative job because the Kennedy center has furloughed just about 70% of its staff for what I would call physically responsible reasons. So many of us are in transition also trying to figure out what the value of our work is. What's the difference between the work and the job. Without the job, how does the work continue. Without a place, without context like this and how do some of the things that we were doing in social impact at the Kennedy center still resonate if that is in the container for our principles. So currency, the body, the ephemerality of all these ideas and just trying to figure out how to put a kind of value statement on these valued to principles.

Tim Cynova:

I want to highlight some love coming from our chat. "Some of our greatest minds and hearts here. Thank you for the comment. I totally agree."

Bamuthi:

-singing

Lisa Yancey:

As you were talking, bare with you. So those who know me know that I have a background in dance and those who know me as a facilitator know that often I talk about how I moved from my body and the center of where I feel it starts in my cavity. And I know that those who may not move in the body, cause there are a lot of visual based and other types of discipline-based artists and creators and innovators, engineers, entrepreneurs probably listen to this as well and create different modalities. As you were talking [inaudible 00:08:51] I was thinking about how this idea of this sheltering in place even [inaudible 00:08:57] I feel that this notion of social distancing as oxymoronic. Like social but be distant, what does that mean? Again what does it mean for those of us who are socially quarantine distant by themselves, i.e. me. In a home where you live and move in the body and you engage energetically in space.

Lisa Yancey:

And so there's a work element of those who practice and in their practice their currency is directly connected to their physical being informed. And then there's the regular human, "where are my people at? Can we hang, and have drinks, and laugh, and kick it, and decompress in mining all the craziness." Cause that's a part of our emotional equalizer and anchoring. That body piece is lost too. So we can talk about our work and our leadership, but we're straight up humans and this too, and how all are managing the post-traumatic realities that's going to happen as a result of this.

Lisa Yancey:

That those of us who are actively and consciously mining our balance and presence are just kind of putting in our bodies. Like its in our bodies, we're holding this in our bodies and so where are we going to have those release? Great, thank God for D-nice and other kinds of dance party. [inaudible 00:10:16] I'm like, I'm dancing around in my own house still by myself and being excite about someone else clicking a join with a heart. So these technologies becoming this translation where our translation would be verbal, physical sweats, emotional passion. That's not being fed. That definitely is playing into all that we do.

Tim Cynova:

I totally second the comment about the dopeness, that is Lisa Yancy here. Well Lisa can I tag onto this one because you and your incredible colleague Jolita have been hosting weekly online community gatherings every Friday. You described them as spaces that are designed for individuals to ideate, be heard, find breath, just be, just sit. You've been doing this for a number of weeks. What's resonating from these convenings that that you're bringing together?

Lisa Yancey:

I think the biggest thing that resonates from those conversations is love. I want to just say that. There's so much love internally. We decided we wanted to facilitate a space that is open for anyone who may or may not want to join, it as a no pressure zone. Typically when I work, I say language likes ... one of the agreements is," silence is not consent". So I expect you to actually use your voice to hear, but in this space you can be completely wherever you are in silence and that we all bring intellectual assets that is not just ... doesn't live in one place. So how do we aggregate and accumulate all of those assets that we hold from all of our experiences. It's been a beautiful space where across ... What, they're four time zones in the United States? At least three times zones show up every week and from all over. People coming together just to talk about whatever they want to talk about. We don't lead with titles. You just show up however you are and just comes together so it's love. It's lots of love.

Lisa Yancey:

When you get to the end of the week when you've been here zoned out, you've been to much. It doesn't feel like I'm in another, it's not another, it is like our home and that energy that I referenced earlier that's being compromised where I can't kick it with my girls. I can't ... I'm a traveling human. I am a wondering earth person and I've been grounded. I feel like I'm in the corner, someone put Lisa in a corner. Lisa don't do well in corners. But these conversations allow us to be across space and [inaudible 00:12:40] I'm grateful for everyone who joins and the ideas that get shared in that thing.

Tim Cynova:

Bamuthi, one of your TED talks, a quote is, "soccer is like the only thing on this planet that we can all agree to do together. It's like the official sport of the spinning ball." I'm wondering, I think that was maybe two or three years ago that you gave that talk. You also talked about creating a sports space. Political action curriculum for youth that uses, among other things, the politics of joy. As you think about that talk that you gave a couple of years ago, the politics of joy coming together around something like soccer or share to humanity on this globe. What's resonating for you right now in this moment?

Bamuthi:

The program that we did was in partnership with the Guggenheim and it came out of my residency there and the company of [Pilloton 00:13:30] and I were able to work in schools and around the country from Maui to Raleigh, North Carolina to the Bronx. I'm working with immigrant youth around what we call the politics of joy. And part of the impetus there was my first blood memory of joy was scoring a goal on the soccer field when I was maybe five or six years old. I don't know if any of you watch professional football or ever seen the reaction of an amateur or professional football player after they score. It's probably the closest thing to total mania that we can kind of share in public. So the premise was if we can locate or co-located an exposure to culture in that same space where joy is kind of ingested and manifested, then we're creating a kind of psychic continuum. Where folks who have been marginalized because of their immigrant status or because of their first generation status can understand that the culture that they bring, the culture that they love has some continuity in terms of a sheltering from the outside world.

Bamuthi:

When I think broadly about the politics of joy, Lisa mentioned the club quarantine and the versus concerts have been great. The whole Baby Face versus Teddy Riley thing tomorrow night. Jill Scott versus Eric about Duke. That's the appointment viewing at this point. Those are the spaces where we can feel like we do have some level of cultural synthesis besides the cutthroat politics. I welcome the opportunity to continue to design those spaces to move them from kind of the secular tactile space to the virtual space and then eventually back to kind of the live co-located space. In that design of live co-located space is going to be really important. Lisa mentioned, talked about a collective trauma that we're experiencing and some thing that I think she and I both believe in is that we can design our way to joy. That the arts sector and the vector of arts spaces have been the places where we've decided that design is most resonant and most viable. So that's the thing that I look forward to building, hopefully in intention around the community design where joy isn't so political. That joy is the healing act that ameliorates the trauma that we're all experiencing.

Tim Cynova:

We have a question. I'm going to throw it up here and read it. What if interdependence becomes trendy, just for this moment? Do you have recommendations for how we can fold interdependence into the DNA of our institutions and organizations? Thanks for the questions. Thanks for the amazing chat that's going on right here. Our guests can't see this, but it's exciting. So back to the question.

Bamuthi:

Lisa and I worked on this project, a fledgling project, where we essentially were co-visioning, the unification of a performing arts center, a performing arts organization, and a visual arts organization in Brooklyn a number of years ago. I had the privilege and the opportunity of suggesting what the administrative structure, do you remember this Lisa?

Lisa Yancey:

Yep, totally.

Bamuthi:

The administrative structure might be in, we talked about an executive director, but we talked about a director of the political imagination. We talked about a director of art framed economies and we talked about a director of creative excellence. We said that the curation of this art space would need those three working in concert with their community. So creative excellence, art framed economies, and the political imagination.

Bamuthi:

So to respond to the question, which I think is a poignant one, we cannot extract out of this moment the DNA or the genetics that precipitated it. But we can be future thinking about how we reorganize leadership structures and the purpose and mandates, certainly of our performing arts center, but just our cultural centers period. So you might've had a director of the performing arts, you might've had someone that curated dance and those positions are going to be incredibly necessary. But if the proscenium theater or the gallery is still the beating heart of your organization after this is over, then you're doing it wrong. We have a new mandate to bring people together in a different kind of way. So we can't be politically inert. We can't not think about our financial acuity as it relates to our organizations and we also have to spark not just the political imagination, but the creative imagination too. I don't think it's as much of a DNA question as it is a mutation. Now that we're all X-Men, what's our superpower going to be.

Lisa Yancey:

An exploit men. So what I'll add to this adultness of a movie is what he's saying is this notion of trend period. There is nothing that is singulary reliant on itself. Nothing. Everything relies on something else. I think one of the first anchors to even getting to a place where you can reimagine structurally whether it's leadership, whether it's departmental engagement, whether it's cross culture and community, whether it's residency, if you don't hold as an anchor value, the notion of the interdependence and togetherness as a core alliance for your whole existence, then your thinking has been completely compromised. Anything else that follows from that is shallow and can't even be recruited because you can't even to identify where you are in relationships with others and where collectively you hold strength. I've had two conversations this week while with an individual an amazing artists. We talked about togetherness and the importance of togetherness and how this is amplifying and could be amplifying the opportunity for us to strengthen our practice and valuing of togetherness, not as a hobby.

Lisa Yancey:

Not as a thing you do on the side. Not as a program, a separate party. But the togetherness as a core understanding of how you function and where your value proposition as an institution and as individuals and those institutions live.The other conversation was about the connectivity tissue. One of those conversations is that ... it was a conversation of different cohorts that are allied solidarity, but still within the silos of those various different areas and what we haven't done and strengthening from an infrastructure place, the practice and tools around the connectivity tissue of that interdependence. So interdependence is language without tools. We need to strengthen the tools of how we apply interdependence that's beyond an intellectual framework and that the value of how we understand whether we're hitting our [formers 00:20:30] indicators or whatever thing, our milestones, whatever that thing is. If it isn't hinge on what's happening with others within the ecosystem of your existence. Then it's compromised. It's shallow. It is not maximizing its potential results. I think our work is to build the tools and the language and the constructions for that connectivity tissue to not just be an idea.

Tim Cynova:

Sorry, what to toss it to the social impact question. I just want to take a moment. There are moments of my life when I think, "how the hell did I get here?" This just happens to be one of them, where you realize, I don't know what sequence of events led me to be able to be sitting and listening to this conversation but this is really amazing. With that over, it's a two parter here. Both of you work on social impact. The question here is, "Can you please define what that has meant and the opportunities and the pitfalls?"

Lisa Yancey:

Way to Go Suhly.

Bamuthi:

If I may, how we define social impact at the Kennedy center, I define impact more by our processes than outcomes. So I think a community engagement paradigm, which is where I've lived in the performing arts sector, kind of the intersection of performance curation and community engagement generally that has been measured. The effectiveness has been measured by how many folks are in the room. But what I've learned from elders, mentors and through experience is that it's impacted and much less about how many people, but how you treat people. How materially the processes have enough integrity that folks are able to organize without you. So providing conduits in a healthy way, in a way with integrity for folks to be empowered in their bodies, particularly in marginalized communities. I think they're in, those are the opportunities and the pitfalls. The larger an organization is generally the further away it is from skin in the game. There is no impact on an institutional level if there isn't shared risk and shared accountability.

Bamuthi:

So I would say that. I would also say that I'm currently making a work. I'm making an opera, Bill T Jones is directing this commission it a new performing arts center in New York. The opera is scheduled to premiere, I want to say in 21, 22. I have no idea whether building an opera right now is the right thing to do, because the opera that I'm writing requires like 60 people to be on stage and you'd imagine hundreds of people in the audience. So impact work means I think, deploying artists in a different way so that maybe instead of making work for proscenium, some artists are being deployed in systems innovations through the lens or through the conduit of these institutions. So that we're thinking as artfully about what happens outside of a theater using the resources of the theater as what happens inside of the proscenium stage as well. Impact is about redirection of creative resources to rethink our shared culture.

Lisa Yancey:

What I'll add. When I think about impact, ultimately I think about whomever the system wasn't designed for. Are they having the ... do we, because I've [inaudible 00:23:57] live in what we often in our language called margins, but I want to just give it a little jargon, ultimately impact me is that everybody gets to live the life they imagine themselves.

Tim Cynova:

Amen.

Lisa Yancey:

Full stop. Impact means that everyone, everyone gets to live the life that they imagined for themselves. That opportunities are presented for you to show up in your whole self with all of your differences. With all of our differences, none of it being a measurement and defining of what is or isn't normal. All of those constructions is compared to some kind of creative singular center and I believe that social impact is when we have an inclusive society where everyone has the opportunity to live their best lives.

Lisa Yancey:

In terms of pitfalls and opportunities. I think that we are in, we have been, I'm [inaudible 00:24:49] on my language about elevating COVID and this pandemic as more than a disruptor as fracturing, some vague understanding. But there have been and consistently has been inequities and different realities that has compromised people's ability to live their best lives consistently, systematically, pragmatically, emotionally, health, lots of them financially. So in terms of opportunities and pitfalls, I think that we've been moving in an opportunity to de-center the singularity of things. This no binary, black, white, gay, straight, female, male. We've been doing that work. To untangle and embrace more fluidity and even getting language and tools around intersectionality that we need to continue to do to eviscerate the centering of anything. Even the idea of inclusion [crosstalk 00:25:41] because inclusion center something to be included in. That in itself is problematic, because you're saying your outside and you set this thing as the standard of which you want to become a part of.

Lisa Yancey:

That's problematic and so I think the opportunity is to just continue to interrogate all of those constructions that doesn't allow for the fluidity and variety. The pitfall would be is to fall into a place where even in our language that feels like we are just begin to mirror the same type of exclusionary practice that sensor's a single thing. It can seem like an unintended consequence of being righteous and still hold behaviors that we haven't shed enough of. Stay transparent and embracing of difference.

Lauren Ruffin:

A couple of things are really clear. One, as Tim said, amazing conversation. Two, if we get renewed for season two by our distributor, y'all will have to be our first guests up. There's so much more that we got to talk about, but we do have to wind this episode down. So I'll leave you with a question, a little dreaming question, I suppose. Your entire life you've been carrying around a suitcase, a figurative suitcase that's got all of these habits, behaviors, things you've always done to center yourself. So the question is, what's one thing that has been in your suitcase for a long time that's coming out? What's one new habit behavior thing you do, practice that you're holding dear, that you're going to put into that suitcase for the rest of your life coming out of the pandemic?

Bamuthi:

I know one thing that's coming out of my suitcase is dumb ass Facebook friends. You know, I've been on social media more because I'm at the crib. You know what I'm saying. I'm shocked by how many of my Facebook "friends" are conspiracy theorists. Listen, I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary here. You know what I'm saying? I was set to ride for Bernie, but Mike Flynn is free and unemployment is at 15%. all y'all that are just like riding for you got to earn my vote people and all the conspiracy Plandemic people got to go. Yelling at Facebook, dumb ass Facebook.

Lauren Ruffin:

Unnoticed.

Bamuthi:

They are gone. What am I keeping? Smoothies. The mornings are a little bit longer, they're a little bit more luxurious and there isn't the need for coffee like there used to be, so smoothies. Getting rid of you my conspiracy theorist marginal ass. Okay. Yep, go! I'm kidding here.

Lisa Yancey:

What I'm taking out of the suitcase is oppressing the more urgency idea that just got to get done. It's got to happen. They have to ... I have to deliver this thing out because for a whole bunch of reasons that could be a whole another point. I won't go to that. But I'm putting in and keeping that has replaced that sense of urgency is the stillness and you said luxurious, Bamuthi. A luxury, I actually want to take it out of it being luxurious because it feels like it's exceptional. Like its something that happens on occasion. I want to keep in my long conversations with my family, my nieces and nephews that I didn't ever have time for. Now have Sunday conversations with my nephew every Sunday. No matter what. I find these WhatsApp me, I am available no matter what. I could be in a meeting and someone who I care about almost, I'll answer it and, "just like a minute I'll call you back." I don't just leave it. I'm keeping in the human connections as the priority and the work. Time is in the service of us. So remembering that not getting lost in deliverables, but staying connected to love even if it feels like it's a whatever. I've never been the one to call like professional, unprofessional. But this notion of, I always have time for you, because I love you and you'd love me back. That's what I'm keeping.

Tim Cynova:

Amazing. God, I don't know how to wrap this up, but profoundly thankful for the time that you've been able to spend with us today. Wish you could see the chat that's going on, a lot of love that's being sent your way, Bamuthi and Lisa, thank you so much for being with us on the show.

Lisa Yancey:

Thank you for having us and asking us.

Tim Cynova:

Yes.

Lisa Yancey:

I love anytime I can be with Bamuthi.

Bamuthi:

Love you Lisa, be safe.

Lisa Yancey:

Bye, love you.

Tim Cynova:

Continue the Works Shouldn't Suck Live adventure with us on our next episode when we're joined by Darren Walker. Missing us in the meantime, you can download more Works Shouldn't Suck Live episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice, and re-watch Works Shouldn't Suck Live episodes over on workshouldntsuck.co. If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic and joined the fun to. 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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Guest User 5/8/20 Guest User 5/8/20

Live with Alexis Frasz! (EP.35)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Alexis Frasz. [Live show recorded: May 7, 2020.]

Last Updated

May 8, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Alexis Frasz. [Live show recorded: May 7, 2020.]

Guest: Alexis Frasz

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guest

ALEXIS FRASZ sees culture as both a context for and a driver of social change. She is a researcher, strategist and advisor to partners in culture, philanthropy, and the environmental sector, helping design and implement strategies to drive transformative change. Her perspective on systems change draws on her background in cultural anthropology, Chinese Medicine, permaculture design, Buddhism, and martial arts. She is passionate about bringing arts and culture into greater solidarity with broader movements working for social, ecological, and economic justice.

Alexis speaks, teaches, and mentors leaders in the U.S. and Canada on integrating creative and civic leadership, and is faculty in the cultural leadership program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Creative Climate Leadership program run by Julie’s Bicycle. Her research (with Holly Sidford) on socially engaged artistic practice has informed artist training curriculums and philanthropic programs worldwide. She is actively engaged in Helicon’s ongoing work to confront structural inequities in the cultural sector.

Alexis graduated Summa cum Laude from Princeton University with a degree in Cultural Anthropology and has pursued Master’s level study in Chinese Medicine. She is an advisor of the NorCal Resilience Network, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and The Artist’s Literacy’s Institute. She lives in Oakland, where she spends time in her garden and studies with integrated spiritual/psychological teacher, Jennifer Welwood.

Hear more about Alexis's thoughts on Basic Income.

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 Alexis Frasz. Alexis currently serves as a co-director of Helicon Collaborative. In her work, she is a researcher, strategist, and advisor to partners in culture, philanthropy in the environmental sector, helping design and implement strategies to drive transformative change. Her perspective on systems change draws on her background in cultural anthropology, Chinese medicine, permaculture design, Buddhism, and martial arts. And, as you soon will find out, she is passionate about bringing arts and culture into greater solidarity with broader movements, working for social, ecological, and economic change.

Tim Cynova:

Her research with friend of the show, Holly Sidford, on socially engaged artistic practice has informed artist training curriculums and philanthropic programs worldwide. She's actively engaged in Helicon's ongoing work to confront structural inequities in the cultural sector, and we are honored that she's here to spend a couple minutes with us today.

Tim Cynova:

Without further ado, Alexis, welcome to the show.

Alexis Frasz:

Hi. It's good to be here.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, it's good to see your face, one of our favorite people to talk to.

Alexis Frasz:

Likewise.

Lauren Ruffin:

So, how are you, and how's your community doing right now, during the pandemic?

Alexis Frasz:

I'm good. I feel really lucky, I think as a lot of us do, who have jobs, who are healthy, so I feel pretty good. I'm a gardener. I'm a bit of a prepper, actually, so I feel validated in some ways. My friends are coming to me and asking for my canned goods, and my tips on how to grow things, so I finally feel like I have a purpose. Yeah, I feel good.

Alexis Frasz:

Of course, that's on a background of, really, being over the extent of the suffering that's in the larger community, so that's heartbreaking, too.

Tim Cynova:

Just on the prepper and tips, what's the most frequent tip that you give people? Before we move into the broader conversation, deeper conversation, what's the most frequent tip you're giving your friends right now?

Alexis Frasz:

Store food, store water. We're in earthquake country, so for us ... I'm in California, so it's really important to have extra stuff. My pantry before, I didn't have to make a Costco run. My pantry was full for months, which is just how I live. That's because I cook a lot, that's not all prepping. Yeah, keep things around.

Alexis Frasz:

Learn how to grow a garden, if you've got space. I know, Tim, you probably don't do that in New York.

Tim Cynova:

I had one of those electric gardens, like the hydroponic gardens with the pods.

Alexis Frasz:

Oh, yeah.

Tim Cynova:

But, it's a small apartment, and those lights don't go off at night, so it's like this floodlight coming into your sleeping space.

Alexis Frasz:

That's torture, too.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, it lasted one or two pod rounds. We were like, "It's not worth those cherry tomatoes and fresh basil from this thing."

Alexis Frasz:

Right.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm really enjoying the torture theme of this episode.

Tim Cynova:

It's really started off weird, Lauren.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's why the audience keeps coming back.

Tim Cynova:

That stresses me out.

Lauren Ruffin:

As a fellow prepper, I feel like every good prepper has an apocalypse team. When you meet people, you have new friends, and you're thinking if things go left in the world, who am I taking with me, do you currently have any openings on your apocalypse team? If so, what skills are you looking for?

Alexis Frasz:

Oh my God, that's such a good question. First of all, Lauren, you're in.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I know. I'm on everybody's apocalypse team. Entertainment and ax throwing, what else do you need?

Alexis Frasz:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, the weapons thing, I have to admit my apocalypse team tends more ... I studied martial arts, so I used to feel confident in that piece of it, but these days I'm pretty rusty. So, I think if we actually needed to, I've got a rag tag band of sailors, and cooks, and very caring, gentle people, so I think we might need some of that.

Tim Cynova:

If anyone needs a long distance cyclist on their team ...

Alexis Frasz:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

I mean, bike mechanics, that's a valuable skill.

Tim Cynova:

I didn't say bike mechanics, I said long distance cyclist.

Lauren Ruffin:

Well, you're going to have to get there.

Alexis Frasz:

Endurance. Endurance is key, too.

Lauren Ruffin:

I know I was pushing you.

Tim Cynova:

You're right, I could change flat tires for everyone. Just to keep this going.

Tim Cynova:

Speaking of systems change, we had the opportunity to chat a couple weeks ago, and one of the things that came up was that we talk about systems change a lot. People talk about systems change in various ways, and few people ... I shouldn't say few people. It feels like more, nowadays, people are actually starting to see systems that they might otherwise not have seen.

Tim Cynova:

I'm curious to get your thoughts, Alexis, this is something that you spend a lot of time thinking about, how the systems work, how the systems don't work, what we can do to use this as an opportunity to create better systems for us in the future, so that more people can thrive. I'm throwing out a really wide question, to get us off of the topic of me not being able to be a team member for your team, so we're going to take a hard left here, and come into a different topic.

Alexis Frasz:

Yeah, I do think a lot about systems change, and I think it's tough because right now is the moment when a lot of people are looking, and A, seeing that we live in a system. We see the systems around us falling apart, so we're aware of them in ways that we might not otherwise be. This is middle class or upper class people, I think that people who live with broken systems every day understand that they're broken, and they know that they're victims of them. But, more people are seeing that, and that's a real opportunity. At the same time, it's daunting to think about how to actually influence change in those systems.

Alexis Frasz:

But, I do think there's some really interesting things that are giving me hope right now, about that, because we're seeing ideas that were so fringe, even six months ago. Well, we had Andrea in talking about basic income, that I don't think people were taking that very seriously. Universal healthcare has been a struggle, the idea of eliminating debt has been something that fringe groups have been working on. But now, people understand why that matters, so I think there is this opening where people are suddenly understanding why those things affect us all.

Lauren Ruffin:

Earlier this week, maybe yesterday, the days are blending together, the Wallace Global Fund published a piece in USA Today that talked about the need to increase foundations giving to the 10%. I mean, you work with such a wide range of organizations, do you think that's another idea that might gain traction in the coming weeks and months?

Alexis Frasz:

I hope so. I mean, I think people who are promoting that are saying, "Well, what are we waiting for? Are we going to wait until it gets much worse?" I work in the environmental space as well, and people who work on climate change have been saying that for a long time because it's only going to get more expensive, the dollars are going to go less far the worse things get.

Alexis Frasz:

I really hope that is something that is taken seriously. I think there have been funders who have been spending down for a long time, so there's precedent for that. But, the majority are pretty conservative about wanting to preserve their endowments at times when the endowments are already shrinking because it's the market, often, that accentuates the conservatism.

Tim Cynova:

That article is really interesting, with some stats that I hadn't seen before. For those working in the space, it might not be new. For those unfamiliar with it, usually foundations give out about 5% a year of their investment corpus, and the idea, the Wallace Fund was arguing, up it to 10%.

Tim Cynova:

The really interesting thing that I found was, of the 85, 86,000 private foundations, with about $900 billion in assets, and for every additional percentage point, it's about $12.5 billion in added foundation spending a year. The article in the USA Today was arguing, or proposing, not an indefinite requirement to go to 10%, but if you do this over, say, a three year, where everyone had to give 10%, it would throw of an additional $800 billion, maybe it's $200 billion. My math this morning just isn't fast enough for this.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I think it was two, with a lot of zeroes behind it.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Alexis Frasz:

Yeah. But, I think the other piece of that is, what are they going to spend it on? We work with a lot of foundations, and I think they do the best they can. I think right now, a lot of foundations are really struggling with that Hunger Games feeling, of who do we pick to survive and who doesn't get to survive. But, the reality is that the majority of philanthropy goes to the margins, it goes to the Band-Aids of the problems that are actually structural.

Alexis Frasz:

I think we also need to have a conversation about how philanthropy actually supports the systems change that we need, so that the problems don't exist 10 years from now, and not just spreading the money around a little bit further than they're doing right now.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm holding a couple of different things, at the same time. One, being what we're seeing with PPP, and with government support. They said 95% of black businesses were locked out of the Paycheck Protection Program. And that, over the last couple years, a lot of friends, Ashford Schultz, Hebrews Unite, all these organizations have sprung up, talking about the lack of capital for limited minority businesses, generally. And it's becoming pretty clear that the philanthropic sector, as you know, and as the work Helicon's done, is remarkably discriminatory towards black and brown people, the data has not really moved a whole lot.

Lauren Ruffin:

But, at the same time with the disappearance of traditional debt funding, or CTFI money, it's like philanthropy might be the only place where small businesses, black and brown businesses, non-profits, can actually find capital for some of the systems change work. For me right now, this is one of those moments of urgency that I'm hearing, but I don't know if I'm seeing the dollars flow as quickly as they probably should in this crisis.

Alexis Frasz:

I don't know. You're probably right, I'm sure they're not flowing as fast as they could or should. Definitely, I don't think they're flowing to the organizations that are doing systems change in the quantities of money that need to be there for systems change. I think that we know the Center for Cultural Innovation, we know is spending some money on entities that are trying to prototype new models for getting capital to communities in different ways, and looking at worker cooperatives, for example, and things like that, that they're prototyping. The money needs to flow in much bigger quantities, and much faster to those types of things, to really make a systems change.

Tim Cynova:

I've been making space to meditate, and contemplate if I were in the role of foundation president, sitting on assets. I think, to your earlier point, those working in foundations are caring, they care about the work that they do, the people that they work with, and often times are working with systems themselves, that they're struggling with speed and innovation.

Tim Cynova:

But I was thinking, in this moment in time, this feels different. And would I, as the foundation president, argue for we need to spend as much money as we possibly can right now, to try and move the needle on this? First is, continue to drip it out in perpetuity, essentially. Essentially, go big or go home. What might that mean for us to actually effect change, rather than hitting around the edges if you will? I don't have a perfect answer, I'm glad I'm not in a foundation president role right now, but it has been this thought experiment that I've been wrestling with.

Tim Cynova:

If you found yourself in the role of being a foundation president with $10 billion or so, how might you approach that?

Alexis Frasz:

Unequivocally, I think now is the time to spend the money. I think both for the crisis that we're in, which is not just COVID. I think COVID is the spark that lit the fire, but we know that ... Naomi Klein, who I love, the comedian journalist who talks a lot about climate change and systems, talks about how NORML was a crisis for a lot of people. It is, and I think that, especially with climate coming down more on us, I think now is the time to make the changes that we need to make so that we can have the better future that we know is possible.

Alexis Frasz:

I think there's the crisis piece of it, but there's also the opportunity piece of it, as I was saying. I mean, I think there's a lot of things that are already moving that need a push, and with a push could really tip things. Whether it's politically, or in terms of the social safety nets that we have which never should be in the realm of foundations, permanently. That's something that the money will never be enough as we're seeing, even with the bailout bill. We need that to be something that's institutionalized in our system.

Tim Cynova:

We're going to circle back to a question from a friend of the show, a friend of ours. For those organizations just coming to a more systems view in this pandemic, what are some "ways in" to that thinking that you suggest from your own practice?

Alexis Frasz:

Oh, tough question from a friend. We're always part of multiple systems, so we've got our family system, we think in systems all the time, we're just not conscious that we are. But, we're part of our neighborhood, we're part of our organization, and the art system, and then the bigger system, so I think it can be interesting to map that, and just really understand who you influence, and what influence you're having.

Alexis Frasz:

I think the arts has been really interesting because they think of their own system as a system, but they don't see the lower down entities, like the artists, or the people, as part of their system, and they don't see the big meta systems. So, the arts tends to think it can influence its own system without attending to those other things. I think it's really, in some ways, just about listening and reflecting, first and foremost, about influence.

Lauren Ruffin:

Also, in the systems thinking, I've always found it helpful to really inventory all the assumptions that go into it, into what you think a system is. I'm wondering, are you seeing people making assumptions about what's going to happen next that are impacting their ability to act right now? So for instance, the assumption that we are going to open up again, or that things are going to go back to normal.

Alexis Frasz:

I do. I mean, I think a friend of ours that Tim knows, Josh Yates, and right of the beginning of this he said, "People are either relating to this as a snow day, a long winter, or an Ice Age." Depending on how you see it depends completely ... I mean, it completely changes how you act. I think we're all knowing now that we're not in a snow day, it's gone on too long. But, I think the idea of it being this is just a long winter, and then we'll open back up and things are the same, more or less. Or, is this a fundamental shift in paradigms of how we live?

Alexis Frasz:

I think those really do affect the way we're dealing with it. I think I'm firmly in the Ice Age camp, even though that's a dire metaphor because I think there's a lot of beauty that actually could come out of this. But, I think now's the time to start preparing for that. Some of that is, really, part of it is what do we want to keep, what's essential right now, and what do we need to let go of, either because it doesn't serve us anymore or it's just not going to work in the future that we see coming to be now.

Alexis Frasz:

There's a lot of grief in that, that I think needs to be acknowledged, and a lot of fear about the unknown, which is I think why people try to hang onto the thing we're used to, is its better than the alternative. But, maybe it's not better than the alternative, and maybe we can make a better alternative if we step into that unknown space, but it's scary.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm also wondering along those same lines of Ice Age, what are some of the beautiful things that you think can come out of this, practically?

Alexis Frasz:

Well, some of it we're already seeing. It's like that quote of "the future's already here, it's not evenly distributed." It's the mutual aid stuff that is coming out of this, on a community level, where people are seeing their system, they're seeing that. That's always been something that, I think, vulnerable communities that haven't had ... Whether its rural communities, I'm from a really rural place, or communities of color, or immigrant communities have always supported each other that way so that's beautiful, I think.

Alexis Frasz:

I think that the many, many entities and organizations that have worked, both in the arts and not building the grassroots social structure, that is now being called on to support their communities, and we're seeing the relevance of that, and how that protects and cares for people. The awareness around the care economy, and the care work, I think is really positive.

Alexis Frasz:

Then, ideally, the bigger portico shifts, and shifts in systems that we were talking about before. I mean, I do really see that as a possibility if we push for it.

Lauren Ruffin:

The caring economy is ... I was talking to Jeff Solomon a couple weeks ago, and was lamenting the fact that I wasn't ... not lamenting, actually not being super close to my family. But, I was saying that if I were closer, the interactions we'd be having would be so much different. Now, I'm realizing that I'm using capital in exchange for care, so instead of bringing groceries to my aunt's house, I'm sending groceries. There's this weird thing that's happening about how care shows up.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm also thinking a lot about what's happening on reservations right now. So many folks on reservations out here in New Mexico don't have running water. One of the interesting infrastructure pieces, because they don't have water, they've been doing water deliveries for years. There's been members of the community who are now working with Dig Deep and other organizations, but in some ways that system that was already in place as a form of long care mutual aid, is in some ways a guiding light, or one of very few positive spots in what's happening on reservations right now. I'm really hopeful about the strength of those systems, that have been an outcrop of the failure of government to provide running water in the United States. But, they're there, thank goodness.

Alexis Frasz:

Well, and you're making an interesting point because it's like, how do we not make those systems the only safety net that people have? But also, not try to replace them with capital or with government, so that people don't have those systems? Because there's something, beyond just getting your basic needs met, that comes from those. I mean, there's a sense of community trust, and camaraderie, and connectedness that comes from that. On both sides, on the giver and the receiver side, which often goes back and forth, so I think that's really beautiful.

Lauren Ruffin:

I was talking to a friend in the Bay Area who runs a large, regenerative food organization, a startup. She said something that surprised me yesterday, around our food system. In essence, everything I've read [inaudible 00:18:01] the US food system is completely screwed. But she said, actually, when you boil it down to its basics, in terms of most people being able to get the calories they need to survive a day, our system isn't working. She was like, "So many of us think about the system as being are you having healthy food, organic food, and everything else." She's like, "But in a crisis, you have to go back to the basic level, so it is working."

Lauren Ruffin:

I was so surprised by that perspective because she's a plant-forward, super healthy, organic person. Are there things that have surprised you, in the last few months?

Alexis Frasz:

That are working?

Lauren Ruffin:

That are working, things that your early prediction said this shit's going to ... That was my first curse word.

Tim Cynova:

Oh, God. Oh no, now I've got to go back and do it.

Alexis Frasz:

I was wondering about curses, because I curse a lot, too.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, that was my first one.

Tim Cynova:

This is the benefit of us having a podcast prior to the livestream, because you can edit those things out before they go online. The livestream, you're living on the edge a little bit, which stresses me out.

Lauren Ruffin:

Poor Tim. But, are there things that you thought, systems that you were fairly certain that would break, that have actually held up?

Alexis Frasz:

Yeah, I don't know. I think, in some ways it's too early to tell. Right now, we're seeing the breakdown of more of them. I think, in some ways the artists that are coming together around mutual aid is so, just heartening. You guys probably know about the Level Up work that Taylor Mac started, the getting well known artists to do things online, and then have people pay for that. But then, giving the money to people who are not well known.

Alexis Frasz:

I think just the idea that none of these artists are rich, that they're going beyond asking philanthropy for the money that they need, to finding the support for themselves, and I think that's how artists have always worked. But, in this time, you would expect that to break down, and it didn't. If anything, I think it's strengthening.

Tim Cynova:

Alexis, what are you doing for your own resilience and self care right now? Is it similar, is it different, from what it was three months ago?

Alexis Frasz:

It's pretty similar. I mean, I think other than spending time with friends, but I meditate daily. I bike also, Tim, cycle. I'm actually supposed to be training for the AIDS Life Cycle right now, which got canceled but I'm still trying to keep up my fitness, and not let everything go all to waste.

Alexis Frasz:

It's funny, though, I actually have a problem with the word self care, just the concept as it's used in our culture. Because I think that it is typically presented as you do the things that kill you during the day, you work really hard or whatever, then you have to care for yourself. Then, that's separate from all the other things you do, which are caring for others, doing your work in the world. I think this is my edge, because I'm not always good at this, but for me it's about how can we have a more integrated life, where care is woven into it, and we're not burning ourselves out. That's part of the paradigm of our culture, it's that extractive mindset where it's like, I can burn myself out, and then I just rebuild myself up again, so I can do it again tomorrow.

Alexis Frasz:

I'm trying to make more space in my days, and I think especially with the Zoom life, we have to do that. Make more space in your days to go out in the garden, or take a walk, or talk to our friend, or whatever it is, and not feel guilty about that.

Tim Cynova:

I think this is one of the things that I'm hopeful for. At the same time that, now that people's lives, and work, and caring, and everything is all in one place for most people, and that can be really hazardous, and toxic if people now have homes that are toxic workplaces. It does, on a certain level, give people an opportunity to see all of these things together in a way that, when you went to the office, you could separate that thing. My hope is that people have space to question, why is it that I do all of these things in this way? Is this how I want my life to be? Where do I have agency to change things, in order to create ... We've talked about this, the three of us, before, a place where everyone can thrive, but that really aligns with our values, and sense of purpose if that's important to us.

Tim Cynova:

But, I think you're right, these often have lived in different buckets, and you try to make sure that they all work in concert, and now all those buckets are in the same place.

Alexis Frasz:

The other thing I'll just say about that is I think that, when we're talking about the world we want to create, if we're trying to really create the new, which I think we're in that space of the cycle, we can only do that from a place of being transformed internally, and being stable, being grounded, being heartful, all of that.

Alexis Frasz:

It's not just a because it makes us feel good thing, it's for the effectiveness of the work we're trying to do in the world, we have to work on ourselves and be transformed from that extractive lifestyle.

Lauren Ruffin:

Also, I have similar issues with the term self care. I keep thinking, going back to the mutual aid piece, it's been cool to see so many of my friends be awakened to how they can ... A lot of my friends are lawyers, lobbyists, people who are more accustomed to writing a check than to actually getting their hands dirty with work. And seeing them awakened to the pleasures of actually lending a hand in their community, that's not the requirement of pro-bono hours or anything else, has been so cool talking to them about it. I think that's just a really important component.

Lauren Ruffin:

I hope that service and community involvement becomes core to a lot more peoples how they spend their time during the day.

Tim Cynova:

Well, speaking of transformation from this moment, we're coming up on time. This means, Lauren, it's time for your suitcase question.

Lauren Ruffin:

Dun dun dun. It's starting to take on, as you introduce it, this ominous quality. It's just, your suitcase question.

Tim Cynova:

It's probably the mic I'm using, I'm sorry.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I like it. It adds a little something.

Lauren Ruffin:

So Alexis, you've been carrying around a suitcase with you for your whole life, there's stuff that's been in there for years, behaviors, habits, things you do every day, ways you work, that during the pandemic you realize you don't need anymore, and they're never going back in your suitcase. Conversely, there are probably some behaviors, and habits, and things that you have fallen in love with during the pandemic, and that you're going to do from now on. Can you give us one thing that's coming out of your suitcase, and one thing that's going in your suitcase?

Alexis Frasz:

I think coming out would be control, the idea that I can be in control of the world, and my world, so flowing with life a little bit more. Because right now, we just can't control anything.

Alexis Frasz:

Then, going in, I think what we've been talking about with this embodied living. I think being in my garden is just so incredible, and I think finding ways so that the energy in and of the practice comes into my life, my work life more and infuses it, I think is really a key piece of what I want to practice going forward.

Tim Cynova:

Awesome. Alexis, it's always wonderful spending time with you.

Alexis Frasz:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yes.

Alexis Frasz:

It's so good to see you guys.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, thanks for being on the show.

Alexis Frasz:

Thank you for having me.

Tim Cynova:

Continue with the Work Shouldn't Suck Live adventure with us, on our next episode, when we're joined by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Lisa Yancey. Miss us in the meantime? You can download more Work Shouldn't Suck episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice, and re-watch Work Shouldn't Suck Live episodes over on workshouldntsuck.co.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation, or are just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might the 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.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

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Guest User 5/7/20 Guest User 5/7/20

Live with Danny Harris! (EP.34)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Danny Harris. [Live show recorded: May 6, 2020.]

Last Updated

May 7, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Danny Harris. [Live show recorded: May 6, 2020.]

Guest: Danny Harris

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guest

DANNY HARRIS, a passionate advocate for livable, walkable and bike-friendly cities, has been named the new executive director of Transportation Alternatives by the non-profit organization’s board of directors. He will officially assume this role on Sept. 3, 2019.

Harris spent four years as program director with the Knight Foundation in San Jose, California, where he oversaw grantmaking related to placemaking, transportation, and affordable housing. He most recently served as senior vice president of Civic Entertainment Group in New York City, where he led teams responsible for high-profile product launches and events.

“Danny Harris is a proven leader and a practiced storyteller who understands the urgency of reclaiming our streets as public space for all New Yorkers,” said Steve Hindy, chair of Transportation Alternatives’ Board of Directors. “Danny is a broad thinker on cities, people, and the connections that drive us. I am confident that he will lead the organization to a new level of effectiveness.”

Harris is an innovator as well as an educator. He has taught at San Jose State University, was named a Vanguard Fellow by Next City, and received a citation from the American Institute of Architects. Harris, a graduate of Connecticut College and Princeton University, is a native New Yorker and currently resides in Manhattan with his family.

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 Danny Harris. Danny currently serves as the Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives, an organization working to reclaim New York City streets from the automobile and advocating for better bicycling, walking and public transit for all New Yorkers. Prior to Transportation Alternatives, Danny was a Senior Vice President at Civic Entertainment Group in New York City, a Program Officer at the Knight Foundation working in San Jose.

Tim Cynova:

He was a principal at Story Social, a full service creative design studio working at the intersection of storytelling and community building. And a co-founder of Feastly, an online marketplace for food experiences. And many years ago, Danny and I connected at National Art Strategies, Creative Community Fellows, where we also met fellow Morning(ish) Show guest, Kristina Newman-Scott and Gail Crider and where I may or I may not have been a very ineffective mentor for him. So, without further ado, Danny, welcome to the show.

Danny Harris:

Hi, everybody, thanks for having me.

Lauren Ruffin:

Danny, it's really great to catch up with you.

Danny Harris:

Yeah. Same here.

Lauren Ruffin:

So, how are you doing? How's your family and how's your community right now?

Danny Harris:

Thanks for asking. We're holding up. We're fortunate that we can be at home and we have two very small kids, we have a one-year-old and a four-year-old. And then otherwise we're transitioning as a staff to probably week seven or eight that we're working from home now and we're holding up together as a staff and trying to figure out, amid this really challenging moment, how it creates a space for one that we can continue to build morale while not being together and that we can continue to advance the work, especially given how important transportation is proving to be amid coronavirus, especially in New York City.

Lauren Ruffin:

Is the way that you're thinking about yourself and your role and your organization's role shifting at all due to the pandemic?

Danny Harris:

I would say everything is shifting amid the pandemic. I think the really difficult thing is that for advocates who have been in, you pick the field, from income inequality, to workforce development, to transportation, to race. I mean, you pick the issue, this has been probably the biggest magnifying glass on all of the broken infrastructure across our society and nation. So, the hard part is that advocates have been screaming, in many ways, into the winds for years or for decades about these problems.

Danny Harris:

And then something like coronavirus hits, and last night they shut down the New York City subway between one and five in the morning for the first time in, I think, over a hundred years, and had to bring 1,000 cops to take out 2,000 homeless people. So, think of every broken part of that system that played out last night for a four-hour period and that's just one small microcosm of all the other huge issues that this nation is facing and will continue to do so over the years to come.

Tim Cynova:

You are deeply committed, you have been for years, to creating livable cities. In your previous role, we met right before you started, you were the program director at the Knight Foundation working in San Jose. You oversaw the grant making for the placemaking, transportation, affordable housing. Your Twitter feed made it appear that you were everywhere all the time, thinking about these issues, visiting cities to learn about this.

Tim Cynova:

As you think about this moment in our history, systems that are breaking down, people for the first time, maybe seeing systems, how are you processing this? What are you thinking about and trying to prioritize now at this moment that feels like a once in a lifetime moment for maybe the opportunity to create real change where more people could thrive, where everyone could thrive?

Danny Harris:

I think the biggest tragedy in cities is that they stopped being built for people. And you can draw that back to cars being sold as freedom and independence or planners like Robert Moses re-imagining a city in an urban area and doing so with really strong and apparent racist undertones that we continue to see today. To the environmental impact of what it means to build, not just for cars now really, but for SUVs and light trucks.

Danny Harris:

I think that as a human, as an urbanist, as somebody who's lived in cities and suburbs my whole life, the biggest difference between the cities that work for communities and those that don't, is the ones that choose to build for people and they build for all people. Because the point is that, regardless of your age, ability, background, income, if you're able to walk out of your home or if you are in a wheelchair, if you're able to leave your home and find that you have a suite of options to get around, and those options are safe, they're dignified, they're equitable, they're sustainable, they're resilient, they're for absolutely everybody.

Danny Harris:

The problem is that too many of our cities have forced people to rely on cars to get around. Cars can be an option, they certainly should be for many people. But when you force people to buy a car, to spend AAA estimates about $9,000 a year in car related payments, to have communities like the South Bronx where kids are struggling with childhood asthma, we have fundamentally failed our communities in doing so. Cars don't pay taxes, cars don't pay for free parking in most places, and they're continuing to dictate the decisions we make. That is wrong and our future cannot be built for cars. It's failed us. We have to build the future for people.

Tim Cynova:

One of the things I've thought about what I'm seeing with the work that you and Transportation Alternatives are doing and just being a New York City resident as well is, what's the ideal number of cars in New York City?

Danny Harris:

I feel like it's one of these you go and you interview at a McKinsey and they ask you how many golf balls will fit on a 747? The truth is, I don't know. And also, the thing that you have to remember is that right now, because I spent a year also working closely with Ford Motor Company, car companies are not building for a future of cars, but cities are. So, I think your question is really about, it should be about whether it's mode shift goals, whether it's about vehicle miles traveled, there are all of these really sort of technical pieces.

Danny Harris:

But I might reframe your question as, how many options should a city be able to give to an individual to get around? And if the answer is that the majority of people only have one option, that city has failed and it needs to provide at least two options and those options should be, again, safe, they should be dignified, they should be sustainable, they should be affordable. So again, car ownership can certainly be a part of it, but I don't think we have a number yet of how many cars. We'll be able to mark our success if we can land on the aircraft carrier and say mission accomplished.

Tim Cynova:

This is the type of conversation that when Danny was assigned me as a mentor, I'm like I'm failing in my duties as a mentor here. Because it was like, yeah, what are you ... You're approaching this all wrong, Tim. I'm like, okay. Oh God, I'm so sorry. Apologies for decades to come.

Danny Harris:

I do have to give a huge [inaudible 00:06:56] Tim. So when Tim was my mentor, when I was a fellow and I was sitting and it was my first time sitting with you and a few others and I think you had said to me what I knew, but just was very bad at is like you were asking me for help and I was just giving advice for maybe 30 minutes and you're like, you should really ask for help. You shouldn't just be better about acknowledging it and getting support from people around you. And it's a very small thing, but it's fundamentally changed the way that I approach my work and I have a huge network of mentors and people that I lean on and I'm also much more comfortable with being vulnerable and asking for help. So I really appreciate that, Tim. So I take that away from you. Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

That's very kind. Lauren, you can take this one before it gets really awkward here.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm sitting here trying to imagine how many golf balls fit on a Boeing 747.

Danny Harris:

There's probably an answer to that.

Tim Cynova:

There is, yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

There's got to be, and I will know it immediately following this show.

Danny Harris:

There's a searching mechanism.

Lauren Ruffin:

I am curious. So, so much of the conversation does happen about sort of cars and that at the heart of Tim's question is, what should we be thinking about if not about how many cars? Are there other things that are contributing to sort of the poor quality of life, the way that we're moving around cities? I live in Albuquerque, which has notoriously few transportation options outside of a car and they just built a rapid bus line that everybody's really angry about. I'm curious, what are the other things that we should be talking about besides cars, if car companies aren't building for a future that has a whole bunch of cars?

Danny Harris:

I think we should be talking about options. Even if you look at what's happening in the debate around gun control, it's about responsible gun ownership, at least as you see it play out on the other side of the NRA. For us, it's simply about just giving people options. I think the problem is that the car companies and the oil companies were basically the dealers and then the people who have cars became the addicts and in many ways we're letting the addicts continue to sort of push at community board meetings and op-eds.

Danny Harris:

For example, last night I got a phone call from a local TV reporter and this is how it started. It said, "Hi, Danny. We know that there's a huge increase in speeding in New York and so we want to capture both sides of the story." What two sides are there to a story? There's speeding is illegal, speeding kills people. We have automated tools that capture people, so it doesn't matter what you look like if you go over 11 miles an hour, it captures your ticket. But this is a journalist who's trying to capture both sides of a story of people breaking the law. Like if you were walking around looting in the city because no one was around that would be seen as clearly disorder and that would be unacceptable.

Danny Harris:

But we give a pass to terrible car behavior. You can run over a child, you call it an accident. You speed well, nobody was on the road. Again, all of this is a mentality that basically empowers drivers, some drivers ... of a situation where 40,000 people a year are killed. So I just think in many ways in society, we don't take this seriously. We sort of write off car crashes as these accidents, all the infrastructure spending we say is necessary to widen our roads. I think in many ways, again, it's very simple concept, but if we prioritize around people. I have a one and a four-year-old, I just simply want to be able to cross the street with them or let them bike to school. That is not a radical concept, but in many cities or in places like Albuquerque, that basically brings out people with their pitchforks.

Lauren Ruffin:

Did you say 40,000 people a year die from car crashes in New York?

Danny Harris:

No, sorry. That's nationwide.

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay, got it.

Danny Harris:

That's nationwide, yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

I mean, it's still a huge number, but ...

Danny Harris:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, the biking to school thing. So our kids started biking to school this year and it's been fantastic for their independence, but in some places, it's a really radical notion that kids should be able to do that safely. Also, Tim, did you have another question or can I keep talking?

Tim Cynova:

You can keep talking. Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Awesome. I love when that happens. Are there specific strategies that folks can do in their own towns? Advocacy organizing is a skill and there's a way to do it. Are there strategies that you'd recommend folks are seeing sort of upticks in poor car behavior? How should people be organizing and thinking about this as we rethink the world?

Danny Harris:

Sure. I think the first thing, the instinct of many is to focus on enforcement and that's what our mayor in New York likes to do is to throw cops at the problem. The problem is that this is really about design. So in most of our communities, well let me start with New York. In New York, about 80% of all of our public space is devoted to car storage and movement. So if you think of a city with 8.6 million people who live in small spaces, all of our playgrounds are currently closed. Most sidewalks are not six feet. We're giving away all this space for free in a pandemic when it's desperately needed for physical distancing. You can play out that scenario across almost any community of simply what's the equation of space that's given away to cars versus people?

Danny Harris:

The second stage of that is simply for people who are watching to look outside of your window in regardless of where you live. I live in New York city and I live by the FDR highway that runs along the east side. I hear birds in the morning and the air quality is amazing. I can see all the way out to the airports in Queens. My kids, I take them out in the morning, they can cross the street and I don't have to worry about cars everywhere. There are these fundamental quality of life elements that are better and many people are not able to attribute them to the absence of cars.

Danny Harris:

I think so many of our leaders want us to get back to normal and of course, we obviously want the economy and the nation to get up and running, but if we jumped right back into the way we were before, there's another looming pandemic on the horizon around climate change and we have seen how our nation has been incapable of addressing this one. That will be fundamentally worse and impact so many more communities in so many more devastating ways.

Danny Harris:

We need to get ahead of that, and a way that we can do that is to start thinking of streets as assets instead of liabilities, assets for economic growth, assets for public health, assets for income inequality, assets to address income inequality, for the environment. And right now we're just giving them away to, in many cases, its worse use, which is predominantly SUVs and light trucks that are looting our air, they're killing people and they're parking for free.

Tim Cynova:

A few years back when you were at the Knight Foundation, do you publish a piece titled "What Silicon Valley Doesn't Get About People. Poor planning didn't just aggravate the area's housing problem: It helped create the Valley's growing empathy gap." We've talked a lot on the show with leaders and organizations about the need for leaders and organizations to demonstrate empathy, humanity in the face of some incredible challenges that we're all facing and increasingly talking about worker dignity, even in the face of having to make some heartbreaking decisions. As you think back on that piece around planning and empathy and how we can use this moment for the future, what resonates with you, thinking back on that?

Danny Harris:

I think there are a few things. The first is what it means to be a good, I wouldn't even just say a corporate partner, what it means to be a leader in this age. And so I just sort of share as my own example. I have two brothers and one of them is a doctor and he's a pediatrician and now part of his job, as most doctors, is to do shifts at the ER. And so he has a newborn and he had to quarantine from his newborn and his family. And he's also just a very stoic person and he doesn't complain about it, doesn't post it on social media, is happy that people clap but doesn't see it as for him.

Danny Harris:

And on the other side of it, you have those from the brands to the CSR, to the foundations, even the nonprofits who are making it about themselves, finding a way to sort of tie up this crisis into the mission critical work or the way that their brand is doing X, Y and Z, or the very small percentage of their resources that they're putting towards these types of efforts. Now, I mean, as I'm sure with you and many people watching, I'm the child of my mom is a refugee. All four of my grandparents are refugees and this sort of story goes back and they all told stories about the experience, and where they were and what they did.

Danny Harris:

Now, basically the stories that we're going to tell our grandkids are, we stayed home and we posted on TikTok or we ran a CSR campaign and we gave away a hundred thousand dollars for a company that produces billions. These are not compelling stories that we're going to want to be sharing down the generations. I think now everybody needs to do what makes the most sense to protect themselves and their community. But people ask very fundamental questions of, especially in places like foundations, you had money, what did you do with it? How hard did you make it for people to get it? How much of the story that you told was about yourself instead of those on the front lines?

Danny Harris:

There are these things that I think we'll start to track over time. And I think the hope is that the leaders who are really getting it right, they're supporting the people around them. They're finding a way to support their counterparts in other cities. They're checking in with their staff and their community, and they're finding ways of being relevant, supportive. And I think like most organizations, given how quick this is changing in two weeks, you don't want to look like a fool because you said or you pushed the wrong thing, given the need for ventilators or whether COVID is going to come back or talking about opportunity when people are dying. So I think about all of that through the lens of my experience in Silicon Valley and just if I get another CSR email or hear what the aggressive action that Warby Parker is taking in advanced COVID, I'm going to lose my mind.

Lauren Ruffin:

I get those emails too. The Warby Parker ones really are really special. Yet another company that's not going to sponsor the show.

Tim Cynova:

Every episode we lose one more potential sponsor.

Danny Harris:

I have a list of grievances if you're looking for that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay. Got it. Several years ago I read this quote that stayed with me and as I approach my 40th birthday, it was essentially the best and brightest minds of my generation have been spent trying to convince people to click on ads, which is so true. So something you said really triggered that for me. It also strikes me that this question around what did you do in foundations and how corporations are really thinking about this right now.

Lauren Ruffin:

I had a great conversation a couple weeks ago with a friend who's a CEO of a large ed tech company and she went down to a four-day workweek and talked about how she did that to save money on payroll. But what it's unlocked is all the potential of her staff who are now in their communities doing things. And it strikes me that there's a climate change/transportation component to that too. Are you thinking about what a shorter workweek would look like as part of the work that you're doing in New York? Is how we think about work and capitalism and time spent something that you're working on and thinking about right now?

Danny Harris:

I think everything is on the table. The reality is that public transit is seeing a decrease of 90 plus percent, and so even as we start to get back to whatever a new normal is going to look like, one, not everybody's going to open at the same time. Two, not everyone's going to flock to public transit. Three, the number of people are going to realize that they can continue to work from home, they may not need an office, telecommuting, working at various hours.

Danny Harris:

I live in the city and my office is in the city and it still takes me three hours to go there and back. That's insane. I have little kids and I'm so happy that I can be with them all day. All of those things are really up for discussion, but it'd really, I think, be dependent about employers to start to make those decisions, especially ideally in partnership with their teams.

Tim Cynova:

Speaking about your team, you posted a really great video in the past 24 hours that your team made about their new commutes now. We can't show this right now, but I encourage everyone to go to Danny's Twitter feed, Transportation Alternatives' Twitter feed to watch this very creative, clever video to highlight some of the new commuting options that your team has been experiencing. I will just leave it as a cliffhanger, but it is well worth your time if you've not yet seen this video.

Tim Cynova:

Can you talk a bit about ... So Lauren's a cyclist. I'm a cyclist. We've had conversations about how many bikes are too many bikes to own. Lauren sees the sky's the limit on this one. I live in a tiny apartment, I just have one. I want to talk about Bike Match because this is something, the Bike Match initiative, that Transportation Alternatives has been involved in. What is it? How's it working, and how did it come about?

Danny Harris:

So in March, as things started to shut down, our Art Director, J Oberman, had an extra bike and posted it up on social media. And a few hours later somebody came and picked it up. And as he shared the story with our staff, they had this great idea of, well, why don't we create a platform to match bikes? So anybody who might have an extra bike or somebody who might need it. And that's how it started towards the end of March. And so if we fast-forward today we're at about 650 participants in New York, I think about half of all matches have gone to healthcare workers and we've helped to scale the network to 20 plus cities around the world.

Danny Harris:

So I think what we saw was a huge uptake in cycling and unfortunately many people who were concerned about taking public transit. And so it was just sort of a simple tool that we could give them in a way to connect with our membership who might have an extra bike or we started to engage with some brands who were able to donate at scale. The really nice thing about it, I mean beyond obviously the supporting people are kind of two really beautiful points. One is the moment of connection. So obviously as you go through all of the layers of how you have to go about doing it, it's two strangers meeting in a physically distant safe location, giving opportunity to somebody else.

Danny Harris:

And the second is the stories that we hear from people who get bikes. And so there was one person who is a healthcare worker and he hadn't ridden in 20 plus years and he just described the excitement of, he's an adult, riding down a hill on a bike, which he hadn't done in 20 plus years. He's an adult, he's a healthcare worker. He has a very stressful job and he talked about the glee and the wind and the speed and just the sense of freedom and it's a beautiful and touching story that people just need to get around it.

Danny Harris:

Wouldn't it be nice if in addition to having to get around you enjoyed it, it was good for you? It also came from somebody who loved that bike and wanted to see it get into better hands. So it's been really inspiring to see it play out and we want to continue to grow and scale it. We're now, I think, in 120 plus zip codes in New York and so we want to obviously continue to expand here and then grow it to more communities around the world.

Tim Cynova:

That's great.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's great. I'm sitting here thinking about which bike I would give away.

Danny Harris:

[inaudible 00:21:45] child.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Lauren's got specific bikes and some in the queue to add.

Lauren Ruffin:

I think the Centurion would go. I've got an old, beautiful. Now I can't go. I can't let it.

Danny Harris:

We'll go back and see.

Tim Cynova:

We'll process this on a different podcast episode, Lauren. You can have time. You can have time like this one.

Lauren Ruffin:

I need time.

Tim Cynova:

That's such a heartwarming story. I may or may not have had maybe some tears welling up in my eyes just thinking about like the freedom and sort of ... Because as a cyclist ever since, that was my first opportunity to not be with my parents really when like you went on a bike ride as a kid, and since I had an opportunity to bike across the country and what that means and how at this time when it is so stressful and especially for healthcare workers who are on the front lines here, to be able to find that joy in something like that is really heartwarming.

Danny Harris:

And just because this is all of our soap boxes. I mean, I have a one-year-old who learned how to walk and a four-year-old who's learning to ride a bike, this is something that every parent goes through and you sort of imagine these are sort of the milestones of growing up. If we go back to the point that we shared before, imagine being able to give kids these incredible gifts and then have it taken away from them for decades.

Danny Harris:

Lauren, I don't know about you, it sounds like your kids can ride, but my daughter, when she gets that joy and glee of riding her bike, then it's okay, great. Let's put the bike away until maybe college or after college when you live in a city or unless we move to Amsterdam or Copenhagen because that amazing thing we got for you is now only limited in school yard. But you have an entire city that the kids can go off and explore.

Lauren Ruffin:

You're so right. In DC, I did a fair amount of work with public schools and helping kids get bikes, access to bikes and the joy on a kid's face when they get their first bike is-

Danny Harris:

The best.

Lauren Ruffin:

I mean, again, I'm a bike junkie so they know they're not buying a car, like they'll get an electric bike for their 16th birthday. So that's definitely ...

Danny Harris:

I'm happy we don't have to get the both sides of the debate on this TV show. The other side [inaudible 00:23:55].

Tim Cynova:

You'd be like another e-bike is another side of that equation? Yeah, one road and one off road. Lauren, we're coming up on time here, so it's right for the suitcase question.

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay. So, the pandemic has changed everything about us and how we live. And for most of your life you've been carrying around sort of a figurative suitcase of practices and behaviors and sort of things you've done. So the question is, what's one thing that's been in your suitcase for most of your life that you're taking out forever because of the pandemic? And what's one new behavior or habit or sort of thing you love that you're putting in your suitcase and you're never giving up moving forward?

Danny Harris:

I'm trying to give up regret because I had a lot of it. Something that you can sort of look at various stages and even with different successes or different opportunities, you can still hark back on either things you got wrong or things you didn't do or the things you didn't fully advance as much as they could. So I'm trying to let a lot of that go. The thing I want to carry with me, and I'm sure it's sort of an overused phrase, but it's really just about being present and grateful.

Danny Harris:

I feel even in the difficult moments of being at home and not sleeping and kids running around at all hours and not quite understanding what's happening. It's maybe for the best. I am so incredibly grateful that we have a situation that allows us to be employed, that allows us to have two beautiful children that we can be at home with, that we have a home and that we're also surrounded by an incredible community of people who are out in the front lines every single day for us.

Danny Harris:

So I think my hope is that as we get to the other side of this, I know we're at least in New York, we're all clapping at seven and the mayor is talking about a ticker tape parade every block in New York City. I hope we'll have a huge block party where they'll finally get to see their neighbors, who we see each other clapping outside of the window. We'll be able to embrace, and we'll be able to thank all those on the front lines. So that would be my hope for the first moment that we get to the other side of this, at least in my little corner of the world.

Tim Cynova:

That's great, Danny. Yeah. Thank you so much for being with us, grateful for the time and the work that you're doing.

Danny Harris:

Thank you both. I appreciate it. Thank you for telling stories.

Tim Cynova:

Continue the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE adventure with us on our next episode when we're joined by Alexis Frasz, Co-Director of Helicon Collaborative. Miss us in the meantime? You can download more Work. Shouldn't. Suck. episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice. And re-watch Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE episodes over on workshouldntsuck.co.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation or are just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on 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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Live with Diane Ragsdale & Andrew Taylor! (EP.33)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Diane Ragsdale & Andrew Taylor. [Live show recorded: May 1, 2020.]

Last Updated

May 5, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guests Diane Ragsdale & Andrew Taylor. [Live show recorded: May 1, 2020.]

Guests Diane Ragsdale & Andrew Taylor

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guest

E. ANDREW TAYLOR, Associate Professor and Department Chair of the Performing Arts Department at American University thinks (a bit too much) about organizational structure, strategy, and management practice in the nonprofit arts. An Associate Professor of Arts Management at American University, he also consults for cultural, educational, and support organizations throughout North America. He recently completed a five-year sponsored research project for the William Penn Foundation on “Capitalizing Change in the Performing Arts.” Andrew is past president of the Association of Arts Administration Educators, board member for Fractured Atlas, and consulting editor for The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, and for Artivate, a journal on arts entrepreneurship. Since July 2003, he has written a popular weblog on the business of arts and culture, "The Artful Manager," hosted by ArtsJournal.com (www.artfulmanager.com ).

DIANE RAGSDALE is faculty co-lead of the Cultural Leadership Program at Banff Center for Arts & Creativity; and an assistant professor and program director for the Masters in Arts Management & Entrepreneurship MA at the New School in NYC, where she also designed and launched a graduate minor in Creative Community Development. She additionally teaches a workshop on aesthetic values in a changed cultural context for Yale University's Theater Management MA. Ragsdale is a frequent speaker, blogger, writer, and advisor on a range of arts and culture topics. She previously worked as a program officer for theater and dance at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ran a contemporary performing arts center and a music festival, held a variety of administrative posts, and began her arts career as a theater practitioner (she has an MFA in acting & directing). She is presently a doctoral candidate at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, where she lectured in the cultural economics program from 2011-2015. Her dissertation examines the evolving relationship between the nonprofit and commercial theater in the US over an 80-year period. She is on the board of Anne Bogart's SITI Company; on the editorial board for Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts; and on the Advisory Council for the online theater platform and journal, HowlRound. Among others, she wrote an essay ("To What End Permanence?") for the 2019 book, A Moment on the Clock of the World, published by Haymarket Press. She has dual-citizenship and divides her time between the US and the Netherlands.

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 another duo of guests, Diane Ragsdale and Andrew Taylor. They each have extensive enrich bios that are available in the episode description, so I thought it'd be fun to look at the similarities. They were both early to the blogging game with Diane's Jumper blog and Andrew's Artful Manager blog being featured on ArtsJournal for more than a decade. They both direct and teach in university programs and led efforts over the past few months to rapidly transition curriculum processes and work to an entirely virtual context, and I'll offer even more importantly in my opinion, doing this while also being there for their students as they process the huge shifts in their lives in education.

Tim Cynova:

They are each sought after consultants with their own unique specialties, have both been gracious to appear on previous Work. Shouldn't. Suck. podcast episodes and they are genuinely amazing humans who we are honored to know and have the opportunity to work with. I'm not exactly sure which way this conversation will go, but I'm excited to find out. Without further ado, Andrew and Diane, welcome to the show.

Diane Ragsdale:

Thank you. [crosstalk 00:01:14].

Lauren Ruffin:

Tim gave both of you bios.

Andrew Taylor:

That's cool.

Lauren Ruffin:

And in particular one of the questions we've been opening with everyone is how is your community? And I know the two of you share community similarities that Tim highlighted, but would love to just hear how your students and how your colleagues and how you're fairing right now, how you're processing things.

Andrew Taylor:

You go Diane.

Diane Ragsdale:

Okay. Hi. I knew we'd figured that out. So I would say on the one hand, I work at two different institutions, The New School and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Banff Centre had to lay off 80% of its staff. I'm not staffed there, I'm an independent contractor. But that's of course really tough to see. Just the sudden loss of... They're furloughed, I think. But I think the questions of when people come back. So people are dealing with that uncertainty. Certainly lots and lots of artists I know who have just had all of their gigs fall the way at The New School because the program is... I'm the program director for an arts management and entrepreneurship program for artists and they've lost those gigs and sometimes their day jobs, working in restaurants or other places. So that's been huge. And of course it's not a level playing field. Some students come from different parts of the world where they've been trying to get back to or concerned about family members. Everyone's in different situations. And so yeah, quite concerned about their welfare.

Andrew Taylor:

Yeah. And I guess that I'm noticing how many communities I'm part of and there's certainly the immediate community, I would imagine our students and our colleagues and the faculty, obviously my family and circle of friends. But then I think both Diane and I travel in multiple circles. So just seeing independent artists in this moment, performing artists, in my case, smaller midsize arts organizations, large scale, multi-venue performing arts centers, foundations, all these are different communities. And I'm noticing both how they're all suffering in their way, but they're also more disconnected than I imagined them to be.

Andrew Taylor:

That even among theaters and the artists in the theater, these are different communities in many cases and they are struggling to find their feet separately rather than together in many ways and obviously that's because we're so distant at the moment, maybe. But I think all the communities are struggling. I'm absolutely privileged and I'm continuing to be employed and that's extraordinary and I figure that's a responsibility too, so let's take it out for a spin, as are you guys, which is amazing.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I'm also wondering along, Andrew, your point about how even within communities there's distinctions that raises the folks who are doing functions that are full-time job functions, but who are contractors. It feels like those legal employment designations that we take for granted in some ways, at this point you really do begin to see how disparate the playing field is.

Andrew Taylor:

Yeah, very much, in particularly through artists who are on gig schedules and their employers who are on salary. That tends to be okay-ish, although pretty inequitable anytime, but on a even keel economy at least there's a gig coming up and there's another gig after that. And the detachment of now institutions, as Diane said, furloughing and certainly canceling all contracts. So any gig worker's out and then even part-times are out. Just the floor falling out from some people and being shaky for others. But just seeing the inequity in the structure so obvious even though it was there before is pretty striking.

Lauren Ruffin:

And Diane, I know you're working with a Canadian institution. And the government's been providing a different level of support than we have in the United States. Are any of your colleagues there feeling like this is an opportunity for them to perhaps pivot their work or think about how they engage with their work differently because they are getting that financial support?

Diane Ragsdale:

I would say it depends. In Canada, it often depends on what province you're in in terms of what kind of local support et cetera you can get, so that's also not a monolithic response by any means. I would say that even with government support organizations are having to pivot and are definitely looking at doing so. One of the things that's interesting to me, Banff of course is a place that is a destination. People want to go up the mountain and be in that place. And so those big question marks, like what does it mean to run an institution where place is so critical and people want to gather there in this time?

Diane Ragsdale:

But even in the U.S., one of the things I really, in the performing arts center front, for a long time I've worried about the coupling of mission and venue or facility and a conflating of that. And I'm struck by at this moment how many of the questions seem to center around when do we get back in the space? What are we going to do with the space? How is the space going to work? And I think, is that the right question or should we be asking maybe questions like, what's the role of art in the time of COVID and after COVID and artists and teaching artists and what are the ways we might be in the world? And without the frame of the building I think being so front and center, the lens through which all questions have to be asked.

Tim Cynova:

Well, and speaking about buildings, you both work for universities and have both gone through what I can imagine has been an incredibly challenging rough time as everyone almost overnight and sometimes overnight had to transition from what was very place-based and in most cases to now being virtual to each other. So I'm wondering how that's going for you. And also, as you speak with the students and think about your own courses that you're teaching and what you hope that the students you're working with might take from this or learn in a way, if only to just be human and understanding, but what is the role for our curriculum and training arts administrators of the future at this time?

Diane Ragsdale:

You go, Andrew.

Andrew Taylor:

Okay. Thank you. Yeah, the whole university pivoted to online and distant work and I talked to some of our tech people. They said they were planning some more online work, but they figured it would take a year and a half to transition us all before the reality came and we pivoted in four days. And I guess what I keep noticing is technology doesn't create things. It exposes them. It reveals them. And what it revealed to me is my colleagues are extraordinary, kind, generous, compassionate, and that's the stuff that it revealed. It also revealed all sorts of the fault lines in a badly constructed syllabus. It's a weak approach to developing and designing the course suddenly became so obvious to everybody.

Andrew Taylor:

In terms of our students, I think the message is around really understand how a system is connected when it's falling apart. I mean that's when you see it. It's invisible otherwise, and I just encourage them, watch, just describe what you're seeing. Don't judge, just describe what you see and you're going to start to see the problems that were always there, but now they're so obvious we can't even pretend they're not there. Which on the good side and the bad side. So on the positive, compassionate, connected, people are so passionate about their work. And on the downside, inequitable structures overly coupled, as Diane was saying, to capital, physical and economic. It's just all revealing itself.

Andrew Taylor:

And then on it's side they're all terrified because they came to grad school to get working strong and powerful jobs and that way they could make a difference in the arts, and that whole infrastructure is getting really fuzzy lifting right now. So fear and revelation there. That's it. That's the Bible.

Lauren Ruffin:

There's a book on that [crosstalk 00:07:31].

Diane Ragsdale:

Do you want me to weigh in on that one too?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, please.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Diane Ragsdale:

One of the things, just from a practical standpoint as a assistant professor, program director, that sort of realm, I've been struck by how symbolic or performative the spaces are for faculty at universities or maybe it's just my university, but I've had this in other places as well, which is we go to our offices and we sit in them sometimes, but I have a bookshelf this big, you have a drawer that can fit about eight files. I share an office with eight people. If we each have a student in to talk, and if one of those is teaching a lesson, you really can't actually have a decent conversation, can't really work and do the things that faculty do.

Diane Ragsdale:

And so in a weird way, being home these last 30 days and adapting to that, I'm like, I don't know why I would ever go back into the office again because I'm so much more productive at home because the environment is so much more conducive to things that assistant professors do, which is read, write, prepare lectures, have one on one conversations with people that are sustained and need to be thoughtful. But there is a symbolism to it, which is people just like to know there's somebody sitting in the office. So, that's one thing.

Diane Ragsdale:

I agree with everything Andrew said in terms of how much is revealed. And I've really seen, I think The New School has really stepped up in an awesome way during this time, and The College of Performing Arts. I've been so impressed with my colleagues and everyone, the students and their gamesmanship and willingness to keep going with this, even though it's clunky. If you can imagine in a conservatory trying to teach lessons and do ensembles and all of that and they're going with it.

Diane Ragsdale:

One thing I've observed though is that moving to technology, it's like the flipped classroom is less about the tech and more about the disruption of power dynamics. When you have to do this day after day, you begin to feel what it means to cede power to the students in terms of their being able to, I think, have more agency in their learning journey. I've always heard that saying that the flipped classroom is about going from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. And I've always said that. I don't think I've ever really done it until now and now it's like, oh, okay, I get this. It's really their thing now and I'm there to support it. And I think that's a really good thing that's come out of this experience.

Lauren Ruffin:

This is a random question, but I realized... Tim blinked rapidly, so I know random questions make you a little nervous. But early on in our show, Tim, you were sharing that you were curious about what professors who are working with ensembles or multiple groups, and I realized I don't know how or if that ever resolved itself until you've mentioned it, Diane. So how is that working out practically?

Diane Ragsdale:

Well, some of that work, I think it can't happen really practically. One on one lessons we found actually are translating really well, and certainly smaller ensembles. I have a student who, for their graduation, for their capstone project, students had to do independently produced projects. One of them is doing a podcast musical, his name is Alexander Ronneburg, and he's been able to completely rehearse online and make click tracks. And then a lot of students and faculty as well are really adapting to this and figuring out ways to continue to work. I don't know that the large ensemble yet has been solved. I think these are more intractable. What about you Andrew? Do you know?

Andrew Taylor:

I'm chair of The Department of Performing Arts at American University. So we have five programs, dance, musical theater, music, audio technology and arts management. And as you can imagine this semester, I think we've got a pass. We're just all scrambling. We canceled all of our live productions in theaters, all of our performances in music, all the recitals and juries, all the things that really, really should happen in a shared space with an audience. And we got a pass, we did substitutes, we did online lessons and we shifted a lot of practical work toward more theoretical work. Like let's learn how an orchestra works and let's talk about the different sections and maybe we can do sectionals. But the challenge for us is fall. So it's quite likely that most universities are not going to physically open at the beginning of the semester and probably maybe in the January, February.

Andrew Taylor:

So we don't get the pass in fall. We have time to think about, well, how do you teach ensemble derive theater? How do you teach acting? How do you teach ensemble performance? And you have a runway to figure it out, so you better figure it out. We're all thinking now like okay, we made it, everybody understood. We were just like, yeah, whatever. Scrambling, flailing, fine. Fall is not going to be that. And the students will expect more from, us as they should. I've been looking, there's not a whole lot of resources available to say, well how do you do this in a way that has deep meaningful social context and context? So, luckily I won't be chair then. Yay. So I'll just hand it off mid-summer.

Tim Cynova:

I was talking with someone this morning who works at a conservatory and they measured out their stage to see six feet physical distance, how many people could fit on the stage, and it's a big stage. They could fit 45 people. That's like half the orchestra. So even if you come back into a space and you have those constraints, what does that even look like? How do you do that? One of the things we've talked about a lot is it's a different thing. Doing a lesson or ensembles is a different thing. Much like managing in person versus managing remotely and what new skills are we learning and how are we developing in different ways?

Tim Cynova:

And I don't know, something someone said has just resulted in a lot of people on our live chat. So I'm going to just like toss this back into the space and see what's going on in the live chat. Make of that what you will.

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay.

Andrew Taylor:

Yeah, right. Yes, it's a different thing. To Diane's earlier point, I can't wait to get back to my office. Oh my God. And I know it's symbolic. [crosstalk 00:12:22]. It's symbolic for me to be in a different place where my role is to be a person working, which is not what my house is. And I know a lot of these people have different tolerances for that. My tolerance is zero. If I'm here, I should be available to the people in the house and not off in a corner. And so it's, anyway, I'll talk to my therapist about this.

Tim Cynova:

We have some comments coming in. I'm still reading through them, but someone that we all know [inaudible 00:12:47]. Getting greetings from Toronto. Here's to hear from Andrew and Diane on which writers, thinkers, and content digital or not you're leaning on during this time. I assume [inaudible 00:12:56] means other than [inaudible 00:12:57].

Andrew Taylor:

Yeah. What else is there?

Tim Cynova:

So what else is on your list?

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah, and we are, I think two of your biggest fans. We have been dedicated [inaudible 00:13:05]. I'll give one thing. Rebecca Solnit's, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which I love her work. Generally, I feel like she is just, her voice at this time on anything is interesting to me. And she has many, many books, but that's the one that I've been going back to the most. And I'll give you just one [inaudible 00:13:21] from that that's been sticking with me, which is, she talks about getting lost in the relationship and that in the creative process, but also the different ways we can get lost. And one of them is losing yourself in a sense. And in these times when you have to adapt from the old thing to the new thing, and you're in the middle and at some point the old thing is lost to you. It's less familiar and you've started to move into the new thing. It's not quite familiar. And I feel like that's where I'm at at the moment. And it reminds me a bit of...

Diane Ragsdale:

Even when I moved to the Netherlands, there was a point when I didn't yet feel Dutch or part of that world, but I had already started losing my connection to the U.S. So I feel like that book has been [inaudible 00:13:58].

Andrew Taylor:

Yeah. I guess reading poetry is really useful because it's at the intersection of intellect and sensibility and emotion and that borderline is evaporated in most of our lives. There's no difference now between the rational world and the emotional world, and that's where poetry lives for me. So there's just stuff I keep going back to and that connects. And I think I'm just starting to read a lot more about evidence based learning.

Andrew Taylor:

So if I'm supposed to be a teacher in this world, what does it mean to learn? And a lot of the assumptions I had were based on physical proximity and being in a room and riffing with students and imagining I was teaching them. And so now I'm really thinking I need to deconstruct that engine, take it apart and put it back together again because it's going to be different. So a bunch of different books on pedagogy and the evidence of how the brain gains knowledge and adapts it to the world is important to me right now.

Tim Cynova:

God, I always hated teaching after Andrew because he's got amazing poems that fit exactly the moment. I'm like how do you find these things? [inaudible 00:14:48] this YouTube video that's 20 seconds, but it captures the entire four hour lesson in a 20 second video. I'm like, God I really need to step up my game here-

Andrew Taylor:

No, it's [crosstalk 00:14:58]

Tim Cynova:

-before Andrew.

Lauren Ruffin:

It does strike me that, in talking to in particular people who are really, or organizations that are really, really invested in events and gatherings that the quality of our content is going to have to get so much stronger and the discernment around keynote speakers, panels, however we're going to do this thing. I do feel like it's going to be a bit of the people who go first in this brave new world in terms of bringing together large convenings are going to be like the emperor's new clothes. It's just, you're going to be stripped bare because the content's going to have to be so solid because I think audiences are becoming more discerning in how they're consuming and how they're ranking and rating content and learning and knowledge.

Andrew Taylor:

I was talking to a colleague this morning and I'm noticing so many conferences are now moving online, but their assumption is... Actually, so just to push back a little, the content is the thing that makes the conference matter. When it's actually the cocktail party and the snarkiness while you're listening to a panel you think is not particularly bright. The event is a social object. It's this thing that pulls us together like a magnet and allows us to pet your dogs are the classic social object. They pull people together and then they start a conversation, so the dog is the initiator.

Andrew Taylor:

So I'm just curious if really the nature of the content as opposed to the structure around it, which is I want to go to a conference online where it's encouraged that you be snarky with your digital neighbor and don't necessarily listen to the panel, and that could be cool. I'm curious about the new relationship between what we imagine to be important about an arts experience, which is the thing on the stage and what is actually valuable, which is that plus. And I think Diane always writes about this so beautifully. I don't know if you agree.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Well that's so nice, Andrew. For a long, long time I feel like I've been pushing against the conferences of trade associations and things like that in part because they were initially established when we didn't have other ways to communicate, and so to pull everyone together and march through these sessions one after another and when as exactly as Andrew says, you realize at some point the most meaningful stuff is happening at the bar or at the breakfast. I think also now we have this weird phenomenon where not only are we seeing digital content, but you can get access to some really awesome folks.

Tim Cynova:

What's it going to mean that now that we've been able to watch the top opera singers in the world seeing from their bedrooms to us or we've been able to have just a rockstar person jump on Zoom and give a talk that everybody can listen to for free. How does that begin to also adapt on the other side of this, our expectations of who we want to listen to and do we even ever want to get on planes again and fly anywhere? And if so, what's going to be that experience? I'm already thinking about the number of conferences that I would be like, yeah, if there's going to be a stream, I'll just watch that. And which ones I would go, no, I'd really want to go there because I want to basically hang out with people in a more social way.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I was talking to Jess Solomon who's with the Deutsch Foundation a couple weeks ago and she was saying that one of the beautiful parts of this moment is we have are the masters of our time being willing to share their gifts for free and that's just going to refine our sense of how we should be spending our time.

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

So yeah, I think that's spot on.

Diane Ragsdale:

It's also important to note how many people... There are certain... There are people in disability justice. There are various people who are being called on right now to jump on webinars day and night and share their wisdom and I think are often uncompensated. And this is a moment I think where everybody's like, I just want to jump in and be valuable and useful, of course. There's going to come a point where we'll need to figure out how these things get compensated as well, so we're not back in the same situation that has been revealed by COVID, which is the number of artists and public intellectuals and other kinds of people for whom there is no real couch to sustain their throw pillows, so to speak, to use any [inaudible 00:18:19] metaphor for our business models.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

That's awesome. Let's see some more stuff online. I've got to scroll back and catch some stuff. Your resonating comment that students have been incredible in their resilience and creativity and making things work. A lot of innovation coming from them and there's a sense of shared purpose. Comment about the hybrid pedagogy community and because people can't share links here, we'll figure out how to share the link there. And a question about, since we can see world-class opera singers in their bedroom singing, what does this mean for local organizations who are trying to enter the digital content world? Any thoughts on that?

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah, so Jamie Bennett, who was the first speaker on The Morning-ish Show, first guest, brought up DreamYard, which is an arts and education center in the Bronx, who looked at this moment and went, what's the thing we could do right now that would be really valuable to the community we serve? And they decided to serve free lunches because in their community that was the thing that was really needed. Part of what I've been thinking about the last couple of weeks is actually the beauty of small and local and what it means to just go back to those essentials of being a good neighbor.

Diane Ragsdale:

So I don't know if I had a smaller organization, if my first impulse would be to throw content online, particularly because right, you can watch The National Theater, et cetera, or whether it would be to in some ways engage the community around other needs. I also, one of my observations is the number of organizations that, I'm going to use a crass phrase, but kicked to the curb their teaching artists during this period of time and I feel like that was so foolish because if there's a kind of person in the world that I think could be really valuable in any kind of institution right now it's teaching artists.

Diane Ragsdale:

They know how to help people create scaffolds of meaning and learning. They know how to facilitate. They understand their communities. They're often in the front lines of organizations. People are at home right now trying to make meaning, try to enjoy their lives, trying to teach their kids. And I think I would have been trying to hire up an army of teaching artists and figure out a way to deploy them in the world. Maybe that would be another scenario or another option.

Tim Cynova:

We're coming up on Lauren's question. I think we need to... I mean, we could run this for three hours and I would feel like we're just maybe getting to 30 minutes. So sadly we're coming up on time. So Lauren, why don't you lead off or close up with the suitcase question?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Or as it's known now after Deena yesterday, the up in the air question with George Clooney. So for both of you, and we heard hints of this during this conversation, but you have a suitcase that you carry around with you throughout your life, filled with habits and things you love to do and things you maybe don't like to do, but you do anyway. What's one thing that has been in your suitcase for a long time that you were leaving out post-pandemic? And then what's one thing, one habit, behavior, love, whatever that you've picked up during the pandemic that you're going to take with you forever?

Andrew Taylor:

One thing I'm leaving out, obviously I teach organizational management theory. So there's a whole bunch of theories about how structures work and how you're supposed to behave, best practice. Most of those are gone and it's more about what are the useful ways to see the world? What are the frameworks that actually help me see more clearly and in more actionable ways? There's a series of those, I'm happy to share offline somewhere. And the other thing is just be kind. Kindness is the thing that really first and always and that almost, it helps patch the cracks in a lot of things. So just kindness first and then just tools that help me see more clearly and help other people say more clearly.

Diane Ragsdale:

That's so nice Andrew. Mine's really prosaic. On the one hand I think one of the things that's going out of the suitcase is paper. I have been a hugely paper dependent person and I don't have a printer at home. I do, but it doesn't really work well and so I just haven't been printing. And I'm like, I think I'm past the paper, which I know my associate, Alex Chadwell who's a composer works day to day with me. He's often like, "You're really paper dependent." I'm like, "it's gone. Alex, it's gone."

Diane Ragsdale:

And then on the what's coming into the suitcase. So family Zoom. I have four brothers, a mom, a dad, a stepdad, a biological dad, and one of the things, when my mom and stepdad, my three younger brothers, we've started family Zoom on Sundays, which we've never done. We live all over the place and it has been one of the best things ever and I hope we keep that for the rest of our lives. It's so meaningful to me. And maybe if I could add one more little thing. One of the things, Syrus Marcus Ware, who you had on, one of the things he taught me in his work is the saying, I hope I get it right. It's something like, we've got a lot to do, so we better go slow.

Diane Ragsdale:

And I've always been a intense, keep it going kind of person. And one of the things this is teaching me I think is how to pause and go slower, even though you feel the pressure to respond right now to that.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's great. [crosstalk 00:22:32]. Both of you.

Lauren Ruffin:

You guys are great.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. So uplifting to spend time with you today. Thank you both for making time to be on the show.

Andrew Taylor:

Well, thank you guys for this show, it has saved me and so thank you.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I love every episode. It's been great.

Tim Cynova:

Continue the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live adventure with us on our next episode when we're joined by Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. Miss us in the meantime, you can download more Work. Shouldn't. Suck. episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and re-watch Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live episodes over on workshoudntsuck.co.

Tim Cynova:

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Guest User 5/3/20 Guest User 5/3/20

Live with Deana Haggag! (EP.32)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Deana Haggag. [Live show recorded: April 30, 2020.]

Last Updated

May 3, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Deana Haggag. [Live show recorded: April 30, 2020.]

Guest: Deana Haggag

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guest

DEANA HAGGAG is the President & CEO of United States Artists, a national arts funding organization based in Chicago, IL. Before joining USA in February 2017, she was the Executive Director of The Contemporary, a nomadic and non-collecting art museum in Baltimore, MD, for four years. In addition to her leadership roles, Deana lectures extensively, consults on various art initiatives, contributes to cultural publications, and has taught at institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and Towson University. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Artistic Director's Council of Prospect.5, and the Advisory Council of Recess. She received her MFA in Curatorial Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA from Rutgers University in Art History and Philosophy.

She is proudly a first-generation Egyptian-American Muslim disabled woman of Afro-Arab descent. She currently lives in Chicago, Illinois and New York, New York.

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 Deana Haggag. Dina currently serves as president and CEO of United States artists, a national arts funding organization based in Chicago, found online at unitedstatesartists.org. Before joining USA, she was the executive director of The Contemporary, a nomadic and non-collecting art museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Deana lectures, consults, contributes and teaches at numerous places. She's on the board of trustees of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Artistic Director Circle of Prospect Five and the Advisory Council of Recess. She received her MFA in curatorial practice from Maryland Institute College of Art and BA from Rutgers in art history and philosophy. She is proudly a first generation Egyptian American Muslim, disabled woman of Afro Arab descent and we are honored she's with us today. Without further ado, Deana, welcome to the show.

Deana Haggag:

Thank you for having me. Hi, good morning-ish.

Lauren Ruffin:

Good morning-ish.

Deana Haggag:

Am I the first one to make that joke?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, we'll tell you, you are.

Deana Haggag:

Thanks.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yes, absolutely. So Deana, it's so good to see your face, so good to catch up.

Deana Haggag:

Likewise.

Lauren Ruffin:

So the question we've been throwing to folks just to sort of ground us is, how are you doing and how's your community? What are you hearing from folks that you're talking to regularly?

Deana Haggag:

Yeah. Oh man. How is my community? I mean I guess my community feels like nonprofit arts administrators. I think right now I am working in collaboration with several, and I think right now my community is feeling two things at once. The first is an urgency to get work done, and I think we're really proud and honored to be doing the work that we're doing at a moment where we know that artists need so much support. Then on the other side, we're also feeling the dire pressure of supporting a really vulnerable workforce. I think right now my community feels like it's in a moment of extreme cognitive dissonance and just trying to take it one day at a time.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. So Tim read your bio, but are there things right now that you think are sort of coming to the fore as you would introduce yourself to our audience?

Deana Haggag:

Yeah, I mean I think a few things are coming to the fore for me right now. Tim noted very quickly that I am a disabled person and I think living as a disabled person in the middle of a global health pandemic is a very specific experience. I am also a disabled person that has a tremendous amount of economic privilege. I have this, for the time being at least, a full-time paying job with health benefits, a well paying job. I am in a partnership with someone who also has a well paying job and so I am disabled and yet have economic resources to take care of myself in a very scary moment.

Deana Haggag:

I think what's been really coming to the fore is the experience of the disability community right now in particular and then the intersections of low income disabled folks who, I don't know that this is affecting anyone more than folks in that level of precocity. So that community for me feels like the one I am working in the deepest favor of. Sort of in a quiet day-to-day way, and the one I'm the most worried about, and the one I think about every morning and every night. But yes, I think of all of the identities and hats and caps. I think man, being in a disabled body is a really specific thing right now.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I think it's been interesting to see over the last couple of years in particular, but always when nations go through trauma-

Deana Haggag:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

In 2016 I felt like it was black women who really sort of chartered the path for a possible way out of there that unfortunately a lot of folks didn't follow. But those were the voices-

Deana Haggag:

Amen.

Lauren Ruffin:

Those were the voices that really sort of rose up, and I think right now it's folks who are really, really steeped in disability justice that are charting a path for us. I don't know that we're doing a great job hearing those voices candidly. We've had probably one of our most memorable conversations on here was with Syrus Marcus Ware, who's based in Toronto. But yeah, I think you're spot on around this moment being one where we have to look to that community for sort of guidance.

Deana Haggag:

Yeah. Yesterday I was talking to the folks at Disart in Grand Rapids and that was sort of the conversation. It was just like, "Oh, but will folks really listen? Will they know where to look? Will those lessons survive the, what feels like the immediacy of COID-19?" I think in really big structural ways, a ton of stuff I think is really clear. Never again will employers be able to go back and say, "Work can't be done remotely." For specifically office workers. Right? Which is something that disability communities have to face forever, but then also these conversations around healthcare and insurance and the medical industrial complex and these things that I think the disabled community has been on the front lines of since the dawn of our nation, more or less. Now I think all of those conversations are coming to a head.

Deana Haggag:

But I think one thing that was really clear on our call yesterday and in general is there's looking to disabled folks for sort of logistical and infrastructural changes. Like what does it mean to work remotely? What does it mean to be in a moment of physical distancing? Because so many disabled people live in a lot of physical distancing as a result of their own wellness and care needs. But I think the thing that's actually really funny to me is there's a difference between social distancing and physical distancing.

Deana Haggag:

There's lots of ways that people make communities and there's lots of ways that people have to learn new intellectual and conceptual vernaculars to survive a physical distancing. I don't know how many folks are talking to disabled people about that, so I don't think it's enough to be like, "Oh, y'all have been using things like Zoom since the beginning of time. Cool." It's like, "No, there's like a whole other lexicon that exists in sort of disability and [inaudible 00:05:57] justice that I don't think people are really, really getting into, that I think could help non-disabled people in this moment of extreme terror as both physical distancing and possibly social distancing is such a new phenomenon.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Are there organizations or individuals, collectives that are doing really, really great work that our audience should be listening to right now?

Deana Haggag:

Yeah, I think the folks at Sins Invalid in the Bay area have been on the front lines of this thing since forever. I think anything that they're touching or thinking about is super important, I think the Harriet Tubman collective is incredible and I think exists at the intersections of both disability but also racial justice, abolitionists movements. I think there's a book, Care Work by Leah Lakshmi that I think should be required reading for everyone right now.

Deana Haggag:

Then I think there's just a lot of notable scholars like Claire, John Lee Clark, I mean it's just sort of an endless list of folks. But yeah, I think I'm curious about what does a bibliography look like, and I think also the tension of a lot of this right now, it's like there's an entire community whose lived experience and knowledge of this is so important and it's also a community that can be easily exhausted if folks... I think it's one thing to talk to disabled folks who are like, "Oh I am being invited to be on a bunch of webinars." But also the pace and the immediacy of that is so important. So I do think looking at a preexisting scholarship or books or texts or videos could be super helpful. So sorry, a very long answer to your question is like, I can't stop thinking about disabled people every second of every day, more so than usual.

Lauren Ruffin:

No, we're taking notes. I think that was really helpful. One of the things I'm curious about on this live stream, we've gotten so many resources for folks just in these conversations like that, just lists of... I feel like we do have to put together a bibliography of all the thinking and thought that has come out of what people have been reading, thinking, listening to, to sort of guide us out of this because it's hard to feel like we continually are Columbusing communities. Like they've been there, we discover them, we listen to them and then we put them back on the shelf until the next crisis that could have been averted if we had just held on to them for a little bit longer.

Deana Haggag:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

So much there. I'm fortunate that we have the transcripts and it feels like next week is probably the end of our daily live streams with six weeks of daily live streams and it feels like just sitting with the transcripts, reading, reflecting on it because they, like this conversation, are so informative. There's so much here and thinking about what does a future look like where everyone thrives and what do we need to do right now to make sure that we're not missing this moment? You mentioned we can't go back to where people say some jobs can't be done remotely. I fear that we will go back to that. How do we hold onto, yes, the jobs that you said couldn't be done remotely, now are done remotely, and the thing that could have been an email, but instead it was a meeting, it was an email.

Tim Cynova:

So what's the responsibility of organizations as leaders, as accomplices and allies in the organizations inside the sector, in the sector to support and hold onto the things that we've proven that can be done and just iterate and adjust and improve on those things to move forward rather than everyone goes back to the office on a some date and we forget that we were able to do this.

Tim Cynova:

So I guess that's personally what I'm wrestling with. How do we not miss this maybe once in a lifetime moment? So on a podcast I would edit out that last part where I just rambled until I ended at three periods, but on a live stream. Yeah, there you go.

Deana Haggag:

We love a live stream. We need a little danger, you know? A little danger these days.

Lauren Ruffin:

On that remote work thread. So Deana, in the green room I realized we didn't know where we were physically.

Deana Haggag:

Yeah, same with me.

Lauren Ruffin:

Tell me as you're leading US Artists, can you give us a sense of how your staff and your organization was working and whether/how you've pivoted right now, what that felt like as a leader?

Deana Haggag:

Yeah, so United States Artists is headquartered in Chicago where we have a little over 15 full, part-time employees and a couple of contractors and we went to our office every day. I, for the past three years that I've had this job, have actually been living between Chicago and New York. So in the weeks that I was in Chicago, went to a sort of traditional nine-ish, 10-ish to like six or seven-ish job with the rest of our staff.

Deana Haggag:

Our lease was actually up in February and throughout all of February and into March we started all working remotely in a moment where there was about five weeks-ish that our offices were being transitioned and so actually it was kind of good practice where we all figured out how to talk to each other remotely kind of right before COVID hit. We moved into a new office. It's actually called the Fabric Impact House in Chicago where a group of justice funders all moved in together, so we moved in with folks like the Woods Fund, Field Foundations, Pillars Fund, and have spent the last year cultivating this kind of communal workspace. We all moved in there for about two weeks before the stay-at-home order came down, so now my entire staff is all back out in their remote working situations.

Deana Haggag:

Right now I have moved to New York full-time. I am here in Brooklyn currently and communicating via Zoom and Slack with our staff who are, again, predominantly in Chicago. We have one contractor here in New York and then two full-time staff in Baltimore that have also been remote pretty much the entire time. So I think I was still planning on going back and forth to Chicago even though I have made New York my primary residence. Clearly, that does not feel like it is on the horizon. One thing that's coming up a lot for our staff right now in terms of how we work is questions about, well if the stay-at-home order lifts, are people expected to just go back to the office if they don't feel safe. There's a thing the news says, and I think a lot of us lately are feeling like, "Whoa, there's like the thing a spreadsheet says, there's nothing my policy says, but then there's the right thing to do."

Deana Haggag:

I feel like how people work is one of those matters. The board and I are unanimous in this, we will get back to our office if and when it feels like that's the right call to make. But we're not deciding that based on the government's perception of the COVID-19 situation. I think right now our staff clearly misses one another, or at least I miss them. It's kind of a weird thing to adjust to everybody remotely all the time. But I think we're all doing the best we can in such a weird situation.

Tim Cynova:

This has been one of the things that Lauren and I have been talking a lot about offline, or off the live stream is the responsibility of employers to provide a safe workplace even concerning what's coming out now around limiting liability for employers around workplace safety, around OSHA, and then what the responsibility is going to be and how this is really going to come down to leaders and organizations living their values. It's unfortunate in a lot of reasons and it's infuriating to think that we're balancing dying people with cash to states or whatever that might be. I think having the message out there around... Because a lot of people don't understand what OSHA means from an office, but you don't have to really think about it in office. But what does a workplace free of harm look like and what is supposed to be in our responsibilities? Even if you legally could do it or legally could get away with something, that's not the right thing to do.

Deana Haggag:

Yeah. Yeah. I think a few things. I think this thing has made so many things perfectly clear. I think the first thing it's made clear is like every policy is just a damn Google document. You can just change the word doc. That means you can make life better for your employees or you can make things worse, like scale back regulations that are again, just words that humans sit around the table and determine together. There's no big magical force we owe anybody anything except for our own morality. Right? So I think in terms of a staff, a part of me feels like doing no harm is also psychological and intellectual. I think right now USA, it's rough man. We, a couple of weeks ago joined a coalition of six other nonprofit partners to start an artist relief fund.

Deana Haggag:

USA funds artists, that's what we do. We give them unrestricted grants. We trust fully that people can decide for themselves how to use a financial resource to take the best care of their own needs. But we are a philanthropic organization that moves at a relatively glacial pace. It takes us a year to identify who these people are. We are very thoughtful. We dot every I, we cross every T and when you do something that's a relief effort, the pace of that thing is different.

Deana Haggag:

When Lauren was talking about running a slower marathon, we went from being a bunch of bowlers to sprinters overnight. It's really different and I think one thing that's been really, really clear, at least for USA staff and I imagine many of our coalition partners is, we're all worried about our people taking the best care of themselves. At the same time when our people are trying to help however they can, but to help means they have to work at a pace that is not okay.

Deana Haggag:

It's not okay to meet the demands of COVID-19 if you are really trying to help people. I think a few things we've implemented or we're trying, it's we're trying to take everybody to a four day work week in the next two weeks as a way to say, "Just take one extra day." We really want to meet the challenge of supporting artists in dire financial needs, but we also want to meet the challenge of protecting our staffs who are going through so many different things at their own home lives. I think we're all just thinking about how to do that. It's not an easy task, my heart goes out to everybody in leadership right now, but I do think we know what the right thing to do is, and we know the difference between what the spreadsheet says and what we should actually be doing, and I don't think we'll forgive ourselves.

Deana Haggag:

At the end of the day, we will look back on this time and the choices we made will be perfectly clear, not just our communities but to ourselves. I think every leader should really be sitting with what this will feel like in a few months when you've made these decisions on behalf of the people you're supposed to take care of.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. So I had virtual dinner with Susie Davis last week, which was hilarious. Of course.

Deana Haggag:

Yes.

Lauren Ruffin:

Can you talk about who's your partner with the relief fund?

Deana Haggag:

Yes.

Lauren Ruffin:

Can you talk about it? She said it was your brainchild and gave you all the credit.

Deana Haggag:

Of course she did, no.

Lauren Ruffin:

So tell us about the fund and I'm particularly curious about a couple of words you used, trust being one of them and then sort of speed/pace because the difference between immediate relief and longterm recovery is so, so bad. I'd love to hear sort of your thoughts on those things.

Deana Haggag:

So yes, thank you Susie. But no, I think a few things. I actually think immediate relief, the pace feels entirely structural. We all just had to do certain infrastructural things faster to pull something like this off. I think that's happening across industries right now. I actually think the pace for longterm recovery to me it feels less structural and more intellectual. We just got to change our minds about a few things real quick before we can even get into a conversation to talk about longterm recovery. I only want to say that because I want to go back to the word trust. It is very, very clear how much we distrust poor folks and folks who live in low income communities, right? We've always known this and I think right now something like artist relief is a bridge to those communities.

Deana Haggag:

We've had to pace hella fast to meet that within the infrastructures of our orgs. Creative capital, Arcadia, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Academy of American Poets, Young Arts, the Map Fund in USA, we're all little baby orgs and now all of a sudden we're like an over 50% coalition that is dragging at this thing. I think everyone wants to have a conversation about what is the longterm recovery going to look like. To me, the pacing there is just how fast are we going to change our minds about how much we trust poor people? Truly, how fast can we shift that psychology societally before we even all get together to figure out what does life look like for the next year, 18 months.

Deana Haggag:

Because even now in the middle of needs being entirely clarified across every industry and in every region of our country, there are still industries that are questioning handouts and charity and how to inform how certain money is spent to vulnerable communities and I'm like, "Oh, the pace on that needs to move faster."

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, yeah. You're so right on that and I think part of that's just nonprofits only exists because rich people don't trust poor people.

Deana Haggag:

Yeah, exactly.

Lauren Ruffin:

I was always astounded when I was working in a homeless shelter. I managed a $20 million stuff program. We were giving out backpacks to kids and everything else, gift cards. The question I got more often than not, when someone gave me a $50 gift card was, "How does your organization guarantee that these people are not going to spend this gift card on alcohol in the store?" And I would look at them in Bethesda, Maryland and be like, "Your 16 year old gets wasted every weekend."

Deana Haggag:

Literally.

Lauren Ruffin:

You don't think that someone who is raising three kids on $700 a month in Washington DC that you've rapidly gentrified gets to buy a case of beer? Like I just don't. But that piece around trusting, it's a radical idea that we would in the United States, we would trust people to understand, one, to look out for their communities with any sort of relief effort and to prepare those who are sort of closest to them. So y'all raised what, like 11 or 12 million in a couple-

Deana Haggag:

Yeah, we're at a little over 11 million right now. We launched with 10, I think now we've raised like another million and a half since we launched, and we're redistributing it. Someone is at my door. This deeply embarrassing, but this doorbell keeps ringing. [crosstalk 00:19:52] while I talk and then-

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, totally, it's a really cute doorbell.

Tim Cynova:

Lauren looked down at her desk and I thought, is this a new ring on your phone or is this like the old Nokia phone ring?

Lauren Ruffin:

No, here we go. [crosstalk 00:20:04] That's not an old Nokia phone ring because that ring is very distinctive. It's not that cute. My phone ring is not that cute.

Deana Haggag:

I love it. Yeah, so we launched with 10 million. We're distributing it in $5,000 unrestricted grants cross-discipline, and I think the number one thing we're prioritizing is just need, but it's rough. So we wanted to launch with 10 million specifically to be able to fund a hundred artists a week until September. The reason for that again, is we just wanted to make sure we reached artists where communication's not going to travel fast versus spending out 10 million in a month. It's just that way there's no way coastal cities, visual art, will hear about it faster. There was no way to do that equitably. But in our first cycle, which closed last week, we got over 55,000 applications. [crosstalk 00:20:51] Yeah, we funded 300 of those people.

Lauren Ruffin:

Thousand?

Deana Haggag:

55,000, yeah. Which I think that brings me to the single biggest adamant revelation about this whole thing, which is on one hand the arts are an economic engine and we all know this and we're constantly trying to justify ourselves in this frame. But I think this thing really is like, damn, we are like a workforce. We are a massive, massive, multidisciplinary workforce. I think in a moment where I think COVID-19 has really lost the narrative around how the United States takes care of its workforce, is super clarified. That being a gig worker in the United States... Being a worker, period in the United States is hard and complicated, but being a gig worker, there is nothing for you. It really doesn't matter that, I mean, it does matter of course, that Congress wrote 1099 employees into the Cares Act under unemployment.

Deana Haggag:

But there's also a moment where unemployment can't keep up with any worker, let alone adding a huge workforce. So I think that at Artist Relief reading these applications is wild, because it really clarifies our industry and our industry is akin to restaurant workers, domestic workers, transportation workers sometimes because artists are both. A nanny and a poet, a painter and a bartender, but then when they're not and their sole income is coming from their work in a self-employed way, they move at the same speed that some of these other industries do. So I really am hopeful that a longterm strategy is that we band together with other industries of gig workers. We fight this fight that people need to be insured. The number of things we're reading that could be preventable are like what? That part's been hard.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I think in hindsight, we look back at the decade of 2010 to 2020, the rise of the concept of gig worker and the gig economy and that going from a side gig to people's full-time work is something that we didn't consent to as workers. It happened, and it's been interesting working in the art sector and seeing that from sort of working in homeless shelters and seeing how that became a lifeline for people to get out of poverty. But I don't think it's the same thing for the arts and culture sector.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm really curious about how we start to reframe work and absolutely a hundred percent reframing solidarity for the other sectors. Restaurant opportunity coalition is doing amazing work, has always done amazing work. To me, that's the bedrock. You can't meet a restaurant worker in New York City who wasn't also an actor, actress, performer, artist.

Deana Haggag:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

I think you're so right on that. Can we ask the suitcase question?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, let's go with the suitcase. So we've got two minutes left, so we need to get suitcase in.

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay. Deana, life is a suitcase. You're carrying this bag around with you. We've been in this thing for like five weeks, this pandemic. What was in your suitcase before we went to the pandemic that you are not taking with you after we're out, if we're ever out, and what have you discovered during the pandemic that you were keeping in your suitcase forever?

Deana Haggag:

Oh my Lord. Okay. So first of all, I've cooked more than I ever have in my life. I would like to keep that. I'm amazed a little bit that when you cook you just have to like wash dishes constantly. This is blowing my mind that you like eat on a dish and then you wash it and then you just put more food on it and then you wash it and then you just put more food on it and then you wash it. But yeah, the cooking has been incredibly... I want to take that with me. I've been super into risottos. You can just totally zone out for 20 minutes and stir and you just really get into a rhythm and you can't really be on your phone, it's just you and the risotto and something about that's really intimate and nice. So that I want to take with me forever, cooking.

Deana Haggag:

What I want to leave behind, I mean honestly and maybe it's not possible, I want to leave behind the performances of my profession. I think a thing about COVID that I've loved so much is for a second, for a glimmering second, lots of incredible people were willing to break the fourth wall together and it was cross industry. It was the lawyers, philanthropists, the nonprofits. Everyone was just like, but this is how the world really is and we met certain challenges because we all just broke the fourth wall.

Deana Haggag:

I think maybe it's a little twofold. I want to leave behind all the things that made that not as possible pre-COVID, and I want to take with me this way that everybody together could say, "Hey, I know we think we ought to do it this way, but what about this?"" And then everyone in the room was like, "Yeah, there's literally no reason we can't do it that way. Let's go."

Deana Haggag:

So the last thing I do want to take is the power of a coalition and I think that's what I love so much about your broadcast is that, in some weird way, it's like this strange morning-ish coalition moment you've made every morning with people in the workplace. But that sense of collaboration I think is actually really mighty.

Tim Cynova:

Well and with that we're out of time, but before we go, we can't just stop there and be like, "That's where we're ending it." Are there any parting thoughts? Anything you wanted to include that you didn't?

Deana Haggag:

No, I'd like to just reiterate that everybody needs to read books by disabled people. Follow disabled people on the internet. Just find your disabled homies like fast. That's it, thank you.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Deana, amazing to have you on the show. Thank you so much.

Deana Haggag:

Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

Oh, sorry. If you want to say thank you again. I cut you off.

Deana Haggag:

Thank you. No, no, bye-bye, bye.

Tim Cynova:

Oh God, This is the worst ending to the show. Yes, it was so amazing.

Lauren Ruffin:

It also might've been the best.

Tim Cynova:

Continue the Work Shouldn't Suck live adventure with us on our next episode when we're joined by Diane Ragsdale and Andrew Taylor. Miss us in the meantime? You can download more Work Shouldn't Suck episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and re-watch 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 on 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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Guest User 5/1/20 Guest User 5/1/20

Live with Edgar Villanueva! (EP.31)

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Edgar Villanueva. [Live show recorded: April 28, 2020.]

Last Updated

May 1, 2020

Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Edgar Villanueva. [Live show recorded: April 28, 2020.]

Guest: Edgar Villanueva

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

Episode Transcript

Guest

EDGAR VILLANUEVA is a globally-recognized expert on social justice philanthropy. Edgar serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of Native Americans in Philanthropy, NDN Collective, and is a Board Member of the Andrus Family Fund, a national foundation that works to improve outcomes for vulnerable youth.

Edgar currently serves as Senior Vice President at the Schott Foundation for Public Education where he oversees grant investment and capacity building supports for education justice campaigns across the United States.

Edgar is the award-winning author of Decolonizing Wealth, a bestselling book offering hopeful and compelling alternatives to the dynamics of colonization in the philanthropic and social finance sectors.

In addition to working in philanthropy for many years, he has consulted with numerous nonprofit organizations and national and global philanthropies on advancing racial equity inside of their institutions and through their investment strategies.

Edgar holds two degrees from the Gillings Global School of Public Health at The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Edgar is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and resides in Brooklyn, NY.

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 Edgar Villanueva. Edgar is a globally recognized expert on social justice philanthropy. He currently serves as senior vice president at the Schott Foundation for Public Education where he oversees grant investments and capacity building support for education justice campaigns across the US. Edgar is also an award-winning author of Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom To Heal, Divides And Restore Balance, a bestselling book offering hopeful and compelling alternatives to the dynamics of colonization in the philanthropic and social finance sectors and Liberated Capitol a decolonizing wealth fund is a giving circle created by Edgar that's online at grapevine.org. To date, their Native American community response fund for COVID has already raised nearly $400,000. We have so much to discuss today, so without further ado, Edgar, welcome to the show.

Edgar Villanueva:

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Tim Cynova:

Lauren, this is when you take the first question.

Lauren Ruffin:

Sorry, I had a weird glitch on my screen. Hi, Edgar. Good morning.

Edgar Villanueva:

Hey, good morning, ish.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh yeah, it's good morning for me. Almost good afternoon for y'all. So one of the questions we've been asking all of our guests just to ground us, is how are you and how's your community doing?

Edgar Villanueva:

For me personally, it's day to day. I am fortunate to have a job in these times that I can work from home. So I'm grateful for that. I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I'm very fortunate to have a backyard, which is a rare thing here. So I do have moments where I can have some outdoor time there. So it's day to day, I think like everyone, I have my moments of personal anxiety and fear and just sadness. I'm holding a lot of grief around what's happening here in New York City, but also just around the world. My community in particular, it's what's causing me a lot of pain. You guys have probably seen the headlines, native communities across the country are greatly impacted and especially right now in the southwest, with the Navajo nation and the Pueblos across New Mexico. So I'm daily tracking and checking in with people there and doing everything I can to help from here in New York to support these communities.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, we've noticed that some of our guests, and Tim gave us the background on your bio and told us some things about you, but a lot of our guests and how they introduce themselves has shifted a little bit. So how are you introducing yourself right now and what are you thinking is your primary means of working in service right now?

Edgar Villanueva:

I think the way I would introduce myself is sharing who my people are. Where I'm from originally in North Carolina, we say, "Who's your people?" When we meet someone new. My people for the most part are black and brown indigenous people who are on the side of justice, fighting for social justice and liberation, those progressive white brothers and sisters and relatives that are a part of this struggle as well. I work often in and around spaces of philanthropy, and really find myself connected to and building community with people who are organizing and resources for community. So I get up every day with a passion for moving money specifically into communities of color and native communities.

Edgar Villanueva:

I think of myself as someone from the south, that's a big part of my identity. I am from North Carolina. I'm an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe, which is the largest, a native American tribe east of the Mississippi river. I think of myself as a spiritual person and as a person that is really connected to community and a person who's committed to healing in my own life, but also helping to support healing in others.

Tim Cynova:

You wrote Decolonizing Wealth and I want to thank personally for taking the time to write that book, I read it last fall when I was traveling to Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in Denver. Most of the sessions were focused on social justice, racial equity, and then I flew immediately to the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit outside of Austin, Texas. Your book has been deeply meaningful in my own journey in anti-racism, anti-oppression and then to sit with the ideas, having arrived at Grantmakers in the Arts and then go to Conscious Capitalism and take my colleagues' thoughts with me from ... when I told them at Grantmakers in the Arts where I was going. I'm wondering for those who haven't read it, if you can talk about what led you to write the book and maybe how have some of the ideas that you put in the book have evolved or changed in light of current events?

Lauren Ruffin:

So I think what led me to write the book. It's interesting, a lot of folks have approached me, they think they may want to write a book. I think personally for me, writing a book is a calling, I felt like I had a story inside of me that had to come out, that it wasn't even a choice, I had to get it out. I think what was driving that was just my personal experience as a Native American person who had found themselves working in this crazy world of institutional philanthropy, which is a mystery to a lot of folks. I came from poverty. I came from a position of not having a lot of power and then when I got into this field, I automatically was at the table with a lot of power and a lot of access to resources and in a place that has this facade of doing good in the world.

Lauren Ruffin:

I initially thought early on in my work that, while this is ... how I'm very fortunate to be a part of this sector that's so aligned with wanting to make change in the world, all I ever want to do in life, was make a difference. There's so much that transpired in my career and in my journey, where I began to be really disillusioned about the role of philanthropy in the sector and I just begin uncovering other parts of our work that are hidden away and began to just what the net value of this work was in actuality. I experienced a lot of pain personally and then I saw that a lot of people like me, especially people of color, women, queer folks, people coming from marginalized backgrounds, found it very difficult to work in this space and often did not last very long. I began just journaling about my own experiences and my pain, and trying to find meaning in doing this work.

Lauren Ruffin:

Should I be in this field? Is there another place where I'm actually supposed to be? Is this legitimate? And just really through that process of journaling and having conversations with a lot of people who've got a shared experience, I realized, "Well, I think there's a story here." Where it really began to become clear to me is that the experience that I had, this is so much about money and it is so much about philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, but is actually a shared experience across sectors and for many people in the world. In wanting to get to a place of real change, real transformation, what are the lies that we're telling ourselves and what is the truth that's hidden away that we need to bring to the surface, to really grapple with once or for all, if we're really going to move forward as philanthropy, as institutions that could be in a right relationship with community, but also just as people in community and as people that live in this country that has yet to go through that type of process?

Lauren Ruffin:

I don't know, I think in short, it was writing the book was my own healing journey. Where I landed with the book is not where I thought I was going to land. It was going to be something very different, but my own experience of healing throughout writing that process began to steer me toward a different vision for what I wanted to offer the sector.

Tim Cynova:

I mean there's so much that resonated with me. One of the things that I have held is philanthropy have often investment portfolios that support the 5% that then they give out and the ... It's not a dichotomy, it's the tension between where you might be investing, it could be 95% undermining the money that you're giving out and we're seeing this increasingly responsible investing. Where are you putting your money to make sure that it's in line with your values as an organization? Certainly from our own standpoint at Fractured Atlas thinking where we've invested, does it align with our anti-racism, anti-oppression commitments, and how can we move toward that, has been something that certainly is, well, it was [inaudible 00:08:24]. So I'll end the part at where I talked about how excited I was to read your book and how cool it is to have you on our show. So Lauren, you can take us in a different direction now.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, you're totally nerding out, I [crosstalk 00:08:33] that.

Tim Cynova:

I am, this is the [inaudible 00:08:34] look.

Lauren Ruffin:

You are absolutely geeking out right now.

Edgar Villanueva:

Love it.

Tim Cynova:

If you cannot have a live stream where you get to hang out with cool people who you always wanted to meet, what's the purpose of a live stream?

Lauren Ruffin:

Throw the live stream in the trash if you can't do that.

Tim Cynova:

Very much so.

Lauren Ruffin:

The transfer of wealth thing resonates with me as a former fundraiser or retired fundraiser, whatever I am, because we're seeing right now in so much of the recovery stimulus package, CARES Act, that we're seeing hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth transfer from the federal government and the latest data I think says that probably at least 90% of that is going to wealthy white people and I think our audience is really going to have to grapple with that reality because I think businesses that we care about are going to just be gone and people that we love are not going to be employed and there's just so much fantastic work that's going to be lost as this wealth is transferred. Do you have any words around strategies that we can use to start to recover from this, or to even grapple with how this is happening in the United States yet again?

Edgar Villanueva:

Money always tells a story and I've had people that say, "Wealth isn't just about money. What about other kinds of wealth?" I do think of wealth more broadly, but money is this very tangible thing that really tells a story about where our values are and what we care about, budgets are story. So historically, the way that money has been used reflects how people in power think and feel about people of color and indigenous people. Philanthropy, where money goes and where it doesn't go also paints a picture on what is really important. Regardless of what we say on our website, or what our missions are, the money tells the story of what life we're really about. When I think in the stimulus packages, you see the same thing happening in terms of who was prioritized in these relief efforts.

Edgar Villanueva:

We see first and foremost that corporations ... First, corporations then small businesses and then people and then tribes, right?

Lauren Ruffin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Edgar Villanueva:

Indigenous communities are at the very bottom. So I think for folks who hold access to resources are the gatekeepers to these resources, where they make decisions around where to put the money is just a direct reflection of what's really important to them and what they care about. It's obvious when you look at the big picture of how capital was moving through the world, in general, there is a disconnection from people and a disconnection from the planet and it's a separation-based economy. So the only response to that that I have is I think we have to have a fundamental shift in our world view and our values and maybe the silver lining in this pandemic, my hope is that this situation has shook us to our core to wake us up, to help us remember what's really important.

Edgar Villanueva:

What is really important? Right now, there's a lot of things that I thought were important six months ago that I do not care about right now. I thought it was important to step out of my house, dressed to the nines like in the [inaudible 00:11:26]. Right now, I don't care about that. I could care less what ...

Lauren Ruffin:

You still look good.

Edgar Villanueva:

Well thank you, thank you. Don't you feel like even celebrities and people that we tend to track, where are they right now? None of that stuff, seeing everything feels so superficial. What seems most important in this moment is that we take care of people and that we survive this pandemic together. I hope in some small way, that that awakening for some people sticks and that we figure out and understand that the inequalities that have been exposed to this pandemic are unacceptable and that there is a different way that we can show up as leaders in community, as folks who have the responsibility to care for the public, that we can learn from the failures and begin to design a different type of future that does center people and the planet. That's my hope and prayer and the only way I see us getting out of this and not repeating that cycle over and over in the future.

Tim Cynova:

Speaking about the designing of the future, we talk a lot on this live stream about the workplace and what's happening right now with so many people so unprepared as organizations to now be working remote and I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about your work at the Schott Foundation, because you're working in education justice and at the same time that we're seeing this from workplaces, we're also seeing schools, where people are wrestling with both of these at the same time. Sorry, I just had a puppy whining at the door, so train of thought, Tim. Wonder if you could talk about what you're doing right now, hopes for the future there and how can we use this time to build that future that works for everyone, not just for some?

Edgar Villanueva:

Schools are communities too and they're very, very important communities. I think of schools as really some of the remaining institutions in our communities that represent our democracy. The right to a quality public education is one of the fundamental rights of our democracy and it's sad to me that that is actually under attack. What I'm hearing and seeing from our partners at the Schott Foundation right now is who have been fighting to preserve that right to a education for all kids in this country. I've been hearing that a lot of the challenges facing communities, especially communities of color that we focus on and prioritize in our work, that kids are not having access to food of course, that ... where feeding was happening in schools. Kids not having access to mental health support and safe places, young people not having the resources and the technology and the equipment they need to do this distance learning.

Edgar Villanueva:

So a lot of the challenges that young people of color are already facing in trying to have access to the same rights and privileges as others have been exacerbated in this moment. The folks that we support at the Schott Foundation are the parents, the students, the teachers who organize and are working to build power in communities to ensure that communities of color and parent voice and student voice, those voices are at the table when decisions are being made about our young people. So my concern is in this moment, is that we're being distracted of course by this emergency and this crisis, which is critical as something we have to do. But we also have to watch because in every disaster, disaster capitalism. This happened in New Orleans right after Katrina, where private charters came in and completely dismantled the education system there and privatized it and folks with corporate agendas.

Edgar Villanueva:

So I'm very concerned at this moment what could be happening and what plans are being put in place to erode public education in this country and to look at our young people as commodities, or to look at dismantling these institutions of democracy in our communities that, especially for communities of color, they are our homes and lives such a critical part of our identity and a place where we feel safe. So that's what we're thinking about at Schott right now. It's both the immediate response, what do we need to do right now to make sure that young people are okay and safe and have food and have the equipment to continue their learning? But also working with our advocacy partners and our network to understand what do we need to be thinking about right now when kids get ready to return to school, hopefully in the fall. What type of schools are they going to be coming into? What type of supports will they need as a result of this additional trauma that has been placed on them and how do we continue to fight for the right to public education when there is a movement that's trying to dismantle that?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I think that's spot on, in particular linkage to the rise of the charter movement in New Orleans after Katrina, that was super wild. In terms of knowledge, my wife works for the public education department here in New Mexico, we've been talking a lot about what kids learn in school and when. Full disclosure, I'm a total prepper so I'm a survivalist, freak out person. So she's like, "Great. Lauren's got something to really sink her teeth into on this one." But when you spoke last year at Native Women Lead and I was there and listened. It was the first time I had heard you speak, I was really ... and I hold onto this idea that you shared around indigenous wisdom being something that so many of us are looking for right now. Even if we don't know that's what it is. I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about that stream of thought, in particular because as a lifelong learner, we talk about K through 12 and then higher ed, but there is this sort of lifelong relationship with each other and with the planet, that I think is particularly important right now.

Edgar Villanueva:

Absolutely. For me, as a native person who did not grow up in my community, I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was the only native in my school. I didn't really know any other Native Americans outside my immediate family until I got to college. I have been on this quest for many, many years to reconnect and to be Indian enough. Is there something I've missed by this experience? Frankly, I had internalized dominant culture or white dominant ways of being in so many ways because of the society that we live in, frankly. It's funny, as I was writing the book, I spent a lot of time talking to elders and really trying to get to what are those nuggets of indigenous wisdom that I need to understand and practice in my own life? What did I perhaps miss because I didn't grow up on a reservation, or in a native community in that way.

Edgar Villanueva:

As I was learning some of these ... hearing these stories and jotting down these pieces of wisdom, I understood in that moment that that wisdom has always been with me because it was in my body. I had inherited these ideas, I had just lost my way. So part of the call to understand indigenous wisdom is the invitation to everyone to return to your original instructions.

Edgar Villanueva:

When you look back in your own family's history, regardless of where you come from, what I have found is that many of us have a shared sense of values and a way of being that was communal, that was tribal, that was about ensuring that we were all cared for and that was handed down to all of us. Somewhere along the way, we've lost those identities, the idea of all my relations, that we are all inherently connected and that our interdependence is inescapable.

Edgar Villanueva:

We've lost our way with that because we've assimilated to this idea of being American and individual and ideas of competition. So it's not like we have, or I have, these secrets over here that we're not telling anybody that are like ... It's a worldview to that I think we all can share and it goes back to our own families and it simply just comes down to like really placing people as the center of everything we do and understanding ideas like seven generations. Every decision that I make today impacts generations to come for seven generations.

Edgar Villanueva:

If we actually hold that value and that mindset that wow, my decisions will impact people outside of my immediate family for generations to come, every choice I make impacts others, every choice I make impacts this planet. That's a whole nother lens to [inaudible 00:19:39] in how we show up in the decisions that we make.

Edgar Villanueva:

We have subscribed to this false way of being where we think if it's not happening in my backyard and it doesn't impact me. That's why corporations can dump toxic waste right down the street and sleep just fine at night because, "Oh, it's not in my backyard, it doesn't impact me." Well, we all know that the toxic waste of getting into the water that we all drink and we're all going to die because of it. Because regardless of our backgrounds, we are all connected.

Edgar Villanueva:

So those are the nuggets of indigenous wisdom that I share in the book and bring to life through storytelling and really understanding a process that we can engage on personally to remember our original instructions.

Tim Cynova:

Thank you. I want to combine both a viewer question and a question about the Native American Community Response Fund. So, viewer question, curious about the processes of requesting and receiving funding, which tend to favor large organizations with staff and capacity to complete that process. So the question is what are you changing to open the door wider? The other question is, as it relates to funding, and what is the Native American Community Response Fund and how does it work? I would just put those two questions together as we're making decisions that do influence seven generations from now.

Edgar Villanueva:

I think in two ways, I'm trying to make a difference. One is being a disruptor in this space, speaking truth to power and really pushing philanthropy when inviting philanthropy into a loving conversation about the reality of all the barriers and things that are in place that are prohibiting the flow of resources to organizations that are deemed to not have the capacity, which is a whole nother thing. So we know within philanthropy, only 8% of grants actually go to communities of color. So I am challenging my colleagues in this space, through my work at the Schott Foundation, through my work with Decolonizing Wealth, to hold up a mirror and do that hard work of where am I perpetuating a colonizer mindset, or colonial dynamics that are inherent in this system that have to be dismantled in order to liberate those resources and move money to where the hurt is the worst? Which for me is in communities of color.

Edgar Villanueva:

The other thing, part two of my response would be, we need to find ways to move faster and to just move capital into communities of color today. We don't have the luxury to sit back for people to catch up and understand and think about it and especially when by far, the folks who are making those decisions in philanthropy are still white men. So I'm pushing folks to get on their own learning journeys and do this work and shift our grantmaking practices and bring DEI all the way around into your work. But at the same time, look for these opportunities to move capital now. There are people of color led organizations and institutions and philanthropic intermediaries, like the Schott Foundation, like what I'm doing with this Native Response Fund, who already have the analysis and have the relationships to move that money in a way that centers community and justice today.

Edgar Villanueva:

So one example, as you mentioned Tim, we are running a rapid response fund to support native communities through Decolonizing Wealth called the Native American Community Response Fund, and what I say with this fund ... Well let me just say that the fund is about supporting native-led organizations who are on the front lines responding, providing relief, providing support. So food, housing, shelter, access to medical care, the whole nine yards and we're funding across the US, we began looking in the urban centers where we have large native populations supporting there and as a pandemic has shifted and now the nation Navajo is now a hotspot, we're moving resources there as well. What I would say about Liberating Capital, which is the giving circle that we have at Decolonizing Wealth supporting this fund, is that this is not about charity, this is about solidarity.

Edgar Villanueva:

So going right back to what we've been talking about, we're not asking for a handout in our communities. We are extending a lifeline into your own humanity and into your own liberation and healing by giving to our communities. I think this transfer of wealth is helping to reset a balance of power and resources that will help our communities in the long term have what we need through a self-determined process to survive and sustain ourselves. We often get caught up on thinking about a good grant and an effective grant and as you were saying at the start of the show Tim, that 5%, I want the 95%. I want your grant and I also want capital. I want folks to divest from these harmful and destructive industries and actually write large checks out of their endowments and hand that money over to these natives and black and Latino and other communities of color led intermediaries that are doing this work already embedded in community. That's the way that we decolonize wealth and shift wealth in a way that is closing the race wealth gap.

Tim Cynova:

God, yes. We've got some affirmative comments on the YouTube chat and we also are coming up on time. So one last question, any parting thoughts as we come in to land the plane now?

Edgar Villanueva:

We're out of time, so please check out the website, decolonizingwealth.com, information about the fund is there and I just encourage everyone to start their journey. This is not about whether or not you work in philanthropy or a nonprofit sector. We are all called to be leaders and agents of change and it starts with our families. We need to do this work of healing as individuals. We need to do it with our families and we need to do it with each other. So everyone, I'm asking you to have grace toward your fellow human beings during this crazy time, spread the love and find some way to get involved in supporting in this moment. We heal through giving and so I've found my sustainability and healing in this moment is by running these funds and knowing that I'm doing my part to give back and to help take care of others and so that's what we've all got to do in this moment.

Tim Cynova:

Thank you so much for being on the episode. If you didn't know, a huge honor to have you on the episode. Again, Decolonizing Wealth, Edgar's book is available, go to the website. Thank you so much for taking time to spend some of it with us this morning.

Edgar Villanueva:

Absolutely. Thank you again for having me on.

Tim Cynova:

Continue. The Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live adventure with us on our next episode, when we're joined by Deana Haggag, president and CEO of United States Artists. Missed us in the meantime? You can download more Work. Shouldn't. Suck. episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and re-watch 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 on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up, or a 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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