Podcast appearances and mentions of katie what

Hiring Business Lawyers With Katie Richards Have you ever put yourself in a position where you're thinking, should I do that? Should I not do that? It might not even be something that you've done legally wrong; it might just be a situation where you're having a separation or whatnot, but a lot of the time, you can find yourself in hot water if you have the right relationship set up. Today, we've got Katie Richards from Law on Earth, and she's going to be talking to us about why and when you should hire a business lawyer. What is the right time in business to do that? When should you set up these relationships? She'll shed some light and remove some fear from everything legal in business. Learn more about hiring a business lawyer at dorksdelivered.com.au Does every small business need a lawyer? Katie: I think it depends on what phase of the business they're going through at the time. I would always suggest that before someone gets into business, have a chat with a lawyer first so they understand what legal needs they're going to have coming up over the life of the business. Katie: You get a bit of a strategy in place because it's not just your business planning that's important. You have to understand what legal risks happen at the beginning, while you're running the company, and then also on exit so you can be ready for them and then you'll be less likely to need lawyers along the way if you already know what to watch out for. A lot of the time, businesses start because you're really passionate about the work that you do. It could be that you're a labourer, an accountant, etc. A lot of the time, you start in the trenches doing that sort of work and you jump in because you're good at what you do. That can obviously cause some conflict if you're doing exactly the same thing as when you had an employer.  When should you hire a business lawyer? Are you better off speaking to someone to make sure you're doing things right? Or is it just when you've started turning over some dollars? When should one really start looking towards consulting a business lawyer? Solicitor Before Accountant Katie: I think it's actually before that. It's right at the beginning when you actually have a chat with an accountant because you need to work out what kind of structure you should be setting up before you actually go and set the business up. That's important because the structure comes down to how much risk is going to be on you personally. How can a business lawyer help you? Katie: If you're set up as a sole trader, you could have issues such as something going terribly wrong in your business, especially if it's your first business. If you don't really understand how businesses operate, you could have your house on the line. You could lose your car, all of your assets, and all of your savings because you are personally liable as a sole trader, whereas generally, people will wait for a while before they set up a company down the track. Katie: There also could be taxation issues if you do that. If you've got some potential contracts already set up, you're probably better off going down the company path from the start. You know that the revenue amount is likely to be a lot higher. The right time to talk to someone about that is actually before you start trading and then you've got a bit of a road map and you understand why. Video Sessions With Business Lawyers in Brisbane Katie: At Law on Earth, we've actually done a lot of free guides around this so that people can just go and have a look at them, get an understanding around what all the different options are in terms of the structures, think about what would actually suit their lifestyle not only now, but also in the future. Katie: Think three, four, or five years ahead because if you set up as a sole trader now, you're going to be paying tax through the roof once you get over a certain financial amount. No one in their right mind is going to want to set up a business if it's not generating at least a decent amount of money that exceeds what you were doing as an employee, unless you're only doing it as a hobby or for some kind of lifestyle benefit, because there is a lot of pain that comes with setting up and running businesses. Katie: You must have a good reason why you want to put yourself through that. Otherwise, sometimes it actually is easier just to remain an employee, doing what you love. I couldn't agree more. Some employees think that their employers are bringing in double or triple of what they earn, and then they wonder about jumping out on their own without thinking about any of the nitty-gritty and the mechanics that go into the infrastructure that supports the business. You're right: you want to be able to earn a little bit more money or just be a side hustle or a lifestyle choice. That obviously changes the structure. If you're going to start a business, first, make sure that you're passionate about doing whatever you're going to be doing because you're going to be doing a lot of it. Second, make sure you're able to do that with enough time to be able to do all the other admin stuff that comes with it. Don't think you'll get to do 80-hour weeks that are going to be billable to clients. On top of that, probably talk to a solicitor before you talk to an accountant. Katie: It really comes down to that risk piece. What we tend to find in the last couple of days through the platform at Law on Earth is people who are passionate about a social cause want to set up a business around it. They're trying to work out whether to set up a charity, a social enterprise, for-profit or not for profit. It all comes down to how far you're prepared to take that social cause. Katie: There's a lot to think about. At that stage, you also have to think about not just the business, but what about the people around you? If you have a family, what are you prepared to put them through when you're setting up this business? Are you even going to bring them in down the track? If that's the case, then you're going to be employing people within the business. Again, it's probably better to do that for a company. Katie: The conversation around trusts will come up as well. You might have some kids at home and your wife or husband may not be working. You might want to get money by the business to them in the most cost-effective way.  How much does a business attorney cost? Katie: You'd have an initial chat with your accountant and your lawyer around those ideas. People are using just like a 20-minute advice session on our platform just to ask those kinds of questions. It's only going to cost them $150 to answer all of those questions before they even think through the next part of their strategy. It's not prohibitive. That's pretty much nothing in the scheme of things. That is going to protect you because different opportunities or things can come up. There are always bumps along the road of business, and you can have situations where you're being sued depending on the type of work that you're doing or having partnerships that go south. Even if you are set up as a sole trader, for instance, and you invest a little bit too much time in the business and the business is going really well.  This sounds terrible, but if you look at Melinda Gates, she is one of the best investors in the world. You need to be very careful. If a break-up does happen in your personal life, that can affect your business life and ongoing time. When you do engage, you spend $150, you get a little bit more visibility and insights and confidence in what you'd be doing with your business. How often should you talk to a business lawyer? What are normally the touchpoints with small business lawyers? Is it something that you engage with clients every three months, or is it something that you set up the relationship and then when the shit hits the fan, so to speak, you then start talking or what happens? Katie: I think it depends on the person who's setting up the business and what their circumstances are. The way that I deal with clients is that I'll have that initial chat with them. I'll give them a list and priorities as to what they should do and how soon they should get them done and at what stage of the business they'll think about activating the next step. Katie: That way, it gives them the tools that they need to actually go away and be in control of what they're doing. We have stuff in the learning centre that will help them do that. As they reach those little milestones in their business, they know what to do and what to watch out for. That just makes it a lot easier. It takes a lot of the anxiety away from the business.  Katie: A lot of my clients will actually Zoom me once a month and just ask me and do another 20-minute session and say what they've done and ask me to have a look over. They can actually watch me read into contracts that they've prepared themselves, just keeping them out of any risk so that they don't have to lie awake at night because they know they've already covered their bombs and then they can take that next step a little bit more confidently. Katie: There may be someone who's just really slow to get a bit of traction. If that's the case, they don't have to push themselves ahead at any rate to actually go and get more legal advice. It's only as they need it. But as they grow, you'll tend to find the need will pop up more often. Katie: It really comes down to the stage of growth and how risk-averse that business owner is. There are some people that will do all these documents, go forth and conquer—and they will just call me when they're in trouble. Katie: No matter how good of a business owner you are, things just pop up in business and you can't avoid it. If you can at least recognise when an issue is coming up, jump on it straight away and get some advice on what you should do next. You can probably go forward and just sell back and look after yourself potentially.  Katie: You just need to find out what the laws are around it and get a bit of a commercial understanding of what you can do and what repercussions there are for each of those different options—what are the repercussions now and what we're going to be the repercussions, say, two or three years time. If you do take this path, how is that going to impact the relationship you have with all the business owners? How will that affect me on a reputation level? Be Proactive, Not Reactive You brought up a couple of really good points. Do you find that business owners who are looking for business lawyers particularly in Brisbane are more proactive or reactive when it comes to these situations? Katie: I think they have been quite reactive for a long time, and I believe they're starting to get a bit more proactive. Maybe that's just the ones that I deal with because we've made it a bit more accessible for them to get little snippets of advice and not cost them a billion dollars for that. Katie: It's easier to be proactive. Like going to the doctor, you don't go, 'I'm not sure if I want to go to the doctor even though I'm sick because it is going to cost me a fortune.' You just go. That's what we've tried to recreate: an ability for people to just grab it as and when they need it so they can be proactive. Katie: But I think a lot of people in the past have been really reactive. The problem is that by the time I actually engage someone to help them with it, the problem is 10 times bigger and you actually could have fixed it for one-tenth of the cost had they gone to you at the very beginning of it before they sort of got into too much of a deep hole. The old adage is 'Save a nickel, spend a dime.' Once you've gone too far, you kind of have to do what you have to do and that can be a big problem for you. There's a business that we were talking with a month and a half ago. He decided to set up his own business and he thought it is going to be great because he loves doing what he does. His boss was fine with him doing that. The clients that his boss had went to him because they enjoyed working with him more, and that caused big problems.  His previous boss sued him, and then he engaged some legal advice. He had to change a whole bunch of stuff around to get everyone happy and ended up having to sell his business to his old boss to keep his boss happy. You've already worked for a whole bunch of stuff and then you've got all this stuff that's taxing on your mind and soul. It's not going to help you very well mentally to be having to do that while already going through the mechanics of setting up a business. Katie: That's actually one of the first things we chat about when we're having that initial strategy session. When talking about the structuring, the first thing I say to them is, 'What did you do before you came up with this business idea?' And then I add, 'Who did you work for? Show me your employment agreement.' Some would say, 'No, it's okay, we all parted on happy terms.' Katie: Stealing their IP and setting up a business in competition with them, they're just not going to be happy. Some employers will pursue it, and some won't. Some will have this ridiculous restraint of trade clause in there, and it'll be for like five years. The court is not going to hold that up, but you have to get advice around it to find out whether it's a reasonable restraint or not and whether it's worth the punt. Correct. He's still in business now but trading underneath a different entity on advice that he got from his lawyer. That would have been easy just to get it at the start, wouldn't it? I think it's a total cost of $150,000. Katie: I know someone else that's had a very similar situation. They're doing really well now, but it was really crushing. You just don't want to be in that situation. Not at all. It's not going to make you feel very good mentally. And that changes your whole game with how you're dealing with clients and giving you that confidence to build up your business. How do you legally protect yourself from risks in business? Do the legal requirements for business and milestones in business vary depending on the business vertical? For instance, hairdressers are dealing with scissors and if they have a slip, someone could get hurt. I'm running an IT business and if something goes wrong, their infrastructure could be down, costing them tens of thousands of dollars an hour or more depending on the business.  How do you protect yourself against things like that? Is that through agreements that you set up with your clients? Set Up a Business Plan  Katie: I think what people really need to be doing at the very beginning is setting up a business plan. Most people put it in a drawer and they don't have a look at it again. That's not useful. You need to actually write some kind of document about all the things that could go wrong in this business and then write out your mitigation. If this happens, what would I do next and then next and then next so that you don't have to worry about those kinds of risks so much because you've thought about it. Have a Business Continuity Plan Katie: Your next step is to look at each of those risks and think about what you can insure and what you can minimise any risk for. How likely is it to happen? If it does happen, like the electricity goes out and you can't run your business, can we jump to another premises so we can keep trading? If not, do we need business continuity insurance in place? Pulling all those ideas together is what we call a business continuity plan. Katie: Continuity is essentially continuing. What kind of plans do we need to put in place so no matter what comes up, we've actually got a Plan B that we can jump to straightaway. How do I train my staff to also know what the Plan B is at any point in time? Katie: If you're on holiday in Hawaii and all of a sudden something goes wrong in the business, you need to know that someone can grab out the continuity plan and have a look at what you would have done if you were here. Katie: Otherwise, if you end up building a business where you're stuck in it and no one else can run it for you, you're going to end up basically buying yourself a job but that's quite high risk. And you don't want to go through the pain of building a business and get to make this great revenue to have it all ripped away from you all of a sudden. Continuity plans are very, very strong to my heart. In the IT space, things are moving into the cloud, and you have to be more and more creative to allow for people's infrastructure to stay up and running when it's not necessarily available in your hands. There's a gun that's pointing at us. If something goes wrong with the client, we have to see how we can make sure to mitigate this risk if Office 365 goes down or if you have a problem with G-Suite applications. We've worked out things here but it's surprising to us and this is why I was asking before about the proactive versus reactive. We talk to business owners and say let's do this but a lot of the time they want to wait until it happens. Then it happens and they're like, 'We need to be up and running now. We can't get the contract out.' Katie: When you're dealing with big clients and if you can show them that if this happens this is what we do, but if that happens that's is what we do, it actually puts you way ahead in their eyes because they know that you have a much better ability to deliver on work, especially when it comes to tender processes. Katie: We've actually gone down the path with Law on Earth to do ISO certification. Even though we don't necessarily need to do that, I want to make sure that no matter what happens, we can be reliable and consistent so that people can keep using us. That was a big ask to actually get someone to come in and actually do all that.  Have a Risk Mitigation Strategy Katie: Risks are really important. If you don't watch the risks in your business, you won't have a business. That can destroy lives and families. That's what it's all about: risk mitigation. Does risk mitigation negate the need for more insurance? You're saying about possibly needing to get different types of insurances. Does it complement or mitigate the risk? Katie: I take it one step further with my businesses. I've got Virtual Legal, my law firm, and then Law on Earth, the software platform. List Down at All of the Risks Katie: What I've done is I looked at all the risks and wrote up a disaster recovery plan as well as a business continuity plan. And then I took that to the insurer and put them on notice on what I've asked them to insure for so there can't be any grey areas as to what risks they had to cover. It actually makes them accountable. Reduce the Risk, Reduce the Insurance Premium Katie: Second, I said, 'I've done all this risk mitigation. I want you to give me a discount on insurance because I've done half of your job for you.' That's actually helpful too because you can get your insurance premiums reduced because I know exactly what risks need to be covered. Katie: When it comes to things like negotiating a contract with someone else, sometimes what people do is they contract out of provisions. If I say, 'We don't want this liability clause in there.' and the business owner is like, 'Oh, yeah, no worries.' because they want the big contract. The problem is if you actually contract out of something that the insurance company then can't use to help you fight that claim, then your insurance sometimes might payout. You must have a think about those kinds of things. Insurance Can Be a Double-Edged Sword Katie: Insurance can be a double-edged sword. If you cut corners, you could end up not getting insurance paid out. I think it's a really good way of knowing the risks, making sure that you've covered up on what you can and that your systems actually back up what you say they're doing. It makes your business more valuable. When you're more repeatable with what you're doing, at least you know what your risks are. At Dorks Delivered, we call our agreements with clients business continuity agreements because we want their business to have uptime. We want IT and technology in their business to be like a utility.  If we tell a client that this is what they need to have in place and they say they're not interested, we put in denial of service agreements. We have them sign off on something saying, 'We're aware that this risk is what we're taking on ourselves,' and they can't come back to us and say this doesn't work. Should you use legal documents or templates available online? There are different documents that you can find online, such as NDAs and employee agreements. Are they worth the digital paper that they're written on? Does your mileage vary if you're just going to get a boilerplate document off the Internet that hasn't been checked over by business lawyers in Brisbane? Katie: It's funny you bring this up because this is my biggest pain point. This is literally the entire reason I set this platform up about three years ago. The problem with templates is that people don't know what's in them. When you actually sign a template or some kind of contract without understanding what's actually in it. Katie: There is no standard contract. It just doesn't exist. You can actually contract out of protective rights you would have had under the law if you had no agreement in place at all. You can actually contract out of different types of rights that can actually be in that agreement.  Katie: What we did was we went through and drafted out all the precedents that you would need for business and then you get a guide that comes along with it and explains in really simple English what every single clause in that agreement actually means so you can understand what you're doing. Katie: Make sure you understand what's in the agreement before you sign it. If you don't understand it, don't sign it because you could really do yourself some damage. That's why at Virtual Legal, we get a lot of the cleanup work from people just using templates they found on the Internet. Sometimes they use American documents, and sometimes they don't even change the names in the contract.  They haven't even read the contracts. Far out. I'm a stickler for reading things. When I got my first credit card in my teenage years, I read the 68-page document that came with it to make sure I understood. That's just a small document about how your information is shared. You've got a fantastic service there to alleviate some of that pain and make sure people are using Australian documents. Most of the software that we use in business or the SaaS platforms come from overseas. We're using these ERP solutions or CRM solutions, and a big sales tactic that I've seen is that they'll say they'll give all the documents that we need for our client relations and everything else, but they're all from America, so they're practically useless unless you're an international business only dealing with America. How does Law on Earth work? We've covered a little bit of information about what Law on Earth does. With $150, what does that entail and how does that work for someone who's looking to get into business or someone who's looking to have a review of their documents if they've got something that's been made by someone else or maybe they need to dust off the documents that they haven't looked at for 10 years. How does the process work for Law on Earth? [add this photo https://d3hh6raz9l4662.cloudfront.net/media/various/homepage-banner.png] Katie: It is really simple. It's a social enterprise that was set up for a social purpose. It's essentially established just to help people. Just go on the platform and set up a free account. Once you've got a free account, you'll get a full dashboard so you can go into the learning centre and have a look at all these different guides that actually teach you what you should look out for, what to do next. Katie: Once you've found a guide that matches your legal situation, you can then work out whether you just go and get the documents in our system. You can just answer a simple question. The system actually does much of the legal work so it'll slot all the right clauses in and then give you that human God that we talked about and then you can read through that. Katie: If that doesn't work for what you wanted practically in the business, go back, unlock the document and then answer the questions again. It will slot different clauses in there. You have complete control over it. You don't necessarily have to get a lawyer if you don't want to get a lawyer, but you have the ability to do that. Katie: We've restructured it recently so even if you get a 6-month subscription, it's unlimited documents so you can use as many documents as you want and the whole 6 months is only $197. Katie: Once you drop down to that, you get your video calls with a lawyer for $97 for 20 minutes. It becomes ridiculously cheap to get a lawyer online.  Katie: Some people do more videos, others do fewer videos and go crazy on the documents and then go and do the business stuff, set up their wills and powers of attorney, and all that stuff. We've got a bunch of people doing their divorces at the moment. Katie: Essentially, a lot of people will actually book their first calls in their sixth month and they'll extend it and then book in a couple of days later. Once they've gone and done their documents, we'll reverse the screen and help them re-drop bits and pieces of it for their situation. I might not hear from them for another five, six, seven weeks. Some people check in every week because it's just easy and affordable for them to do it bit by bit.  It is a fantastic service. You've only been around three years, right? Katie: Yeah, we built it inside Virtual Legal, and we split it off about two years ago and then we actually launched it last July. We have 150 people signing up since August 2020.  Katie: The good thing is that as and when we find other needs or documents that people want, if it's not in there, they just click a button to email us, and we actually draft it and then upload it. You're not going to find any lawyers that'll do that without charging you $2,000 or $3,000. That benefits everyone.  Katie: It helps people with whatever they're dealing with because if they need it, someone else is going to need it at some stage as well. We just have a team of guys here that just jump straight on it. Get free guides to setting up a business in Australia and affordable legal advice. Jump onto Law on Earth! [link to https://lawonearth.com.au/howtos] There's pretty much no reason why every business in Australia shouldn't be jumping on Law on Earth and checking out the work that you do and how it can help their business. I know I'm going to be signing up for an account because it's going to give more visibility and assurance for the times that you might not expect things to go as well as you want them to or at least mitigate some of those risks. Recommended Books: The Hard Thing About Hard Things and Measure What Matters If there's a favourite book that influenced you in business and in being where you are now, what would that be? Katie: There was actually one that I listened to recently. It's called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.  Katie: I really resonated with that because he said that as a CEO, you have to get used to everything being your fault. I thought that sounds like a really negative thing to say, but it's true. You are responsible as the head of the company, whether you are the founder or just the CEO, but you're responsible for making sure that everything runs smoothly.  Katie: If something happened in marketing, you should have had some kind of process in marketing for feedback so you can make sure those things don't happen. If you are not watching what's happening in all the other divisions, even though you're not the one executing on it, it really is your fault. Katie: I think it just puts it back into place. You have to get comfortable with being a bit uncomfortable as a business owner. You can say, 'My job is just to do this bit here' but if you are the person running that business, that's not correct. You are still responsible for the feet up. You just need to make sure reporting back to you is good if you've delegated work out. That comes into play with what you're saying about strategies, making documentation processes, accountability systems, and things like that. I'm going to be checking that on my radar. Katie: Yes, it's downloadable so you can listen to it while you're going for a run. Another is Measure What Matters by John Doerr, and that's all about objective, key results and understanding how to give reporting responsibilities out to your teams so that it can be feedbacked correctly.  I'm going to check out that one.  What is freedom to you? The podcast is called Business Built Freedom. What would you say business freedom is to you?  Katie: For me, freedom is not necessarily having a lot of time on my hands. It's more about being able to actually do what I want to be able to do, even though it's still a lot of work for me to do.  Katie: Virtual Legal runs really well, so I can actually have my freedom but I've gone straight back into the grind with Law on Earth. I'm passionate about it, so I'm happy to spend my time doing that. As and when I find different elements that I can delegate to other people, I can then do that and then I can spend more time thinking. I think freedom really comes down to having just being engaged in what you love and finding ways to start stepping back from it to have thinking time again.  I think I couldn't have said it better myself. I find working in business isn't really working if you're enjoying it. That sounds so cliche. People go on holidays to read books, but if you don't think an editor would go on holidays to read books, I still think they would. If you have enjoyed the podcast, jump across to iTunes. Leave us some love, give us some feedback. Katie: will be jumping into our Facebook group to answer any possible questions that you might have. Stay healthy! Mitigate risks and turn your IT into a utility. Schedule a free consultation or check out the Dollar IT Club for affordable business solutions. [module-379]

Todd: So Katie, I want to go to the mall.Katie: Okay.Todd: Have you been to the new mall?Katie: Yeah, I actually went there just yesterday.Todd: Okay. So I want to buy some computer stuff. Is there a computer store?Katie: There are two computer stores.Todd: Really? Ooh, that's good.Katie: There's a computer store on the first floor, and then very close to that there's also a Mac store.Todd: Ooh, that's perfect. I want to buy a new Mac.Katie: Oh, me too.Todd: They're so expensive, though.Katie: Mm-hmm.Todd: Okay, what about books? I really like books. Is there a bookstore with English books?Katie: There's a huge bookstore on the fourth floor.Todd: Ooh, that's good.Katie: It's really big. And there are lots of English books you can read there.Todd: Oh, great. Nice. And how about the food there?Katie: The food's okay. There's a big food court on the third floor, and you can get a variety of food. You can get a Subway.Todd: Oh, that's good. I love sandwiches. Is the food good there, though?Katie: They don't have any sandwiches that I like, basically.Todd: Oh, really. Okay. So what else is there at the mall?Katie: Oh, there's so much at the mall. There's a café on the ground floor.Todd: Oh, nice.Katie: If you like drinking coffee.Todd: I do. I like to go and study and just relax.Katie: That's the perfect place for you, then.Todd: I like to people watch. Is it a good people-watching place?Katie: Oh, it's a great people-watching place.Todd: Oh, cool.Katie: The windows are really big, and you can see out onto the street.Todd: Oh, cool. What else is there? Is there a movie theater?Katie: Mm-hmm. There's a movie theater on the fourth floor.Todd: Oh, great. Now, do they have English movies?Katie: They have English and Japanese movies.Todd: Oh, that's good. I should watch some Japanese movies too.Katie: They're interesting.Todd: And how about food? I hear there's a new supermarket, a big supermarket there.Katie: It's pretty big. And you can get lots of food there. It's on the first floor.Todd: Okay. Is there anything else I should see?Katie: What about the roof garden?Todd: Oh, what is the roof garden?Katie: It's on the fifth floor, and it's, well it's on the roof, and you can see a beautiful view of the city. And there's also places for you to sit and just enjoy the view.Todd: Oh, nice. A roof garden, I like that.Katie: It's really nice.Todd: Now, do you buy clothes at the mall? Do they have nice clothing shops?Katie: Yeah, they have nice clothing shops. Some of them are a little bit expensive.Todd: Ah, yeah.Katie: And I like buying cheap clothes.Todd: Okay. When's a good time to go?Katie: I think the best time to go is probably weekdays.Todd: Okay. Why?Katie: If you go on the weekend, there are so many children there.Todd: Oh.Katie: Ugh. It's hard to walk around.Todd: Yeah, and we're teachers, we teach kids all day.Katie: Mm-hmm.Todd: Okay. I don't want to go then.Katie: No, me neither.Todd: Well, I want to go there next week, maybe Thursday night.Katie: Okay.Todd: Do you want to join me?Katie: Yeah, that sounds good. Maybe we can watch a movie.Todd: Cool. I'll buy you dinner.Katie: Sounds great.

Todd: OK, Katie.Katie: Yeah.Todd: Let's take an international test.Katie: Oh, OK.Todd: How international are you? Let's find out.Katie: Let's find out.Todd: First, have you ever eaten Greek food?Katie: Greek food? Ah, I've eaten, how do you say it, falafel.Todd: Oh, is that Greek?Katie: I think so. I've had that, but apart from that, I've never eaten Greek food. How about you?Todd: Ah, I think I have. Like, I've eaten Greek yogurt. Does that count?Katie: That counts.Todd: That counts?Katie: That counts.Todd: OK, have you ever eaten Russian food?Katie: What's Russian food?Todd: I think, Russian food, is it borscht? Borscht is like a cabbage soup.Katie: Hmm, I've never eaten Russian food.Todd: Yeah, maybe I haven't eaten Russian food either. OK, last one, have you ever eaten Vietnamese food?Katie: Ah, I see it written down. Is it pho?Todd: Pho, the noodles?Katie: Yeah, I've eaten pho before.Todd: Yeah, I've been to Vietnam so I've eaten Vietnamese food a lot. And pho the noodles is really good.Katie: Yeah, it's delicious.Todd: I've had that too.Katie: OK, now let's talk about languages.Todd: Oh, OK. Have you ever studied French?Katie: I have. I studied French for five years.Todd: Oh, can you still speak French?Katie: Nope. Not at all.Todd: Yeah, me too. I once studied French years ago, but I haven't spoken French in so long I can't remember anything.Katie: I can't remember anything either.Todd: Have you ever studied an Asian Language?Katie: I've studied Japanese. I can still speak it a little bit now, and I studied a little bit of Korean, but I don't speak Korean.Todd: Oh, really. OK. Wow, like I've studied Thai because I lived in Thailand for five years, and like you I've studied Japanese, but my Japanese is terrible.Katie: How about your Thai?Todd: My Thai is OK. It's OK. I can talk a little bit. OK, so have you ever met a Spanish person?Katie: A Spanish person? Actually, I don't think I have.Todd: Really?Katie: I don't think I have met a Spanish person.Todd: Oh, interesting. I've been to Spain so, I've met a few and we have a Spanish teacher at our school.Katie: Oh, maybe I have met a Spanish person then. Maybe, I've met a secret Spanish person.Todd: OK, have you met a Chinese person?Katie: Oh, yes, I've met lots of Chinese people.Todd: OK, and have you met a Brazilian person?Katie: I feel like if I say no, then I have. Probably. Probably, I've met a Brazilian person.Todd: Yeah, I've met a few people from Brazil, so they're always very nice. Very friendly people.

Katie: So what do you think is a good age for girls to start wearing?Aimee: I think it depends on the kind of that they're wearing and the purpose, you know, because to me, it seems like there are two different kinds. You know, there are young children, young girls, young children, who wear play, you know.Katie: Yeah.Aimee: It's a toy. It washes off easily, garish colors, very mild on the skin, and you know, it's literally just coloring in their face. It's not, you know, enhancing their features or trying to look as society thinks beautiful, you know. They're not covering up any pimples or spots, you know. It's not like that. It's just coloring in their face, trying to look more like a princess.And I have a six-year old daughter and she loves. She has her own, like, young like toyand she asks permission to wear it, and I let her wear it. I bought some for her. I make sure that she can only do it if she has a clean face and clean hands and that she washes off properly at the end. And that she tidides it away afterwards.Katie: That's good.Aimee: She's actually on her final warning because she used to leave it out – and I've warned her I will throw it in the bin. Because I have a toddler and she wants to see what her big sister is doing and she wants to play with it, so she grabs it and makes a mess everywhere. So yeah, six-year old is on her final warning.So I guess to answer your question, my six-year old is wearing her play make-up already. So it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't bother me. Young is –Katie: How old were you when you started wearing?Aimee: Well, I love, and that's probably where my daughter got it from. I wanted to wear from a young age, the way my daughter does. I wasn't allowed. It was forbidden. And I first actually managed to buy a secret when I was about 9 or 10.Katie: Secret.Aimee: Yeah. I had to hide it from my mom, and she would only let me wear lip gloss when I was that age, and I wasn't allowed to wear any lip sticks, soI had to buy a secret one. And I was always so interested in my grandmother's and my mom's as well. But she never really wore much. She has a very simple sort of beauty routine.I'm much more interested in it than she is – she ever was. So I don't know where I inherited that from, but my daughter has definitely inherited that from me. So maybe because it was forbidden for me that's why I was drawn to it more.Katie: Makes it more tantalizing.Aimee: I think so. That could be it, but yeah, it's a real hobby for me. I really, really love it. I wish I had more money to purchase more. You can never have enough.Katie: You can never have too many.Aimee: I know. It's true.Katie: What do you think about boys wearing?Aimee: If they want to wear, then they should. Like it annoys me this horrible idea and concept of like men and boys have to be manly, like what is manly?For me, is an art. It really is. It's artistry. And, you know, if they want it, if they're feeling bad about their skin the way I feel bad about my skin, right. If I have pimples or spots, I'm lucky. I get to just cover up with like foundation and concealer, a bit of blusher. It makes me feel better.But, you know, if there's like a boy who has, you know, going through teenage years and he's got bad skin and he wants to cover up, and his macho friends catch him wearing it or whatever people in school catch him wearing it and it can be a really bad situation for him. And I think that is awful. It is really, really terrible. I think boys should wear as they like.I actually follow quite a lot of artists on social media. And I look at many, many pictures of different products and the art that they produce, and I follow male artists as well. And the skills they have are unbelievable, honestly. The blending skills.Katie: Their contouring.Aimee: Yeah.Katie: Oh my goodness.Aimee: The blending skills and like covering up, you know, basically just like covering up their whole face and putting a new face on top of it.Katie: It's pretty impressive.Aimee: It's really impressive. It's so amazing. I would really enjoy a lesson from some of the artists that I follow on different sites.Katie: Absolutely.

Bird and LJ welcome Katie Sadleir, general manager Women's Rugby with World Rugby since 2016 and was recognised as one of the top 10 rugby influencers (Rugby World Magazine 2020).Here are the questions they asked Katie:What has been your driving force to keep working at a strategic level? What does a typical day look like in your role as World Rugby’s General Manager? What has been your greatest moment of change/influence? How and why did you become involved in rugby? Did your educational journey help you in your passion for sport or was it outside influences that shaped you? What have you learnt/taken from your personal participation and experience at a strategic level in other sports?What advice could you give to any female’s wanting to hold a position of influence/change within sporting organisations? What are your aspirations for women’s rugby over the next five years?What has been your greatest challenge in your involvement with women’s rugby? Does the development of women in rugby include female coaches as well as players? What plans are there to grow the number of female coaches across the game and how can we support at grassroots level (as local recruitment is normally a players’ mum)?Katie is a Commonwealth Games medal winner and in 2016 was awarded Sport NZ Life Time Achievement Award for contribution to sport and recreation sector in NZ. Her impressive CV included general manager roles with NZ Academy of Sport and the NZ Sports Foundation.

Katie: So, we're talking about going local as we're in a different country. How much of the local culture do you absorb? How much, like local ... cause we both live in Japan right? How much in percentage for example? How much Japanese food would you say you eat?Gilda: Oh, I would say probably like 80% of my food is Japanese food. Yeah, I like it because most of it is healthy and it's actually like what I can get in the cafeteria at work so ...Katie: That's convenient.Gilda: It's convenient. What about you?Katie: I mostly make my own food, and Japanese food is really difficult to make I think. I'm really challenged when it comes to cooking anyway. I'm really bad a cooking. And to have to try to learn a new style of cooking is just too much for me. I'm really lazy. So I would probably say if I'm cooking food myself, I never cook Japanese food. Zero percent of the time. I never, but if I go to a restaurant then sure, I can eat Japanese food sometimes.Gilda: I sometimes watch the TV and learn how to cook Japanese food. There's some easy recipes. Do you ever watch that - Japanese television?Katie: I try, but like you said there's a lot of cooking programsGilda: That's what I was about to say, there's tons of cooking TV shows, programs.Katie: And I watch cooking programs and I just get angry that I can't cook! I can't do it like that so I get frustrated, so I stop watching.Gilda: Yeah, I see.Katie: What about other kinds of shows? Like, not just cooking shows?Gilda: Well, they have, I guess they have pretty funny shows, but I don't understand what they're saying, but I try to follow them, and yeah, sometimes they are very interesting. They also talk about the clothing season, what's trending in Japan. What young would people would do, and they have some interviews sometimes, and they're always teaching you something, so that's something I like about Japanese TV, you always learn something, from other countries as well. That's true.Katie: That's true. So how about your friendship circle? How much percent of your friends would you say are Japanese versus International?Gilda: Oh, I would say probably 40% are Japanese. Yeah, the rest of them are international people cause I work with intenational people, so I spend most of the time with them.Katie: And when you're with your Japanese friends, so you speak mostly in English, or mostly in Japanese?Gilda: Oh, I would say like probably 70% Japanese and the rest would be English because normally when they know a second language, it's English not Spanish, so I like zero percent Spanish, a lot of Japanese, but yeah like I would say 70% of the conversation is in Japanese also because I want to practice my Japanese.Katie: Right.Gilda: What about you?Katie: Well, I would say out of my friends, recently, I've had like no time to socialize, so probably like 30% of my friends are Japanese, but when I speak with them it's mostly in Japanese. I don't like speaking in English. For me, for the same reasons as you, like, I want to practice my JapaneseGilda: But I would say that from my Japanese friends, like most of them, probably like 80% of them always want to speak in English because they want to practice English too, so it's like a give-and-take, like we speak a little bit in Japanese, but sometimes we speak more in English. It depends also the topic and what you're talking about.Katie: If it's a topic you can talk about, then, yeah, go for it in Japanese, but if it's a difficult topic ...Gilda: Yes, exactly, yeah!

Katie: So what are three foods that you absolutely have to have that you can't live without?Gilda: I would say that I could not live without arepa. It's like my daily breakfast in Venezuela.Katie: What's that?Gilda: Arepa is made of corn flour, and it looks like a hamburger. So you put anything you want inside and it's very tasty. And I would say like 95 percent of Venezuelans eat arepas every day. Well, it's kind of like a high-carb diet in my country. So I need rice also for lunch, and bread. Bread is another thing. In the afternoon, a piece of bread, sweet bread with coffee is kind of like mandatory.Katie: So lots and lots of carbs in your diet.Gilda: Yes. What about you? What about in England?Katie: Well, English breakfast is not the healthiest of breakfast. It's like a big plate with fried eggs, fried sausages, hash browns, like hash potatoes, beans, just everything fried and everything delicious. And I would say that I can't live without that, but if I ate it every day, then I would probably not be able to leave my house because I would be so, so fat. But it's definitely a food that is in my top foods of all time. That's probably my favorite. But recently, I've been eating lots of tofu. It's breakfast.Gilda: Oh, okay.Katie: Yeah. So a little bit of tofu, a little bit of soy sauce just for breakfast, which is just – it's a bit of a boring breakfast. But it's really healthy, I guess. So I've been eating that a lot every day. So I probably can't live without that recently. And also, pizza. Pizza.Gilda: Oh, pizza. Yes, very good.Katie: Pizza. I think everyone can't live without pizza.Gilda: Yes.Katie: Pizza is the best. Pizza is definitely a food that I can't live without.Gilda: Yeah, I try to have pizza probably once a week, I would say. Yeah.Katie: What's your favorite topping?Gilda: That would be cheese.Katie: Cheese. Classic.Gilda: Definitely. Bacon.Katie: Cheese and bacon. Oh it sounds good.Gilda: Yes. Very, very tasty.Katie: Just cheese and bacon or anything else?Gilda: No, no. I'm going for anything actually but I will always need to have cheese and bacon on my pizza.Katie: Pizza is not pizza without cheese.Gilda: Yes. Yes.Katie: It has to have cheese.Gilda: So what else do you have? So you said tofu, pizza, what other food can you live without?Katie: Well, my grandma is part Italian. So we have lots of like pasta and lasagna in our family. So I try and eat – well, I try not to eat a lot of pasta because I'll get really fat. But pasta is definitely something that I can't live without. So good.Gilda: Yeah. Italian food is so good.Katie: Yeah. And again, lots of cheese.Gilda: Yeah. We also do a lot of lasagna but, well, we call it pasticho.Katie: Pasticho.Gilda: It's a different name but it's the same lasagna. And it's also very tasty.Katie: So good.Gilda: Yeah. But high fat food.Katie: So like a real like comfort food, isn't it? Lasagna.Gilda: Yeah. Yeah.Katie: So good. So what would you say is your comfort food?Gilda: My comfort food – that would be arepa, again. Yeah, definitely.Katie: You said you're going to have lots of like fillings in that.Gilda: Yes. So my favorite would be black beans with cheese inside. It sounds a little bit like a mix up of things but it's really, really tasty. We do eat a lot of black beans every day in Venezuela. It's very common. What about you?Katie: My comfort food, I can't eat it as much as I would like to these days but it's probably my mom's spaghetti Bolognese. So good. It's so good, like lots of pasta, lots of tomato, lots of herbs, lots of cheese.Gilda: Sounds good.Katie: It's amazing. I would like live with my parents if it meant I could have spaghetti Bolognese every day. So good. So tasty. I think it's the best

Katie: So I don't really know much about Venezuela in terms of the different regions and things. So could you tell me something about it?Gilda: Well, in terms of weather we have only two seasons. We have a rainy season and the rest is dry. But so, you get to enjoy the four seasons in a way if you go to the west side of the country. We have like high mountains and you can see some snow and also, like it's a little bit cold over there.But if you go to the middle, in the middle of the country, the center, is hot. It's quite hot and dry. So it's where the – it's like the cowboys' area in Venezuela. So a lot of horses and they eat a lot of meat.In a little bit of north, in facing the Caribbean Sea, is the capital, Caracas. There, we have a very nice weather. I guess, that's the reason why it's the capital, maybe because the weather is really nice. We can wear the same clothes the whole year around.Katie: Nice.Gilda: So we don't have to think about winter clothes or anything like that. You can wear shorts all the time. So it's really, really nice. Yeah.Katie: What's the average temperature in Caracas?Gilda: While the, all this weather reports would say like 30, 35 and people will be like, "Oh, it's really, really hot."Katie: Yeah.Gilda: It's not. When you're there, you feel like probably 27 is like the body temperature, probably.Katie: Still pretty hot though, right?Gilda: It is but it's dry. It's not so humid. Even though we are close to the Caribbean Sea, it's not so humid. So it's a very nice weather. Yeah. I really like it. Yeah.Katie: So, outside of Caracas, are there any other famous cities in Venezuela?Gilda: Yes. There is one called Maracaibo. This is famous. It's the oil city. Venezuela is famous for having a lot of petroleum, and that's the city where all, most of the petroleum is concentrated and all the companies, oil companies. And since they have oil, the city is pretty modern and, yeah. So it's another major city in the country.There is another city that is kind of developing now is in the middle of the country. It's called Valencia. And also, it's famous because it has lots of industries and factories. So many people are moving there for job opportunities. And yeah, they have very nice places as well. Yeah.Katie: Are there any resort towns in Venezuela?Gilda: Yes, there are many especially because Venezuela is facing the Caribbean Sea. So there are many places for enjoying to see the ocean, beach side. There is an island called Margarita island. It's also very famous for occasion like to enjoy the summer at the fullest, and it's famous. That city has a lot of foreigners, visitors, yeah, all year around.Katie: So it's popular all over the world.Gilda: Yes, it's popular. Yeah.

Katie: So imagine that I was going to go to Venezuela, what are three things that I absolutely have to see if I go there?Gilda: Well, it depends where you go. But if you go to Caracas, the capital, definitely visit the wealthy side of the city. You can go shopping at very nice shopping malls. And also, you have to go to the disco. There are so many nightclubs.Katie: Nice.Gilda: Enjoy salsa. Yeah. What else? Oh. Well, we are very close to the beach side from the city. So like normally, every weekend, people in Caracas, the capital go to the beach and spend the day there after having – after spending the whole night dancing, so.Katie: That sounds amazing.Gilda: It's like connecting two days.Katie: Amazing.Gilda: Yeah. If you go to the south, definitely you should visit the Canaima National Park. It's a famous park because it has the highest waterfall in the world. It's called Angel Falls.Katie: Yeah.Gilda: Yeah. So, and obviously, if you go there, you will get to see how the indigenous people live and try some of their food. Yeah. Arepa, which is mandatory if you got to Venezuela, you have to eat that.Katie: What's that?Gilda: It's made of corn, yes corn – it's sort of like corn flour. It's only in Venezuela, you can find it. And it's daily breakfast. So like I cannot live without arepas every day. I have to eat it.Katie: So is it like a sandwich or…?Gilda: It looks like a hamburgerKatie: Okay.Gilda: And in the middle, like you put stuff in. It could be anything you want; cheese, meat, whatever you want. So there are so many styles of arepas. Yeah.Katie: Sounds amazing. And speaking of food, what other Venezuelan food could you recommend?Gilda: We also eat a lot of empanadas. I think you can find those in all the countries in South America. But every country has their original style.Katie: What's that?Gilda: It's also made from corn flour, and it's baked. Some of them could be fried. And they have meat or chicken inside. It's very tasty. And it's always like a breakfast thing. Yeah.Also, if you go there during, you can try hallaca. It's a traditional dish in. And it has all the four types of meat. It has pork, it has chicken, beef, fish, plus vegetables. It's very tasty. I know it sounds a little bit like oh, all together, but it's very tasty but you get a lot of weight after.Katie: I can imagine. That's what is for, right? Putting on weight.Gilda: Yeah, exactly. So everybody in January, new resolutions, losing weight.Katie: Sounds about right. Now I'm really hungry.

Todd: Hey Katie. I'm having a party, Super Bowl party at my house on Sunday in a couple of weeks. Would you like to come over?Katie: Okay. But I have absolutely no idea what a Super Bowl is.Todd: Well, you know, the Super Bowl is a big sporting event and we have it once a year. But it's okay if you don't know anything about American football because actually, the Super Bowl is kind of like our unofficial holiday.Katie: Okay.Todd: Yeah. So what happens is, is everybody comes over to somebody's house, and you have a big party and you watch the game but nobody really watches the game. There's lots of other stuff going on so it's should be good.Katie: Do you have like Super Bowl food that you eat?Todd: Exactly. Exactly. So it's kind of like a big feast. So we'll have, you know, like hamburgers and stuff we'll barbecue. And we'll have lots of like chips and dip and stuff like that. So you don't have to bring any food but it's potluck. So if you do want to bring something, yeah, I would recommend it.Katie: Do you have to be like a supporter of one of the teams in the final?Todd: No. And actually, the game is not for a couple of weeks so we don't know who the two final teams are going to be.Katie: All right.Todd: They still have to decide, but actually, there's a bunch of things that have nothing to do with football on the Super Bowl that you'll probably like. The first is, they have the halftime show. You may have heard about the Super Bowl halftime show.Katie: Okay.Todd: You like music, right?Katie: I love music.Todd: Right. So they always have a really big musical act. And actually this year, I don't remember who it is. I'll have to check but it's usually somebody like Bruno Mars or U2 or somebody like that.Katie: I think last year, it was Katie Perry, was it not?Todd: It might have been. Yeah. But it's always a really, really big person. Another thing that's really cool about the Super Bowl is the commercials. So the commercials, you know, the companies spend a lot of money on the commercials, and they're usually really good. So the commercials—the people are often more into the commercials than the game.Katie: Okay.Todd: Especially if one team is kind of – if it's a lopsided win. So yeah, so the commercials are fun.Katie: What kind of commercials do they have?Todd: You know, like companies like Pepsi or Coke or like really big name companies.Katie: So the really big ones.Todd: Yeah. They'll spend like millions and millions of dollars. These are usually the most expensive commercials because it's one local game and one local audience. Like the World Cup is a more watched event but the commercials are regional for all the different countries, whereas the Super Bowl, the commercials are just for Americans.Katie: Yeah.Todd: So yeah, these are usually the most expensive commercials like around the world. So they're usually really well done.Katie: Is it just American teams in the Super Bowl?Todd: Yes, it's very, you know, Americanized name, I'd say. But, you know, like I said, the game is really not that important. But there is one way that you can make money.Katie: Okay. I'm interested.Todd: So what happens is, we have like a pool and you can draw numbers. And like you don't have to know anything about football but you can have like, you know, draw numbers for the first person to score a touchdown, or the first player to get a penalty or things like that. And you just fill out the chart and then if your player gets that, then you can get money.So you have to contribute. You have to pay like 10 bucks to play. But then it's in the pool and then you could win money at different points during the game.Katie: Have you ever won at the Super Bowl before?Todd: Yeah. It's kind of like how it works out where everybody wins a little money and everybody loses a little money. So, you know, gambling technically is illegal but…Katie: Of course.Todd: Yeah. But it's like just one of those things that everybody does.Katie: It's not for big money.Todd: No.Katie: Just a little bit of money.Todd: Just a little bit of money.Katie: So it's okay.Todd: Just to have fun. Yeah. So, and then, once I find out what teams are in the finals then I'll tell you about the colors. And it's usually best that you choose one team that you're going to support.Katie: Okay.Todd: So I'll fill you in about who the teams are later and all that.Katie: Right.Todd: So are you willing to come?Katie: Yeah. Sounds like fun.Todd: Okay, cool.Katie: I'm in.Todd: All right. So it's going to be at my house at 3:00. So if you can show up around 2:00-ish.Katie: Should I bring some food?Todd: You can. Like you can bring some type of maybe salad or like a bean dish or something like that if you like. But we'll – like the main food, we'll provide. We'll have pizza. We'll have burgers. Oh, and it's BYOB.Katie: Okay.Todd: So if you want to drink, you have to bring your own alcohol.Katie: All right.Todd: But we will have some beers and stuff. Do you drink?Katie: Sometimes.Todd: Okay. Cool.Katie: Like tenths of the time.Todd: All right. So see you there. Glad you can come.Katie: No worries.

Soo excited for this next podcast episode with special guests from Art of Floors, Tom Ethridge and Katie Stewart, we'll be discussing what it means to design for the Hospitality industry and how creativity plays a role. In this episode, we discuss the following questions: 1.) [Tom & Katie] From a design standpoint, how is Hospitality different from other industries? 2.) [Tom] How did the idea for Art of Floors get started? What role does creativity play at Art of Floors? 3.) [Katie] What are some design styles that Hospitality clients are drawn towards and why? 4.) [Tom & Katie] If a designer would like to work in the Hospitality industry, what are some essential things you’d look for in a portfolio? 5.) [Tom] How do you see the Hospitality industry changing in the next 5-10 years? How does Art of Floors plan to evolve and “future-proof” its business? 6.) [Katie] What are some up & coming trends you see coming specifically into the Hospitality segment? How do you do your trend research? 7.) [Katie] What types of software do designers need to know to work in Hospitality? Or is it different for every company? 8.) [Tom] How do handmade goods play a role in Hospitality? Do you see a rise in demand for handmade products or only in certain niches? 9.) [Tom] Do you see Art of Floors expanding into other categories? Would you ever offer pillows, upholstery fabrics, or other types of products? 10.) [Katie] Walk us through your career as a designer. You have an interesting story and made some major sacrifices being long distance with your (now) husband. What advice would you give entry level designers who are looking for a new opportunity? ➡️FREE TRAINING in Textile Design:

TRANSCRIPT:Ashley: My name is Ashley Hart and our family did the growing Christmas tree in Goshen project.Katie: Alright so you worked on getting to know your neighbors last year through this project? And talk me through that year, what did it look like, what did it take for you guys to put all that together?Ashley: Well it started off with me getting really excited about creating something new. So I came up with a list to my mentor of all the fun ideas I had. Then evaluating how those ideas matched with the community that we lived in and what would be a gift to them and something that we could make memories together with them. So we kind of spent time connecting with neighbors in a different way than we had before. So we might go on a walk and stop over and say good evening to our neighbor or call them over and invite them over for dessert or whatever. And that kind of got the relationship frequency enough that we were able to have more conversations.Katie: Yeah, and were you bringing the idea of this Christmas tree project to them right away or how did you start on that path to get to that project idea?Ashley: So I think one of the things that I realized for myself and took that to the way I was connecting with our neighbors was that I in my own life wasn't prepared for a big ask and so I didn't want to throw a big ask at someone else. Really I was still putting feelers out to see if the idea that we had could even happen. So our neighbor happened to be a landscaper, so I didn't even know if he would plant Christmas trees in December or not, or if that was like not going to work. If the trees were going to die or the ground would be too frozen or whatever.Katie: Because you guys did not have Christmas trees on your property when you started this?Ashley: Correct.Katie: But you had how many acres?Ashley: Eleven acres.Katie: Eleven acres and what are you going to do with it, how are you going to make that an asset to the community?Ashley: Right, and we had always kind of had a vision even on our wedding day we invited people to our property and invited people to spend time there. We wanted it to be a hospitable place but I don't think we had the tools and the permission that we were given to make it kind of an official thing to start inviting people and doing something unique for the community.Katie: So it took some permission seeking?Ashley: I think so, which is weird, but yeah. I think someone saying here's some support and here's some encouragement and start dreaming. And I was desperate for the idea to be dreaming about something other than being concerned about what's going on in our day to day experience.Katie: Right what was your main concern at that point, what were you worrying about?Ashley: I think I was really focused on ensuring that our daughter would be prepared to engage in her community and the way that I thought I was going about that was through therapy and appointments and things like that because that required so much energy I just didn't think I had anymore energy to start something new. Katie: So you were trying to pave the way for your daughter to be part of the community some day, but you weren't really sure about how to go about it. And meanwhile you had other day to day appointments and things that you had to be doing that were taking up time, energy and effort and that that permission that you go to do something off the scope of the therapy list.Ashley: Oh yeah it was like it was such a gift. Yeah it was just you know you get stuck in the grind of doing what's best and the idea to imagine creating something that intrinsically you already know what is good for you, and what is good for your family and what is good for the community. And just someone saying ‘Go for it' it's really.. I've talked about that you're getting to lift your eyes off a problem or what is perceived as a problem and getting to lift your eyes to bringing beauty into your world and your community.Katie: Yes, so before you started this, was it a year long project, about?Ashley: Yeah.Katie: Ten months, year long project, before you started the year long project to plant Christmas trees in your yard and invite your neighbors to, can you explain actually a little bit more about what that Christmas tree project was in the end?Ashley: Yeah, so the goal was, we started the project in July, and because of the event, our event was in December. So we had to kind of move quickly once we decided what we were doing but the idea was to invite families in the community, so because it's a rural community that's a wide area, but invite community members to come and to plant a CHristmas tree on our land. And we wanted it to be a healing experience to everyone who came so we talked through what's healing for community and individuals. So we brought the five senses into the experience. So we had art, lighting, lumineers, paths through the fields and Christmas music anda baker came and baked Christmas cookies that's from Goshen and hot cocoa and a bonfire. So we tried to make it as memory making as we could by sealing in those five senses and then families are invited to come back each year and they can either take their Christmas tree if it's tall enough for them or they can just check on it and take a picture with their family. So that's been really fun to see families bewildered in the generosity. Families would call us and say, “ok so what are the rules around this?” or like ‘well how do we sign, and ensure that this is ours.” And so they've just been really surprised by the generosity.Katie: They also are seeking permission.Ashley: Yeah.Katie: To just show up and have a Christmas tree party?Ashley: Right. Right.Katie: Yeah it kind of shows that we've lost a little bit of our muscle for community building. We don't really know what to do in the face of something as ordinary and simply beautiful as this, it's kind of like there's a catch. Where's the marketing here?Ashley: Right, exactly and we have a friend here at Starfire mention that really we're just returning to our roots as rural people. Who used to sit on one another's porches and play music and eat together, so we talked about that that evening that we want more of that. And we really got a sense from our neighbors that they did too. So people would come by and talk to me about it like, “Oh I have this idea or I have that idea.” So we're hoping that fosters more and more of that. Katie: Did many people know your family who came to the event? How did you make connections and make that neighborliness happen?Ashley: So it was funny because several days before the event we had no one signed up for the event.Katie: Seven days before?Ashley: Several, several so like three or four days before. We had like signs up, we had advertised.Katie: So really quickly describe your neighborhood real quick because when you say you have signs and things up it's at like the one library and maybe like…Ashley: One coffee shop.Katie: Yeah.Ashley: There's one coffee shop, there's like two fast food restaurants or three and two gas stations and a library. Otherwise it's a very rural community. So we had posted things on Facebook, on the Goshen Facebook community page but then we had also put it in a coffee shop. So we really had no idea how many trees we needed so we picked thirty, I'm not sure why but it was crazy because somebody called like three or four days before and was like I know it's really late but is there anyway our family could sign up? And I was like yeah we've got some room.Katie: You hang up and were like woo-hoo!Ashley: Yes totally, like we got one and her friend wanted to sign up too so that made two families and what we didn't know which I think is really important is having people invested in the process, so our neighbor Dan brough him and everyone he knew to that event. He was excited about it because he had done so much in giving advice and shopping around for trees and going to get thte trees, that he was invested enough to want it to be a good event and want his people to come and experience it.Katie: And is this the landscaper you had mentioned? So you had a neighbor, I mean you have eleven acres how many acres are around you?Ashley: We have one to our right and one to our left then we have one across the street, so yeah. Not a lot.Katie: So you have three neighbors in the vicinity of you and neighbor Dan was one of them. What a gem.Ashley: I know he is a gem.Katie: How did you meet him? Did you already know him?Ashley: Yeah, he has been friends with my husband's parents who live right next door also. So he's been a friend of their families for a while and you know in rural communities if there's something wrong everyone shows up. But otherwise you kind of naturally keep to yourself and sometimes you might stop over and say hi but this just was really nice because we got to spend more time together and got to use one another's gifts in a way that brought people together so that was great.Katie: Yeah. So this was not the first time that you've been part of a community in an intentional way. This experience that you had in your neighborhood with your family was sort of precluded by your own youth living in intentional community being part of living with a family, so you've tried community in various forms?Ashley: Yeah it's always been important to me.Katie: Can you talk more about that?Ashley: I think I've always experienced more joy when I'm doing life with other people and yet when you're doing life with more people it can be complicated too. So that's just being with other people. Katie: That's a good thing to know going into it.Ashley: Yeah I think so.Katie: You had seen some of the pitfalls of it but you had also lived some of the joys of it and knew I want this for my family now too?Ashley: Right and you know even having your own family that's having a small community. So yeah I've experienced it in multiple different settings and really just treasured the gift of letting people be beyond the veils of their front doors and back doors and getting to spend real life with one another.Katie: Yeah so you've sought it out in that way. You've been seeking it. How were those experiences that you've had in the past in the intentional community that you have been different from the one that you experienced when you reached out to your neighbors and kind of had this project type experience where you're connecting over a shared idea, a creation versus like all living together in the same house?Ashley: Yeah, well it's nice because you have a goal and it's accomplishable and you're kind of bringing everyone in so that's different I would say. Then just all doing life together. You have an event and then it's done.Katie: Yeah, you've all achieved something together and like you said earlier and it's a way for everyone to use their specific gifts like you had the baker that came, neighbor Dan brought the trees, there were other people who probably set up the decorates and had ideas around where to plant the trees. Even the people who showed up that day, their gifts were their presence and getting enthusiastic about what's going on. And everybody can kind of have a role there and doing something that's kind of out of the ordinary.Ashley: Very out of the ordinary for Goshen. Yeah we had one experience where it was like an art installation where we zig-zagged rope through the trees and everyone brought a little lantern out, different sizes of light lite lanterns so by the end they had created this beautiful art piece and we talked about you've all brought your gifts here tonight, just being together and this is just a display of what could be as we spend time together and do life together.Katie: Yeah I love that imagery. So we're going to segue. To the time you decided to move away from this place. The moment you made the decision after all of this goodness had been created to say you know what we're going to try a new neighborhood. Take me to some of the decision making and what was that like? Was it difficult? Where you anxious about leaving? Did you feel like what if we regret this because we've made all these connections. What was your motive there?Ashley: Sure, yeah well I think one important thing to talk about as far as the project goes is we were in the midst of deciding while we were doing the project. So I asked my mentor should we do it in Goshen? Should we do it where we think we're going to go? And we kind of ended up deciding to do it now and do it where you are and I think there's a lot of lessons in that.We don't have to wait until we think everything is right to start building community and to start creating spaces of belonging for our neighbors and memory making moments for each other those are always good and always can be healing, so I'm glad we didn't wait. Katie: And you also have a two year old, three year old?Ashley: Three year old now.Katie: A three year old. So as parents too it's like well I'm going to wait until my kid gets older, things are less hectic. So doing it in the midst of all of it and what's the value in that that you found at the end even when you guys were packing up your bags and deciding to leave?Ashley: Well I think the biggest take away for us was that we built the muscle to like we now have the muscle to build community. And I”m just naturally looking for it all the time going like ‘oh what could we do here?' So we've done a couple of things in our new neighborhood not for any project per say but because we now have the muscle and we want community where we are. Katie: Yeah tell me what were some of the first few things that you did when you moved to the new neighborhood that maybe you didn't do when you moved to your Goshen neighborhood?Ashley: Yeah, so our new neighborhood before we had actually bought the house but we were pretty sure that was where we were headed it was trick-or-treat so we were like ok how often are you invited to every single person's house at the same time. Like this, we can't miss this.Katie: Yeah that's a good point.Ashley: Yeah like never.Katie: Yes please come knock on our door and we'll give you things.Ashley: So we went to that neighborhood that night, just to introduce ourselves and said we are probably going to be living right there and we're eager to connect with you guys.Katie: Wow so even before you put money down on the house, even before you closed on the house?Ashley: Yes, yes.Katie: Wow, ok.Ashley: Yeah, so we were excited about building community there and we really wanted to take what we were learning and not just leave it in Goshen, but bring it along with us for all of us. So that's one thing that we did, that was in late October and then in February we made jars of hot cocoa and put our picture on them and our address and we said we're your new neighbors and our daughter was in a little red wagon and just saying hello and that inspired lots of conversations and people coming to our house and bringing us stuff. So that kind of got the wheels spinning in the neighborhood I think.Katie: Were you writing down names after each one?Ashley: Yes, my husband actually was really intent too which was a fun dynamic to see him to start getting invested in the idea of community building because he didn't grow up building community like I did as much.Katie: And he was the note taker he was the one, yeah?Ashley: Yeah, wanting to know his neighbors.Katie: So I think what you just touched on which is really important is we think sometimes we need to be the ones welcomed in and instead you guys were the welcomers to your new neighborhood to your new neighbors to say hey we're here and we want to know you. So taking the first step doesn't always have to come from the other person.Ashley: Right, and I think that's kind of fun for the neighbors to be like ‘wait she flipped the switch, like what just happened there?' Yeah, and it was totally fun for us so we said we would do it again in a heartbeat because we got to go in people's houses and visit and people came in our house, it was nice. Katie: Yeah when you left your neighborhood behind did you have any lessons that you were taken from what you learned over that year with the Christmas tree project that you were like we're going to do it differently this time. We tried it that way and now let's try it this way. Was there anything that stood out where you're like…Ashley: Lessons learned?Katie: Yeah.Ashley: Yeah, I think the big lesson, my big takeaway from growing Christmas trees in Goshen was with a new event, a new project no one knows what to expect so it's really hard to get people invested unless they're a part of the creation of the idea, and so we only had a couple people that were involved with the creation of the idea. And so that ends up meaning that you're doing a lot of the creation and administration of the event, so my take away in the future is that I want our neighbors there with us like what should we do with our community what would be something that our community needs or wants that would be fun for everybody. So bringing everyone into the decision making piece..Katie: From the beginning?Ashley: From the beginning. Now we're trying to back track and go like maybe we do a Christmas planning in July so we get everybody to come together to start working towards the goal for the event.Katie: Yeah and it's what you said before neighbor Dan was invested from the beginning and he was somebody who brought a lot of people with him, so the people who come it's hard to sometimes invite the whole neighborhood if it's just your family. But the more people who come, the more networks they have and everybody's networks kind of show up too. But also you're saying just the excitement piece and getting it all together, it's not all on you as a family to plan it all and dream it all up and there's more shared ownership.Ashley: Right which means there's more presence at the event too. There's ten families that are excited about it and they're bringing all their gifts and networks there. So that's a big help, so I think that that would be if I was doing that again when we tried to do that but I think we're all just learning as we go and I think we did it by inviting a group of people, we weren't good at explaining this is what we're thinking about we just said come plan with us we're going to do an event and they were like i have other things going on so..Katie: Yeah, sounds like work.Ashley: Yeah, exactly, so eventually they came to the event and they're definitely a part of our community but not bringing people in early to help ideate and create it.Katie: What about just in terms of knowing neighbors and interacting with them differently are their things that you do as part of your lifestyle now that maybe you didn't do you know in your former neighborhood that know you can kind of.. I guess I'm asking that because you can reinvent yourself when you move somewhere, you can be a new person in a way. So there's a benefit in showing up as this new neighbor and being like ok this is the type of neighbor I want to be now, I might not have been that in my neighborhood prior but now I can show up and nobody knows me and I can start new right?Ashley: Yeah I think the big thing that we've done differently is just at the outset let people know that we're interested in being together. So a lot of people I've learned that in suburban neighborhoods like to play and do outdoor life in their backyard with their privacy fence and so we've spent a lot of time in our driveway and in the front yard and going for walks and interacting with people that way so some of it is just relearning how to be in a new environment too. Katie: Yeah I love that so you're spending time in the front yard so that when people get home from work and they pull in their driveway you can be like ‘hey'!Ashley: Right.Katie: Privacy, there's a value of privacy that we have as Americans.Ashley: For sure.Katie: But we aren't necessarily happy in our private lives we'd rather spend it with other people we just don't know what that looks like any more. So do you think that you have a different mindset than you started this with and in what way?Ashley: I definitely, I have a huge different mindset yeah. In so many different ways I mean it's like so many different layers, my mindset during community building I'm still super excited about community building in our new neighborhood and I'm also so grateful that i now see people who are neighbors with their gifts. Like that I think is different than before which is surprising to me because I thought that I saw people that way always but I think you know as we were getting to know people in our new neighborhood we were like ‘oh my gosh this is amazing we have this person across the street that does this or that's interested in that' and before I think we were just trying to do our own thing and then relating to people asit happened where as now we're much more intentional about making it happen that we connect with those people and creating spaces where we can do that together.Katie: So seeing those gifts as an avenue for ‘this is how we can connect with them, wow' let's learn from that person or is that the difference?Ashley: Yeah and I think even outside of our neighborhood I'm just learning how other people we're connected with have their gifts and who they are, connect with us and vice versa.Katie: Like the common?Ashley: Commonality, yeah the things we share and care about. For example, my uncle is a musician and piano tuner and everytime he and my daughter get together they just love doing music together. And so I asked can we do this quarterly even though you live two hours away, can we like break bread together and do music together and so we've been doing that for two and a half years since we started getting involved here. So I think just being more intentional and making it happen putting it on the calendar and dreaming in a different way.Katie: Yeah and you brought up your daughter and I think I want to bring it back to this idea that in the beginning you were like I need to prepare her to be part of the community. In what ways do you see her now as a part of the community and was there preparation in that or did it sort of did she, did she just get immersed in this way through gifts?Ashley: Yeah I think I've been really intentional about not putting her up on a stage to be engaged with but instead just being a part of our family and people engaging with us and with her. If that makes sense. Katie: Was that a shift for you to think of it that way?Ashley: I think possibly yeah I think I had an intrinsic sense of her belonging and her belonging in her community but I think I had to learn what things I want to bring our family around and to fuel and what things I want to invest in with our family, if that makes sense.Katie: Time-wise even?Ashley: Yeah.Katie: Where you're spending your time?Ashley: Yeah, we did study with our congregation with families and the number one asset the number one deficit that they had was time. That's your number one thing, right, you have to spend it where it counts and so for us we really decided that we look like being together as a family and being with our extended family and being with our neighbors.Katie: Yeah. I guess that part of it in the beginning you were looking at therapy and things to get her ready for people and now you're just like you're doing those things still.Ashley: Yeah, and I guess my answer is I always had a sense intrinsically that she belonged no matter what and I think that having conversations with my mentor affirmed my intrinsic sense of her belonging, does that make sense?Katie: Yes, do you think that hearing that from somebody who is in the disability field to say something as ordinary as like go get to know your neighbors, was that.. Because it's playing into your instincts as a parent that you already know and it seems like most places aren't playing into those instincts they're telling you ‘we're experts and this is what we know that you don't'. And for someone to give you something that you already know as a way of life, you have taken that and it's caught on so quickly and so rapidly.So I guess that was kind of part of my question was like in the beginning you were waiting maybe on ‘well we've got to get these things done, we've got to line this stuff up and then maybe we'll find community or maybe there will be a way to be connected to people, maybe there will be a better time' and then hearing from somebody who's in this role to say no it's now, that you do it the best time is now.Ashley: Yeah, I think it was helpful that my mentor also was involved with their neighborhood, like they're doing it, I've been involved in community and i know the fruits of it. It's helpful to be reminded that it's good and my eyes were just stuck on ensuring that I did everything that I thought I needed to do to support her. It was kind of like with blinders on just missing like the biggest piece of providing her abundant community now and making those connections.Katie: Well what I love about this too is that it's a metaphor for most people's lives, whatever that thing is that you're trying to do the best at, do right at is preventing you from just living and usually that is all you need to be doing. But we're going, we're trying to succeed or we're trying to reach these different heights that have these requirements and steps along the way.Ashley: And then we reach those and there's more. Yeah, we're on like the treadmill of the institution and instead of getting invited out of that and saying ok I'm also going to look for something outside of those boundaries to build my life on is huge.Katie: So what is at stake for you for your family if you don't make an effort then to get off the treadmill? If you don't make this effort to connect to the people around you?Ashley: My daughter being isolated as she gets older and I mean for a girl who is in my bones to know the joy of community that's just not an option. So it makes me really sad to think of her facing isolation when it's not in her bones either.Katie: Were you getting a glimpse of that already? I mean she's really young, were you already feeling like that was part of your lives or becoming part of your lives?Ashley: Well interestingly I was going to a lot of different community things, events and stuff and we were the only ones there who had a child with a disability and I was like I know that's that is not always the case but in the unique places that I was that was the case. So one I thought it was important that I was there and two I just hate that that's the culture that that's set out for families for anyone that's marginalized, right?Katie: The culture being we don't go to ordinary places in the community.Ashley: Yeah being like, well the culture being you're welcome if you are a certain way.Katie: Yes so the culture speaks more towards the families of and unwelcoming sense to say like there's a group for that and it's over there.Ashley: Yeah I think one thing was we belong and we're going and she was really young so I mean when you go to a six month old story time it's fine. Difference is more evident as kids age but I think so kids get older it probably would be more challenging to face that head on for the first time without having some understanding and foundation in kind of what do we believe about this what do we believe is true.Katie: As you grow into connections in your neighborhood do you think you're kind of heading off that uncomfortable feeling in the community when you, as your daughter does get older?Ashley: Yeah it's interesting because we have two or three intervention specialists in our neighborhood. So you can always tell when people have a predisposed idea and so you know you just meet those in conversation and bring to the conversations what you believe in small snippets over time. But yeah I think we have work to do and I think our daughter will lead the way in that with our support. So I think the biggest thing I think maybe it was a quote I read from Starfire, you guys were quoting someone that talked about when you toddle, have people who have known you since you've toddled. Do you remember that quote?Katie: David Pitonyak, “Who holds your story?”Ashley: They'll be like that's.. You know we know her, yeah?Katie: Yes. Ending on a piece of hope what is one hope that you have for your family in the next ten years that has to do with your community building work?Ashley: I hope that we establish rhythms with our neighbors that go on year after year and that we know one another's stories. And when my neighbor is sick I know what to make him because I know what he likes, you know, just the good life of community. And if my daughter is out and she isn't supposed to be out then they know me and they know where to bring her, or that she gets invited to the pool party across the street. Just the basic stuff, nothing extravagant but maybe extraordinary in this time, yeah. Katie: Yeah that is extraordinary, is there anything else you would want to say?Ashley: I don't think so.Katie: Ok I love that, thank you.

In This Episode: Who are Void and Katie? What could this be all about? If you guessed that they’re podcasters and that this is a Disney podcast… good job! Cookie for you. Gold Star. You win the day. Learn all there is to learn (or as much as we can cram into a short intro episode). Join Our Community! Discord: discord.geektogeekmedia.com Slack: slack.geektogeekmedia.com Reddit: reddit.com/r/geektogeekcast Subscribe Subscription links coming soon! Geek to Geek Podcast Network Geek to Geek Geek Fitness Dragon Quest FM Geektitude Tea Time with Katie and Chelsea TroytlePower CapsuleJay Geekery Blog And Sometimes Rob

TRANSCRIPT:0:00 – 0:44Bridget: I'm Bridget Vogt and I have worked at Starfire for twenty years in a variety of ways.Katie: That's two decades. So that's a long time. What has been all the variety of ways?Bridget: When I first started it was just office help and doing the outings that we had during the evening and weekends. You know a few years after that we started a day program so I started that, doing the day program. A few years after that we started StarfireU, so I worked in both and then just StarfireU and now I am doing one-on-one work with people and their families.0:45 – 2:46Katie: What do you think has changed in the way that you show up to work from then and now, and what has stayed the same?Bridget: Well I'd say there's just a different way of showing up when you're starting your day with a room of 12 people or 15 or 20 people with disabilities versus showing up and talking to one person at a time. There's a much different energy, there's a different effort, there's a different priority that is just the reality of probably day program life. You know, you're hoping that everybody gets along and that they can say they had a pretty good day and I think the days of working with a group of people at a time it is more about being an entertainer and showing them a good time and keeping them happy and building them up. Now working just with one person at a time it is still about building them up and making sure they're confident but it's not quite the same, the word entertainer keeps coming to mind. The people who were really successful in the day program that keep coming to mind were the staff with big personalities who drew people in with just who they were naturally and they could almost perform, if that makes sense. They were a good storyteller or funny, all those things, and that's not necessarily as useful or needed with just one person. So you're still building into the person to help them understand who they are and that they're a good person, that they have gifts to give, what are they, and figuring all that stuff out. And that's kind of the biggest difference is working with one person and thinking.. You know.. Where do you belong... what do you do? Where are you going to be happy doing?Katie: Yeah, so it's a little bit more of an in-depth conversation when you're sitting with somebody, you don't need to be the entertainer. You need to be the deep listener and over-shadowing a person by being too enthusiastic or too much of the entertainer could give the opposite effect than when you're working with just one person at the time.Bridget: Yeah, I think that's possible. Like I definitely think that's happened, you know we're working to help people meet people and if you kind of take over and don't let that person who you're working with shine more than you than you're not doing a very good job.2:57 – 4:30Katie: Yeah, so you stayed through this change, and you've had to turn on different parts of you or skills/strengths that you have during the change, and so what's been really consistent about the work? Obviously, it's kept you here, doing it.Bridget: Well I think we have, one way or another, throughout these times — we did what we thought was best and that's still the case. I care a great deal for all the people we've met with disabilities out there. And to recognize that appealing to a group of people doesn't change what happens in their lives in ten years. Letting that sink in and figuring out how to do something that hopefully will mean something in ten years with or without my presence is the bigger key too. So I think that's what keeps me here, is the belief that what I'm doing is going to matter in ten years to these people that I know. Katie: So obviously like a deep well of love or care for people with disabilities is consistent in you, you showed up in both worlds with that, with that intention.Bridget: Yeah, yeah I'd say so. There wasn't a whole lot of outside forces drawing or keeping me. There are plenty of potentially simpler things to do out there in the world definitely probably more lucrative things to do out there in the world but that's not where my heart was or what I felt called to do. Annd Starfire seemed like a good place at the time when I started here.4:31 – 6:30Katie: Yeah, Starfire had something different even back then twenty years ago than other places, it was founded by family members who were looking for a better way and so that thread of intentionality and family driven-ness has kind of carried through.One of the things you told me before this podcast around building community was that If we want other people to learn how to build community or do it on their own we have to really learn how to do it ourselves. Take me back to when things did try to shift to Starfire being more of a community building place for people with disabilities to connect to the community — and what was your involvement in the community when that change started to happen?Bridget: You know, before anyone saw any changes at Starfire before it started to change Tim and I, mainly Tim, started doing a lot more learning around topics like asset-based community development (ABCD). And being introduced to some concepts that we had not heard of or knew anything about and kind of working through those and wrestling with some of the things we were learning with. You know if there was a belief that the community is the answer, it sounds great that the community can be the answer but we don't always see it. But part of why I think for us what we had to acknowledge was well our community is not our answer, we've lived in Bellevue for three years and we don't know anyone, we only know two of our neighbors and that's probably about it. And we go to work and then we come back and then we had some old friends from like college and high school and those are who we see and not our neighbors.That was sort of the beginning of noticing, we don't really know our neighbors so this idea of community being the answer is just ridiculous. But is it ridiculous or is it that we just haven't tried? And if this is possible, if community is the answer, then we probably need to figure out what community it is, and what does it look like and what are we doing to be active in our community. 6:31 – 7:06Katie: Describe Bellevue, describe what that neighborhood is like.Bridget: It is one square mile, in Kentucky, on the river.Katie: Is that it?Bridget: Yeah, one square mile.Katie: Oh wow.Bridget: You didn't know we were that little? So it's pretty small, what else would you say about Bellevue. It's overall a working class neighborhood.Katie: How many people in the one square mile?Bridget: I don't know.Katie: It's pretty concentrated, like there are a lot of houses.Bridget: Yeah, I mean it's urban. You know houses are very close together there's not a lot of yards.Katie: There's a big.. There's a great little main strip there with coffee shops and...Bridget: Yeah like your typical main street.Katie: Kind of on the river.Bridget: Close to it, yeah.7:07 – 9:16Katie: Ok, so when you're thinking back to that time and you're just learning these new concepts around community building and you're looking in you're neighborhood and you're like ok there's.. We don't have any connections here.. Did you have any revelations at that time or what started to shift and how did you start building community?Bridget: Tim was a little more, I know he had been to Peter Block and John McKnight and they had been talking about neighborhood interviews. Truly going and finding people and interviewing them and Tim did that. He was like, “Alright the challenge is I've got to meet five different people, I'm going to interview them on their gifts and talents,” and then he was like, “you should too.” And I said maybe in a more informal way.Katie: What was your hesitation around that?Bridget: Yeah, well it's weird right, like this is an awkward beginning of like ‘hey stranger' or someone that I've just seen in passing, ‘Could we sit down and I'll interview you?' I think anyone would say once they've done it it's not weird at all it's just the hurdle of asking. Because I think I did talk to a few people but I didn't… I would just kind of talk to them instead of like scheduling it. I would just kind of be in a conversation and kind of work my way through what the interview probably would be.Katie: So like what are your talents, interests, passions, skills?Bridget: Yeah what do you like to do?Katie: So you kind of start with the low hanging fruit, I already know them..Bridget: I started with the easy-peasy, ‘Hey friend that I already know' and then we started talking about doing a starting a community garden in Bellevue, I wanted to do it, one of the people we like already knew was interested in doing it and then that kind of grew out of there. Like ok throw it out to the masses, who would want to start a community garden?Katie: So once you started talking to neighbors you start to kind of plot ideas? I feel like that's kind of a natural thing that happens just with people, is once you get to talking you start talking about what would be great in our neighborhood? And that conversations just kind of naturally evolves right like, probably pretty informally like the way that your conversations evolved.Bridget: Yeah I think so, like what would you want to do? Oh do we have this here?9:17 – 12:36Katie: So did you find that there are people who are really driven/motivated to get something created off the ground like ‘ok we'll do all the plans for the garden' and then there are the people who step in once it's there and say ‘yeah we're going to establish this and make it set'?Bridget: I don't know, there were some people who were interested in the beginning but they had some pretty… They were randomly enough when I went to community garden training there were two other people that I never met from Bellevue.Katie: Is that how you got started was just to go and learn how to do it?Bridget: That was one of my commitments, is I said I'm going to well I thought that I would get one I would interested helpful practice probably. And all the like powers that be were very supportive like the neighborhood association the people that were there at the time, had talked about it but they've never done it and I'm like I'm really going to do it, I've already signed up for the class. And they were like sure, go for it, you know we'll support it and you can do it under the neighborhood association umbrella.Katie: Had you gardened before?Bridget: Just in the backyard a little bit, I mean I still would say I'm not an expert gardener. Whatever, you plant seeds that grow, maybe they don't, and that's ok you just. You just keep going and that's what's great about it because the weather is unpredictable, the season is unpredictable. There's no guarantee that just because you did it well last year you could do the exact... You could think you're doing the exact same thing and it's not.Katie: I like that approach, I really like that because I think there's a lot of wisdom in that for people who want to do something that they don't know how to do and maybe think they'll never know how to do or be experts at, and for something like gardening that can be really intimidating. And what you're saying is that's ok even if it fails. The whole point isn't necessarily...Bridget: Well, and that would be my perspective on it and what I bring to the community garden. I think I was talking about how there were two people at that training who wanted to grow their own food. They had plans to make a community garden, they wanted to sustain their living, they wanted to plant enough food to last their... They wanted to eat off their land. But it wasn't going to be their land it was going to be some neighbor's property that as an empty lot. And we kind of parted ways because they were very serious about, like we will be producing enough food for ourselves and the difference between the lot they already thought they could use and some of the lots like empty some vacant property that we were looking at they were like “oh there's not enough room, not enough room” and I was like “not enough room for what?” But like my idea was not going out to produce enough food to support all of Bellevue.It was always going to be a community garden, a place to meet, a place to garden, a place to enjoy each other. And hopefully get some vegetables out of it. So meeting those people at first was exciting and then it was like this is a struggle, they were not interested in the community aspect of it.Katie: The community aspect of it is what.. And that's what you went to people with.. It wasn't do you want to grow vegetables it was do you want to be part of a community that is growing vegetables?Bridget: Right. Yeah like bring your kids, it won't matter, we won't care. No hard core rules no you know some of the strict regulations.12:37 – 15:18Katie: That's the key. So then how did the potluck evolve?Bridget: There was ourselves and another family, the Salzmans, who I guess we just decided we should try it. There wasn't a whole lot of planning involved other than like we all do it once a month, we'll have it at the city building and that's it. And we don't know what will happen, I think it was just mainly them and just saying like well it might just be the four of us - and kids who show up and we'll just see what happens from there.Katie: And so during this time, you guys are starting to shake a little bit of your patterns about how you live in your neighborhood, can you talk about some of those smaller micro-things that you've done to build community and ways that you've also met neighbors. Because you know it helps to have that form of communication where it's not just a flier going out. What were the ways you got to kind of know more neighbors so you could make those invites?Bridget: I think a lot of it was, one the coffee shop became much more of a hub. So there were people coming and going and just running into people and saying hello. There were programs that our kids did, like there was a basketball program with young kids and we walked around, I think we went around to a few different people and talked to them about, ‘hey would you come? You'd be welcome.” There was a neighborhood group started on Facebook too.Katie: And I love that you guys do stuff in your front yard too.Bridget: Yeah we usually have our fire pit out there, so we'll sit out there. Halloween we sit out there with a fire and hot dogs or just anytime and there's quite a few kids in our neighborhood especially at this point, that just kind of wander around, hang out looking for stuff to do. So if we're doing that they can come and hang out and sometimes their parents come with them. Sometimes it's a formal ‘hey we're having a fire pit who wants to come?'Katie: And the same spirit happens at the garden. Right where people just kind of walk by and they see it so that's an invitation?Bridget: Yeah and I have gone to the school and done, like with the after school program, pretty much since the beginning brought a group weekly or however often works in their schedule. So there were a lot of kids then that I got to know who I would meet their parents somewhere in the grocery or wherever and be like ‘oh hi I know you' and then they'd have to explain who is this lady? And then there is stuff like when people walk by, still like ten years later like ‘What is this? We have a community garden?' And the community garden was communal, that was the other thing that we did, it's not as if you pay a membership due and get so much property or square foot bed, it's just everybody gardening together, so that if somebody is to come once, they don't have to wait until next year to get their bed or whatever. They come and they can do whatever we're doing, like everybody works on it together, same thing with kids and everything.15:19 – 16:44Katie: So I mean taking it back to when you guys were first looking at Bellevue and saying this is not a place where we can build community to today it just seems like...Bridget: I don't think we thought that we couldn't build it but we just hadn't.Katie: Yeah or I guess..Bridget: We just didn't know what community was, like to sit back and be like ‘oh yeah when we grew up we could talk to all these neighbors and we did run.. Like I did run around with my neighbor friends, there were five or six kids I was allowed to go around the block... I just think we as adults had not even attempted. Like we were just the people coming in and out our front door, parking, getting out and going out to work, coming home and staying home or going out somewhere else. And we just had that shift of well what is going on here in Bellevue?We should be a part of this. If this is where we are going to live, let's live here. It shifted from work and people we know from work or old college friends that we're going to go visit and see to shifting to like well who are our neighbors? You know maybe we thought that the neighborhood itself wasn't very welcoming like when I look back nobody welcomed us what the heck. But we've been here long enough we are the people who have lived here, we should be the “welcomers” so I think we just kind of recognized our own role. If we want our community to look a certain way we've got to do it. We can't wait and think well nobody else did that, so I guess it doesn't exist.Katie: That's just not part of our neighborhood.Bridget: It's just not a thing.16:45 – 18:41Katie: And that's also something that you almost don't want to impose on people its like ‘well nobody else is doing that here so maybe that means people don't want it and if we tried we'd be imposing' or we'd be asking people too much. But I'm wondering too is there something to the rhythm of the garden and the potluck that has allowed for this to take shape?Bridget: I don't know I wanted to make a community garden. I think that as far as where is your energy best, where gives you energy, what makes you happy is a big factor. So if it's going to make you miserable to garden then you're probably not going to be the person that starts the community garden. Like you might help with some aspect of it but going to the garden overall is a fun time for me, I enjoy it, it makes me happy. I love when new people come I love when old people show up versus trying to do something just because I think it's a good thing to do, if that makes sense. There's definitely been times and roles that I have taken on because ‘oh wouldn't you, would you be willing to do this for us, you'd be really great at that' ..Ok, I can do that, you know I'll commit to that role… and then realizing this is killing me.. Like this just makes me miserable, why would I say I'd do this and now I say I've done it so I'll do it but I've got to step out quickly. And I think that's more like there are plenty of ways to build community and plenty of things that you can do, I think it's just making sure you're enjoying them. And then it's also possible to make sure you're enjoying them with the right people. You know some of those..Katie: Keeping an eye out for who is going to be in the same.. Who has the same motivations as you.Bridget: Versus being like, oh if you're willing. You know sometimes you agree just to have help, to have anyone on board to do something but if its... You know what you want and you're going the wrong direction you might be really disappointed.18:42 – 21:04Katie: You can be discerning when you build community and it doesn't mean you're not a good neighbor.Bridget: Yeah, I think the other things we've done like the potluck we were very conscious of doing things that are simple, keeping it simple, don't make it complicated, don't promise gourmet meals. We have never said that we are going to... You know the tables will be set up by 5:30 and we will have brought the main dish, anything like that. It's kind of, the more people come the more comfortable they are, like “oh it starts at five o'clock and that means we just get here at five o'clock and we start setting tables up and chairs and arranging the room it doesn't mean at five o'clock dinner is served and you've walked into like a dinner party with tablecloths. It's very laid back, we make sure there are plates which actually on Sunday we ran out but oh well. People figured it out, they reused some, ate off the cake plates.Katie: Yeah, that's the part that stresses me out about potluck, when I hear it and I think of hosting it I think I have to bring the main dish, I have to be the one to set up everything and you figured out a way to make that low key.Bridget: You just kind of set it up with the expectation of 1) there's not really a host, like Ryan will put it on the Facebook group and he'll set the events, it's every fourth Sunday and that's kind of done for the year actually. Between a few of us we throw in paper plates and forks every once in a while, so yeah and just kind of knowing we could have put the bar really high from the beginning but I think at that point we were aware enough to know that that would wear us down. We wanted to make sure it would be nothing any of us dreaded going to and that's not going to keep it going.Katie: Yeah, and how could you ever go on vacation or have a missed week?Bridget: Yeah and if we're not there what do you do? You know luckily there's not a key, the way Bellevue works is we just call the police and they have a key to the building and they let us in. Now anybody, the early birds know that. So if we're not the first one there the other first person knows ‘oh I just call this number and they'll come and let us in and we can get the tables out and start moving things around.' I mean that all took time you know, but I think just to be cautious or thoughtful about if it's something that you want to do for a long time, what is it that you enjoy doing and it won't drain you over the long-haul?21:05 – 23:13Katie: And how often do you go to the garden? How often are you..Bridget: In the season I'll go twice a week.Katie: Ok, and are you going at a set time when everyone else is coming too?Bridget: Yes, Wednesdays 6:30, Sunday at 9:30.Katie: So you have set hours?Bridget: Those are the established.. They kind of shift from year to year but usually it's like Wednesday night and Sunday morning.Katie: Ok. How many people would you say are showing up to these different things, does that even matter? How important is that to you?Bridget: It's great when there is a crowd. There's probably like 30-40 people plus kids, and then some kids at the potluck.Katie: Starting out it was just you and the Salzmans right?Bridget: Well a couple more people came and even then obviously in the time that we've been doing them, who shows up and who is still showing up has changed. The same thing with the garden, some people who were really helpful and got us you know came and did some hard work at the beginning, you know one couple's moved out of Bellevue another one is still semi-involved, actually a couple of people have moved out.. You know so some people who were involved are gone. And now it's a different wave of people almost. And then there's people that for some of those people that were a part of the community garden they never came to a potluck, that wasn't their scene. We even though it is kind of close.. Bellevue is pretty small, so you could be conscious of — ‘oh they've never shown up once' but it's not their thing. So I think to just keep that.. Because when you first.. When things first get started and they're sort of in that fragile state of beginning, it is sort of fragile right and you think ‘oh how come they aren't coming to the garden, I thought they'd help and they've never shown up.' And you can take it personally but then again another part of living in a neighborhood for your life is expecting you to live by these same people. So if you want to hold a grudge about the fact they said they'd show up and they didn't you probably aren't going to be great neighbors, you know like this is a lifetime of living so let's not hold a grudge about the time they said they'd show up or why didn't they and all that kind of stuff. Because that's not necessarily going to help build community either.23:14 – 24:18Katie: One of the things that I'm wondering now is if it is a new neighbor and they want to get involved in the garden, do they contact you? If they do want to come to the potluck is there a main person there to kind of coordinate things or..Bridget: I think the Facebook group is a pretty big communication device for everyone, and that shows the times and then if somebody asks a question then the person tags my name or somebody else in there and say “hey they want to know about this” or you know I think Facebook is a big driver as far as communication that I've had and then it might be a personal message or text from somebody whose met, you know maybe they live next door to somebody who had that question and they say ‘oh here's her phone number or I'll text her or email her.'Katie: So you are the main contact for a lot of these questions for the garden?Bridget: I mean for the garden I am, I don't know that anybody really reaches out for the potluck as much as they would just show up and be like ‘what is this, who should I talk to?' And then people would probably point out a few different people to talk to there.24:19 - 26:40Katie: So when people talk to you I guess they see you as a coordinator of the garden especially, and they come to you and they have a brand new idea for the garden or they want to implement something, being in that role as the main contact how do you deal with that how do you respond?Bridget: Usually it's that sounds great, you can do it. Just recently we had a big, one of our neighbors was part of Crossroads and she was leading a go global effort in Bellevue and she wanted to do it at the community garden and she was like, “I've got some ideas” and I was like “I'd love to hear them” and they wanted to put in a pergola and a grill. The grill didn't happen but the pergola is up and it was like that would be amazing, that would be great, and they did it. There have been many suggestions like at the potluck we should use silverware, all this plastic and I was like, “I hear ya I bring my own.” My answer to that is me and my family, we have the dishes we come here with and we take them home.Katie: So you bring your own set of dishes and silverware?Bridget: I do.Katie: Oh that's smart.Bridget: But I provide the paper ones as well, but one of the people who comes says we should really.. Or shouldn't we all.. We should just have silverware here and I'm like, “if you want to bring it and take it home and wash it I would love it.” But I am also making it clear that I'm not volunteering to do that.Katie: To clean everybody's dishes.Bridget: I am taking home these five plates and these five forks because I would really probably resent everyone as I washed their dirty dishes.Katie: Oh my gosh yeah.Bridget: But I would love it if somebody really was motivated and was like I'm going to do this, this is my thing I'm going to do every month, I would totally support that.Katie: Yeah it goes back to do what you want other people to do, sort of be the change by living it. I think people forget what an individual looks like versus what an organization looks like. It's like an organization who runs a potluck would probably take that and implement a new system of dishwashing because they could but an individual or a family..Bridget: Or organize like it's your month. Like could you imagine the rotating..Katie: No.Bridget: Who knows.. Who knows what any organization would do.Katie: But that's the slipery slope of it getting really entangled and emmeshed in this sort of process, agenda, structure that ends up killing the spirit of it.26:41 – 34:21Katie: Now when you look at your neighborhood, Bellevue, what does community look like? What would be like a key image?Bridget: There's a few that come to mind, like one is the ability for my... like Patrick who is old enough and friends live with he just walks around and finds friends. Like that's a pretty great image for me, like that's kind of his classic line at this point is “I'm going to go out and find some friends, I'll be back.” That's a pretty big deal for your kids to be able to go out and find some friends to play with. I don't know there's a lot of images, you know we just had the memorial day parade and we weren't in the parade but knew.. Waving at all the groups that were walking by, how many people we knew or as people go to sit down or as we go to sit down talking to so many of the people that are around that's pretty great.. That's a big day for Bellevue I feel like Memorial day parade but pretty great.Katie: Do you ever feel the need to go back in time to this hidden life in pulling in from work and going in the house and not talking to any of your neighbors, is there ever a time when you not regret but wish you could be more under cover in your neighborhood?Bridget: I don't think so, no, like I said I think there is the things you learn about being in community and being around your neighbors of knowing how far to take of personal feelings right, “oh you hurt my feelings.” And kind of working.. Being aware of who you are and why that hurt your feelings, like don't hold onto that forever because I could find a way to probably be upset with a lot of people if I wanted to, right? Like we could find hurts everywhere or slight grievances whether they're real or not, whole other story, but if I wanted to take that as a personal afront to what they said or not showing up..Katie: Or even just differences in political opinions.Bridget: That would be a big one right now. Like stuff like that, Facebook profile what somebody said on Facebook or on the group page you know, like how much do you engage in those conversations that people get started. So no I don't, at the same time there's been moments of struggle where you have to sit down and say “ok this is what community is about, it is about you can be this person and we can still talk about our kids being friends even though we have the.. We are not alike in a lot of ways.Katie: That part of it is what I think is the most magical. Is when you can actually get to a place where you can be common with people who you are so different from and you can feel connected and familiar with them even though you might never have chosen them but they're your neighbor. It's kind of like family but in a different way.Bridget: It is, and it's not to.. You know to paint this picture there are plenty of people who don't want to know me. It's not as if the whole neighborhood is all sharing.. You know there are those people who think a community garden is a waste of space, that's fine. There were people when we first started who thought we were taking away a place for kids to play, we can win them over or just ignore them. You know they'll either be won over all with time, I mean its not our intent, it's not as if we're hiding some intention other than.. I don't know if some people are suspicious like “why are you doing this” “what's your end goal?” And I think they're have been some people who have asked me that and I was like “um what do you mean? End goal? We're going to get to know each other isn't that enough?” But that's not enough some people just don't.. I don't know people have suspicious nature sometimes, sometimes they don't understand that you can just be doing it. I don't know how many times Tim has been asked if he is going to run for mayor. He's not.. Or city council.. Like are you running for something. Some people thought I worked at the school, “well you're a teacher there right?” “no, no I just live in Bellevue.” But like people's concepts of why people do things, you know it's your job to do them versus no this is just what I do for fun. This is my hobby.Katie: Yeah and it.. I think the intrastent motivation behind why you're doing something or if you were trying to get something out of it even if it wasn't this is my job or I'm trying to run for city council, if it was something less tangible than that like “I want to do this so I am.. So that people like me so I'm a good neighbor.. I'm going to do this so everyone thanks me and loves me for this garden at the end of it I'm going to be well renowned” so even that gets you in trouble because there are people that say, “you took away my this this or this” by doing it, you can't make everybody happy, you can't win everybody over so your motivation has to be pretty.. I would even think it gets whittled down to being just a pure motivation of “the only reason I would do this is because I love it and I want to be with the community. The community doesn't have to all of it but if some people do and we can enjoy it together than that's enough. I can see though where that would be really hurtful to be like “but wait a minute, wait I'm not trying to hurt anyone why is this being misconstrued?”Bridget: Why, why would you mock my garden? What do you think this is? But yeah. So you know that's one of the learning, take your toys and go home or stick it out and see what happens, see who comes around, all things with time. Sometimes its hard at this point to be like “wow it's been ten years” ten years of growing and what did it look like then, what were the struggles when we started versus what are they now? You know, I think overall the struggles now.. There's not really.. We kind of went over some of the hurdles and now it's just like I don't stress about it a lot. You know if people's expectations when they come to the potluck are let down because there wasn't a greeter at the door or there wasn't assigned seats, or whatever they had in their mind when they come in the door they may come and be disappointed because it wasn't organized enough and they really think it should be organized. And they probably don't come back and that's too bad I wish they would but at the same time this is maybe not where their energy is fulfilling, like they would be really stressed out by our lack of..Katie: So loose structure just kind of lends itself to anybody being able to fit in at the same time..Bridget: But there are people who come to the potluck who do not always bring a dish for whatever reason, they don't cook maybe they can't afford the meal, nobodies checking at the door. We can all show up differently and bring a different gift and that ties pretty directly to our work right and all that we have done. Not everybody.. The stricter the ways are the more exacting and perfect you have to be. At the community garden it would be really hard for groups of kids to show up at our community garden if you can't touch this and you can't touch that and if you step there.. I knew I wasn't going to organize.. I wasn't going to manage ten plots and ten people's opinions on how each plot should look. I was like heck no. That's one of the things garden managers.. Community garden managers do.34:22 – 36:18Katie: Ok so it has a lot of your spirit in it and whatever community effort is built has the person who starts it spirits in it. So let's take it back to Starfire's work real quick. Where is this type of community building that you do in your own life where does that show up in your work at Starfire and how is it influencing your work with disabilities one on one, do you think you'd be able to do some type of job if you weren't doing this at home?Bridget: Yeah, I think I could. I can definitely.. I know I believe in the community building work. I know it, I've seen it I've lived it in my own live and seen how if we had not changed or shifted what we were doing around our own neighborhood I don't know what our kids would be doing. Because of how we've shifted and lived I know that there is a lot of good things a lot of potential out here for communities to build up around. So I think that helps motivate the work but I think I could do it even if I hadn't. I wouldn't quite understand all the ins and outs I wouldn't have had the experiences to understand or think through some of the things but some have probably played off each other too.Katie: So your work at Starfire has kind of informed your role in your neighborhood and vice versa?Bridget: I would say it has.Katie: Yeah, how could it not.Bridget: I don't know how it wouldn't have at this point but I'm sure they've definitely influenced each other.Katie: That's the work life blend I think that was talked about at the beginning of this change at Starfire. It's not that we have to take our work home and do our work at home it just means that our work is actually is a way of life and we do it everywhere. We do it at our work but we don't clock out and go home and be sucky neighbors because it kind of just influences the way you live everywhere.36:19 – 38:14Katie: Why do you think it's important for you to do this work in people with disabilities lives?Bridget: Well I think the.. What I've seen in our own world and I think with some of the people that have started projects as families too is that it kind of spurs on the next thing. So by starting something it kind of opens another door, it's a ripple effect of all of it. So I think that is somebody starts something in their neighborhood and then you know you don't necessarily have to do it all, there will be other people who are motivated to something else then maybe you just show up to support them or tell them they did a great job later on. It's not you for everything, but I definitely think for more people to know each other is good for everyone, for sure.Katie: So what is your hope for the next ten years, in the next ten years, let's say ten years from now what is your hope for Bellevue?Bridget: I think that's pretty hard because I think Bellevue is pretty great right now it doesn't need to change anymore, but I'm sure there will be change in ten years and hopefully it will all be good change. My hope is that it is just a welcoming happy community for everyone and continues to be that and in ten years my sons will then be young adults will want to be there too. That this is a place where they want to be and feel as strongly connected to as they do now.Katie: And maybe carry through with some of the work that you guys have set?Bridget: Maybe I can't imagine.. In their own way they'll be doing something else. I have no doubt they'll be doing something.Katie: Maybe they'll run for mayor. One of them will run for mayor.Bridget: No, well maybe who knows. We'll see.Katie: Alright well thank you, I appreciate it.Bridget: Thank you Katie.

Scott: One of Kyle's big interests is birds. So what we did was created a birding weekend, and invited a bunch of guests who were connected with the Audubon Society, Cincinnati chapter, Cincinnati Bird Club. People along that line those who share the same interest in birding as Kyle does.Katie: Yeah and this interest in birding is more than just - I like to be outside and in the woods, right? Tell me about that interest that Kyle has and what that looks like.Tammi: When Kyle was born we had two acres in the woods and my husband is the biggest Audubon-nut known to man. And we had every bird in our yard. So Scott had all these CDs from Audubon and from Cornell University of bird calls.Tammi: What we didn't realize is Kyle's gift is audio memory and at age 2, age 3 he was putting those CDs in our old stereo and memorizing, we didn't realize, he was memorizing all those bird calls by track. We're thinking three hundred, four hundred, or five hundred bird calls he has memorized, and he still knows them to age 20. Katie: That is incredible, I didn't realize that it was something that started that young. So when you chose what to do, you were thinking around Kyle's interests. Why were you looking at Kyle's interest in particular?Scott: Well we want to get him integrated, involved in the community - trying to link him up with like-minded people. People with the same interests, shared interests.Katie: So let's unpack how you came up with the idea to eventually have a retreat, what was your initial concept around what you would do?Tammi: My initial thought was a running event, Kyle ran cross country in eight grade and he wants to run again. But Scott and I don't run long distance. So I thought I thought we would set some kind of annual running event. And that was mom, all on my own, in my own head, I get caught in my head.Katie: What do you mean by that? Why was it like being caught?Tammi: When we came to Starfire and started learning different strategies. Taking people to lunch, taking other runners, birders, artists, taking even neighbors, just taking people to lunch and pick their brains, I just call it getting out of my own head.Scott: Yeah the cool thing about some of this was when we first started thinking about this we thought well we can do this, we can do this with no input from anybody else you know we'll come up with the idea and then we can help execute. And then talking to a particular person at Starfire we were told to just talk to people, see what they think and let them kind of run with the program. Don't plan everything for yourself, this is not about you, this is about Kyle integrating into the community. Don't even make the event about him, just make an event of which he is an equal part of and let people volunteer and get the buy in from that.Katie: How important do you think those coffees were and those plannings were over time?Tammi: They were critical.Scott: Critical that's the word I was thinking too.Tammi: It was fun and it was critical to get everyone's feedback and to brainstorm with others. The synergy of getting all our ideas together.Scott: Yeah, simple conversations and getting buy-in, otherwise you're going in cold asking people to do something when they don't even know who you are. It just, you have to.Tammi: And we took a few birders to lunch and they said, well why don't we rent a cabin out in rural Adams County and go birding? And that had never crossed our minds. Scott: And then all the pieces, well what would we need to do for this and this and and it just kind of fell in place in some ways. It still look a lot of planning.Katie: And did it fall in place because the people who helped come up with the idea were helping with some of the logistics and thinking through what to do?Scott: Yeah.Katie: Some shared ownership there, and that's kind of what you were saying that you might get caught in your head, that the original idea didn't have anyone else owning it and so that's the shift where some other people being part of this and feeling just as passionately is what drives the whole ship.Tammi: Absolutely.Katie: And then so everybody who participated in the planning of it how did you work with their schedules to make sure they were involved?Scott: Our event was more of a regional draw, it's not people who live on our street. So our meetings were one on one, they were through email, phone calls things like that. It wasn't like a collective group of people meeting all the time. Turned out there was a bigger interest than we really kind of expected so we had to kind of pull back on it because the place we were getting for the weekend wasn't large enough to hold everybody. So their enthusiasm made things so much easier. The worse thing you can do is throw a party and nobody shows up.Katie: That's really neat. And what was Kyle's role in the project planning itself?Tammi: Excellent question.Scott: I won't say Kyle initiated any of the plans himself, what we would do is we would always ask Kyle if he wanted to do this, get his sign-off essentially.Tammi: Is it ok to have a sleepover with ten people in a cabin? And he would give us a thumbs up or thumbs down. He would come on all the lunches with us or the coffees we would have with people.Katie: Once you came up with this idea together and you landed on your theme, you came up with what you were going to do, you probably set a date, picked a location, were there any other things logistically that you really had to work through that were big parts of this?Tammi: We had to watch the weather, and it rained, which actually turned out to be a good thing because the birds like the rain.Scott: Yeah, it was migration season for the warblers, it was in May, so a nice spring rain kept them calm and singing.Tammi: Picking trails that were accessible and worthy of seeing lots of birds. Picking a trail that was near a lunch picnic shelter, because we provided lunch.Katie: Did anything come up during the process where you felt like, oh no this is never going to work?Tammi: Oh big time.Scott: YesKatie: Can you name a couple of those?Scott: Well, we had a spot all picked out, it was an hour and a half east of the city of Cincinnati, and was it a week or two before? They said, there's — I'll just call it an environmental issue. They had some wild animals on the premises, and we cannot have you come to this. Katie: What type of wild animals?Scott: Feral hogs.Katie: Oh of courseScott: Feral hogs were loose on the property and we need to trap them and we can't have humans at the facility because it'll spook the feral hogs. So we had to scramble, Tammi actually did, scrambled and found a place that we then rented for the weekend.Katie: That must have been just.. How did that feel, gut wrenching?Scott: (Laughter)Tammi: Gut-wrenching except that the rental I think turned out to be a better option for us.Katie: So it was a good thing, hogs feral hogs who would've thought can actually be the best part of your project?Scott: Yeah and then we walked into the place we rented and the first thing we see is the mounted head of a hog on the wall, and I was like, this is perfect, it was meant to be.Katie: So take me to the day of the birding event. It sounds like a lot of the planning happened with you all and you were the connection but maybe having everyone in the room at once was kind of an exciting thing. Where everybody's like, now we're all here. Tell me about the day, how did it feel?Tammi: It was May and it was rainy and we all met at a trail head and that's how we got our day started with a hike.Scott: And we turned the hike procedures and all that over to one of the birders, who was familiar with the trail. So they led the hike and we just participated like everybody else.Tammi: It was exciting, everyone showed up.Scott: Everyone showed up.Tammi: We had 17 on the hike and I think 14 came back to the cabin for dinner. That was exciting to finally get inside and out of the rain. We had a lot of fun stories to tell. And then ten people, that's the limit on the cabin for spending the night, so we had ten conversations to midnight.And what Scott and I noticed too, Kyle being such a (I don't want to say expert) but the audio memory, he can hold his own in that group of experts.Katie: Were they impressed by the level of knowledge that he has?Tammi: Absolutely.Katie: After all this your goal to help Kyle get more integrated into the community, and also as a family to connect more socially with people who share the birding interest, what has happened since? What is a result of this project that you want to share?Scott: During that weekend one of the activities we did was we had a little contest where we would play a bird call and the avid birders had to identify what the bird was. We had fifteen birds and Kyle ended up winning the competition. It was pretty cool in and of itself. Then a few months later there was a bird outing, and the person that was leading the birding walk - we had never met. And when we introduced ourselves to him he said,“Oh Kyle I've heard about you, you're the one who knows all the bird calls.” So we decided to take him to lunch just to make the connection with him. Over lunch he said he would like to do that, he heard about the birding weekend, he actually knew of the place we went and said that was one of his favorite places to go birding ever. And he would like to do that same weekend if we'd be interested in doing it with he and his buddies. So great yeah, we'll do that. And then at lunch he decided I have about an hour, I'm going to go birding, Kyle would you like to join me? So we all went birding and it was kind of interesting because Josh kind of took Kyle. And they went birding and Tammi and I were kind of behind them watching it was pretty cool because it all came out of the birding weekend. It was that connection, he knew about the weekend, he knew about Kyle's skills, he knew of where we went birding, it was just this perfect puzzle that was put together.Katie: And you didn't even have to put that out there?Scott: He did it all. It was his idea, and it's his guest list, so we're connecting Kyle to a whole other group of people he didn't know before.Katie: That's incredible, thank you guys anything else you want to say?Tammi: Well, I was going to say, I felt as the non-birder, you know the big let down after the big weekend… Birders all go away for the summer and I thought, oh my gosh we did all of this and there's no connection. And then a month later they go on that hike and then — there's Josh.Katie: Pretty awesome.Tammi: It was awesome.

Have you ever had the feeling of pure exhaustion? Like the feeling from work where you just cannot get out of bed, where your creative juices are no longer flowing, and where all you want to do is curl up for a good nap?  If you've been running yourself ragged in your job, you may be on the verge of burnout. In this episode we walk you through how to know if you're about to hit burnout and what to do about it.  MY GUESTS: Meredith: Meredith is a registered nurse, blogger & podcaster. She works as a trauma & transport nurse in the emergency department at a level one trauma center. She is a certified emergency nurse (CEN) a sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) and has a background in critical care. The Other Half is her blog & podcast where she & her husband Justin go off script telling stories & sharing poignant insights on the Enneagram, entrepreneurship & relationships, talking about real life that doesn't make the highlight reel. They live in their hometown of Nashville Tennessee with their black lab Lady.   Katie: Katie Norris left her fire escape in New York City for a front porch in Nashville. She is an online marketing director in book publishing and a writer. You'll probably find her reading a book or obsessing over how-good her coffee really is. You can connect with her on Instagram (@KickinKate).   Episode highlights:   The meaning of work-life balance.   The average day-to-day for Meredith and Katie and how they balance it to avoid burnout.   Meredith and Katie’s burnout stories and what burnout means to them.   What Meredith and Katie did to heal and stop their burnout from happening.   How Meredith separates work life and personal life, and what she does on her resting periods to help recharge and unwind.   Katie’s thoughts on mindset shifts for the “work-hard” mentality.   Meredith’s suggestions for creating boundaries and shutoff.   Processes Meredith and Katie do to mitigate burnout and self-care practices they do to keep themselves in check.   Links   Meredith’s Website: https://www.meredithwboggs.com/ Meredith’s Instagram: @meredithwboggs The Other Half Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-other-half/id1459160306   Katie’s Instagram: @kickinkate   Download Work-Life Balance Smartphone Wallpapers that will remind you to slow down: www.jenaviviano.com/burnout   Quotes:   Katie - “I was working full time jobs and I was just coming home and feeling really exhausted, but I didn't really know even how to express myself.”   Meredith - “We kind of noticed it early on and we said, it's coming sooner or later we've got to figure out how to mitigate this, how to set some boundaries so that we don't get to this place that's really burnout.”   Jena - “It's like laying on the bathroom floor at work and just being like, I have got to get out, this cannot go on any longer.”   Katie - “What am I going to care most about when I'm on my deathbed?” … “I don't know that I'm going to have a long-term impact and then when I die, I'm going to look back and say this was worth it.”   “The place God calls you to is the place where your gladness and the world’s deep hunger coincide.”   Meredith - “You have to put yourself first and you have to have boundaries.”   Jena - “You want to be a woman who focuses on building wealth and relationships and building things for long-term success, not just for the quick thing that could change tomorrow.”   Katie - “For me it's really getting home with enough daylight and time to get outside to go for a walk or run or something like that, and that just sets me in the right mental space.”   Meredith - “I need to have something fun to look forward to.”

TRANSCRIPTION 0:00 – 1:00Mieke: You're never ready. There are some things you just can't predict everything. You can't know the end from the beginning. You just have to trust that it's ok to not know what you're doing and get started at the same time.Katie: What if there were a bigger story than disability? You're listening to More conversations at the center of the movement to build connection and belonging in an age of isolation. Ever felt stuck? Or like you don't know where to begin? This conversation with Mieke will help you conquer some of your own doubts around just getting started. Mieke is part of Starfire's initiative to put families at the center of community building, this means she was granted a small stipend and offered a mentor from Starfire to help nudge and uncover her families own wisdom around building community. So she'll address some of her own struggles of getting started with this family project in her neighborhood. Like expanding her concept of who her neighbors might be.1:01 – 1:58Katie: And her epiphany about how to bring her four kids passions together in one project. She'll also talk about how she leveraged some of her weak ties or people she already knows to help with the project. And some of the tools you might need to get started. If you listen to the podcast with David Shu you'll recognize the quote at the end by T.S. Eliot “For us there is only the trying the rest is not our business.” So let's get into the conversation. Alright do you want to introduce yourself?Mieke: My name's Mieke and I have been passionate about community building pretty much since forever. I was the kid who was the bridge between friend groups in elementary school, I got voted most outgoing in my high school class of 307 people and I have just always been about bringing different groups of people to the same table.1:59 – 3:12Katie: Yeah, and that's very true. I know you personally as well and I know that that's been my experience with you. So your high school classmates - they had it right. So one of the questions that comes up a lot about community building and trying to do a creative project in your neighborhood is that starting is the hardest part and for somebody like yourself, it sounds like you're more outgoing, so help people who might not be as outgoing, also bring them along in this podcast, so they can get a deeper understanding of what ittakes. Because I don't think this is just for people who are outgoing, do you?Mieke: No, definitely not.Katie: Ok, take us back to when you first started your project with Starfire what were some of your first steps?Mieke: The hardest thing about getting started for me was that I didn't feel like I was owned by any particular geographic neighborhood. I feel like I belong to Cincinnati, and I wasn't sure how to narrow that down.Katie: So your project really started around that problem that this is supposed to be a way to activate my neighbors, but what you kind of had to come around to or learn was that community could be a community of interest, is that right?3:13 – 4:09Mieke: That's exactly right. So that was my first struggle and I struggled with that for like five or six months. We walked our neighborhood, we looked around and we looked at the community bulletin boards and looked at the rec center and met people and I just still did not feel like that was what we wanted to do.Katie: And you had said that was a neighborhood you had newly moved to?Mieke: Yeah, and so just kind of first problem expanding my concept of who my neighbors are and realizing that it's ok to do a project on a community of interests rather than a geographic community.Katie: So once you landed on that how did you come up with that community of interests?Mieke: The next big problem that I had was that I was very involved in a lot of this community work in Cincinnati but I was doing it without my kids.Katie: And you have how many kids?Mieke: I have four kids.4:10 – 5:12Mieke: From 10-17 and they all have very strong opinions and a lot of varied interests.Katie: Ok, so each child had their own thing going on?Mieke: Yeah, a lot of our time is spent going in different directions. And so I would say another big hurdle I had to jump over was how do I bring it all in guys, coach mom at the helm here trying to figure out what we're going to do as a family and how we are going to combine all the things that everybody, exploring everybody's interests and bringing everybody back to the table together. So that each kid can feel some ownership of our project.Katie: Yeah, I think it's really interesting as a parent to do that because you do, you end up, well this child likes ballet and this child likes soccer, this child likes crafts and this child likes theater. So you end up doing things very separately and in their own age group. So then to bring it all back together and say we are going to do something as a family, was that more effort in the long run to have everybody come together or was it more efficient with your time?5:13 – 6:29Mieke: I would say having a central focus point for what we are going to do with our project did end up bringing the kids all together which did make it somewhat more efficient. But the fascinating part to me was that the project that we picked had so many different tasks. We had a master tasks list and each of the tasks built on each kid's strengths. One kid could really care less about art in some ways but he took on the role of you know I'll walk the stuff over to the venue and I'll walk my youngest brother over to the venue and I'll help by transporting things and carry things. Which was really helpful because I don't have a staff I don't have administrators, or secretaries or anything you know, I could use about five. And you know another kid is very creative but very picky so I said well you can do all the décor and you cann design the space and she was ecstatic about that, that's in her wheel house. I guess what I'm trying to say is the project ended up having lots of little tasks that played to each kid's strengths which brought them all around the table in a way that I did not expect.6:30 – 7:29Katie: Yeah, and I love the idea of having really intentional invitations for your children to participate but also anyone who is getting involved from the community, you have that mind set of: ok where are they going to thrive and how is this going to feel energizing for them so it's not a chore? And definitely coming from a mother/parent asking your kid to do something often sounds like a chore but you found a way to make it this fun thing that they did together. So tell me a little bit more about your project, what exactly you guys ended up landing on.Mieke: I had been meeting with my mentor for this entire time at a café in our neighborhood and it turned out that being at that café every month ended up being the open door for my daughter to get a job there. So then my daughter started working there and we became friends with the owners, and made community for ourselves in this space and then one day our mentor said why don't you hold an event at this café? You're friends with the owners already, they're open to doing cool stuff in their neighborhood.7:30 – 8:29Mieke: So we ended up saying what can we do that is a community event that gives back some kind of creativity opportunity to the kids in the neighborhood, our friends, the people that we know. We wanted to do an event that had mindfulness, art, music and food. And we ended up inviting some artists, we invited the pop-art truck, my friend Janet owns that.Katie: And you had not known Janet as a friend when you reached out to her right, because you guys had known each other as acquaintances and then you reached out, how did she take to that invitation?Mieke: Yeah, she was thrilled. She was super excited, I told her what my budget was she said she would make it work. At first with my mentor I was brainstorming, I could put out a call to artists, I could put out an ad and then it was like, stop, think. I already know people.Katie: So you had the pop-art truck, you had a woman from the Hive.Mieke: Yes, there's a woman whose an art teacher who made art journals with people, like these little made out of one sheet. Then my youngest son is also an artist, and he taught origami at this table and just him being able to you know use his gift of creativity to do the actual teaching which he thrives in. Having him have his own space you know, where he felt respected, was huge for him.8:30 – 9:29Katie: And he did awesome, at ten years old I was super impressed.Mieke: He was nine at the time.Katie: Ok, yeah not even in double digits and he mastered me in origami I could not do it.Mieke: He's pretty amazing at that.Katie: So do you think for people who are just getting started and they might not have the vast network that you already had, do you think one of the steps might be, who do I know who knows a lot of people and going out to find that super connector in their life who might be willing to reach out to their network?Mieke: Yes, I think that makes a lot of sense, because you are your own best resource.Katie: Yeah, and it seems like what we tend to do right now is I'm going to go online, I'm going to Google it and then you just don't have that personal connection to really start with.9:30 – 10:33Mieke: Right. And I think don't minimize the fact that no matter how young your kids are, they have ideas, so don't lose sight of your own household as a source for ideas. Even for somebody like me who already has so many connections, it's like, I have so many other things on my plate, this is for the benefit of you, the benefit of your family, the benefit of your community. There's nothing to feel guilty about or feel stressed about, it's a win win.Katie: Yeah, because we can definitely put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be the ideal of what we have in our minds.Mieke: Exactly.Katie: So how do you know when you're ready to jump in?Mieke: that's a great question. I think of it a lot of times as how do you know when you're ready to start a family? You're never ready, there's some things you can't predict everything and you can't know the end from the beginning. You just have to trust that it's ok to not know what you're doing and get started at the same time. Things will happen almost organically and dare I say magically.10:34 – 11:30Mieke: It just kind of happens and you don't have, there's so few things in life that you are actually are ready for before you do them, but you just do them anyway.Katie: What's the magic?Mieke: The magic is you already know people, you have a family, you have a community, you just haven't really stopped to think about it. But it's already in you. Literally you are the magic. You bring you to the table and everything else happens. You are the only tool you need.Katie: So it's that simple? You don't need some master chart that you hang up on a wall, it's within you?Mieke: 100%.Katie: Mieke that's too easy.Mieke: No I know, well let me just tell you a little secret. I did buy this big wall chart, it happened to have five rows and we have five people in our family and it had all the days of the week and it had all these little post it notes. I lost it.11:31 – 13:30Mieke: And then I replaced it, it arrived from Amazon and then I lost it. Basically there are no tools.Katie: Clearly it wasn't being used enough if you're able to lose it. Well I think that's really important because sometimes tools can get in the way of doing what is hard. And it's not to say that tools are bad or that they don't come in handy for some people but the point is that there is no magic thing that's going to get you on that track.Mieke: I mean I think everybody has all the tools that are needed just kind of built into being an adult in this world and you just keep putting one foot in front of another and you keep going down a path and it ends up being something so much more special than you set out to make it.Katie: Well let's end on this quote then, from T.S. Eliot “For us there is only the trying, the rest is not our business.”Mieke: It's good.Katie: What'd you think about that?Mieke: In more poetic terms it's a value that I live by, it's like I'm not responsible for the outcome, I can't make people love something that I do or participate in something that I am passionate about but I just keep going anyway. And yeah I think you just have to take the leap, trust that there's going to be a trampoline under there somewhere and that you're going to bounce back higher than where you started.Katie: Sounds like fun too. When you put it like that.Mieke: Super fun. I'm all about fun.Katie: Well thank you, I appreciate it.Learn more at starfirecincy.org/familyleadership

This week, Brian and Frank are joined by and comedian Katie Arroyo of the Reluctantly Here Podcast. Brian and Katie crack open a bottle of Pinot Grigio and discuss the film “The Notebook.” Who cried more, Brian or Katie? What happens when Brian drinks a bottle of white wine? Find out this week on The Wicked Funny Podcast! SUBSCRIBE! REVIEW! LISTEN! This episode is brought to you by The Battery Shop in Warwick, RI.  SUBSCRIBE! REVIEW! LISTEN! iTunes Stitcher Google Play

Matt joins Katie to talk about love. Don’t be a thirsty ass ho. This podcast is all about redefining the word “bitch” from a derogatory one to the acronym Being In Total Control of Herself. Katie Boyd will teach you how to use the very stones thrown at you to power your purpose and build your empire. You and only you can create and curate a life of happiness, abundance and magic. Join Katie for some truth bombs, life tools, laughs and spiritual smack talk. If you want personal empowerment with respect to your lifestyle, spirituality, health, fitness, and nutrition this is the podcast for you! Katie talks about her new book titled Ambitchious How can I work with Katie? What are the six life breakers and makers? Finding love does not complete you Know your self-worth Katie shares some dating stories Know that relationships take work, but love is freely given Trust your gut – your intuition is real Ask yourself why you feel you need a relationship to be whole Whatever you resist will persist Kripalu Program Weekend: https://kripalu.org/presenters-programs/living-your-best-life-2019-motivation-today-tomorrow-and-forever All this and more on this week’s Ambitchious Podcast recorded this and every week at the Studio 21 Podcast Café and proudly hosted on the United Podcast Network.

Practice makes perfect! To get the bonus materials for this lesson, including a quiz and flashcards, head over to our website: http://joyoflanguages.com/how-to-say-i-miss-you-in-italian/ Join the Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5.minute.italian/ Today's Italian words and phrases Che cosa ti manca di Napoli? = What do you miss about Naples? Che cosa = what ti manca = from you manca = it misses di = about Napoli = Naples Mi manca la mia famiglia, il mare, e la pizza napoletana naturalmente = I miss my family, the sea and Neapolitan pizza obviously.  Mi = from me manca = it misses la mia famiglia = my family il mare = the sea e = and la pizza napoletana = Neapolitan pizza Naturalmente = of course. E tu Katie? Che cosa ti manca dell’inghilterra? = And you Katie? What do you miss about England? Mi manca la famiglia, gli amici, e la colazione inglese = I miss my family, friends and English breakfast.