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2 episodes with growing communities
2 episodes with growing communities
2 episodes with growing communities
2 episodes with growing communities
Good day ladies and gentlemen, this is IRC news, I am Joy Stephen, a certified Canadian Immigration practitioner, and I bring to you this Provincial News Bulletin from the province of Alberta. This recording originates from the Polinsys studios in Cambridge, Ontario.As the province continues to grow, Alberta's government is investing in new schools and student spaces to meet that growth and provide the learning spaces students need for success. If passed, Budget 2024 would advance 43 priority school projects, including 28 new schools, 10 replacement schools and five modernizations. When complete, these projects will create about 35,000 new and modernized spaces for Alberta students to learn, grow, and meet their full potential.With an additional 43 projects included in this year's budget, the government is funding a total of 98 school projects in various stages across the province.As part of the $2.1 billion three-year capital investment, $103 million over three years will be used to supply modular classrooms to quickly increase classroom spaces in schools facing significant capacity challenges. Collegiate schools and public charter schools will be supported by a commitment of $123 million over three years, as Alberta's government continues to expand career education and support a full range of school choices for students and families.The recent announcement holds crucial implications for Teachers and Administrators contemplating a move to Alberta. By providing insights into the existing opportunities, it equips Teachers and Administrators with the necessary information to adapt their immigration strategies in anticipation of the sector's evolving demands. You can always access past news from the Province of Alberta by visiting this link: https://myar.me/tag/ab/.Furthermore, if you are interested in gaining comprehensive insights into the Provincial Express Entry Federal pool Canadian Permanent Residence Program or other Canadian Federal or Provincial Immigration programs, or if you require guidance after your selection, we cordially invite you to connect with us through https://myar.me/c.We highly recommend participating in our complimentary Zoom resource meetings, which take place every Thursday. We kindly request you to carefully review the available resources. Should any questions arise, our team of Canadian Authorized Representatives is readily available to address your concerns during the weekly AR's Q&A session held on Fridays. You can find the details for both of these meetings at https://myar.me/zoom.Our dedicated team is committed to providing you with professional assistance throughout the immigration process. Additionally, IRCNews offers valuable insights on selecting a qualified representative to advocate on your behalf with the Canadian Federal or Provincial governments, which can be accessed at
The innovator turning forgotten spaces into thriving community hubs. Meet Felix Atkin, founder of tech startup Sharsey - the Airbnb for community spaces. What stemmed from a personal problem of trying to book a local venue for his kids' birthday party has blossomed into a business that has already generated over £1million in bookings. Felix delves deep into his journey, unveils the strategic steps behind Sharesy's considered growth, and shares invaluable insights on coping with the demands of startup leadership.Key Takeaways- Self-Care Is Paramount. Amidst the drive for success, remember that personal well-being is crucial for sustaining long-term ambition.- Resilience in Fundraising. Embrace rejections as learning opportunities. Maintain transparency with your investors and lean on your support network during challenging times.- Learn the secret of how to context switch between high-level strategic planning and the nitty-gritty of day-to-day operations in your business- How to win at founder-led salesHave questions about this episode? Ask our hosts, chat now via our websiteSupport the showProudly sponsored by our wonderful partners:National Protective Security Authority - NSPA: The Secure Innovation campaign helps you take steps to protect your business from hostile threats. Don't leave it too late. Use the link to download the quick-start guide now:NPSA.gov.uk/innovation Hexa Finance: Hexa provides business finance to help you grow from start-up to success. To access your free consultation, simply go to:hexafinance.co.uk/contact Have questions about our podcast or an episode? Ask our hosts, chat now
Jim Grisanzio from Java Developer Relations talks with Stéphane Nicoll, a software engineer based in Belgium working on the Spring team. Stéphane talks about his experience becoming a Java developer, his observations seeing Java evolve and improve, and the importance of contributing to Java and Open Source generally. He's keen on building community by directly engaging engineers at events as well as mentoring contributors through the development process for issue reports and code changes. He said that "building our community is super important for us" as he outlined the process that he and his team uses to welcome new developers. That says it all. Get Stéphane on Twitter @snicoll and get Jim on Twitter @jimgris.
Brian Ladd is joined by Brian Rankin, the Long Range Planning Manager for the City of Bend, in our latest BendBeat episode. They explore the impact of Oregon's latest housing bill, which opens doors to more diverse and affordable housing options for Bend residents. While the city plays a role in helping fund affordable housing, given Bend's urgent housing needs, the state has stepped in to relax regulations on converting traditional homes into multi-family units (ADUs, duplexes, triplexes, etc.) to increase the supply of affordable, multi-family housing in Bend. Many of these new regulations were not permissible by the state before, so these significant changes are relatively new, and time will tell how it all plays out. Rankin also delves into the concept of "complete communities," which is reshaping Bend's present and future neighborhoods. This idea, originally conceived by city planners in the 90s, is gradually becoming a reality. Its goal is to create neighborhoods with a blend of amenities that allow residents to live comfortably within their community without the need for extensive travel. These topics and more are covered in this dynamic conversation that sheds light on how the city hopes to address Bend's "growing pains" with a vision for developing a city for everyone.
Better Help: Thank you to our sponsor BetterHelp, you can use my link https://betterhelp.com/musicspeaks for 10% off your first month of therapy. Bones Coffee: Get 10% any order on bonescoffee.com with code: MUSICSPEAKS Website - www.whenwordsfailmusicspeaks.com YouTube - www.youtube.com/whenwordsfailmusicspeaks Facebook - www.facebook.com/WWFMSPodcast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/when_words_fail_podcast/ Twitter - @WhenWordsFailMS Link to our merchandise: http://tee.pub/lic/WhenWordsFailMusicSpeaksMerch Email Us! James@whenwordsfailmusicspeaks.com Blake@whenwordsfailmusicspeaks.com AmandaDolin@whenwordsfailmusicspeaks.com
Minnesota's communities of color are growing. That's the good news from U.S. Census data released Thursday morning. The bad news? Minnesotans of color still face more poverty and unemployment than white Minnesotans. Sahan Journal reporter Joey Peters joined MPR News host Cathy Wurzer to break down new data from an annual survey of populations across the country. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.
Jeff Siegler is back with an incredibly thought-provoking episode about built places, communities, assumptions, and loneliness, and why designing our spaces and cities and towns to promote community is so important. This episode has it all: hot takes, hard truths, hard-to-discuss-but-mega-important ideas, and solutions to forge a better path forward. (Please tell us you also read that last sentence like Bill Hader's SNL character Stefon on Weekend Update.) About Jeff: Jeff Siegler is a writer, speaker, and consultant concerned with the powerful role place plays in our lives. He is the founder of the civic pride consulting firm, Revitalize, or Die and co-founder of the organization Proud Places. After obtaining his Masters in Urban Planning from Virginia Commonwealth University, Jeff went to work on Main Street. First as a downtown manager, and later as the Ohio Main Street State Coordinator. His first book, “Your City is Sick" is scheduled to be released on September 1st.. Jeff and his wife Amber and their four kids call Pittsburgh home. In this episode, we cover: Why we need to be intentional about our communities Why beauty actually isn't all that subjective How the “urban” and “rural” labels can contribute to divisiveness and blind spots How much our built environment affects our health A better way forward Links and Resources Mentioned: Your City is Sick Website (almost ready! Keep checking back!) YourCityisSick.com Ann Sussman's Cognitive Architecture Ep. 99 with Jeff - How to Combat Apathy in Your Small Town: https://www.growingsmalltowns.org/post/episode99
As we heard in our recent Redesigning Food series, our food system needs to be redesigned to help nature and people thrive.In our final episode from London, we meet Julie Brown, Director of Growing Communities, and Danny Fisher from Better Food Shed, about how they're working to supply Londoners with healthy, regeneratively-produced fruit and vegetables.Find out more about circular economy in cities
Each of us belong to some group, such as a university alumni or an industry association or a business group, etc. And we humans like it that way. When it comes to professional environment, especially for a business owner it can get lonelier and difficult and that's where belonging to a professional community can help.In this episode, host Surbhi Dedhia is talking with Mr. Chirantan Joshi who is a leading businessman in UAE and is also the National Director of Corporate Connections - a select community for business owners. Chirantan a.k.a. CJ has successfully built this community from ground up. On the show, he shares:What made him bring Corporate Connections to UAE? Why it is different than other community he was a part of.Why building a community was important for him and how using key virtues of patience and empathy helped him to lead better?Defining the success of the community and localising a global brand to local needsGrowing the community from strength to strength - Challenges and WinsGrowing his own thought leadership with the community on topics close his heart.and much moreListen to the full episode as CJ shares generously about building a community and making it thrive under his leadership.Know more about Chirantan Joshi:His personal brand website: https://www.chirantanjoshi.com/Connect with him on LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshi8/Download his e-book on Mastering Time: https://www.chirantanjoshi.com/wp-content/uploads/Mastering_time_book_8-15-19.pdf Thank you for listening!You can connect with the host - Surbhi Dedhia - on LinkedIn to share ideas and thoughts on building your #thoughtleadershipThe Making of a Thought Leader podcast is brought to you by Jot My Bio.comJot My Bio helps executives and entrepreneurs to narrate their professional experience through personal bios. Personal bios are essential to position one's work experience and skill sets to attract more interactions, be it on the About us section of the website, Linkedin or on presentation slides. To get a professionally handcrafted bio, get in touch with https://www.JotMybio.com
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What will be the impact of Britain's withdrawal from the EU on food standards in the UK? When the Brexit referendum was held, trade was trumpeted as a great benefit. No longer would the UK be constrained by EU deals; the country could sign trade agreements with whomever it wanted. Almost immediately, concerns were raised about the effect on food standards, food quality and animal welfare. Consumers and farmers would suffer, it was said. Well, several years on, those trade deals are slowly emerging, and the warnings have returned. A recent focus has been the big trade deal signed with Australia, which eliminates tariffs on a vast range of products, including lamb, beef, sugar, and dairy. The Australia deal was the first to be built from scratch, most others have rolled over from what the UK had when it was in the EU, or in some cases deals have been slightly extended. The brand-newness of the Australia deal makes it significant. But how big a deal is it and how significant is the food and farming sector within it? Critics say the Australia deal is bad news for British agriculture and environmental standards. The UK Government says it will unlock billions in additional trade, and boost wages across the country. The policy paper from government said “imports will still have to meet the same food safety and biosecurity standards as they did before. "For the UK this means, for example, that imports of hormone-treated beef will continue to be banned.” And it's not just food standards that people are worried about. The RSPCA says the UK has higher legal animal welfare standards than Australia in virtually every area. The National Farmers Union has warned that UK producers cannot compete with Australia's vast cattle and sheep stations. So where does the truth lie? And what might the real impact of post-Brexit trade deals be on the UK food sector? Dr Marco Springmann, Senior Researcher, Nuffield Department of Population Health, Oxford Martin School Marco Springmann is a senior researcher in the Centre on Population Approaches for Non-Communicable Disease Prevention in the Nuffield Department of Population Health, and leads the Centre's programme on environmental sustainability and public health. He is interested in the health, environmental, and economic dimensions of the global food systems. He often uses systems models to provide quantitative estimates on food-related questions. Marco joined the Centre in December 2013. Between 2013 and 2017, he has been a James Martin Fellow of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food to work with researchers from the Nuffield Department of Population Health, the Department of International Development, and the Environmental Change Institute, to develop an integrated model of environmental sustainability, health, and economic development. Since 2017, he is working on extending the health and environmental aspects of that model as part of the Wellcome funded project “Livestock, Environment and People” (LEAP), working closely with different departments across Oxford, as well as international collaborators, such as the International Policy Research Institute based in the US. Marco holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Oldenburg (Germany), a MSc in Sustainability from the University of Leeds (UK), and a MS in Physics from Stony Brook University (USA). He maintains international research collaborations, and has conducted regular placements, including at the International Food Policy Research Institute (USA), Deakin University (Australia), Tsinghua University (China), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA), Resources for the Future (USA), the European Investment Bank (Luxemburg), and the German Federal Ministry for the Environment (Germany). He is a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, and a Honorary Research Associate in the Food Systems Group of the Environmental Change Institute. Kath Dalmeny, Chief Executive, Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming Kath has been Chief Executive of Sustain: The alliance for better food and farming, since 2016. She is leading the alliance's response to Brexit and its profound implications for healthy and sustainable food, farming and fishing. She is also a member of the London Food Board and helped establish the Sustainable Food Cities Network. She is a vocal advocate of high standards for food, environment and animal welfare, and champions better trading practices and government support to reward food producers and workers for all the benefits they generate. Kath instigated Sustainable Fish Cities to persuade major foodservice companies to serve only sustainable fish; and the Right to Food initiative to address food poverty systematically so that everyone can eat well. She also helps run the Campaign for Better Hospital Food, and sits on Defra's food procurement taskforce. On a voluntary basis she serves on the board of Growing Communities, an award-winning community-run sustainable food trading enterprise based in Hackney. Emily Lydgate, Deputy Director, UK Trade Policy Observatory I am a specialist in international trade law and Deputy Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory, a partnership between University of Sussex and Chatham House. My research focuses at the intersection of environmental regulation and economic integration, and the interrelation between trade, agricultural and climate policies in the EU and UK. I am a Specialist Advisor to the EFRA Committee (UK House of Commons) and have provided expert testimony for a number of UK Parliamentary Committees on implications of exit from the EU. I am also an instructor for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office's Advanced Diplomatic Academy. I hold a PhD from King's College London and an MSc (with distinction) from Oxford University. I was a Marie Curie Researcher at Bocconi University and have consulted at the United Nations Environment Programme's Economics and Trade Branch, where I acted as a WTO liaison. I am currently working on an EU Horizon 2020 grant project on how EU Free Trade Agreements and wider trade policy reflects the goal of securing sustainable agricultural practices, and leading on a report for the UK Committee on Climate Change on trade policy and emissions reduction. I am also on the management team of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy, a UK Research Council-funded centre commencing in April 2022. My research and commentary have been featured in the Associated Press, Marketplace, BBC, CNN, China Daily, Financial Times, Independent, Guardian, New Scientist, Times, Telegraph, Vice, Wired, Xinhua News, and others.
On this episode of the DIVI Crypto Podcast our host Steve McGarry is talking with Seth Goldstein, Founder of Bright Moments NFT Gallery. The two dive into the details behind the gallery and how they were able to cultivate communities through launches in new cities. Steve and Seth go into how their gallery events also include an in-person minting element, and how that is a big part of the model. Bright Moments is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that delivers unforgettable IRL minting experiences and cultural moments through NFT galleries around the world. As a DAO, Bright Moments is governed by holders of its own PFP project, Crypto Citizens. - Website - https://www.brightmoments.io/ - Crypto Citizens - https://opensea.io/collection/cryptocitizensofficial - Instagram @Brightmomentsgallery - https://www.instagram.com/brightmomentsgallery/ - Twitter @brtmoments - https://twitter.com/brtmoments -- DIVI is creating the world's first closed-loop, vertically-integrated cryptocurrency ecosystem. Much like Apple's ecosystem is anchored by iCloud, the DIVI Project blockchain serves as the core of the DIVI network of technologies. Thanks to a keen understanding of the divide that separates the mainstream from the crypto world, the DIVI team is able to create solutions to the industry's biggest problem: adoption by non-technical users. DIVI's user-friendly, one-click solutions aim to bring blockchain-based payments into modernity with great UX. In this podcast, we will cover all aspects of cryptocurrency, hot topics, and technology as worldwide adoption grows.
On today's show, smaller towns in northwest Arkansas are experiencing growth, just like the bigger towns. Plus, the communities that have evaporated along Route 66, a conversation with Carlos Santana, and much more.
Texas APWA's 2022 President, Shawn Poe, joins Kevin Krahn to discuss the mission of APWA and its importance to the Texas community. He also provides an update on current challenges that public works systems and the organization have been facing in Texas and shares his advice for young professionals in the industry.
Can you make more money and help people's lives simultaneously? You don't want to miss this episode as today's guest Samuel Sells will answer this question and talks about developing distressed properties for the better and how it positively impacts their community. This episode will change your perspective on being rich, so make sure to listen in!Key Takeaways To Listen ForThe importance of using money as an instrument to impact people's livesWhat is “impact investing”?Steps for running distressed properties more smoothlyHow to set better expectations for real estate projectsHow to cope with unforeseen events in the real estate industryStrategies to find compatible business partnersResources Mentioned In This EpisodeFree Apartment Syndication Due Diligence Checklist for Passive Investor About Samuel SellsSam Sells, a retired U.S. Air Force officer and combat veteran, founded Wild Mountain Holdings and its affiliates in 2018 with his hero dad. Sam started his real estate career in the early 2000s by funding and completing rehabs on numerous fix-and-flips across several states. since 2019, the team has purchased numerous development/rehab properties creating equity growth of nearly 2x initial investment in less than 3-years. Projects include apartment communities, mobile home communities, and self-storage. Connect with SamuelWebsite: Wild Mountain CapitalEmail: sam@wildmountaincapital.comFacebook: Wild Mountain CapitalLinkedIn: Wild Mountain CapitalInstagram: @wildmountaincapitalYouTube: Wild Mountain CapitalTo Connect With UsPlease visit our website: www.bonavestcapital.com and please click here, to leave a rating and review!SponsorsGrow Your Show, LLCThinking About Creating and Growing Your Own Podcast But Not Sure Where To Start?Visit GrowYourShow.com and Schedule a call with Adam A. Adams.
Episode 125 of the Common Weal Policy Podcast You can download the episode directly here.This week, Craig talks to Nancy Barr and Terry Paterson both from Larkhall Community Growers and the Larkhall Lighthouse Community Centre. They discuss the various projects they run around the town - including the community gardens - and the impact they've had on the collective wellbeing of the people of Larkhall.You can visit the Community Growers webpage here.The Larkhall Lighthouse can be contacted via Facebook here.Common Weal's work is only possible thanks to our generous supporters who regularly donate an average of £10 per month. If you would like to help us build our vision of an All of Us First Scotland, you can do so here: https://commonweal.scot/product-category/support-us/The Policy Podcast would like to discuss all of Common Weal's policy papers in detail as well as other major policy stories in and around Scotland so if there are any topics that you would like to see covered or if you have an interesting policy story to tell and would like to be a guest on the show, please contact Craig at craig@common.scotYou can also find us on iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, Stitcher, Tunein, iHeart Radio and other major podcast aggregators.You can also add the podcast to your RSS feed using this link: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/264906.rssPhoto Credit: Larkhall Community GrowersTheme"Hiding Your Reality" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Support the show
When Eugenio Lopez and his family moved to Worthington 17 years ago, only a few families of color lived on their block. Arriving from Canton, Miss., southwestern Minnesota seemed like another world. “We kind of felt like [we were] outside of the group of these people,” said Lopez, whose parents came to the United States from Guatemala. “But, they took us in and they welcomed us with open arms.” These days, Lopez's street is a mix of neighbors able to trace their roots to Central America as easily as Central Europe. Like all of Worthington, it's been transformed by people of color who've found work, built businesses and bought homes, and whose kids have sustained the public schools in an era of declining white student enrollment. Their rapidly growing numbers and economic muscle, however, have not yet translated into political power. While people of color are the majority now in Worthington, politics in the city and across Nobles County remain nearly all white and male. That came into sharp focus in the last election cycle when three women of color ran for city, county and Minnesota House seats, and all lost. The reasons for that are more complex than racial or ethnic bias or the power of incumbency. But lack of representation is still a concern for those who need support from government leaders to fund projects and provide resources to fill in gaps for needed services. There are signs of change. Voters in 2019 backed a bond sale allowing Worthington to build a badly needed school for its growing student body, a measure that had failed for years before with some supporters feeling white Worthington didn't want to pay for a school needed by nonwhite kids. Stephen Groves | AP 2019 A yard sign supporting a school funding ballot measure is seen in Worthington, Minn., Nov. 5, 2019. People of color are also increasingly willing to run for office. That includes Lopez, 18, who expects to run for mayor someday. “It doesn't cause discouragement, it even empowers me,” he said of the lack of political diversity now. “It even motivates me even further to actually run for public office here in Worthington.” People who've been fighting for years to break through those barriers, though, know the time, energy and money it will take to win hearts and minds. An uphill battle Hannah Yang | MPR News Leticia Rodriguez frequents Mini Market Lupita in Worthington. Rodriguez says small immigrant-owned businesses in town like Lupita's don't receive assistance from their elected leaders. Leticia Rodriguez, 60, frequents Mini Market Lupita, where her friend and owner, Maria Parga, can be seen working behind the counter. Adjacent to the Mexican restaurant is a market with fridges for fresh produce and aisles of specialty items. Rodriguez said that small immigrant-owned businesses in Worthington like Lupita's started from scratch and didn't receive any type of assistance from their elected leaders to get their livelihoods off the ground. “Worthington has been making changes in approaching people and trying to teach people [where] the resources there are, but for the most part, all the businesses didn't start that way with any help from the government, or the county, or the city, or anything,” Rodriguez said. “They just started on their own.” Courtesy of Leticia Rodriguez Leticia Rodriguez, a community organizer in Nobles County. Rodriguez ran for Nobles County Commissioner in 2020, but lost. When she ran, Rodriguez wanted to have her voice heard. She didn't want to run as a person of color, but just as a person because she felt that local officials didn't engage all communities and understand what their needs were. During her campaign, though, Rodriguez began to understand the challenge of winning. She received comments from white voters that she wouldn't represent them at all and that she'd only be serving people of color if elected. Meanwhile, voters of color expected her to enact policies immediately to solve long-standing issues that required time. Rodriguez said she counted as only one vote and would need the support of others. She's not running again for office and instead, shifted her efforts elsewhere into directly working with community members to see results. But with Worthington changing so much in its businesses, its schools and neighborhoods, Rodriguez is hopeful that eventually the community will elect a person of color into office. “It's a changing world,” she said. “It's not gonna go back to the way it always was. It's gonna continue to change and evolve and our young people are going to be the testament of that change.” Worthington Mayor Mike Kuhle has been active in local politics for years but won't seek reelection when his term expires in December. “I figure it's time for some new blood, some new thinking,” Kuhle said. “There's a lot of people in this community that could do a great job. And that's including all the different cultures. But they have to step forward.” They have. Besides Rodriguez, two other women of color recently ran and lost — Aida Simon for city council in 2020 and Cheniqua Johnson for state representative in 2018. However, they are not running for any office in this election cycle. A turning point Alex Baumhardt | APM Reports 2019 A former storage room, photographed on Jan. 7, 2019, has been turned into a classroom at Worthington Middle School in Worthington, Minn. Minnesota towns are fiercely proud of their local school systems. Many in southern Minnesota struggled to keep the doors open as white student counts fell. Students of color helped sustain them. Overcrowding, though, became a chronic problem in Worthington. It needed a new school but for years couldn't get the voters to agree. “I had a class that was like 36 students, and there were only around 30 chairs,” Lopez said. “That's a major concern around the school. There wasn't any space at all and they were running out of closets to convert into classrooms.” By the time Lopez was in high school, the measure failed five times. He and other youth had enough. Lopez couldn't vote because of his age, but he decided that he could still do something to help. “I'm going to talk to my neighbors. I'm going to people in my neighborhood, at church, [to] get them to be informed [about] what is actually going on in school, because many people are just based on the money,” he said. “They don't hear when it's students, when it comes to what is going on in school, what is happening.” After canvassing, calling and knocking on doors, talking to adults at church, Lopez and his classmates were also able to make some breakthroughs in conversations. “I think parents and adults started to kind of understand, that's not how you grew up,” he said. “This is how we are growing up right now, and if you want to prevent this, your vote is important.” Alex Baumhardt | APM Reports 2019 Students squeezed into a regular classroom for band class at Worthington Middle School on Jan. 7, 2019. Weeks before, a high-profile Washington Post article with the headline “Immigrant kids fill this town's schools. Their bus driver is leading the backlash” stung the Worthington community, which prompted a response from Kuhle in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that “without immigrants moving to Worthington, we would likely be a community in decline.” Weeks later, voters approved nearly $34 million in new bonds. A new school is being built where Lopez's younger sister will be attending as a fifth grader. She won't experience overcrowding like he did. She was his biggest motivation to get involved. “Being part of the movement and leading something, it's something that brings joy to me so that my sisters don't actually have to bear and suffer what I actually go through, so that they can have an easier path forward,” he added. Organizations like Seeds of Justice — a collective born after leaders envisioned supporting leaders of color in the area and empowering leaders of immigrants, refugees and people of color — Voices for Racial Justice, and Unidos MN have been working in the area to meet community needs. Leaders organized mobile vaccine clinics during the COVID-19 pandemic, helped register people to vote, hosted food drives and answered questions about applying for housing assistance. Hannah Yang | MPR News 2020 Volunteers of Unidos We Win set up base in Worthington, Minn. on Nov. 3, 2020. Yet, Adyiam Kimbrough of Seeds of Justice, said that getting a person of color elected is still a priority and having someone with voting power is still a necessity. “At the end of the day, we can do all the organizing that we want, get all the grant funds that we want, but when we actually want to do something big in our community … we can't do that without the support of our local government,” Kimbrough said. “At the end of the day, we do need folks that understand us and that value the marginalized communities to get things done.” More than a decade ago, people of color made up one-third of Nobles County residents. Now, they make up nearly half. In Worthington, the county seat, nearly two-thirds of residents identify as people of color. ‘I do want to see a change' Hannah Yang | MPR News Eugenio Lopez says he wants to make the town better and plans to run for office when he returns from college in four years. Minnesota's identity shifted, becoming less white and more diverse over the past decade. About 76 percent of Minnesotans identified as white and non-Hispanic in 2020 compared to 83 percent in the 2010 census. Each county statewide became more diverse during that time, but the fastest changing is Nobles County. Welcome to Nobles County: Minnesota's most rapidly diversifying county Eugenio Lopez said he loved growing up in Worthington, despite not always feeling like the community reciprocated. While he and his family put down strong roots — his parents became homeowners six years ago after saving up a down payment — there were times in his life when he was reminded that people in Worthington lived very different lives. In 2006, an immigration raid at JBS Pork Processing struck fear and tension in relationships between community members and their government officials. During the 2016 presidential elections, Lopez also had personal experiences with racism in town when walking off a bus on his way home from school. “A kid shouted out, ‘When Donald Trump is elected, you and your family are going to be deported!' And then that night, I just went into my bedroom, I started crying. I was like ‘Why would people do that? Why would they say that?' And also my sister during the election of 2020, she also had to go through that same thing. A Caucasian student said to her, ‘Why are you and your people here? You should go back to your country.'” Lopez wants it to be better, but to be better Worthington needs to have someone who can represent everyone's voices. Not all of them have been heard yet. “Actually having a voice in there, I think it's completely important,” he said. “Because, just to have one group of people making a decision, or shutting off another group who don't have any decisions at all or they don't care about them, it's just benefiting yourself, but not for other people.” Lopez plans to attend Minnesota West Community and Technical College in the fall and eventually go for his political science degree at a four-year school. But after, he still plans to come back to Worthington and run for office. “I've always called Worthington my home,” he said. “I've always put my dedication, hard effort in this town, and I do want to see a change.” North Star Journey Pass the Mic What should we look into next? Minnesota names Connections, struggles for inclusion As state considers repairs to I-94 Rondo residents look for reconnection Correction (March 21, 2022): Worthington's new school will serve grades 3-5. An earlier version of this story had described it as a middle school. The story's also been updated to note Cheniqua Johnson lost her Minnesota House election bid in 2018.
Learn more about David:David's LinkedInDavid's TwitterDavid's BookEpisode resources:Meetup's LinkedInMeetup's WebsiteKeep Connected PodcastThe Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive AdvantageSend your stories and feedback on this episode to pod@cmxhub.comIf you enjoyed this episode, then please either:Subscribe, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow on Spotify
In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with David Siegel, CEO of Meetup, Author of Decide & Conquer, and Host of the Keep Connected podcast. Our host, David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy and Co-Founder of CMX, moderated the conversation. They discuss the best practices and values for CEO and community leaders in decision-making. Who is this episode for? Community builders, community managers, community leaders, and CEOs. Timestamps: (05:43) - David's intro and his current role at Meetup (09:27) - The Meetup experience (17:57) - Changing the game (26:00) - Decide and Conquer book (36:00) - What is a decision framework (45:12) - Going with an imperfect plan over a perfect plan (49:31) - Building trust when entering a new company (54:15) - Empowering versus micromanaging people (58:01) - The future of Meetup (01:00:05) - Rapid-fire question round Notable Quotes: “I happen to have grown up with an extremely strong sense of community” “Building a community is about building a quality experience” “And I consider one of my most important jobs as a community leader is to be as transparent as possible so that other people around me are not surprised” “Trying to fit a narrative into principles is much less interesting than creating the principles after you already know what's meaningful and less meaningful” Answers to rapid-fire questions: 1. What's your favorite book to gift or recommend to others? How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie 2. If you were to find yourself on your deathbed today, and you had to condense all of your life lessons into one piece of advice to the rest of the world on how to live, what would that advice be? Find joy in your day-to-day life as that joy can help set you off for longer-term success. 3. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would that food be? Sardines 4. Who in the world of community would you like to take out for lunch? Angela Duckworth, author of GRIT 5. What is the most important metric that you look at when looking at the health of a meetup? The number of connections that we create between people. 6. What's the weirdest Meetup group? Hugging groups 7. What's the weirdest community you've ever been a part of? Fantasy baseball
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Join me for another HerRise Salon Talk with Stefanie Steward-Young. Stefanie is a community development professional with more than 20 years of financial industry experience. She currently serves as senior vice president and chief corporate social responsibility officer.
Growing Chefs! Ontario is a registered charity based in London, Ontario that unites chefs, growers, educators and community members in children's food education projects. Growing Chefs! Ontario offers a variety of Food Education Projects to get kids and communities excited about healthy, wholesome food! In this episode, Andrew tells us all about how he got started with Growing Chefs in Vancouver, how and why he decided to create a headquarters for Growing Chefs in London, the Food Education Programs that they run, such as Growing Communities, Kid's Monthly Cooking Classes and more, the collaborations and other programs Growing Chefs has helped with, how to get over being a picky eater and much more! Growing Chefs! Information Website: https://growingchefsontario.ca Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/growingchefsontario/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/growingchefsontario London's Pretty Cool Information: Email: lpcpod@gmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lpcpodcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LPCPod/ Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVMSbxJ8T9vxDCfReDU8KUQ Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43R5Q9JIsuWgS19TGxAKnU Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/londons-pretty-cool/id1456976350 Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9sb25kb25zcHJldHR5Y29vbC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjNuNCE963yAhVmgnIEHbDDBa4Q9sEGegQIARAC
In this overheated Real Estate environment, you may need to find smaller, growing markets to find the right deals. Depending on where you look, it's still possible to find cap rates of 5% or slightly higher for Class C buildings in decent condition in gentrifying B class areas. Today‘s guest, Jonathan Barr, founder of JB2 Investments, puts a lot of his own capital in play alongside a handful of selected investors in deals that cash flow very well.
Ralph Moore is a Baltimore native who knows the city better than anyone. With a background in community organizing and activism, Ralph is a force that leads to change. Through…
Growing Businesses. Growing People. Growing Communities. That's the mission of The Boreal Collective. This week, I head back to my stomping grounds of Marquette, Michigan to have a great conversation with Ian Altobello of The Boreal Collective, a fully-remote creative marketing company that pairs branded strategy with a collective approach. Altobello and I discuss #TheBorealCollective's approach to growing collective members and how it directly translates to growth for clients and members of the community. Creators, marketers, and analytical thinkers, The Borreal Collective understands that optimal UX happens through collaboration. Altobello and I discuss career transitions in 2021, how you can fully follow your passion and dreams and the power of social media engagement versus followership. To learn more about the beautiful things Altobello and company are working on, visit: https://www.facebook.com/TheBorealCollective. If you are a creative mind and want to learn more about how you can join The Boreal Collective, email theborealcollective@gmail.com The Dexter Report features in-depth discussions with True Community leaders. To learn more on how I can help you tell your story, visit JoeDexterMedia.com. And for more insight, follow me on social media: Twitter: @JoeDexterMedia Instagram: DexterMediaSolutions Facebook: DexterMediaSolutions And Subscribe to the Dexter Media Newsletter: https://www.joedextermedia.com/form/subscribe-to-the-dexter-media-newsletter --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thedexterreport/support
Hello everyone, this is the first episode of my podcast: Meet My Guest. My podcast is created to talk about Community Development and Growing Countries. I am looking to talk about self-awareness and providing values to our community by accentuating the bright side My guest: @nikokezanate Resources of this episode: Ethiopian Parliament http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/04/gender... Mozambique https://www.peacewomen.org/content/mo... Yemeni https://yemen.un.org/en/15853-women-c... To connect with me: My email: fatemasalhany@gmail.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/fatema-al-salhany7/message
Curtis Stone comes out of hiding to rejoin The Gaggle as we discuss how to establish a solutions-based approach to community and how to set a positive culture within it. Moderated by Curtis Stone One this Episode Curtis Stone, TheUrbanFarmer John Bush, livefreenow.show Xavier Hawk, Phireonglobalpartners.com Nicole Sauce, LivingFreeinTennessee.com Jack Spirko, TheSurvivalPodcast.com Sal the Agorist – The Agora Podcast The post Ep 26-Handling Bad Actors in Growing Communities and Welcome Back Curtis Stone first appeared on Agorist Podcast: Unloose the Goose.
Distributed Media: the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Podcast Network
Q sits down w/ Jess Sloss, founder of Seed Club, to discuss the explosive growth of social tokens in 2020 and what's to come for the new industry in 2021, accepting applications for new communities into SeedClub, the rise of $JAMM and $ALEX, Personal vs. Community Tokens, and regulatory framework thoughts. SeedClub https://seedclub.xyz/
We hit the gardening trail with Chorus gardeners John and Paul to see what it was like helping people in their gardens. While gardening is at the heart of what they do, it is so much more than that. “We have lovely connections with our customers,” says John. “It makes us all, as our gardening team goes, dig in and it doesn't feel like a job when you're doing that.” John and Paul agree that they enjoy having a chat with customers and seeing the customers come alive when they talk about their earlier lives. “I've even been sitting down in the shopping centre and the client's walked up and sat down and we’ve had a chat,” adds Paul. When volunteers join in with the crew it’s particularly special. “They come out, gain some skills, and we all have a good time. They look out for us, we look out for them,” says Paul. Earlier in the month John did some work with volunteers from Cannington ESC for now retired volunteers Jim and Wanda (who talked on Ep 50: 50 years in the community). “Wanda came out and gave, very generously, a whole tray of lollies and the kids were over the moon about that,” adds John. Customers Margaret and Audrey are full of praise for John and Paul’s work in their garden. Margaret’s neighbour saw Margaret struggling in the garden one day and suggested she give Chorus (then Volunteer Task Force) a call. I think they're brilliant,” says Margaret. At Audrey’s house Paul gets stuck into the front garden – weeding between the vincas, roses and geraniums– and John fires up the leaf blower out the back. Audrey has been in her home for an amazing 70 years and built up great community connections over the years, particularly through sporting activities. “When the weather's nice I'll sit out the back here quite a lot and then I'll go for walks around the garden,” she says. “I loved hearing from Audrey and Margaret and how their hospitality, when Judith went out, was just that to me speaks of community,” says Louise. “Gardening is work - it's manual work - but it was something a lot richer than that going on in the way that you could hear the guys talking about their day,“ says Dan. “People have a smaller footprint that they work on. A smaller group of people that they get to know. And those connections that spring up when you work locally.” Credits Podcast Hosts: Dan Minchin and Louise Forster Opening Voiceover: Ryan Burke Opening Music: “Wattlebird” by Dylan Hatton Music Interviewees: John Hatton – Support worker gardening and home maintenance Paul Forster - Support worker gardening and home maintenance Margaret Audrey Jane Wittenoom – Company Secretary Producer/Interviewer: Judith Hatton Audio editing: Matthew Clark Special thanks: Maddie Bull Mentioned in this episode Cannington Education Support Centre Ep 50: 50 years in the community
In this episode you can hear Vladik Khononov and Andrei talk about tech stuff, the importance of communities and how you can never succeed if you are not at least a little bit a people person. Show notes on https://techieleadership.com/show66
Conversation with Bailey Richardson from People and Company and co-author of the book Get Together. Pauline and Bailey go about the in and out of building, sustaining and growing communities with notes on what this means for coworking spaces.To keep updated:Follow Coworkies:Web: hotwaterpodcast.comTwitter: twitter.com/coworkiesInstagram: instagram.com/coworkiesPodcast Check list:Get together book on Amazon: gettogetherbook.com/People and company: www.people-and.com/Bailey on Twitter: twitter.com/baileyelaine
Want to start a FaceBook group or a mastermind? You'll benefit from this episode where we dive deep on how we grew our FaceBook group and why we spend time every month masterminding with like-minded business owners! Come say hi on our socials:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breeandstephen/Free FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WeddingIndustryIGMarketing/?ref=bookmarksTools & resources for creative entrepreneurs: https://breeandstephen.com/educationOur favorite Amazon products: https://www.tinyurl.com/BSPrimeGet instant access to over 10 hours of business courses: https://www.patreon.com/breeandstephenSupport the show (http://patreon.com/breeandstephen)
A blend of slow radio, gardening advice and conversation, and readings from the best garden and wildlife writing. These notes may contain affiliate links. Garden soundtrack Poem 00:53 Digging by Seamus Heaney Read by Jemma Mullholland from Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber 1966 (new edition 2006) https://amzn.to/3bwuPpk A feeling of connection to the land. Taken for granted. Interview with the Claire Ratinon 03:39 4:50 TV Production in New York: Claire’s Eureka Moment Brooklyn Grange Farm https://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/ 8:14 Career change gardeners 11:15 Early plant memories. Or not! 16:47 Formative food memories. 18:42 Living and growing in Hackney 20:33 Claire’s organic growing training OrganicLea https://www.organiclea.org.uk/ Growing Communities https://www.growingcommunities.org/ 25:14 The importance of urban growing 27:58 A taste of what’s possible. The role of a growing educator. 30:32 Organic. Urban. Mindful. 37:39 The representatino of People of Colour within gardening and growing. Tokenism, racial passing. Having to aggressively assimilate. 44:58 Burden, responsibility or privilege? 51:09 The party played by Claire’s relationship to the land in her identity. 58:09 After Hackney 60:56 What’s next for Claire? *** Thank you to Claire for joining me on this episode. You can preorder Claire’s book How to grow your dinner without leaving the house, to be published by Laurence King in September 2020, here https://amzn.to/2xx6O2p Claire’s website: https://www.claireratinon.com/ Claire on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/claireratinon/ Thanks too to Jemma Mulholland for reading for us. You can find Jemma on social media here https://www.instagram.com/popcorn_for_lunch/ I’m ever grateful to all my listeners for your continued support and reviews, I really do appreciate them. You can support the podcast by buying its producer a virtual cup of coffee for three quid, at https://ko-fi.com/andrewtimothyOB. Proceeds will go towards equipment, software and the monthly podcast hosting fees. One-to-one online garden coaching I’m very excited about my new venture – it’s a way for me to work with more people than I can physically get around to, helping them to make the very best of their gardens in a way that suits the life they lead. A few limited places left on introductory prices! https://www.gardensweedsandwords.com/garden-coaching website: gardensweedsandwords.com email: gardensweedsandwords@gmail.com Instagram: instagram.com/AndrewTimothyOB Twitter: twitter.com/AndrewTimothyOB
Hannah is a Streamer, Commentator, and Competitor in the FGC. I had the opportunity to commentate with her at Youmacon Battle Opera 2019. Her story was very fascinating so we took some time to chat and get to know her more. Social Media Twitch.tv/hanrosedav Twitter @hanrosedav https://twitter.com/BabealityFGC https://twitter.com/ValkyriesCGL Twitter - https://twitter.com/CEEL0WS My Youtube - https://t.co/eA6dO4N0fX?amp=1 Free Trial of Audible - www.audible.com/taviannapier Currently reading Start With Why by: Simon Sinek Think and Grow Rich by: Napoleon Hill Mindset: The new psychology to Success by: Carol Dweck https://twitter.com/ThePhilocypherTwitter - @ThePhilocpher www.youtube.com/thephilocypher For a free month of audible go to www.taviannapier.com/audible https://twitter.com/ThePhilocypherTwitter - @ThePhilocpher www.youtube.com/thephilocypher For a free month of audible go to www.taviannapier.com/audible Music by: http://youtube.com/chillhopdotcom GYVUS – Tōzen Birocratic - Tony's Belated Breakfast
Hugo started Lowly Food to make choosing sustainable food easy. This year he turned his research-backed low emission recipes into a recipe box for Londoners. In this episode, Hugo shares with us his knowledge of the food industry, his learnings from starting a recipe box delivery service and some insight into British produce. I felt like I learnt a lot about the food on my plate during our chat and I hope you do too. You can read more from Hugo at https://www.lowlyfood.com/ In this episode, Hugo recommends the book How Bad are Bananas by Mike Berners-Lee. As well as Growing Communities, a community-led organisation based in Hackney, North London, which is providing a real, practical alternative to the current damaging food system. https://www.growingcommunities.org/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Article: https://ontarioconstructionnews.com/southwestern-ontarios-cities-dominate-the-top-ten-list-of-growing-communities-in-canada-2/ I really want to know what you think about the rise in construction activity. Is it a good sign? Or is it just creating more vulnerability? Email me: recoffee@joelarndt.ca
Matt was a successful defense attorney, serving as an elder in a large church. As he chats with Rich and Ruben he shares how God called him to give up his conventional career and church paths in order to serve an under-reached demographic in his community. Insights abound for those of all backgrounds and theological persuasions. Check out Matt’s church: https://www.triadadventistfellowship.com/
Listen to episode five of the GCM podcast as we're joined by Kings Group's Senior Community Manager, Hugo Ludewig. Following his massive success with King of Avalon and Guns of Glory, we ask Hugo to share his experiences building and managing the ultimate Mod Squad, and growing communities across multiple platforms using proactive messaging.
Don Cox – Owner, Bald Guy Brew, Johnson City, Tennessee Area From the time Don first saw someone roasting coffee outside in an open market, took a pound home and proceeded to burn it, filling the kitchen with smoke, he has been excited about coffee roasting. Over the course of many years, which took Don and his wife Shannon to various parts of Mexico, Pittsburgh, and eventually Boone, NC, they developed Bald Guy Brew. When arsonists burnt down the business in 2016, their focus turned to training and using coffee as a platform for making a difference in the world. Coffee roasting is not just about the coffee: it's about the people who enjoy it together, the people who grow it, and the places where they live. Don's story and ways of thinking about coffee open up conversation for us to think about the ways we consume, the ways we do business, and how our lives can be intentionally lived in ways that bless the unreached and the poor. He shows some of the connections between land, people, and the global supply chains that connect us all. As you listen be thinking about ways you can live intentionally to bless the people and the lands of the world. To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Paul Dzubinski and Steven Spicer host this edition of the Creation Care Missions Podcast. Check out the full text of this at CreationCareMissions.org
Happy new year everyone, I hope you had a fantastic holiday season. I'm excited to kick off season 4 of the Outdoor Biz Podcast with Todd Branham of Blue Ridge Adventures. Todd is doing great work in the Blue Ridge Mountains building trails and Mtn Bike communities through his businesses. We talk about his early days on a bike, the inspirations, challenges as well as some of the intricate details of building trails. Thanks for all you do Todd and coming on show! And thanks to the crew at Darby Communications and Julie Bacon for connecting us. Facebook Twitter Instagram The Outdoor Biz Podcast Support the show on Patreon Please give us a rating and review HERE Show Notes First Exposure to the Outdoors I guess it started really young. As a kid my parents, all they had to do was put me in a room in the house for a punishment. I really liked the outdoors. I'd stand at the door and cry until I could go outside, so I started pretty young. I just enjoyed being outside. I grew up in the country, I enjoy playing in the forest. I mean, right off the bat, man I was an outdoor person. Things we talked about Blue Ridge Adventures Long Cane Trails Pisgah National Forest Biltmore Forest School Transylvania County Pisco stage race Bill Victor International Mountain Bike Association Advice, tips I think starting early, you know, I mean if you, if you feel the passion that you want to be in it, I mean get your hands dirty and get in the industry however you can. if you, if you stay focused on what you're doing, it'll all fall in place for you. Other Outdoor Activities Trail Run Show Shoe Rollerblade Favorite Books Trail Solutions: IMBA's Guide to Building Sweet Singletrack Best Gear Purchase under $100 Thermacell Insoles Connect with Todd Blue Ridge Adventures Long Cane Trails
From smartphones to growing communities, the TalkScript team covers all the things in the final podcast from JSConf US 2018. The post Episode 20: Smartphone Symphony / Growing Communities (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on TalkScript.FM.
From smartphones to growing communities, the TalkScript team covers all the things in the final podcast from JSConf US 2018. The post Episode 20: Smartphone Symphony / Growing Communities (Live at JSConf US) appeared first on SitePen.
Some communities can't access green space, depriving them of the physical, mental and social benefits that nature brings. This was a sad reality for Norbert and his social housing neighbours in Surry Hills, Sydney before the Community Greening Program. Since 2000, the outreach horticulture program has established 765 community and youth-led gardens - transforming the lives of almost 160,000 people like Norbert across NSW. In the lead up to R U OK Day, explore how this popular program is changing the health and wellbeing of communities one garden at a time.
This year at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show there's a real feeling of coming together and growing communities alongside delicious, healthy food. We meet the people behind these transformational gardens that promise to be a treat for the mind, body and soul. For more info and useful links see www.rhs.org.uk/podcast
Talks at RhemaRad.io #60 " Building Homes & Growing Communities " - John-Son Oei (EPIC Collective) Description: John-Son shares candidly the events that sparked this initiative, their very first toilet project, the public response that shaped his world-view and overcoming the challenges that came his way. Song: Unabashed - This Is Not A Drill
Dr. Mark Kuykendall continues the series "A Better Way" with the sermon titled "Growing Communities"
Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast How do we make permaculture education more affordable? This is a common question in our community, and today I sit down and speak Jessa Fowler, the Education Director at Allegheny Mountain Institute, about a way AMI creates opportunities through a stipend-supported fellowship program. This 18 month course is a hands-on intensive focused on farming, communities, and permaculture. This program stood out for me, and I asked Jessa for this short interview, because the subjects covered are the trifecta of my interests: growing food, taking care of the people around us, and doing so in the framework of permaculture. Many institutes offer farming apprenticeships or community development training or permaculture design certificates, but this fellowship contains all three. The only other similar program I know of operates in California, whereas AMI's location in Virginia is accessible to a wide range of participants along the Eastern seaboard. Making the fellowship viable for even more folks is that Phase I fellows receive a stipend of $1,000 upon completion, and Phase 2 participants receive $1,5000 per month, removing the financial burden of taking the time to live and learn deeply, embedded in community. If you or someone you know are interested in this opportunity you can read more in the: AMI Fellowship Outline (PDF) If you are already ready, get your application in soon, as they are due by February 19, 2017. Apply at: Allegheny Mountain Institute Still looking for more information? Contact Jessa: jessa (at) alleghenymountainschool.org -- Visit our sponsor: Earth Tools Contact the Podcast Call: Email: The Permaculture Podcast Write: The Permaculture Podcast The Permaculture Podcast
In this episode, Leah Silber, CEO of Tilde, Inc. and Ember.js core team member talks about what she's learned building communities, organizing events, and running a business. We talk about how people can move from "observer" to "participant" and grow their own healthy communities and companies. Links: Leah Silber: EmberConf 2016: The Morning-After Post-Mortem Event Driven: How to Run Memorable Tech Conferences Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to the Frontside Podcast, Episode 43. I am Charles Lowell. I'm here with Brandon Hays, and a very, very special guest. Brandon, do you want to introduce her? BRANDON: Yeah, we're here with Leah Silber. She runs Tilde? 'Tild'? I always say this incorrectly. LEAH: You can't be saying it incorrectly. When we named the company, we knew we were choosing one of those names where people are going to say it and you just have to accept it. That's fate and that's how it goes. We usually say 'til-de' here. BRANDON: Okay, I'll say Tilde, and you can say 'Frontsi-de'. CHARLES: The way you say Tilde says more about you, than it does about us. BRANDON: Yeah, it's a verbal Rorschach test. We were really, really glad to have your time. We know that people actually work with you as a consultant for these kinds of things to help with communities, conferences, build their businesses. So, you have a lot of gathered expertise around these things. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background, what you do and kind of how you got involved in tech and running businesses? LEAH: Sure, not unlike an elevator pitch but I have been working in open source startups and companies, I want to say it's probably been like 10 years now or crazy something like that. But my first open source project that I was seriously involved in was jQuery, and that was a long time ago and it was pretty magical in retrospect because jQuery was, at the time, it was like coming out of nowhere. Nobody thought it was going to really make a dent in technology. John Resig was this clearly brilliant but still this nobody, sort of working on this project in his spare time, and Yehuda Katz jumped in and a bunch of other people earlier at the beginning. It was a time in the ecosystem where they were a little bit laughed at the room. In retrospect, there was a time when the ecosystem was a little more rude, like some of the competitive behaviors that happened back then. Thankfully, it just wouldn't fly right now. But it's been super cool to be involved with something and be able to witness something at the ground floor where this little idea and project that nobody takes seriously because there are these seemingly massive projects and landscape, and then just sort of watch it take over the world. It was a process obviously that took a little while. But again, in retrospect, it didn't take all that long, so that was really an amazing experience to watch. It was also my first really intense open source community learning experience. Everything from witnessing what kind of personalities got involved and how they did it, to watching John who sort of -- I want to say he's a consummate politician, but he's not a political person. I guess what I mean, he's just really good at people. CHARLES: He's like a diplomat? LEAH: He is. But like the sort of diplomat where you're in a battle and then suddenly a treaty happens and you just don't even know what happened but everybody's happy and you vaguely remember that you all hated each other a few minutes ago. He's really talented. Obviously, also having the technical chops to build something impressive helps with that. But watching how different personalities in open source interacted with each other, and even just for myself, like learning how to be a good open source citizen and learning how to contribute to a project and finding a way as a non-coder at the time to be useful in an open source project was really amazing. That was something I was involved with for a number of years. Then, slowly as time went on, I got involved in other projects and other events. And along the way, I was like, "This is really fun. Why am I working not in technology but doing this at night." Well pretty early on, I moved out from New York to California which is, I guess, the rite of passage or at least was. Got a job at my first startup, spent a couple years there, sort of again learning everything in fast forward because that's how startups work. I've done that a couple of different times over the years, thankfully not that many. I've managed to have what I consider impressive stability in a startup land where people can end up needing to change jobs, projects and positions very rapidly. Nowadays, I mostly focus on Ember work. There was a big chunk of time in the middle where I was focused on Ruby on Rails work. I do events, conferences, meet up groups, community management. A lot of the less glamorous stuff involved in once a project does become more successful, like figuring out a governance strategy, and figuring out how you protect your brand and what happens when lawyers and PR people and all these other different industry people start coming at you with all these questions that you hadn't thought about. How much infrastructure is too much infrastructure? What happens when the project starts having money? All these sorts of things. I feel like I've lived through a bunch of projects and their growing pains, and have a really solid understanding of the different routes. I'm still learning every day, and that's kind of why I love it. I started with my co-founders, I started my own company about five years ago which I'm always pleased and astonished to still be existing. Obviously, I watched companies spin up and die down overnight in the fast-paced technology sector. So, I'm a fan of stability and continuing to exist, is basically the top of my list. But that was about five years ago now, and it's been really great. I would never previously have identified myself as an entrepreneur. I had this, I want to say now, misconception that I was a support person, that I was the perfect second-in-command that I needed somebody at the top of the food chain who had these brilliant ideas and then I would be the person who would come in and say, "Great idea. Let me make it happen for you," and like operations and execution. At some point, I realized that that's not real. There's no reason that the person who has ideas has to be more in-charge than the person who makes ideas happened, like these two skill sets, if they're not in the same person are equally necessary. I think that was probably a little bit of standard sort of impostor syndrome kind of stuff. And also, there's a lot of pressure involved in thinking about yourself as in-charge of something important with high stakes. But I don't know. At some point, I think I watched enough people do the job and I served as that second-in-command or upper management kind of role for a lot of people. I realized that primarily, the difference between the people who were running the show as figureheads and the people who were actually running the show day to day, the difference primarily was just boldness. Like one of them had the audacity to say, "I can be in charge. I'm going to start a company. I'm going to do this." And that's not actually that big of delta so 'fake it until you make it'. BRANDON: I kind of want to lock in on that concept a little bit. I don't want to let that just float by on the river. That is something that has been such a profound lesson in my life over the last six months or a year that I think, a lot of us that wind up running companies kind of fall into that by accident or happenstance or something. You always have this weird left over hope from times where you work for other people, that somebody will step in and be in charge. It's a deal where everybody stands on the line and like, "Okay, whoever wants to step forward, step forward, and everybody steps back but you." And that feeling of being the last person standing when everybody else has backed, just by nature of not stepping back, you realized, "Oh, you know what --” Like there is such a thing as an operationally oriented CEO. So it really is the idea that you just said, it really is a matter of boldness and being willing to be the person, where the buck stops, is really the only difference between a person that feels like a really great second-in-command versus the person that feels like they could be running things. LEAH: There's just this magical myth of the big important idea person. Anything that's going to be successful or most things are going to be successful I guess, they're rarely just one person sitting on a mountain. One person starts with a shred of an idea, and then everybody around them sort of helps turn it into something real. So it could really be anybody who has that first instinct that it doesn't mean that that person has to be in-charge. CHARLES: I'm wondering, if there's any parallels there between, "Have you borrowed any of that boldness through community?" Or has there been any bouncing back and forth about lesson in terms of somebody has to take the lead on something. LEAH: Actually, it's harder a little bit in community stuff because taking a lead typically means or we think it typically means making a decision. I think that's where in open source, a lot of people go wrong, and a lot of open source projects end up with a top down management strategy where somebody is in-charge and that person tells them what's going to happen and then everybody, for example, freaks out about backwards compatibility. Then they're like, "Oh, yeah. I got a plan for this." But part of that is like you see a power vacuum and you think like, "Okay, I can step up and take this." But in open source, that's not really the ideal way or at least not in the philosophy of most of the projects that I've been in which is you only need to ask people what they think along the way, differently than in a professional environment. Like in Ember, we have the RFP process where we source a feedback before we make massive changes. That just makes everything, like you can even really say, "This is the exact thing I want to do," and you can lay out a really great plan and take that leadership role. But in a framework where it's not an edict, in a framework where it's like, "Okay, now everybody else, what do you think about it? How can you improve my idea?" And there's a whole bunch of things that happen. The first and most obvious is your idea gets better because people point out things that you didn't think of or don't necessarily personally have the experience or have noticed. But also, people just feel consulted in a way that is more critical. I like to think people want to feel consulted in work environments also. But I guess when you're the boss, you can get away with just saying, "This is the policy. I made the policy." In open source, people won't really let that fly. You can't just say, "This is a feature set. I've made this. That's the rule." Certainly not if you want them to use your project and contribute to your project and help you be successful. There are some similar things to think about when running a company versus running an open source project. But essentially, the project has to be a significantly more collaborative environment that makes people feel invested in the project and want to stick around and want to become other contributors so that the project can grow, succeed, and have a lot of people involved rather than just one-idea person. BRANDON: I was listening to a podcast recently that I can't remember which one it was but the people were talking about a different tech community and their definition of community really surprised me and it made me realize that people have different definitions for what a community is. LEAH: Wildly. BRANDON: Yeah, and so I'm curious about what your definition, in terms of an open source community, what it is and what it's job is for that open source project? LEAH: I don't have a dictionary definition and in a lot of cases, it's kind of a feel. Like I like to talk about sometimes how the different communities I've been involved with had a different feel. In an indirect fashion, a lot of what your community is comes from the people who are theoretically in charge, be that your core team, or your benevolent dictator, or whoever sort of the thought leader. That person or people really influence the kind of community that you create with their behavior. For example, the kind of community where the person in charge just tells you what the project is going to do next and does it, has a very different feel where the person in charge says, "Here are my thoughts. What do you guys think about it? How do you want us to do this? Do you have suggestions? Did I miss anything?" I think if there's enough premeditation and consideration that goes into the decisions that that person makes, that he or she can really shape a positive community, a collaborative community, and a supportive community. In Ember, we have managed to collect a group of amazing people who want to help each other, want to support each other, and who are enthusiastic about what's happening, and on most good days who don't freak out when they get a little worried that something isn't happening the way they want it to because they can trust that they're going to have a period of input and their needs are going to at least be considered. You don't always get the exact thing that you want. But it's a lot better if you know that your concerns were heard, evaluated, and maybe there's some other plan or way to sort of not completely screw you, basically. Ember's been really good at taking care of people and their needs even as the user base is more needy in different changing ways. I guess a community is a living breathing thing. For sure, it changes. I'm oftentimes sort of paying attention to the undercurrent of what happened, what's going to be the outcome of this? Having chats with people, especially people in theoretical leadership roles, about different ways to handle different situations that will keep as many people as possible, happy and supported. BRANDON: As you were describing that, to me, it feels like you've highlighted something interesting about communities, which is, you can use a theme and not be a part of its community. Somebody could use Ember and not choose to be a part of the Ember community. But participating in a community is kind of the desire to influence that thing in some way. Like, when you say they want to have their needs represented and they want to be a part of the RFC process, there is some part of it where I guess a lot of it has to do with just any kind of connection with other people who do the same thing or probably do the textbook one. But I also feel for a lot of people, there's a desire to be able to have their needs represented and met and feel like they are somehow a part of the direction of this thing, as well. LEAH: Yeah. It totally varies based on your personality. Some people just want to feel like they are a part of it. Even if they feel like their interests are well represented, you see people all the time looking for small ways to contribute because it's fun. It's exciting. There's progress happening, there's success, it's something that isn't like a lot of other opportunities that you have especially if you've been in some other industry, or some other kind of job. You don't always have this thing where you can sort of be part of an organism and a community and watch something evolve and maybe even have input in it, or just have 40 friends around the world who want to chat with you about it at any given time. It's fun. BRANDON: A question that I have in terms of following up on that is your role on the Ember side of things, I'm assuming and I want you to clarify if I'm not hitting it properly. My understanding of your role in the Ember ecosystem, in addition to handling a lot of the unglamorous logistical components is to help kind of grow and foster that style of community and Ember's become pretty well-known for having a unique focus on quality of community. I'm wondering if that's intentional or if there are things that you do or if it's sort of been luck. I don't know how much intentionality has gone into that or how much the community design has gone into that. LEAH: For sure, it's mixed. There's a lot of things where select events are really good example of setting the tone. And there's like an evolution of events that I like to follow in some of my newer growing communities that I'm focusing on where you start out with a little more of a campy feel, it's a little scrappy. And slowly, you iterate to get into a much more professional feel. But all along the way at those stages, having that event, the logistically top quality really sort of changes the tone of everything. If you show up to an event and it sort of haphazard and no one knows what's happening, you might all love each other and you probably will have a good time. But it's a different experience than one where it's sort of run like a well-oiled machine where you get a sense of people take this seriously. This is real. This is impressive. We're building big, amazing things together. We can accomplish together. So some of it is just on all the little things. Event is just one sort of example. But all the little things that go into the well-rounded ecosystem, I try and focus on quality so that obviously, there's a whole bunch of people focusing on the quality of the code. But I also want to focus on the quality of the events and the website and helping meet ups run quality events around the world and helping people show off that they use Ember and are proud. Any sort of these peripheral things -- the better you execute them, the more of an overall, "Wow! This is real. This is serious. I can stake my professional future on this." The more of that kind of a feeling that you're going to get. Community growth is organic in a lot of ways, obviously. But there are certainly things that you can do along the way to help foster the community growth. There's like personality things like making sure everyone's actually welcoming, and that people want to come and get to know you and work with you and get involved in your technology. There's things like the tactical processes of our RFC. Making sure there are ways for people technically to get involved. There's things like a focus on documentation, which again just makes it easy. So, it's really an overall quality thing every step along the way, and a lot of community overlook the parts of building community that aren't code. You can do that but you end up on a different trajectory than a project where you pay attention to all the peripheral things. CHARLES: So, I'm actually curious because I've witnessed the things that you've done like on a grand scale which definitely have had that air of quality that you're talking about. But I'm curious about these kind of nascent communities that you're talking about and kind of just, one, just curious about what they are because I'm curious. Then the second is, for people who might be speaking of doing something similarly, like starting something small that they want to grow into something huge, but actually that concrete, small scope. What are the things you can do with limited resources, if you have limited resources and you've got a small scope, what can you do to imbue it with that sense of quality that will carry you to higher places? LEAH: I guess the first thing to think about, and I hope this does not sound bad, but is whether or not your project actually needs a community. By that I mean I certainly think open source projects should all be actual open source projects. So you should accept pull requests, you should let people file issues, you should have collaborators, etcetera. But there have been a lot of projects along the way that I've been involved with helping with where we looked at it and said this doesn't need to be a community. This doesn't need to have a conference every year, or it'll have some sort of community right just amongst people who contribute but it doesn't need to be like Ember, like Rails. We're a whole giant ecosystem that spins up. For example, over the years, there have been projects like Handlebars, Bandler, and Thor. These are projects that tremendous numbers of people use. You don't run into anyone who says like, "I'm a member of the Thor community." And that's perfectly fine, right? There's sort of a version of a project where you have an MVP, you have a good website, you have good docs, you have a bunch of contributors, and that's all you really need. Then there's the version where you want it to be a much bigger, more involved setup. So one community that, I would say, in a nascent stage right now is the Rust community, which I've been peripherally involved with. I'm not on the team. I'm not doing significant community masterminding but I have been working with some people in the project to do agree with me on the value of this quality. And so, I've helped them. We just ran Rust Conf this last weekend which was their first conference. It was 250 people in Portland. It was really, really fantastic. I've worked with them on, for example, making quality swag over the years and trying to figure out what level of control over their brand. It's not too much but still protects the brand enough, things like that. They've also modeled some of their governance kind of stuff after the Ember community which makes sense. Yehuda is involved in both projects and he's a big proponent of a lot of that stuff. But it's been really cool to watch. Like first Rust was saying, "Oh, this how Ember does it. Let's crib some of that stuff." Now, in a lot of cases, Ember is saying, "Oh, wow! Look how Rust is doing that. Let's take that back." It's been a very good symbiotic back and forth relationship. But it really just does take the people who are leading intellectually to decide that they care about quality, to decide that they care about a collaborative community environment, to decide that they care about diversity, to decide that they care about all of these little things along the way. The earlier people recognize that these are things you need to care about, the better job that you can do. You can always sort of ride the ship most of the time. But if you start out on the right path to begin with, you're going to be able to accomplish so much more because you don't have that much course correcting to do. There is obviously, also always course correcting in Ember, in Rust, in Rails, everywhere, where somebody not speaking about code but somebody takes a misstep and the whole community sort of has to figure out like, "Okay, this is not the way we want. This is the kind of interaction to go. How are we going to fix this?" Or, "This is not the way we want. There's kind of major technical decisions to be made. How are we going to fix this?" It's an evolution. It's a collaboration. I'm absolutely a fan of the core team entity and of that core team being a medium sized group. Not tiny but a medium sized group of people who bring really, really different things to the table in terms of who they are, their backgrounds and their skills. For example, this serves me well but I am a fan of core teams that have non-coders on the core team. There's a lot of stuff that can get done for a project that doesn't involve writing a line of code. Now, obviously you want to have somebody around who understands open source and the strategy. It is in fact challenging to find people who don't have to be coders but also appreciate all this other stuff and want to be involved in it. But when you can find people like that, that's the really magical key to this more well-rounded community. I like to say, engineers are basically superheroes. They can sort of think of something and then create it and that is the power that most other kinds of people don't have. I mean, maybe contractors and welders, but if you are working at a desk job somewhere, there's not really much that you can conceive of where you have an idea, you write it down, you spend a couple months then it exists, it works, it actively changes your life. One of the downsides of that amazing superpower is that engineers can oftentimes get into a position where they think anything is possible and they don't recognize that just because they can figure out how to do something doesn't necessarily mean that they are the best people to do that thing. That comes into play a lot with these other qualitative things in an ecosystem. So, you can go to a lot of technical conferences and wonder, sort of, why is the quality not quite there? In a lot of cases, the answer is because the person in charge is not particularly skilled in this area. They are coder. They can write brilliant code but do they know how to think about where the lunch line is going to queue up and make sure that it's going to go through the phase, and that there's enough bathrooms and stuff like that. These are very vastly different skill sets. One of the past successes there is to sort of realize, "Yes, I can probably pull this off." But if I can find somebody for whom this is a natural area of expertise and I can focus on my area of expertise. Like, wow. We'll be able to accomplish so much more and everything will be better all around. BRANDON: I think you've hit on something there again that I've seen since moving into technology from -- I come from a non-technology background and there is a sense outside of this industry that people kind of have different areas of expertise. When you are an engineer, your job -- I actually think a lot of it stems from the fact that your job is to become an expert in the field of other people's jobs. So, your job is to automate something so you have to know enough about marketing to do marketing software. Then you have to know about enough about this other thing to do this other thing. So you think that you can learn anything and it's true that you can learn anything but there's a skill tree associated with each of those things. You don't realize, you're a junior level conference organizer, and maybe it might be worth talking to a senior level conference organizer. We've definitely fallen victim to that many times where we thought, "Oh, you know what? I'm pretty good at the technology side. I can give a conference talk. I must be probably pretty good at education." And it turns out that education is a multi-thousand year old skill tree that is pretty well-defined. LEAH: One of the hard parts in thinking about this for me is, I really like the MVP concept that I have taken from technology, which is you don't have to get it right. Get something out there. Figure out what the bare minimum version of whatever it is you're trying to accomplish is. Ship it, iterate. I like that and I talk about a lot of things in my life in that frame which is kind of weird when I talk to my parents about iterating on things and what not. For example, in a decision about child rearing. "Oh, my God. The first one is this way." It's a very useful way of thinking about things and I am a fan in many things of actually applying it to areas all over your life. But for something like how to run a small conference, you oftentimes don't need an MVP. You don't need to go through the stage of that level of quality because you can just work with somebody who's already learned all those lessons and already done those things. It's not like a greenfield code project where somebody has to actually start from the baseline every time it's a new project and build up all the infrastructure. You can just skip right to the front of the line. Find someone who's good at this and start out initially at a much higher level of quality. BRANDON: I want to kind of dig into that a little bit and ask about you wrote a really great blog post earlier this year about your experiences running Ember Conf. It's so obvious the amount of effort and kind of thought, not just effort, but like directed effort and thought that goes into building a really great experience for people. I'm wondering if you have like certain areas that you look for and noticing whether somebody has really put a lot of thought into designing a good conference experience for somebody. If somebody were hoping to do something like that, what are some of the areas that tell you that you're dealing with like a really good, thoughtfully designed conference? Or where does that effort go basically when you run through the process? You only have so much time and effort you can put into this thing to create that experience, not the minimum viable conference, but the conference when you look at the division of your time and doing conference stuff. I think people wind up being surprised how much goes toward one thing or another. LEAH: I'm not entirely sure how to answer that question because you don't usually get insights into what people are doing along the way. I go to fewer conferences these days because I find myself irritated. I don't even like the way it sounds but it's kind of true, where I go to a conference and I'm really trying to focus on the content and I'm really trying to focus on the goodwill of the people who are organizing it. Oftentimes, it's just so many moments where I'm like, "That should be better quality." Like it is very easy to get that right. You just need to have thought about that. You just need to plan for that. I don't think there's many opportunities to sort of figure out those things ahead of time from somebody else to make an assessment of how a show is going to go. I can say that there are sometimes things that I see on just the websites where I'm like, "Oh, that is not a good sign." There are tools around for most of the things that you would want to do like selling your tickets and collecting information, and the online pre- event functionality. It's rarely a good sign when you see someone build their own. It's sort of another engineer foible kind of thing. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. It takes substantial energy to reinvent the wheel. If you go with something that already exists, you can focus for example, on all this other quality stuff. But there's also sort of the way in which people build the content of their conference, like that's super telling. Maybe not even so much about logistics but it is pretty telling about the community or at least the people running a show as a representation of the community. For example, I think it's pretty much conventional wisdom these days that you want to have blind call for papers. It's not reasonable to me when I see someone not do it that way. I understand that small events maybe just go invitation in the first year or two. I think that's actually a pretty justifiable thing. We don't have the critical mass yet to get enough submissions in for a program, or we're not really sure how to execute on that, and our community has these specific people who we know are really talented and will do a good job. I think you end up with usually a subpar roster that way because you don't have the variety of experience that you'd be able to attract in a call for papers. But what's super weird to me is, yes, we're going to do a call for papers but we're not going to go the classic extras steps that open source and technology as a whole has learned that will really help this task go better and help eliminate latent biases and things like that. That's kind of weird. I still see it sometimes. I find myself confused by it. I suspect more than anything that people just haven't thought of it or don't know how to execute on the strategy that a lot of other conferences has figured out a successful. I don't know, part of the reason I don't like to go to conferences so much is I remember when I was making all these mistakes, and I don't want to be that person who's really critical of someone who's trying to do something good but it's hard. Once you have that experience and once you sort of know better, it's hard to watch somebody else stumble over the same things you stumbled over. You feel like, "You should know that. I know that." CHARLES: So, is there a community of conference organizers? It seems like they need to be some sort of meta conference or some sort of meta community of community organizers. BRANDON: There is Conf Conf. CHARLES: Are you serious? LEAH: I might not be impressive enough to go to something called Conf Conf. I don't know. A lot of those things actually when you get to, "Oh, it's industry, upper-tier collaborator events." They're often times invitation kind of things and I'm not very cool. I don't know. I see things like that sometimes. There's this conference about speakers. It's like speakers conf – CHARLES: Oh, speakers conf, yeah, and it's like in Aruba. LEAH: It seems cool but I'm always like, "How do you get invited to that?" CHARLES: Yeah, that's the part -- BRANDON: How do you get into that club? LEAH: I know people who should be there and don't know it exists, or people who should be there but just - I don't know, no one has invited them, and it's invitational. It's hard to say. But I guess what I was going to say is over the years, I have at times belonged to different online forums that were trying to scratch that itch. The most successful one was probably for a good five, six years. There was a very active community of conference organizers in the Ruby space. But I think most of those people have either stopped doing conferences or gotten to a place where they just don't need that much help anymore, and there hasn't been like an influx of new people doing it. So there isn't really any strong community like that that I belong to today. That's a challenge in anything you face, where once you don't need the help anymore, people don't stick around to help the other people and it's hard to sort of organize that way. BRANDON: That sounds like a big opportunity to me. But it sounds like an opening or a hole for providing something like that. Do you do any consulting for people on this? Do people hire you to help design a conference experience? Because I know that the ones you've put together -- you're pretty well-known for being one of the best in the business for this. LEAH: Thank you, I think. No pressure at all. I do consulting, though obviously, that's mostly for companies and not communities because communities don't typically have money for that sort of thing. In communities, you need to create your own experts, and in an ideal world, there are people who recognize that when they're at the beginning of the learning curve, they should reach out to people who are further along and benefit from their experience and do things like read blog post and books and what not. The blog post that you mentioned earlier, it was absurdly long. I was surprised that anybody read it and then a lot of people read it. I was surprised because of the length but I was also surprised in the way that it's difficult to come up with a conference talk where you're sort of like, "I know all this stuff," but I don't know what amongst this knowledge base is interesting to other people, and I don't know what other people don't know and I know the stuff so obviously, it's not impressive. But I sort of forced myself to write it anyway because it was just such a big endeavor and there were thoughts even for myself that I wanted to preserve for later. Then I was pleasantly surprised by how many people read it and had comments and had useful things to say, or even just like, "I appreciate how much thought went into XYZ. I wouldn't have thought that. It was value that came out of that blog post that I didn't think of at the beginning. The value of other people getting a chance to recognize what kind of thought and planning needs to go into having something like that execute flawlessly, or dealing with things when they don't execute flawlessly. BRANDON: One thing that that was an obvious expenditure of effort, because you started so early in the process, many months before the conference was the Women Helping Women Initiative. I saw that really early on. I actually don't think that was precedented in conference organizing. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I don't remember how far in advance it was, I just remember thinking it was absurdly far in advance and very well thought out and very well designed. LEAH: Well, it was early. For example, I actually have to email the Women Helping Women group today with a long list of thoughts and activities for next year. I feel like I'm super behind because it's September 15th and the conference is at the end of March. Last year, I think we were already talking basically like 2, 3 weeks after the previous year's conference had ended. So basically, I looked at the conference in 2015 and it was great. I was really happy with most areas of it but I was not happy with the representation of women. There's so many groups that in fact, the conference would benefit from that representation of, but women was obviously a target that I thought I could potentially bring something to the table on being a woman in technology and in Ember. I spent some time thinking about all the various women in tech efforts. I have been involved over the years in a lot of things that felt good and said good things but at the end of the day didn't seem to accomplish very much. Right from the beginning, I wanted it to be a tactical effort. I wanted it to be like a short term pipeline of, "We put this in one end and we get this out the other end, and we have accomplished XYZ." Because it's important to have lots of organizations that make people who are under-represented in any community feel good and feel welcome. But it's also just as important and a little bit less prominent, in most cases, to have those same people then become leaders in that community. That' sreally sort of a signal to everybody else that they're welcome and that they can accomplish things. I looked at our community and I thought there are already, actually, really awesome women here. Not as many as I'd like. But I know a lot of women who are impressive and who are like, "Why aren't they on stage?" So, I sort of approached the effort last year from the perspective of there's a lot of organizations out there working on the women in technology pipeline problem, and it's a very real problem. Hopefully, they're going to do a solid job. There's a lot of insights and I'm watching and it's cool. But I want to focus on the problem of -- let's not call it a problem -- but I want to focus on the situation of the people who are already here and helping them take those leadership roles and step up and really join the community at every level. Not just at the entry level. We've come in through the fix the pipeline problem setup. CHARLES: And then hope everything kind of magically works itself out from there. LEAH: Yeah, which shockingly, it doesn't. I don't know... We spent many, many months basically supporting people at every step along the way from, "I want to go to this conference," to, "I'm a speaker at this conference." And we did things like brainstorming about what kind of proposals people could submit. We helped each other once we had a critical mass of a bunch of talented women. We helped each other with our proposals. We helped each other with our ideas. I organized podcasts where the program committee did question and answer sessions with the women. We did some hangouts where women who had more experience than the rest of us came and talked about their first time speaking or their experience getting to know a community or their experience learning to code and we encourage each other in a lot of ways. It's just a really positively pushy support group. We encourage each other. It's funny because it was hard along the way sometimes because you don't want to be too pushy. I was always worried and sort of dancing on that line of, "I want to repeat to you, you can clearly do this. You have said things. You have accomplished things, look at your education, look at your career. You are obviously, obviously good enough and impressive enough to be on the stage and I want to keep reminding you of that so you do it. But I also don't want you to feel like you are being bullied into it." Not everybody wants to be a leader. Not everybody wants to be in a role of getting up on stage and giving a talk. I had a couple of the participants come talk to me or email me after the program saying, "That was really helpful. That was the nudge that I needed." So that made me feel good about the various interactions along the way and it's always just going to be something that you have to do in a very sensitive manner. But there are women that I knew that were here that were talented and then so many women that just came out of the woodwork where I was sort of like, "I know your name or I didn't know you at all," and like, "Why don't I know your name? You're incredible. You're better than half the people I see on stage at a conference." And so we worked on this for months and months and months. I got a bunch of women in the community who were in sort of transitional leadership roles which is I thought, "Hey, you're a community leader," but they weren't sure they were a community leader yet. I got a lot of people like that involved to help nudge along all the other people who could potentially be our next batch of community leaders. I don't know... It was really amazing and you have to pad the numbers every step along the way and at the end of the day, you actually want a conference with impressive representation of anyone. So you have to get significantly more than you need into the pipeline thinking about it, and then significantly more than you need actually submitting and then hopefully at the end of the tunnel when everything shakes out, you'll get a reasonable number of people right. Because obviously things get filtered out and at every step of the way. There's a lot of other people that you're competing with. Overall, the quality of the proposals from the women was astonishing. It was a blind call for papers process in terms of the program committee. But as the administrator, who doesn't get a vote in these things, I was managing the app that handle the voting during the process of picking our speaker and all that kind of stuff. I was just astonished by watching quietly in the background how all these ratings came in and nobody knew they were doing this but the proposals from the women were on average, like dramatically better than everybody else. I'm not like saying, "Oh, yay! We're better." I'm sure a lot of that had to do with the amount of thought that went into it because even a seasoned conference submitter who spoke in a lot of conferences might get to a point where they're sort of cranking out a proposal in a week or even a month, and a lot of these women spent six months thinking about it. But all that hard work showed in the proposals, all that hard work showed in the roster, and I really want that hard work to show around the community. Part of what I'm trying to focus on this year is how do we take that from being the EmberConf Women Helping Women program to being the general Ember Women Helping Women program. Because after EmberConf, I felt like I could really help other conferences change their way that their rosters grew. Specifically before that EmberConf, you did have a lot of well-meaning organizer saying, "I want more women represented at my conference but I can't find them." Now, I think there's certainly ways to do it and there's a lot of clever ways to meet people and encourage people. But when push comes to shove, and it's in that moment, you would just run into a lot of organizer saying, "Well, I don't know what to do. It's an open process. Anyone can submit." And now, they could look at our conference and see there's a dozen women who are clearly talented and capable. I'm going to go to all 12 of those people and ask them to submit to my conference. Maybe some of them will and maybe that will help. It's a small step but I started seeing the women who spoke at EmberConf who a lot of them hadn't spoken anywhere beforehand, pop up at conferences all over the place. So, I sort of felt like the effect was magnified and we were able to really... I don't want to say like we, all of us women together, were able to help each other not just at Ember Conf but in a larger way. We're focusing a lot on that this year or I should say, we're going to start on how can we expand the program to be a resource that helps women take leadership roles and speaking opportunities across the JavaScript ecosystem so that Ember is really truly well represented by the people who actually make up the community. BRANDON: I think it's super clear that the thought process that you put into this was well designed enough and the work that went into it was consistent enough that you both got a huge uptick in the number of women represented at the conference. But also actually overall, the quality of conference talks went up year every year as a result of all of that additional preparation. And the encouraging people from backgrounds that had something to say that maybe felt like they didn't have something to say, instead of seeing the same faces over and over again, they went all the way across the board and it ended up showing and being a better quality conference experience for attendees for that. LEAH: It turns out the diversity is actually awesome. It's not just the thing that you should talk about and put on a list because it's politically correct. But in fact, things will be better if there are more people represented from different backgrounds with different experiences, different skills, different everything. You felt it everywhere you went and felt like you were hearing new things, interesting things, and perspectives that maybe weren't always as well represented. My biggest sad point about things is I'm trying to tackle the community of women but there are so many other communities that could also be better represented in Ember and in technology at large. And I would really love for more people to step up and sort of focus. It's hard to get involved in an effort like this because it's hard to get any traction and also because honestly, there's a lot of concern about, "Am I going to do it right? Am I going to make the problem worse?" All those sorts of self-doubt issues that are legit and based on having seen other people out in the world make a good faith effort trying to fix a problem but like say something wrong and get in huge trouble. It's just challenging and it requires a lot of thought. Even me, as I talk about this right now, I'm stressed out and I'm like, "Am I using the right words? Am I going to say the wrong thing?" But it's still worth doing. And if you're persistent and you work hard, you can really, really change things and have a positive impact. BRANDON: Well, I think it sets forward a lot of good patterns for other people trying to do this thing and I think when you talk about this being scary, the point is that it's not going to be scary. It's very scary so it makes it super brave that you're attempting that stuff. I think the impact is certainly on me. I found that pretty inspiring. Certainly at the Frontside, we found it inspiring. I hope it inspires other people in other communities to follow the same patterns. LEAH: Yeah, I hope so. I mean if there are women or anybody else that feels like they have something to contribute to really improving the landscape of who our leadership is and making sure each they are represented, I guess I would encourage those people to step up. It's the same thing as being a CEO or being the second-in-command. You just need to have the boldness to decide that you're going to try and make a difference. In the Women Helping Women program specifically, I've been talking to a lot of the women that I met last year about how can you take more of a leadership role in the program? For example, I was talking a week ago to somebody who's a student in the Women Helping Women program and I was like, "I can't represent your concerns as well as you can." I was in college at some point but that was a very long time ago, and there are just perspectives that you're going to have that I'm not going to have. Even within the women's group, there's like different perspectives and I've been working with people and encouraging them to try and work with me on taking leadership roles within the program itself. So many well-meaning programs like this, by the way, like spin up, have some success and then go away because the person-in-charge got busy and that's the end of that. It's similar to a community in that if it's going to be a long term successful effort, or at least as long term as it's necessary, I'm really going to need other people in the community to step up and find ways to be involved so that I'm not actually important to the success of this anymore. Instead, it's a whole group of people and there's no one single point of failure. BRANDON: When that happens, I can't wait to read that particular blog post. When you're able to kind of demonstrate the process for other people to be able to follow and, "Hey, look at this thing. It kind of runs itself now." That sounds really awesome and you're definitely -- LEAH: Fingers crossed. BRANDON: Yeah, you're kind of off road because you're helping to find some of the things that may influence other communities, as well. So, I think that's super cool. LEAH: I hope so. BRANDON: All right. We need to get let you get back to CEO-ing. You have a company to run and you have a whole life and everything. LEAH: I'm going to put on my business jacket as soon as I hang up on you and get back to work. BRANDON: You're in Portland. It would be a like a business hoodie probably, right? LEAH: Sort of. I have this really nice blazer. It literally changes my mind some days. I'm like, "Oh, I'm not getting enough done." I'm going to put out my business blazer. Then, they shift into over drive. BRANDON: All right. We'll get your business blazer and get to business-ing. That actually sounds like a cool little business life hack. LEAH: Yeah. BRANDON: Well, thank you so much for your time on this stuff. We got about halfway through the questions I want to talk to you about so I hope we get a shot at doing this again. I really love learning from you on this stuff. I've learned a ton from your writing. I've learned a ton from watching you work and I really appreciate all you do for the Ember community, the JavaScript community, all the stuff you've done for the Ruby community. You've had a really big impact, and so it's really great to talk to somebody that kind of sets a pattern of how these things are possible. I hope that good fortune continues to follow you as you're bold in doing these things. So, thank you for all the stuff that you do. LEAH: Thank you. I hope so, as well. It's been fun. CHARLES: Thank you. All right, goodbye everybody. BRANDON: So, bye everybody. If you have any questions or anybody else that you'd like us to talk to, let us know. If you have any additional questions for Leah, hit us up on Twitter at the Frontside. CHARLES: We usually ask for people's contact information. Where can youl be found on Twitter? LEAH: I do have a Twitter account. I'm not super active because I'm busy wearing my business blazer. But my handle is @Wifelette and I try to be as responsive as I can certainly to people who reach out to me, even if I'm not broadcasting all that much. BRANDON: Awesome. Okay, well thank you again Leah, and thanks Charles. I hope everybody listening has an awesome week.
Lecture 6: Gregory Tarver, Jr., Director of Urban Forest Education, Urban Releaf. Recorded 10/30/15.
Julie Brown is Director of Growing Communities in Hackney. Here she talks to Rob Hopkins of Transition Network about food, fairness and the experience of Growing Communities.
First Nation of Onion Lake seizes business opportunities thanks to significant settlement claim
Peerless Trout First Nation gets a fresh start
Sheila Dillon meets finalists in the BBC Food & Farming Awards offering ideas for our food future, from making more local food available online to redistributing spare food. Joining Sheila to explore these ideas are Kath Dalmeny, research director of Sustain, and Christine Tacon, former CEO of the Coop's farms.Under discussion are Growing Communities in East London, Riverford Organics in Devon, Cornish Food Market, The Real Bread Campaign, and Fareshare.Producer: Toby Field.
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