Interviews with strong, empowered women following their passions.
Episodes
Tuesday Apr 21, 2020
Tuesday Apr 21, 2020
Kate Anderson is a leader in generating change and gender equality within the private fundraising space. As Co-Founder and Operations Director of iFundWomen, she has driven millions of dollars into the hands of female founders. The flexible crowdfunding platform combines a pay-it-forward model, expert startup coaching, professional video production and a private community for its members, all with the goal of helping female entrepreneurs launch successful businesses.
Learn more about Kate Anderson and iFundWomen.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Kate Anderson, a leader in generating change and gender equality within the private fundraising space. As co-founder and operations director of iFundWomen, she's driven millions of dollars into the hands of female founders. IFund Women's flexible crowdfunding platform, combines a pay it forward model, expert startup coaching, professional video production and a private community for its members. All with the goal of helping female entrepreneurs launch successful businesses. So please welcome to the show Kate Anderson.
Kate: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
Passionistas: What's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Kate: I have a lot of passions but I think one of the things I'm most passionate about is representation of women. I'm seeing women represented in boardrooms, seeing women represented in movies, seeing women represented in books. I think the more we can see ourselves in women in media and on television magazines too, the more we can imagine that we can be there. And that's really one thing I find women is working hard to do is promote more women's businesses, help women to elevate their businesses more so that we can see more women in boardrooms and more women as CEOs and more women on the cover of Forbes and fortune.
Passionistas: So talk about how iFundWomen came to be and your role in that.
Kate: Yeah, so um, iFundWomen was a pivot. My two co-founders, Karen Cahn and Sarah Summers. We worked together at another company, our CEO, Karen Cahn was the, uh, was the CEO. Then Sarah and I both worked there and it was a conversation platform for women. Karen had built it and did kind of a lot of the things that we now realize are mistakes, mistakes for start-ups. So we built it without talking to a lot of people about it, without getting a lot of feedback, being really precious about the idea. And we realized after making mistake and all good growth comes from making mistakes, that that's not the right way to start a business. The right way to start a business is to get a lot of people onboard to, to beta test to see if people are interested to build an MVP, which means minimally viable product. It's creating a product that is not perfect, but they get the job done.
And um, so anyways, we had this old company, um, and as a last ditch effort we did a Kickstarter campaign and it was through there that we realized that crowdfunding was a great way for women to raise capital for their businesses to not give away equity did to tap into their own, um, their own great networks and their own ability to be good storytellers. But there was no platform that was speaking specifically to the needs of women that was coaching women through the process of, it's giving them the tools they need to prepare. And that was creating a community. So we decided as a beta to see if people were interested in it. We sent out surveys to various communities that we're all a part of saying, is this something you'd be interested in and what would you look for in that? And we launched in November of 2016 with a beta of about 25 campaigns. We had hundreds apply, but we accepted 25 for the first beta to test it out. And that is a way better way to start a company.
Passionistas: So what were you doing before you started iFundWomen?
Kate: So we are working together on this, on our other startup and then prior to that I worked in commercial real estate development. So really like pivoted my career but, but um, I worked for a company called Heinz, which is a major uh, premier real estate development company. Worked there for about four years right out of college. And it was such a great place to come up because, um, it was really old school and I think that there's a benefit in starting your career at a place that's really old school and established and has a clear guidelines and clear protocols and uh, and it was not casual. I think that the, it really taught me a lot about how to be a great operator, how to be a great employee and less how to be a great manager. I'm learning how to do that now, but it taught me a lot of those things. And I think that there's a real benefit in starting at a place that's um, that's really corporate versus a place that's really good casual.
Passionistas: And what's the vibe at IFund Women? What's the culture like at that company?
Kate: We're a startup so it's way more casual. Um, it's at, uh, Heinz where I work. Nobody talked about personal lives at all. Like you kinda didn't, if you heard about someone's personal life, it almost felt like seeing your parents naked. Like it was so personal and intimate. Um, and, and IFund Women and I think this is true of many startups. Um, you know, everything about the people that you're working with. And I like that. I like that. Um, that is definitely more my nature. It, um, to be open with people, to tell people what's going on in my life. I don't like kind of feeling like that's not something to be able to talk about. But then you have this like fine line of, um, what to share and what not to share. And when Karen, Sarah and I started at the company, right, three people that are great friends, we can share everything. But then as you bring more people in that you can't share everything, just the three of us can.
Passionistas: So what's the mission of iFundWomen?
Kate: Our mission is to close the funding gap for female entrepreneurs. We really want to provide access to capital, coaching and community. That is our core mission. That's our North Star and that is what we work day in and day out to do.
Passionistas: How is iFund Women different beyond that from other crowdfunding websites?
Kate: Yes. So we're the only crowdfunding platform, first of all, speaking specifically to women, but beyond that, um, we are the only crowdfunding platform with expert business coaching tied into our business model, with a network of women business owners that work together to accelerate knowledge and ignite action. We have a pay it forward model that you were talking about that, um, at the end of every month, we, uh, invest 20% of our standard crowdfunding fees back into live campaigns on our platform. So we're actually paying for the revenue that we're making from campaigns. Um, and then we also are offering sponsored grants. So we broker grants on behalf of generous partners who really want to put their money where their mouth is by supporting women entrepreneurs raising capital on our platform.
Passionistas: Talk a little bit more about why that's so important. And the current state of funding for women owned businesses.
Kate: The current state of funding for women owned businesses is not where we want it to be. Um, and I think people are familiar with these stats, but women received 3% of venture capital financing and women have a harder time getting loans. That um, when they do get loans, they get smaller loan amounts and higher interest rates. We know women are starting 1500 net new businesses every single day in the US right, too. You're a woman in the US you have a great idea. You're starting a business. Well, what do you do? How do you get funding for your business? The first thing most people do is they bootstrap and bootstrap means spending your own money to grow your business. And that works r really well if you have money to spend. But if you don't, how do you get your business off the ground? And um, we are the place where women could do that.
We don't think that you should go into debt funding the earliest days of your startup. Um, and even if you do qualify for a loan, that's what you're doing is you're going into debt funding the early days of your startup. And the fact that the matter is most startups fail. And it's important that when you're growing it, you do it in a way that's smart and you're smart about the capital that you take on so that you don't have a failing startup. And then loans to pay back or debt to pay back, credit card debt, whatever it is.
Passionistas: So what makes a successful campaign on iFundWomen? Are there elements that you find that help people succeed?
Kate: Really, first and foremost, if I had to just say one word, it would be grit. And that's probably what makes any successful entrepreneur and business, right? Anybody can have the best idea for something, an amazing idea that's going to make everybody's lives better and everybody is going to be so happy about it. But if you never tell people about the idea, if you're not ready to like put it all on the line, if you are not constantly promoting what you're doing to people, no one's going to find out about it. The specific type of person that's successful on iFundWomen is a person with drive, with commitment and a person that really won't give up, that continues to promote their campaign, continues to get the word out there. And um, and won't stop at anything until their campaign gets funded or their business gets moved to the next phase, whatever that might be.
Passionistas: Let's take a little step back and just explain to a crowdfunding is for someone who's listening and doesn't really understand the concept.
Kate: So crowdfunding is when an entrepreneur raises small increments of money from lots of people that they know in their personal professional social networks. That adds up to just enough money to get their project off the ground. So crowdfunding formally as we know it has been around for about a decade, which is the idea of raising money online from lots of different people. But historically crowdfunding has been around for a long period of time. Um, the Statue of Liberty is a project that was crowd funded. Bringing the base of the Statue of Liberty over was crowdfunded by many people contributing pennies to see something happen. And I think that people really liked that story because it resonates with the idea that lots of people can give amounts of money that feel comfortable to them to create something that's awesome and spectacular and has lasting value, right?
Like I think we all wish that we could contribute to see the statue of Liberty or whatever that kind of iconic project is for us. But crowdfunding, there are two different types of crowdfunding. There's rewards-based crowd funding and equity crowdfunding. Equity crowd funding is a newer concept that came out of the jobs act where you can raise, um, you can have people contribute to your business in exchange for equity. So that's ownership in your business. IFundWomen as a rewards-based crowdfunding platform. Um, so, so people are funding your campaign in exchange for physical or digital reward that they're getting. And the reward is really can be your product, services, unique skills. It's really your opportunity to thank people for contributing to your campaign but also entice them to back your campaign and support your campaign. But because you have awesome rewards that you want to take part in,
Passionistas: What do you find, or do you find, there's a common reason that women hesitate to do this kind of thing? And how do you help them get past that?
Kate: We don't necessarily see that women hesitate to do this. I think in general, people feel uncomfortable asking other people for money. I think that that is kind of a, um, that can stall people, right? I don't want to go out and ask my network and, and what I always pushed back on that I'd say is, well, what happens if somebody else does this idea? How passionate are you about this idea that if somebody else did it, would you feel okay with that? And, and with scaling businesses, and this isn't true for all businesses, not all businesses need capital to grow. Some can be generating revenue from day one and be fine with the revenue that they generate. But many businesses do need capital and you will always have to ask people for money, right? So maybe that's a banker, maybe, um, a venture capital firm, maybe that's uh, an aunt, maybe that's a spouse.
Kate: Um, you don't have to ask a credit card company, but at some point they will ask you to pay the money back. Um, but, but what I think is so empowering, powerful about crowdfunding is it allows you to continue to hone your pitch and your messaging every time you ask people and continue to change it, right? So you might practice your pitch on lots of people and tell them and they say, you know what? I didn't totally get what it is you're raising money for. So then it allows you to say, Oh, you know what? Maybe I wasn't so clear. Let me try to rephrase this so it makes sense to a broader audience and being able to kind of alter and pivot and adapt your pitch in real time is really powerful.
Passionistas: What's been the highlight of iFund for you so far?
Kate: We have been around for over three years so it's been really exciting to see those initial beta campaigns to see what they've done now. We have been one of the premier crowdfunding platforms for co-working spaces, female-focused co-working spaces and it's so cool to see coworking spaces that raise money on iFundWomen open up. Like that to me is like, you know, you kind of feel like that's your baby taking their first steps that you facilitated them being able to do that. It has been a million little things. I wish I could say. There's like one great thing that's come out of it, but it's so many. It's getting handwritten thank you notes in the mail from entrepreneurs that we've helped on iFundWomen. It is getting feedback when I've coached entrepreneurs say you really helped me get on stock and it's seeing products launch I support a lot of the campaigns on iFundWomen and it's supporting and then getting a product in the mail that you supported maybe a year ago and saying, Oh my gosh, I love LOHO tights or Mini Lila or fem power, beauty. I love all of these brands and now I'm getting their products and, and now I'm a lifelong user of it.
Passionistas: Is there a story of like one woman in particular that you've helped or you personally have funded that stands out to you?
Kate: There are so many women on this list. Um, uh, one campaign I particularly love is Lauren Beasley who is an entrepreneur out of Nashville. She, uh, has a company called Move Inclusive Dance. She wants to create a dance studio for children with special needs or a dance camp for children with special needs in Nashville. She put up her campaign and within a week or less it was funded. And then about a year later, her audience said, okay, a dance camp is great in the summer, but what about a dance studio? What about year round dance classes for kids with special needs? So she came back to iFundWomen to raise $100,000 for a dance studio.
She raised about $45,000. And at that point she had gone through, I've been IFundWomen's coaching program and one of the things we tell entrepreneurs to do is list out everybody in your network or people that you know, you might have six degrees of separation. One of those people was Carrie Dorr, who's the founder of pure, uh, Pure Barre, which is a fitness studio. And Lauren reached out to her and said, I'm a Pure Barre instructor. I love your company. Would you check out my campaign? Uh, Carrie Dorr wrote back and said, yes, can you fly out to Denver? Long story medium, she flew out to Denver and Carrie Dorr contributed $50,000 to her campaign and funded her campaign. And why I love this story is Lauren's doing such good. She's creating lasting change, which is so awesome. She's creating something that not a lot of people maybe thought that there was a need for, but there was a huge need for, she made the ask, but she also had data to back it up.
Right? So she wasn't cold emailing this person and she had $0 million in her campaign and zero back. Or if she had $45,000 or $42,000 in her campaign and hundreds of backers and she emailed that person then to say, look at what I've done. She, and she told me she was expecting like $50 from her and got a magnitude more than that. But I love that. I love that that's like so forward facing. So public and obvious. I think that that's just like, and I love what she's doing to make the world a better place. Follow her on social media, Move Inclusive Dance. It is really, really inspiring.
Passionistas: So you mentioned this earlier and like to talk a little bit more about it. You mentioned that iFundWomen reinvests 20% of your fees into campaigns on the site. So talk about why you made that decision and what kind of campaigns you guys back.
Kate: When we started iFundWomen we knew that we wanted to have a give it back model. We knew we had this idea of lifting women up constantly. So if one campaign gets funded, we wanted that campaign to help another campaign get funded and create this virtuous cycle of funding and supporting female entrepreneurs. The way we manifest today was we take iFundWomen takes a 5% fee on any amount of money that you raise. And then at the end of the month, we take 20% of the revenue from those fees and directly reinvest them into live campaigns on the site that are actively raising money. We do not pick them algorithms, pick them, but um, but it's been awesome to see, and it varies every month from maybe one campaign that will be picked or five or six campaigns that will be picked. But those campaigns that are way more, um, way more likely to get funded and it's a great opportunity for them to say that their networks, like, my campaign is so good that the iFundWomen team believed that I should be the recipient at this. And then the money just gets them that much further to their, um, or that much closer to their mark. It's a, it's everybody's favorite day of the month.
Passionistas: How can a woman that's listening to this podcast take advantage of all the iFundWomen has to offer?
Kate: If you head over to, iFundWomen.com and you will see a big suite of resources that we have to offer to people. We have a lot of free resources. It is important to us to educate entrepreneurs before they launch a crowdfunding campaign. Until we don't ever want us to someone to launch a campaign and say, Oh, I thought it was this. Or I thought I would just put a campaign up and magical money elves would come and back my campaign. We wish there were magical money elves, but it doesn't seem like they've really exist. We want people to know that you have to put the work in, that you have to have a plan, that you have to have clear messaging and a direct ask. So we have bundled that all into a free crowdfunding eCourse. It takes about an hour and a half to watch that you could watch on iFundWomen. We have a free webinar every Thursday for an hour that really talks about what crowdfunding is. And then for people that want more hand holding and really are looking for personalized coaching, we have a coaching program. It's a monthly coaching model where you pick the topic of the calls that you want and can get help with anything from your crowdfunding campaign to marketing, to social media, to sales, so that you can really not only elevate your crowdfunding campaign, but at the same time elevate your business.
Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Kate Anderson. To learn more about crowdfunding for female founders and get experts, startup coaching, visit ifundwomen.com now here's more of our interview with Kate.
Do you have a daily routine or is it always different?
Kate: No, it's always different. And you know what, honestly, I kinda like to operate that way. I have, I start off my day at work every day with the same thing. I have a checklist of things that I go through and then the day starts and um, I really have a lot of calls throughout the day. Then I block. So maybe I do, I block out time. Like at three o'clock I've have an education block and that is a time for me to read. Like those articles that people send me or um, things that I saw online that I haven't had a chance to read. I have a 30 minute block in my day to do that. I close out my day between 4:30 and 5:30. So I tried to do that as much as possible. But then I need to get better and having a daily routine cause I think in every other aspect of my life that helps to optimize and helps to just not have to make decisions.
Passionistas: That's such a good idea. That education block, I love that. I need to do that. I'm gonna work that into my schedule now.
Kate: And I think the best thing to do too is to copy the links of, okay this article I saw or this one someone sent me copy the links into the calendar invite. So you open it up and you say, go ahead. This is what I'm reading right now. It's 30 minutes and we all have that time in our day to do something like that. And if you're not, I am kind of maniacally focused on being curious, growing, acquiring new skills, reading. Interesting. And if you don't kind of block that time and then sometimes it gets lost.
Passionistas: Do you think you have a particular personality trait that has helped you succeed?
Kate: I am very skilled at putting myself in other people's shoes and, and that really comes from how I was raised. That was always the position that we were taught is, you know, you never know what someone has going on at home or in other aspects of their life. And that has really helped me in dealing with people, right? All jobs are dealing with people, it's dealing with customers, it's dealing with your team. Um, and if you don't have good skills with that, if you don't have the ability to, to put yourself in other people's shoes, you kind of can't grow. And then I think in addition to that is self awareness and it's a quality I really like in people is really being self aware about what you're good at, what you're not good at. And um, and being honest about that I think is really, really huge.
Passionistas: Is there one lesson that you've learned on your journey so far that really sticks with you?
Kate: Working at a startup is, is really challenging. There's no roadmap of what you're doing. You're constantly having to change. I think like a great lesson is really just being open to change and being curious and not being fixed in your thinking and knowing when to ask for help. And knowing when you can figure things out yourself. But working at a startup is really, there's just a constantly moving target. You constantly change, adapt, learn new things. And that is, I think can be hard for some people. But for me it's been, it's been exciting and I feel like I every damn like have a new skill set that I'm working on.
Passionistas: So what is the most rewarding part about working at a startup?
Kate: I think the really, the most rewarding part from coming from like a corporation is making, like having a suggestion that gets inputted in real time. Like saying, okay, I think we should do this. All right, let's do it. And now our website looks different because of someone's that guidance and advice that is so powerful. And I think if you never had that before, then you're, you're so surprised when you do have it and really appreciative of it. That's been really, really an awesome thing to, to do and see and be able to just see how your suggestions can, can really form, can improve people's lives, can streamline the process, can make things easier. I've been really grateful for to be able to be in a position to do that.
Passionistas: When you were a girl, what lessons did your mother teach you about women's roles in society and what do you want to teach your own children?
Kate: I grew up with a mom who stayed at home until I was in middle school and then she started working and now has her own company and works entirely too much. Um, but my parents were equal partners and, and even though my dad worked, it was very much both people were equal parents. And I think that it's sometimes hard to say what are specific things. I think sometimes you can comment on things that you didn't like. But like one thing I loved my parents did is we would occasionally just be kind of jerky kids and would say something like, that's dad's money. We're just such a jerk thing to say. Right. And it's so, I don't even know where we came up with that, but it was always clear in our household. Like my dad worked and my mom stayed at home and this was the family's money. Nobody was, there was no hierarchy between my parents at all. And that like largely impacted most of my thoughts about relationships.
I worked, both me and my husband work. So that was different than my experience was growing up. But it never felt like that was something I couldn't do because I didn't see that behavior modeled. I saw a relationship between my parents that was, um, that was largely, uh, based on respect and that has been what my relationship has been based on and it has made it easy to be easy enough to be a working, uh, team, raising kids and trying to grow our careers.
Passionistas: Did you have other influential female role models when you were growing up?
Kate: I have so many. I have so many aunts that are absolutely phenomenal. Um, that I'm very, very close with. All my grandmothers are still alive and they are so influential for me. I feel really lucky to always have had like strong women figures in my life. And the idea of like a meek female, that archetype would never existed. And any woman that I've ever had a relationship with but really like the people that had the biggest impact of light my life for my family. And I am so lucky to have three grandmothers that are strong, very funny, very witty, opinionated women who had cool lives. Um, and, and same with, I have amazing aunts and I still have amazing aunts and I'm really fortunate for all of them.
Passionistas: What about professional mentors? Have you had professional mentors and what do you admire about them?
Kate: Yeah, so I've had fewer professional mentors. That's definitely something I am like kind of seek out. I have a lot of people on the same level of careers, me or maybe a few stages ahead and being at a startup and not kind of having like a, um, you know, it's not a big corporation where you have a bit, a huge hierarchy. It's something I definitely seek out, but I have a lot of women that are at the same stage of my careers, like great friends and people who have become great friends who have helped to kind of sir like solve, uh, that mentorship role. And to me, mentorship is not like, Oh, will you be my mentor and guide me in the process. It's having somebody to gut check things.
Like really, as I said, I live in Boston, my best friend in Boston is, has been such an amazing asset for me. And gut checking, um, career questions and kid questions. But, but having kind of people serve in that role of, uh, being advisors to you. I think that can come from just having great friends and not just having one person in a mentorship role. It's surrounding yourself with amazing women and men that can provide guidance for you. That to me is kind of how I, um, how I fill that role.
Passionistas: What's your proudest career achievement?
Kate: There's an organization I love, uh, a media company called Rebel Girls and they write children's books called Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. I love them. I've been such a fan of theirs and we had partnered with them on iFundWomen and I got two for international day of the girl, uh, speak publicly on a panel to, to young girls about representation of women. And my daughter got to see me speak and it was my first paid speaking engagement and that was like my proudest mom moment. My daughter thought I was crushing it. I felt like I was crushing it and she got to watch it. And that really just made me feel like so proud of, of being able to be in a position to do something like that.
Passionistas: What's your dream for women?
Kate: My dream for women is to not have to work so hard to get what we deserve. I kind of, you know, those signs from in the women's March that said like, I can't believe we're still marching about this stuff, is to not have to work so hard is to just be able to exist. And I'm not up to pipe for things that I think that we deserve to have and I think that we deserve to have like 60 years ago. And I think that's largely an inefficient use of time. I would love to see more women in positions of power.
I went to a speaking engagement the other day at Harvard, a male physicist was speaking and a woman introduced him and they said, she is the first tenured physics professor at Harvard. And I turned to my husband and I was like, it's 2020, like you've gotta be kidding me. And we kind of had like a discussion about it and I said like, I find that so problematic that it's 2020 and she's the first tenured physics professor at Harvard and it seemed like she was recently tenured. I would like that to not be the norm. Um, that I would like there to stop being the first woman. Right. Like just not the first woman president, not the first woman, you know, anything. I would just like it to be that's expected. Um, and I think that we're getting there and I think that progress is really slow and I wish that it wasn't so slow.
Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life.
Kate: Balance. Having interests surrounding yourself with interesting people? Um, measuring success not by one metric. Right. So I think when people, their success is just tied to their job that it's not, that's not how I view success. Um, being outside to me solves most problems of life unless, unless there's um, fires happening and we're experiencing global warming. But I think that that can solve a lot of things. But to me it really is, is balance. And then choosing what that balance is for you. I think that work life balance is a term that's overused and misproperly used. But it is to me it's having different things that fill your tank. It's getting up every day and having different things that will get you jazzed to go. So that might be worked. It might be an exercise class, it might be coming home to your kids. It might be like for me it's like reading a really good book but having different things that get you excited and going. That to me is, is like the most important thing.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Kate Anderson. To learn more about crowdfunding for female founders and get expert startup coaching, visit ifundwomen.com.
Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and our new subscription box filled with products made by women-owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions.
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Jamie-Alexis Fowler is the founder and Executive Director of Empower Work, an organization that provides immediate, confidential support for challenging work situations. Jamie-Alexis is on a mission to create healthy environments where employees are valued, supported and empowered. Her company harnesses the knowledge of trained peer counselors who utilize their robust skills, not just on the Empower Work line, but in their workplaces.
Learn more about Jaime-Alexis.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to The Passionistsas Project Podcast where Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Jamie-Alexis Fowler, the founder and executive director of Empower Work, an immediate, confidential support system for challenging business situations via text or web chat.
Jamie-Alexis is on a mission to create healthy environments where employees are valued, supported and empowered. Her company harnesses the knowledge of trained peer counselors who utilize their robust skills, not just on the Empower Work line, but in their workplaces.
And beyond offering one-on-one support, Jamie-Alexis’ goal is to use the aggregate anonymous data from the conversations to inform new approaches, tools, trainings, and policies for systematic workplace change.
So please welcome to the show Jamie-Alexis Fowler.
Jaime-Alexis: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat.
Passionistas: Yeah, we are too. So what are you most passionate about?
Jaime-Alexis: For me it's really about people growing up. My parents had a phrase, how you treat people is important. And I think that that has been a central theme in every facet of my life and has been particularly part of it at work where I spend most of my time.
Passionistas: Tell us about what you do for work and how your passion translates to that.
Jaime-Alexis: Empower Work is a national organization that provides essentially a crisis text line for work. And one of the reasons we started that was that a couple of years ago, as you know, many of these MeToo headlines were raging and of course still are. I was increasingly doing these sort of whisper network style conversations. And after one particularly tough conversation, I hung up the call and thought there has to be a better way than doing this.
And the person I had in particular just spoken to was, you know, first generation to go to college. She was working in this really small startup. Nobody in her family had worked in technology and she was struggling with a lot of different competing factors, the financial pressure of student loans. She was also supporting some of her family. And what had been the promise of, of technology that she could go and make this great salary and you know, lift her family out of the experiences that she'd had growing up was suddenly at risk. And there were these multiple competing factors. And I just left thinking like, there's gotta be a better way to do this. There was nothing in her company that she felt was trusted or safe. There were no resources either. There's no HR and no EAP or any other kind of resource. And so I turned to my husband and said, “You know, there's gotta be some kind of crisis text line for work.”
And we started Google searching that night. You know, I was like, oh yeah, let's just keep that in our back pocket. Let's just like be aware of what other resources exist. I was familiar with all of the traditional resources that are available through a company. So, Oh great, you've got your employee assistance program or you can access and have a conversation with your trusted HR business partner or whatever. Like you know, whatever the situation may be. And honestly, what floored me was that there were no third party resources that what existed with either you sell to the company or you sell to the individual. And so with that left were as I started looking into it as a 40 million Americans work in workplaces with fewer than a hundred people. And that leads to all kinds of disconnections when people face these really challenging situations. And of course when you think about that, that disproportionately impacts low income workers, those with less social capital.
And so at the heart of it for me was this fundamental inequity that we are meant to be this land of opportunity. And we're told that jobs are the means of doing that. But when you face an adverse situation and suddenly your job is on the line, where do you turn? And that threat becomes really real. How do you pay rent? How do you pay for childcare? And unfortunately that means that people are putting up with really toxic situations in order to get that paycheck. And that's leading to all kinds of negative emotional and financial outcomes for workers.
Passionistas: You Googled it, but then how did you actually put it into action?
Jaime-Alexis: I did not set out to start a company. I mean, I really was following my passion around how do we make sure that people are supported. And so the question was what do workers need? And just because we couldn't find it and just because my husband and I Googled around and couldn't find a resource didn't mean there needed to be one. And there certainly didn't mean there needed to be a company. So it really started with in-depth user research. So we started with a simple, I started with a simple survey. I, I say we because it quickly grew into a lot of other people. But you know, at the first it was just me, you know, setting up a Google survey.
But you know, a friend of mine had done polling before. I had other friends who did user research. And so they helped me think about how to set up the survey that started with this simple series of questions. Suddenly we had, you know, hundreds of responses from different folks all around the country, different economic situations, different education backgrounds, different working environments. And in that thread we saw some really key themes. And that was, you know, 90% of people had faced an adverse situation. Overwhelmingly people felt like they didn't have a trusted resource to turn to and that it had significantly impacted people's emotional and economic wellbeing. And there's also additional research that goes into us. We started doing market research and seeing, you know, what existed, what didn't exist, what research was in this space. And then I started doing really in depth interviews. So I did over 200 in depth conversations with labor organizers, HR professionals, labor rights attorneys, just this whole spectrum of folks who touch the workplace.
And they, those conversations reinforced a lot of the gap that we were seeing, which is that folks really felt like they didn't have somewhere to turn. And the impact of not having that support was really negative. And so from that we thought, okay, what would shift that trajectory? And so we started with really simple pilot, which was, you know, me getting a Twilio number, I call it like sort of like band-aiding it back together. And it was like we banded this thing together and I went to Office Depot and printed off these, what I think now are like really sketchy looking flyers, you know, it's like, alright, you know, do you have a tough work situation? And I walked the streets of San Francisco and hung up these flyers just to see like would people use this, you know, before we build out a whole service, let's just see if our theory is on track that like someone would text him on those flyers.
We didn't say whether to text or whether to call. We just showed a number and overwhelmingly people texted us and within six weeks we had folks from 10 different states, not from those sketchy flyers because it rained a couple of days later. I was like, Oh yeah, that's really, don't look, they look, you hit scratch here. But we started doing small digital tests so we would share in a Facebook group or things like that. And people would reach out and say like, I can't believe I've never heard of this before. This is amazing. Like this is exactly what I needed. And at that point we had, you know, more people involved who helped build out the pilot and we really knew we were onto something.
Passionistas: And what's your professional background? What did you do before this and what skills did you learn on other jobs that you brought to this to make it happen?
Jaime-Alexis: I have done a lot of different things. I jokingly refer to myself as a recovering academic. And so I started my career thinking that I was, that my mission in life was to educate, to become a professor and do research and to teach. And that is not the trajectory that I pursued. But I think a lot of the skills that that were part of that and my love of people, my interest in really like connecting with others and, and supporting people to success in various ways has translated across my whole career. And so predominantly I've worked in the social change sector and predominantly in areas that use those skills around connecting with people and writing. So it's marketing communications. But in almost all of those situations, I've been part of the senior leadership team at a variety of organizations and through that have been really passionate internally about building healthy workplaces.
So how do we support a culture where people can thrive and how do we make sure that people feel really valued and heard? And not just with my individual team, but thinking about that as sort of the, the cultural level for the organization. So it's always been something that I've held really from the center for my career. And in part why I was getting a lot of these kind of whisper network conversations because people would be like, Oh, Jamie loves, this is a great manager. She's run into X, Y, or Z before. Like you should, you know, you should talk to her because it feels a little weird to say about myself. But that was a lot of what people would reach out to me and say like, Oh, so-and-so said you were a really great person to talk to.
And that's not scalable. Like people leveraging their LinkedIn network or their personal network to solve a work crisis is not a scalable solution. A theme in a lot of my work is how do you, whether it was code for America or Pathfinder, like how do you work with government to affect large scale change. And so although we're not doing that specifically at Empower Work at this point, one of the goals is how do we learn from the work that we're doing and inform government practices or policies. You know, why don't we have a 4-1-1 for folks to easily connect in. You know you have to go to six different places if you, you're trying to figure out like Oh is this a wage theft issue? Is it that people don't use the term wage theft? So if you Google like I'm not getting paid, you get a lot of different weird articles, you're not necessarily going to get connected to your wage and hour division to log a wage complaint.
So right now we just have a lot of aspects of the system that are inaccessible to people. Part of I think why folks feel like not only is what they're experiencing profoundly unfair, it's hard to understand why there aren't other protections in place. And that's really frustrating for folks.
Passionistas: When you started to put this whole plan into action and you realized you needed a team, how did you bring people in to build this?
Jaime-Alexis: Oh, that's a great question. At night immediately it was like, okay, I'm not a coach. I'm not, you know, I don't have a, an HR background, like who are the folks that we need involved? And so I started, before we even launched it, before I walked those sketchy flyers around, we pulled in folks from every kind of angle. So it was like folks who had an HR background, folks who had operations experience, folks who you know, had PhDs and organizational psychology.
So one of the folks who's now on our board, Jennifer Habig has a PhD in organizational psychology. She's a longtime trainer, executive coach, and she's built out all kinds of trainings. And so she was one of the first people I connected with. And I still remember our conversation. I was sitting in my car between meetings and I was still working another job and I kind of floated this idea to her and you know, she's done in person coaching her entire career and she was skeptical. She was like, well how do you, you know, how do you do this high level coaching over text? And also, you know, what do people really need and how do you incorporate rights-based information or resources? What would that look like? And now, you know, she's one of our biggest advocates and I think for her, I can't speak for her, but it from, you know, from what she shared, it's really meaningful to see the shift that happens in these conversations where someone comes in feeling like extraordinarily stuck, confused, overwhelmed, and in the course of a conversation says things like, you know, to the volunteer, like, are you a fairy God mother for work?
You know, like, this is amazing. We had someone who, I mean we've had multiple people, but just someone last week who said, I had to pause because I'm just in tears. Like this has been the most meaningful conversation I've had. And we had someone last week who said, this was really life altering for me. And it is, it's profound to see that shift happen in an SMS conversation, but there's, there's a level of impact that it has cognitively to type something out. It's an interesting space for reflection because people can write something, think about it. And then it's also a way for people to, you know, people come back and tell us like, Oh, that practice that I did with the volunteer around how to have that conversation with my manager. I then had in my SMS history and I could go back and read it and like get ready for that conversation.And so there's a lot of power to those pieces.
Passionistas: Talk about the actual process of using Empower Work.
Jaime-Alexis: It's pretty seamless so you can easily connect in over SMS or web chat. So we offer both. If folks want to text in, it's a (510) 674-1414 you text us and say hi, I want to talk to someone. You get a quick auto response that says, you know, we got your message, we connect people with a real person under two minutes. And so you're able to start that conversation really seamlessly. There's no barrier to entry, no intake form. You don't have to pay anything. And that's really important because overwhelmingly the folks that we support are isolated. About 40% of the folks that we connect with are lower, lower income. A lot of folks feel like their livelihood is online. So you know when your boss puts a meeting and asks you to come into a meeting in 15 minutes and you're worried you're going to get fired, you don't have time to like fill out a bunch of stuff and try to find someone in whatever you're just in that moment.
So it looks connected on average conversations are about 90 minutes, you know, that can be folks connect with us on their commute, like on the bus, on the way to work sometimes on their lunch break. You know, kind of the benefit of our structures that we meet people where they are. So you're able to say, you know, we have folks who are like, I just, sorry, I took a pause because my, my boss walked by, you know, they're texting us at work, so it's pretty seamless to connect. And then the course of the conversation, we really spend time that a volunteer spends time and understanding what's going on, what's at stake for the person, what do people value? Because it's different for everybody. Like if you're, you're worried you're going to get fired, sometimes that's actually fine for the person. They're like, that's great. This is toxic.
I want to leave. If I get fired, that's mine. I can file for unemployment, I can move on. For other people it's terrifying and they don't lose that job. And so we talked through what does someone want to see happen and then we'll provide space to practice a conversation if needed or an approach. We'll talk through pathways, we'll talk through pros and cons of particular decisions and we'll also provide resources if needed. So if someone's really unsure, like, hey, should I, you know, should I talk to an attorney about this? Is this something even that has legal protections around it, you know, we'll, we'll provide additional resources and information or things like someone's lost their job and they don't know how to access healthcare. We, you know, we provide that as well.
Passionistas: We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Jamie-Alexis Fowler. If you or someone you know is facing a challenge at work, text (510) 674-1414 or visit empowerwork.org. Now here's more of our interview with Jamie-Alexis.
What's the typical background of the volunteers that you have? How do they know all of the things they need to know?
Jaime-Alexis: The main skill or value that's important for volunteers is really empathy. What we train around and our approach is, is really around how to be a deep listener. How to really hear what's going on with someone, what's at stake, and to ask really powerful questions to help someone unpack and like think about what's going on. So that's first and foremost. People come from all different kinds of backgrounds. We do ask that everyone has experienced in the workplace just because it's part and parcel of understanding what people are going through. Those backgrounds can be anything from, you know, chefs to like HR professionals. We have a really a wide spectrum. We have a lot of folks who, for instance have an MSW and you know, have a background in social work, but maybe doing something totally different now and this type of giving back kind of reconnects them with aspects of, of their background that they really appreciate.
One of our volunteers who works in HR said being a volunteer helps her put the human back in HR, that it gives her a chance to really spend time on the people part of it, which is really important. But a lot of folks who volunteer interested in coaching, they're interested in management either because they are a manager and they want to become a better manager and we see that volunteering is really a win-win. It's a way to give back and build professional skills. So we have volunteers who come and say like, I just got a raise because of the skills that I built, volunteering or you know, I just found a new job. And like I talked about how I've built these other, these other skills through Empower Work. So it's, it's really wonderful to see the impact, not just for the folks who connect with us, but for the volunteers. It's not just a one sided, it's really a two sided interaction. And to your question about how do we, how do folks know all of the things, that's one of the benefits of technology. So no one, no one has to remember like, Oh what's the labor information for, you know, X city or like X state. Like they have access to resources around that. So there's, that's not in anyone's brain, it's just part of the platform.
Passionistas: Are the calls confidential or do you look at the calls to see if there are overarching themes that keep coming up so that you can build your resources in a particular area?
Jaime-Alexis: Absolutely. So all the conversations are confidential and one of the reasons we built Empower Work as a nonprofit was that in our initial research we saw, you know, as I mentioned, people work at places where their company wouldn't be willing or able to pay for something as well as the fact that people didn't trust what was provided by companies. This is a little bit of an extreme example, but we don't ask culturally someone who's being abused to go to the abuser for the source of solving that. And that's not to say that companies aren't responsible that companies shouldn't invest in resources. Absolutely. Should we see Empower Work as fitting into a landscape of resources? Companies should have a responsibility and cover resources and should people trust and be willing to go to those. Fantastic. Sometimes it's a yes and like connect with Empower Work, talk through something and then go talk to your HR partner, go to you know, or go use your reporting platform internally.
That's a lot of what we talked through with folks that like evaluating whether or not to do that. So all the conversations are confidential and we do look at those larger trends and themes and one of our goals in the next year is to actually surface a public facing visual of some of our data, and again, totally confidential, but just these higher level themes. So some of the top ones that we see, not surprisingly job decision, job decision tied to many different factors, but job decision is one of the top issues that people start with. Like I'm trying to figure out if I stay or leave this job and it can be tied to a sense of being treated fairly. It can be tried tied to a bad manager. There are a lot of different connections that are part of that. We also see trends and people emotions associated with the issues.
And so top emotions that we see are feeling stuck, feeling isolated. We hear the only a lot. So like I'm the only mom on my team, no one understands that I need to take this time and go to a doctor's appointment with my kid because I'm a single parent. And embarrassment around that for a sense of they shouldn't feel embarrassed but they're being made to feel embarrassed because people aren't supportive. And that's really hard. You know, we see a lot of the stress and anxiety that are tied to these issues and a sense of really being on like an edge I would say. Um, and how tie that is to work and that's really hard. And one of the things that I think as a, as a country we really need to talk about to say what's wrong with the way that things are structured that people feel like they are so on edge, even with a job that seems to pay. Okay. Like you shouldn't feel like you are constantly on a cusp of losing something.
Passionistas: What have you learned about your own personal management style in doing all of this?
Jaime-Alexis: One of the things I kind of knew early on with that, I'd had a lot of positive feedback on being a manager before early in my career, a mentor of mine said, you know, I think you would be a really great manager. And I said, well, I don't really know. Like what does that entail? Like what does that mean? And she actually laughed and she said, you know, I'm not sure, but I kinda just feel like you, you have that. And so I spent like a couple of years, he like, what is good management? Have to know all these like pros and cons and things like that. And I think at the heart of it, I believe one of the reasons that I'm still close with a lot of folks that I worked with him during his teams is that I've set a lot of intention around creating space, people on my team in a way that balances the business need with the individual need.
And that's been really important to me in terms of what I've learned. I mean, so much. And one of the things I often talk to people, it's like I'm someone who loves to jump to solutions. And even though I just talked about, you know, creating space, a lot of times I've now realized how often I would jump to like, well, have you tried, you know, blah, blah, blah. Um, and I have now very intentionally tried to remove, have you questions out of my vocabulary, like to friends, to my partner, like just at all. Because seeing how disempowering that can be to someone because it's like advice wrapped in a question or hidden in a question. And so really trying to take that out is hard, but I'm working on it.
Passionistas: What do you say instead?
Jaime-Alexis: Instead of saying like, Oh, have you talked to HR? I'll ask something like, what have you considered so far? And it creates a more of an openness to it as opposed to like, well, you should have talked to HR, you know, even if your intention is like, Oh, you're just trying to get more information.
Passionistas: What's your vision for the company?
Jaime-Alexis: We have a pretty ambitious goal to reach 3 million people in the next five years. And that's, it's a big, it's a big job. But what we saw when we started was a huge need. I mean, 90% of working Americans have faced something challenging. So the scope of that, you know, 3 million in relation to the overall need is actually pretty small. But we really started with impact. We wanted to understand does this text based intervention have an impact positively for both the people who reach out and for the volunteers. And so rather, you know, it's like yeah, we could probably go out and find millions of people who have adverse situations right now.
We really wanted to understand like what goes into a successful conversation, how do we improve the emotional outcomes, economic outcomes. And so across the first year that we started, every time we ran a training for volunteers, it changed because we were constantly taking feedback from conversations we were seeing from approaches and like re-crafting that into our training. We were building a training completely from scratch. There's no, I mean I say that there's no nothing that's existed in the last three years of doing research on this. I have not come across anything that combines the emotional and tactical support that we provide. And so although we searched high and low, because we did not want to reinvent the wheel, we had to invent the wheel. And so that took a lot of investment. And now we're at the point where we see the positive impact and you know, we have folks coming back to us saying like, Oh my gosh, I got the raise.
You know, like thank you so much for talking that through with me. Like I got it and I paid off more of my student loans and I like, you know, I'm looking for a better place to live that has windows. You know, like you hear these, you hear these stories, you're like, Oh my gosh, this is, this is really impactful. And so now we want to serve 3 million people in the next five years and then keep building this out so that we can build practices across networks, companies to really improve the way that people interact with one another at work. And then we also really want to contribute to structural conversations. Like what are the gaps in policies and approaches. There are some really innovative work happening. For instance, in California, there's a future of work commission in California. There's also a commission on mental health at work.
And so to have these initiatives that California is putting a stake in the ground and saying like we want to be a leader in looking at like what does healthy work environment look like in the future? And so we really want to contribute to those conversations with our data, with perspectives and you know, at the heart of it look at like we know that work is changing. What work used to be 10 ,15, 50 years ago is now totally different. Everything from you know, remote work to things like policies around gig work and how do we support workers in a different way. So we see a huge opportunity to be part of that through our data and through the worker voice that we see when folks are connecting with us and sharing these really powerful perspectives. Like a lot of what we hear from workers is like, I just want to feel valued. Being asked to come in last minute when I'm supposed to be off for two days is not a request where you feel respected and it might be okay, it might be lawful, but it's not. It doesn't feel good. And so how do we support workplaces where folks can thrive?
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistsas Project Podcast and our interview with Jamie-Alexis Fowler, if you or someone you know is facing a challenge at work, text (510) 674-1414 a visit and empowerwork.org.
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Four-time New York Times bestselling author Rachel Van Dyken has been called "the second coming of Candace Bushnell" after the release of her newest book with legendary Super Model turned Super Mogul, Kathy Ireland. The pair co-wrote the novel Fashion Jungle about the model’s life in the fashion industry. The book has been described as "Sex and the City meets the #MeToo Movement with a dash of Valley of the Dolls." Rachel has written close to 85 romance novels in the last ten years and is on mission to change the stigma of the genre.
Learn more about Rachel.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington, and today we're talking with Wall Street Journal, USA Today and four time New York Times bestselling author Rachel Van Dyken. Rachel was called the second coming of Candace Bushnell after the release of her newest book with legendary supermodel turned super mogul Kathy Ireland. The pair co-wrote the novel "Fashion Jungle" about the model's life. The book has been described as "Sex and the City" meets the #MeToo movement, with a dash of "Valley of the Dolls." So please welcome to the show Rachel Van Dyken.
Rachel: Thank you so much for having me.
Passionistas: Thanks for being here. We're really excited to talk to you today. What's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Rachel: The one thing I'm most passionate about is my family. Um, they always come first, no matter what I'm doing, whatever project I'm working on, and then obviously hand in hand with that is writing. It's, it's something that I don't understand the concept of being stressed about deadlines or stressed about getting books out because for me, that's just my passion in life. I love getting words out. I love creating worlds for readers. So really it's, that's my passion and it's my job, which is, I'm really lucky.
Passionistas: Tell us about how you became a writer.
Rachel: So I actually was a school counselor. Right out of college, which I don't know why I thought that was a good idea at 21. But I was a school counselor. I had about 800 kids that I was in charge of, um, which was a lot for someone, you know, at my age. And I got really bad anxiety attacks, like really bad panic attacks from it because you're dealing with so much emotional stuff. You know, you have four year olds that are in preschool talking about suicide and it's just, it's just a lot to handle. Um, so I started reading, so I would take, um, I worked also for the state and I would take my clients to the library and I'd be like, okay, check out a book. And then we'd go through it and talk about, you know, social cues in how to approach friendship and different things like that. And then at the time I just was a voracious reader, so I would check out like 15 books.
And so I started checking out a ton of historical romance and in between the times I had clients, I started thinking, Hey, I could, I'm going to try. I thought I could do it. So I tried writing and would just send chapters to my sister every other day and she was like, this is great, but I'm like, you're a liar. You're my sister. You have to say it's good. Um, but yeah, then I sent it to a publisher and I got my first publishing deal, but it was a really great outlet for me. You know, I always encouraged kids to have a journal and for me it was almost like my own personal journal. Only it was romance.
Passionistas: So why did you pick romance?
Rachel: I love love. And I think that so often, especially as women, we are shamed for maybe being more sexual or talking about love or talking about female empowerment and relationships. And it really bothered me that romance was getting kind of this, this, I loved reading about it and people would always be like, Oh, that's a romance novel. Like I remember in college I had a friend, a friend that whenever I would bring in like a romance book and it was usually like Regency historical, he'd be like, Oh, you're reading one of those again. And I felt like I had to hide it. Like I felt like I wasn't allowed to have that book out in my history class because it wasn't considered real literature. So I wanted to prove that romance obviously is literature and it's good and it's amazing. And so because I love that and kids was a passion and because I loved reading about it, I wanted to write about it too.
Passionistas: Do you feel like the stigma of that genre has changed in recent years?
Rachel: Every time I think it has, I feel like we go backwards. You know, every single time I'm like, Hey, they finally get it and we're getting the respect we deserve. There's like an article somewhere that makes, that a man wrote, obviously that makes fun of our genre or that says there's other authors that are real authors and writers and we just write bodice rippers. And so that's something that it bothers me on a daily basis. I know the other day there was a post that was going viral and now it was about this library that did a thing called bad romance. And they would check out these romance books and they would host it every Valentine's day and they would pick out passages and make fun of romance novels. And I'm thinking, especially when you're taking stuff out of context like that, of course it's going to sound funny because you haven't been reading, you don't know the characters, you don't know.
And there are some of them are my friends, like the ones that are making fun of. And so that is just, I mean that's just more random, 2020 we shouldn't be having to do stuff like that. And so I think that there is still a stigma, but I'm hoping that me and my fellow writers can help continue to battle that as we do.
Passionistas: How do you battle it?
Rachel: The biggest thing that we do is we try to be really informed, like letting people know, okay, like a bodice ripper of maybe back in the day when people were getting Harlequin books that were all Fabio on the front. Like that's what people think when they think romance. You know the other thing you're writing "50 Shades of Gray" or they think that you're writing Fabio. And so for us it's just making sure people know what it is and making sure that the readers do a really good job of um, letting people know what it is and not having, not being shamed for it.
And I think too, on top of that, that's why things like this are so important. Doing a podcast and, and other large media outlets because then it takes that stigma away and then you can start talking about what's so important. You know, like we read about cancer and these books we read about research, we have very intelligent women and men in these books that, you know, have these passionate, you know, times together. But it's all character driven. And I think it's really important that people understand that it's a story and it's still character driven. There's a lot of writers in that space and you've been very successful.
Passionistas: So talk about some of the highs and lows just from a business perspective of what you're doing.
Rachel: When you start writing, you have to look at it as a business. And for me it's always been very important to look at it as a marathon, not a sprint. You know, a lot of writers start out and they put all their eggs in one basket. They're like, this book is going to hit. But what they don't understand is even if that book does hit, you still have to hit all those other times too. It's not just like a one, one hit thing and then you're going to be like, you know, going to the Hamptons with Nicholas Sparks, like, that's not how it works. Um, and I think that's a common misconception because you, when a book does really well, all of a sudden you see this person everywhere and you just assume that it was their first book and they haven't been working really hard for 20 years. Like you just, you don't know 'em and I think when Amazon opened its doors to all the self-publishing, you have a lot of people, you have a lot of competition and you have a lot of people that are coming in and doing what we call like their, I don't, they're called farms basically.
And so they come in and they just make up random pen names and they'll release like 15 books that have all been ghost written and then they're trying to, you know, make money and cheat the system and stuff. And so for us, like you're really having to navigate those waters. And something I, I've mentored a couple of authors and something I always tell them is don't, don't think of it as competition and don't keep people in the red ocean. It's like a red ocean versus blue ocean marketing perspective for me, don't compete. And do the same old thing with everyone else and be like, Oh, this stepbrother romance, that's huge. Let's do that. Don't do that. But bring them over into the blue ocean where there's lots of competition, there's more originality. And even if you're not making as much money in that blue ocean, you're still giving a better product to your readers and you're giving them something different.
You're not giving them the same thing that you're seeing in the Amazon or Apple top 100, you know, you want to give them something different. And so for me, there's been a ton of crazy highs, but there's been a lot of lows too. And you just have to ride that wave and no one publishing. It's going to be that way.
Passionistas: So now your first book was published traditionally with a book publisher and then you also self-published. So talk about the different approaches and how you approach each way.
Rachel: I think it's really a smart to have your hand kind of in a lot of different cookie jars because when you do just traditional publishing, um, you don't have a lot of say in what goes on. Um, um, luckily I have great publishers who do, who really want me to be partners with them, which I love. But that doesn't always happen, especially when you're newer. Um, because you haven't had those sales to prove, you know, that you know what you're talking about. They're like, no, we know. Um, so traditional publishing, it's more of a hands off. You turn in your manuscript, you do your edits, done indie publishing or self-publishing, you have control over the editing process. You have control over the cover art control over the marketing. And so I think it just depends on where your passion is. If you're a really controlling person, it's hard. It's hard to give your baby away to the big publisher if they change it.
I had a publisher change. The girl was, um, had dark hair and they put a blonde on the cover and I was like, why would you do this? And they were like, Oh, we just liked the picture better. And I'm like, that doesn't make any. So then I have readers like coming at me thinking, why would you do this to your cover? And I'm like, I didn't do it. And so then that's a repetitive process. So I think it's nice to have both. I think the indie publishing for me is great because I can plan my schedule to where I do my traditional release and then I have non-compete, so I have to wait six weeks so that I could do my own. So I still have series. I refuse to sell that our mind that I, that I write in. And then I have series that publishers own that they continue to keep. So it's kind of nice to have both. And I think there's, I think there's, I think it's smart to do that. I think it's good, especially if you have a book series, it didn't do that great. And that's, you know, your business and that's how you're putting food on the table. It's nice to have a traditional deal waiting in the back that, you know, was a sure thing.
Passionistas: How many books have you written and do you write more than one at a time?
Rachel: Yes, I write usually three books at a time. Um, but it's because so there was really good point. It, I don't get writer's block because of it because I'm constantly changing scenery, changing characters and I hate being on like tr whenever I have to finish one book and I know it's due in like a week. I hate that because then I have to stop working on other things because that's what helps me stay fresh. That's what helps me, you know, reinvent the story. Like I'll be writing, say a paranormal just for fun and all of a sudden I'm like, Oh, but this could happen and I'll just like click over and go in my other book. So it really helps me out. And I usually don't write in the same genre. So I be writing mafia with contemporary romance, maybe with like a little rock star romance or paranormal. So it's all different so I can keep them apart. Um, and I typically release 11 to 12 books a year and depending on my traditional release schedule, because everything has to go around that. And then I have, I believe we're over 85 books now published.
Passionistas: And how long have you been doing it?
Rachel: 10 years.
Passionistas: And you've had time to have a family.
Rachel: Yeah.
Passionistas: So how do you juggle all that good scheduling?
Rachel: It's, I used to, I don't honestly know what I used to do with my time. My husband and I asked that like every day we're like, did we just read magazines and sit around the house? Like what did we do? Because you know, we had full time jobs but you know with a child everything changes. It is you, your schedule changes your sleep, you don't sleep ever again. It's fantastic. Um, so for you know, for a while and my husband was really just being a full time, cause he works from home, stay at home dad and working full time. And I honestly have such a good partner and he's always been a huge advocate of it's not my job to watch my child. It's my privilege to have this child that gets not, you know, cause so often, especially people that are my age, we hear dads that are like, Oh yeah, I'll watch the kids tonight if you want to go out, you know, with your girls.
And it's like, no, no, like that's this. It's 50/50. You can, you know, I don't know. So he's always been, and he always thinks it's funny that that people are someone all how involved he is. But I'm like, no, that's his, it's his life. You know, he's the one that's like, let's have 10 more kids and I'm like, or we can only have a few. So yeah. So he's really supportive and great. And then obviously I really utilize my time when little guys napping or when he's at school, I'm working as hard as I can, getting those words out and, and I still answer all my own social media and do all that. So I definitely split it up. So if he's around, I'm on my phone trying to answer messages and emails. But then once it's around six, lately it hasn't been like this, but usually that's, it's around six o'clock. I put everything down, everything's done. And then we have family time and he knows that he knows when he's at from his nap, it's time for like mom and dad to play and we do whatever.
Passionistas: So most of the writing you do is classified as new adult. So for someone who doesn't know, talk about what that genre is.
Rachel: New adult is right after sa you're 18, 19 years old, um, it can be all the way up to 25-ish. And it's kind of that time in your life when you're like, what am I doing with my life? Why doesn't my degree work anymore? Why am I in student loan debt? You know, it's that whole time where you're trying to figure out who you are and what your place is in the world. And I find it extremely fascinating because no matter how old you are, it's just like with why books, no matter how old you are, you remember being in that place.
And so it's really fun to write because you remember what it was like when, when you were struggling, when you were like, do I have enough to buy chicken nuggets today? No, I do not. You know, like money and when you first get your first electric bill and you're like, what is this? You know, just all those times and all those life lessons. I think it's so fascinating putting it in book form because that's also a lot of times too, when you have your true love, right? Your very first love or your very first, you know, heartache. And so I think it's interesting to write about that because the feelings that are behind that are so intense because you have so much going on and you're not really, people say you're an but you're really not an adult yet. And so it's just a really fascinating time. So new adult would definitely be that little section of time where we call it like coming of age time.
Passionistas: You wrote your new book, which is called "Fashion Jungle" with supermodel Kathy Ireland. So how did that come about and what was it like working with her?
Rachel: We had a mutual friend introduce us and we honestly, I remember talking about, she called me later that week and I was sitting in front of my house and she was like, Hey, this is my idea. What do you think? Um, I kind of want to call it "Fashion Jungle." And there was these four women and I want them each to be in their thirties, you know, this is post like them, you know, making it in this industry. And she had this story, this incredible story that included a lot of situations where, you know, she was mistreated or her friends were mistreated or there were suicides, um, agents getting people addicted to drugs or people who were involved in sex trafficking. And you never saw again, just like fascinating, heart-wrenching stuff that she really wanted to put in a fiction book, which it was hard cause we had so much content.
Um, and so we decided just to start the project and it went really well. I would write stuff and send it to her. And then she would edit or add things. Um, I remember the first time I sat down, I had 15 pages of notes that we had to just say like, okay, how are we gonna, you know? And the other hard part is a lot of it is based off of real life. You know, it's, it's people, they're still living, some people that have died. And so celebrities, you know, that you can't like name names, you can't name drop it all. And so, you know, in order to protect those people and protect ourselves, we had to change names but also get permission from somebody because we were like, Hey, we're going to be writing about this. So it was really fun. It was a really fun experience. She was fantastic. Is fantastic to work with. Um, and it just one of the sweetest people in the world.
Passionistas: Talk a little bit more about that, about the celebrities and how you go about getting permission from them or, or the decision to change the name rather than get permission.
Rachel: Well, thankfully she was friend or is friends with a lot of these people. I mean, I don't even think that woman has enemies. She's just the nicest person. So, you know, that was the easier part. The harder part was people that maybe were not the greatest people. Um, that did take advantage, that did have the whole casting couch that, you know were worse than the worst that you've seen in Hollywood lately that are no longer with us. You know, how do you deal with that by still respecting the dead, if that makes sense. Um, and what we ended up doing is we were a prequel novella for the ebook launch and we partnered with them. And the, the actual novella was about this man that owned the biggest modeling agency in the world that was known to take advantage of all the girls, you know, and these girls, when I say girls, I'm talking 14 years old, 13 years old, and they're without their parents. They've been, they grew up thinking I trust an adult. Like, you know, you always tell your kids, find an adult, find a teacher, find this person, and then you could trust them. Like that's what you hope for your kid. And so, you know, her being in the big city, she's thinking, well, they're an adult, why would they take advantage of me? You know, she just so innocent. Her friends were innocent. They didn't know.
And then also you have this added pressure of well this is just how things are in this industry, which a lot of people are like, okay, well it's Hollywood. So I guess this is how things go. And it's New York. Okay. It's the fashion industry. It's normal to be, to get asked to be topless. Like that's okay. You know, and just crazy situations. And for her she was like, you know, I knew my boundaries going in. Um, but with this person that we ended up writing about, she, because of the person that he was, she actually didn't want not want to change his first name. So we kept his first name changed the last name just because she was in an altercation with him at one point where he tried to take advantage of her in hotel room saying, there's only one bed. We need to stay the night, you know, one of those situations. And so, so yeah, so we definitely wanted to make sure that we put that out there just because people need to know, you know, and, and she's been talking about in interviews too, so it's just one of those things that I think, you know, you just deal with it as it comes.
Passionistas: Are there any other names you can name in the book?
Rachel: We ended up, uh, basing a character off of Arnold Schwarzenegger because they're really good friends. And so, uh, we had actually finished it and then when I went to book bands and another signing with her, we were on the phone with her manager and he's like an Arnold really just like you to add a part. And we were like, so we went back. It was really, and I was like, repeat yourself Arnold. And then I'm like, okay, we're on a first name basis, get, okay. So I had to go back and, you know, spell that name. So that was fun. Uh, and add him like a little section in, because we also had another character based off of Vanessa Williams in the book. She also did, um, like a little soundtrack, um, song for the book too, which was really nice of her.
Um, and then we do have a one character that, it's one of those things that I don't mention it live cause there's a not supposed to, but if you read the book, you'll know it's based off of American royalty and this person does end up dying in a plane crash. And it's very, very, very sad. But it's someone that was close to her. Um, so that was definitely something that whenever readers pick it up and they read it, they are like, that's one of the gut wrenching parts of the book that really gets people. Because, you know, some of them were like, I remember this happening, I remember seeing this on TV. And if not, then they're, you know, Googling it as fast as they can drain of. Like, it's like for them it's like trying to find the treasure, like, okay. And that was just, you know, trying to relate everything together.
Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Rachel Van Dyken. To learn more about all of her books, including "Fashion Jungle" visit RachelVanDykenauthor.com. Now here's more of our interview with Rachel.
So what do you hope people take away from reading the book?
Rachel: Anyone can pick up this book. It's, it's a clean read. It doesn't have, you know, anything in it that even like a 12-year-old would not be able to read that hasn't been exposed to already. Um, you know, but even if you're in your eighties, we can pick it up and we wrote it that way so that people can not only learn about the fashion industry, which was always interesting, but also learn about the people that maybe no longer have their lives anymore. You know, people that we've lost, people that have gone through really hard times, people that have disappeared.
We wanted to make sure that we did have the #MeToo movement in there because this was back in a time when that was not a movement. It was not, hadn't happened yet. It's weird to me that Hollywood has had this whole movement of #MeToo, but yet no one's been talking about the fashion industry. And I think that's really strange because the fashion industry, it was worse, you know, like there and there's in situations where, you know, it was all young girls. And so that's something that we really want to do include because we haven't had that moment yet and it needs to happen. And I'm hoping that this helps raise awareness for that, you know? And on top of that we have, we deal a lot with sex trafficking. I know that's something that's close to my heart as is to Kathy's heart as well. Um, and that's something that again, like, you know, you try to raise awareness, but I feel like we're still yelling and people aren't listening.
And so it's something that we want to do include in there because she did have friends that she never saw again. You know, friends that were taken overseas. I know she had said one story, which I don't know if we included all of it, but um, when you don't make it, they send you to the other agency over in Europe and they give you drugs and tell you to be nice to the men because they're businessmen. Right? But they're actually sex trafficking, you know what I mean? So like people would go over there because they couldn't make it in New York and then she would never see them again. And so it's just heartbreaking stuff that yes, it's fictionalized. It's, it's still a fun, sexy book. There's still a lot in it. It's a good suspense. But we have all those little kernels of truth and wisdom in there that people can pick up and go, wait. And so I'm hoping that this book does help and continue to help raise awareness.
Passionistas: Do you think you'll start to write more books that are out of outside of the pure romance genre?
Rachel: My goal in life is to write a really good suspense that has a little bit of romance, but as categorized as a suspense. Because I love in this book we have a, I write a mafia romance, which sounds silly, but it's awesome. Love it so much. Um, I just love intense people and I love anti-heroes. So I love people that you think you can't redeem them. They're the worst. They justify all these things and in the end they're actually like a good person. And you see, just in this book we had a character day and that was like that. You think he's like the bad person, the villain and all of this and he's actually the savior of them all, which I think is so cool. And so I love writing stuff like that. And I hope that in the future with Kathy or whoever, I'm writing with the, I can continue to write books that have that romance in there that I desperately love, but also have so many other things that can actually help help people as well.
Passionistas: Are you going to write more with Kathy right now?
Rachel: We have not even talked about it because we've been doing press for two weeks now. Uh, but I would be totally open to it. You know, like I said, we had a lot of content and it was really hard. One of the things that I care from readers is, well there are so many storylines. It was like it took me to like page 10 and I'm like that's fine cause you have to get to know the characters. And like for romance, a lot of times there's just two point of views. So for my readers, you know, they're used to the two, not to the four or five, like different people that are talking.
Uh, so yeah, I would love to write more with her and I would definitely love to bring in, you know, we left it open. So to bring in any of those storylines again and doing an offshoot of that would be fun. Well and she's the kind of person too that seems like you could do something about business. Like, she's such a pioneer in business and branding and yes, I want to just kind of sit at her feet and have her tell me all, all her secrets, all her things. She's brilliant. And she was one of those people that, you know, when, when she was deciding, you know, I'm have a family now where I'm pregnant, you know, what do I do? Like she shifted her mindset to woman business woman. Like even though I'm a model, I'm still a business woman, so I'm going to do this. And I think her very first business was socks. Like she sold a brand of socks and it sold, sold out. And it did. And so they just went from there. You know, what about this, what about that? And she and Kathy Ireland worldwide do a fantastic job of once you're under their wing and you're part of their family, you're part of their family forever. And I think that's something that, that speaks volumes about who she is and who they are. And I think on top of that, it's also why she's so successful is because those people had been with her for a long time. And, and, and once you're partners with her, you know, you've, she mentors you, you know what I mean? And she's really great at that.
Passionistas: What do you think is your best habit?
Rachel: My best habit's probably working out and making sure that I get up. My watch always tells me to stand cause I'm always sitting and I am the type of person that, again, I'm high anxiety cause I'm, you know, I think a lot of creative people are because we're just like Whoa all over the place. You know, I don't sleep super well because I'm constantly thinking about books. And so one thing that I do that my husband's really good at being reminding me like, remember you've been sitting for 10 hours, remember? Like you're going to feel so much better if you do this. And that's, I do CrossFit. So that's, that's a habit that I've kept up for the last five years. You even did it when I was pregnant and I think it's so important. I always tell my readers too, I'm always like a huge advocate of eating healthy, but also getting out, even if it means like just getting out of your chair and walking around your hotel room and doing some air squats or just taking a walk outside.
I think it's really important just to, to move because I feel like we're so disconnected and I think too, when you're disconnected in your home, and I'm like, hold up working all day, I'm not having any social interaction at all except for with people in my head, which means I'm kind of crazy, so I need to go out and so I have to leave the house, go out and make sure that I have that time for myself. And I think so many authors hit burnout this day and age. Like you see so many authors that burn out because they're just like pumping out books, but they're not taking that time for themselves. They're not taking that time to even read or to, or to be outside or to take vacation. And I know I'm preaching to the choir because I'm, I have to remind myself of this every day. But that's why it has to become a habit because you need that time for yourself to relax.
Passionistas: Is there one lesson that you've learned on your journey so far that really sticks with you?
Rachel: The biggest lesson I've learned that I continue to tell myself every day is that even if it's just one person that is impacted by your words, but maybe they were suicidal or maybe they've gone through a death in their family. Maybe they have, they're going through anxiety but anxiety a lot. Then it's worth it. Like it is worth your time, 100% to write that book and to put it out there, even if it just one person buys it because that means that one person needed it at that time. And so I think when sales are down or when you're bummed about a book release or when you know you see someone else doing really well and you're excited, but you're also like, but why? Why do I suck? I don't, I don't get it. Like, you need to know that that's so important.
And I always pray that I'm brought that person. So especially because I think it helps us authors to just understand that like these people are out there like needing these words. Like yes it's romance, but we put so much in these books that, you know, we're so intense, we deal with really intense situations and we use romance, we use comedy to kind of help people out of them. But that reading is an escape. And so no matter what you're providing that escape and that safe place for someone and I think that's really important.
Passionistas: What's the biggest risk you've taken in your career and how has it paid off?
Rachel: I think the biggest risk was quitting my job. Um, I quit my job when I, I mean I had nothing in savings. I had just used my first, then my very first Facebook ad the year before that for 50 bucks. So that's all I had. I mean, we were literally living from paycheck to paycheck off $21,000 a year because my husband had just gotten, he was a commercial diver. And you get a great job. And then he, they almost killed him. He almost died. He was drowned and it was like three months after we were married. And so it was a huge risk because I was the breadwinner and I had my MBA at the time and I had just gotten a brand new job that was paying like double and I was like, yeah, you believe in it. Okay, it's cheaper. But I was like, yes. Um, but I hated that job and I would come, I loved the kids I worked with, but I was a manager and I would come home and the boss, the one boss above me was just so stressed out all the time.
And, and I would, she would keep me there until 10 o'clock at night, you know, so I'm getting up and I'm driving there at eight. And so I was working crazy days, but I was on salary, so it didn't matter. You know what I mean? Um, I wasn't getting to spend time with him. And then I was writing for like three hours a night. So I was getting no sleep because I just had to do it. Like it was my passion and I had just hit the USA today list on my last Regency series. And so I was making okay money with my royalties, but I was like, I just can't, like I can't, I need to do this full force. And so I quit my job and started writing full time with him. Also, you know, just, we started another business, started a publishing house in Indy house under his name and just kind of went full force at it.
Passionistas: What's your definition of success?
Rachel: Success is going to bed at night knowing you got done that day. Everything you needed to get done, even if that means you just brushed your hair. I had a really hard time when I just had my son because I was used to having like 12 hours a day to finish a book and I'd read like 17,000 words a day. Like I was just crazy. And then all of a sudden it was like, okay, well I'm trying to nurse and then I'm trying to like, I can't type one handed. And I was like, how do I, you know, cause he's a boy. So he thought he was hungry every hour of course. And I was like, no formula. And then finally I was like, we're done here. We're going to get formula. Cause I just couldn't deal with any cause I was trying to work.
And then you panic about finances and you're like, okay, well I have to get this book out or if I'm, if I'm late on this deal. And so for me the biggest thing was like understanding, and this, my sister helped with this. She was like, did you brush your hair? And I was like, yeah, actually I did good. You got mascara on. And I was like, I actually got mascara on today. And she's like, congratulations. You have a successful day. Like did you get breakfast? Like you have to look at every single victory is like, even if it's small is a victory. Um, so it's not even about money. It's not about my book at the time. So we looked at this like, I think it's, you have to look at the tiny, tiny, tiny things because then when the big things happen, it's even more epic.
But if they don't, you don't go to bed like, Oh, what was me, you know, you can still celebrate what you've accomplished and what you've done. And I seriously have to tell myself that on a daily basis because in my husband, again, his radar reminded me, cause I'll be like, Ugh, but I didn't get this. He was like, but did you get this done? And so that's kind of like switching your focus to not what I didn't do, but what I did do. And then even writing those things down, which I've done, put on sticky notes around it and like killed it. I killed it today. So I think that's so important and it's something that I struggle with still, but it's good.
Passionistas: What advice would you give to a young woman who wants to be a writer?
Rachel: My advice is write, write, write, write, write. I think, uh, and even if you're writing 27 different manuscripts or if you're, you know, working on just one, it makes sure that you write it and finish it. There's so many people that have like, I've been writing a book for 10 years and I'm like, no, but a lot of times that's because we never think we're good enough. It comes back to that security thing. You think it's not good enough or I'm going to compare it to, to Christina Lauren. No, like they're, they're amazing writing duo, but you're new. Like you can't compare yourself. You know what I mean? It's not fair to you. It's not fair to them. So making sure that you're continuing to write and hone your craft, but do not go back and delete what you've already written because a lot of times what you put down the most raw is the most real, like the most, the stuff that's going to impact people the most.
And I can honestly say my worst selling books are ones that my publisher had me rewrite that I took out all my original stuff that I really loved that made it special and then it just made it like anything else. And I think that that is something that writers need to remember. That's like the best advice I can give.
Passionistas: Do you have a mantra that you live by?
Rachel: My mantra is actually from Joyce Meyer and I, it inspired me to write a book and it's "Do it afraid." So it's like anytime you're, you know, it's not no fear. It's even if you're afraid you can still take a step and do something. And I think that's so important. It's because I've had a lot of really intimidating situations where I'm like, what do I do? My husband's always reminding me, he's like, do it afraid. Just do it. Like it doesn't matter. You can do it and still feel that fear, but don't let that fear define you.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Rachel Van Dyken. To learn more about all of her books, including "Fashion Jungle," visit RachelVanDykenAuthor.com.
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Tuesday Mar 24, 2020
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020
Claudia Cordova Rucker is the founder of the award-winning beauty oasis Aqua Skin and Nail Care and Estetica Mia. Her purpose is to connect with entrepreneurs to work toward a shared vision of elevating work environments through ethical business practices, an open book business management model and heartfelt leadership. In 2013, 2017 and 2018 she was recognized by the California Senate for her excellence in leadership and contributions to her community’s economic growth.
Learn more about Claudia.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington, sisters who are on a mission to inspire you to follow your passions through our interviews with strong, empowered women who are pursuing their dreams.
Today we're talking with Claudia Cardova Rucker, the founder of the award winning beauty oasis Aqua Skin and Nail Care and Estetica Mia. Claudia's purpose is to connect with entrepreneurs to work toward a shared vision of elevating work environments through ethical business practices, an open book business management model and heartfelt leadership. In 2013, 2017 and 2018, she was recognized by the California Senate for her excellence in leadership and contributions to her community's economic growth.
So please welcome to the show, Claudia Cordova Rucker.
Claudia: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.
Passionistas: What are you most passionate about?
Claudia: I'm most passionate about finding what's alive in people. Really being very aware when I'm connecting with them and really listening to what are their needs themes, you know, like what is really important to this person and what do they need to thrive. And I think we're also busy and we're moving through life at such a quick pace, that to me, the beauty is just to slow down when I meet someone and just really be present and listen to them and say, wow, what do they need to thrive? And then to come back and say, how can I be a part of that? What can I offer while still being aware enough that I have to ask permission? Not just go into strategy and analysis for them, but to really listen and connect with them and saying, Hey, do you need someone to listen? Do you need advice? What is it that's alive in you? And how can I meet your needs? And that's what I'm really passionate about. And gaining that awareness and then bringing that to the workplace. That's when I thought, Oh my God, this is magic. This is my purpose. This is really where I want to spend my time and be very intentional about creating these beyond ordinary business work environments.
Passionistas: Talk about that. Talk about how you bring that into the work you do.
Claudia: I have a high need for peace and harmony. Uh, so it was really an identifying my own needs and that, and then realizing that when I either a went anywhere to, uh, be a customer or be in my own workplace, felt, uh, some disharmony that that really affects me on a really deep level. So it was really that like, aha moment that I kind of could pick up on that, that I thought, okay, well how do I go and change this? At first it was implementing open book, business management and transparency. And so that's what I thought would fit. And then I moved to know, Oh, we need a training program that's going to fix that. But it wasn't until I picked up the phone and spoke to Catherine Cooley, she's a nonviolent communications coach that I actually realized, Oh my God, this is the answer.
And so we really bring that into the workplace by starting with communication and how we communicate. And we use a communication style, which it seems kind of dry. It's actually much more than that, but it's called NBC or nonviolent communication. As the founder of the company, you figure out what your needs are and then you really hire for people who share means. So for us in our organization, I have a high need to contribute and our team also has a high need to contribute. And the way that we do that is through a really connective beauty experience. And so there's a lot of layers to it. But I would say that's at the foundation. It really is how we communicate and how we honor what's alive and the people who we collaborate with.
Passionistas: Talk about your journey to starting the nail care salon in 2005.
Claudia: I had been in New York on September 11th and what I now realize is that I was probably suffering from PTSD and I was just super afraid. I was like, if I don't move back to California and something like this happens, how am I going to get back to California and to my family? Because you know, I was stuck in New York for a couple of weeks when that happened. So it was really this thought of like, how do I come back? And I didn't even think about what am I going to do? My expertise at that point was in fabric manufacturing and design for men's wear. And I came to Santa Barbara. There's nothing to do. It has nothing to do with menswear. So I was just here trying to figure that out. When my mom asked me, “Hey, your sister's a single mom, you know, she really needs a way of providing financial support. Can you help her open a business?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure, that's going to be cool. Oh I can do that. That's not, that's not hard.”
And it was really working with my other two sisters that we created. Upwork skin and nail bar, just using our passions. I'm passionate about business. My middle sister Cynthia is passionate about, she's a surgical nurse and you know, all those beautiful cleanliness protocols and health consciousness. And then my, my little sister is passionate about nail care and beauty. So we kind of put all of our strengths together and opened up Aqua nail bar. And then a year later my little sister said, peace out. I do not like managing people and I don't want to do this, but by then we were deep in a business and so someone had to rise to the occasion and take over Aqua and that's really why I ended up continuing with Aqua Aqua Nail Bar.
Passionistas: And then you opened another salon in 2006 but you had to close your first salon three years later. So what happened and how did you handle that setback?
Claudia: One learning lesson was you'd never let your ego get in the way of closing a business when all the signs are there, right? We were leaving a lot of money and I just had this like I can do this attitude and I can make this happen, but we were in a recession and the location was in a, in a neighborhood that was really hit hard by the recession. So closing the original location and just consolidating into the second location. Was this really what kept us going? And it's really where I learned that resiliency that I needed just to say, okay, press pause on ego, keep on moving forward. Find those inner strengths and just keep bouncing back because even after we closed the first one, there's been a lot of journeys, a lot of times where we've had to like kind of look back and rewrite our story to be able to continue on in business.
Passionistas: So talk about focusing on the company culture at Aqua and why that's so important to you.
Claudia: In 2015 California passed AB 1413 which was a labor code change and it, it has culminated into AB five right? What we now know and has gained a lot of publicity, but we were winning all sorts of awards. We were really in a great place when our employment lawyer called me for a meeting and said, Hey, have you heard about AB 1513 you might want to consider this. And really that's when we had to make a decision. What route were we going to go with our business? Where are we going to be compliant and still have employees or were we just going to become landlords and rent space? And for me, I had always had this vision of, Oh, Aqua is going to be a franchise and I'm going to franchise the world. So that meant that we had to adopt AB 50 AB 13 actually all of our independent contractors, employees, well, when you have in place, I mean you really have to lead and you have to create a work culture.
That is a, I mean to me it's, it's taking more responsibility and it was really all these learning lessons of transferring from independent contractors to employees that really would test me over and over and over again. And I also would say is that when I would face the obstacles, I really looked out into the world like Tony Robbins, Simon Sinek, all of these really amazing people that are very inspiring. But then I go into depression, right? Because I didn't know how to make this happen in my business. But as the universe always provides, you know, I had all these really amazing women that just kind of floated in and you know, just taught me that it really starts with work culture, staying positive work culture. And then finally to me it was communicating all of that. And again, coming back to MVC and learning MVC because now I could really have a platform that I could use to communicate the love and tenderness that I always felt in my heart, but that I always had to kind of join with the whole business aspect of it.
Right? And really it's in the, in the work culture, when you get that right and it's helped them tick, um, to what, to who you are, not as who you pretend to be, but who you really are at your core. That's just really magic because there's enough people out there that you're going to find your tribe as long as you're clear and you can communicate what your purpose is clearly. And so that's really where the work on work culture started just through a lot of pain, really, to be honest with you. And then again, that resiliency of saying, no, I'm not going to accept that this is the way that it has to be. I can choose to create what's living inside of my heart. I just don't know how. But I know that the guides are going to come in and they would, it's very miraculously our amazing work culture has been a collaboration of many, many women. Just saying, I see you and you matter and I believe in what you're doing and let me offer you my gift and then take it, say thank you and incorporate it into your work culture.
Passionistas: It's so unusual, and I will speak for myself, it's not something I've experienced in a work culture. So does it take people time to adjust to it?
Claudia: We have a lot of clarity in regards to what needs we made for employees. I would say that before it would take a lot of time, because we weren't in alignment, we were just like kinda housing people under our roof and offering them a job. But for example, now because we're, we're speaking so clearly that women and we mainly employ women will come in and we go through like a seven step interview process because we want to make sure that we're a good fit for them, just like they're a good fit for us. But I would say that because we're so good at communicating what our work culture is like and who will do really well there and thrive that no it doesn't. It's just very natural and they come in with such excitement and they stay with that excitement, even through you know, painful, grow, growing moments.
There's still the excitement and the, and because they trust and they know that we have this mutuality that the company and the leader is so invested in their personal growth. And by doing that we know that we're growing a company together. And who wins? I mean everybody wins. The clients just get amazing beauty experience and our team just gets amazing personal growth experiences. It's really beautiful, especially because we have this aspire training program. So a lot of the trainees that are coming in are young women in their twenties to be able to offer them an environment that's very positive and that can bridge the heart rural business experience and real communication tools. I mean that's the magic. You see them grow so quickly and their confidence is just like every day you see it. Just build and build and build. And that to me is the exciting, the exciting part of it. Yeah. I always tell them, your art legacy, you're going to go out there when you do well in life. That's the seed that we've planted and kindness and compassionate is going to grow. So there's a ripple effect by investing in them. Our bigger, higher purpose of spreading kindness and creating a compassionate world that like there are legacy they're going to make that they're going to make that happen.
Passionistas: Were Amy and Nancy Harrington and you are listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Claudia Cordova Rucker. To learn more about her businesses, visit www.esteticamia.com. Now here's more of our interview with Claudia.
So you've obviously had some setbacks along the way too, and you had a leak, a costly leak that led to you needing to get a bank loan. So talk to us about that process and what happened and what was the result of that?
Claudia: I always say that I'm very thankful for that plumber, that kind of food. So negligent. Um, because that was really the process. I would say of my own personal growth journey, we needed the money. We were not bankable at that point. And even though we were generating over a million dollars in revenue, the bank did not see that five to 6% net profit was enough to get a loan, which is bizarre to me now because in our industry that's very normal. So to ask for someone in the beauty industry to generate more than that is kind of unrealistic unless you're writing like a open book business management model and are highly systematized. So yeah, I was really confused and really kind of like desperate and I think that my banker saw that and she really connected with me and she said, “I know we said no, and I'm really sorry I, it could be a yes, but go to Women's Economic Ventures… to WEV. They will offer you the loan. I'm sure that they will.”
And so really what WEV gave me is they saw me as the leader that I could be, not the manager that I was, they really invested in me through coaching, through the loan, through awards that I've won. We've just been a really foundational part of my own personal growth and developing the methodologies to create these beautiful beyond ordinary businesses. I would just say that WEV was what inspired me to start this journey and this path of empowerment for myself, but also for these women that we're talking about that get to be part of our organization and make it what it really is.
Passionistas: So can you explain a little bit about what the Women's Economic Venture is?
Claudia: They are a women's center. The women's centers are all over the United States and basically what they do is they provide coaching, mentoring, and then they provide funding for my minorities, women or just entrepreneurs that don't have a lot of business experience.
And it's really like a trust lending model, which you know, doesn't really exist out there. And they're a place where you can go as a woman or a man because now men are also a part of the program really where you can say, I have a dream to create a business, but I really don't know how and I really don't have any resources. And you have this whole group of people at WEV that are there who say, come on in, we believe in your dream and we're going to help you make it happen and not only make it happen, we're going to be there with you as you grow because they start with the entrepreneur training program, but then you can go into like long-term coaching like thrive and vibe, which is what I was part of and they offer you these beautiful souls that are called business consultants, which can teach you anything from financial literacy to leadership.
They're your guide through entrepreneurship. I was very lucky. I had a, I had a coach by the name of Jeff, Jeff Alkazian and I always tell him your gift Jeff, is that you see leaders before they see themselves and he taught me that and he taught me that way of thinking, of seeing people before they could actually see themselves and then giving them the tools that they needed and keeping them positive so they could find that resiliency to move forward to really offer the world. That's something amazing. Most of the week businesses are really particular and that they're not just about business. They're really about making an impact in our world. So there's like one girl, her name is Wren and she's offering unloved fish to the world, right? So all these fish that have no home, if people don't know them, she so that we can protect our oceans and still keep what's beautiful and alive in them by not odor fishing or I have another friend of mine that's in weave, her name is Cynthia Taurus and she's offering culturally correct therapy to the Latino community, which is, I didn't even know about that, but it's just like amazing that you can be seen for who you are, not for what therapy has said that you should be. Right. So yeah, so they, they just, they're doing amazing work in our community. I just think that there needs to be more WEVs out there and out there in the world.
Passionistas: Talk a little bit about the salon coaching that you do. This is through strategies.
Claudia: Strategies is really interesting because in 2015 when we were going, we have to make the decision to go employee based strategies, offers an open book business management platform. So really what they're doing is that they're giving you all the tools to be able to implement open book management in your company. An open book management basically is, we're completely transparent with our financials. We teach our team financial literacy. So basically we invite them to be what I call “intrepreneurs.” They get to make the choices. It's choice on how we spend money choice, how we train choice, where we're gonna invest our resources.
So for me, I am the leader of the company, but really we're empowering them to take full ownership. And to me it's just when they believe in that and they can invest themselves in not being afraid to make choices, you really see a lot of personal growth and strategies is the company that gave us the methodologies to be able to implement open book management into our company. How did the California wildfires and mudslide impact you and the business? First, just like an awareness of God. We got a really love every day because we don't have any control over mother nature and especially for us that we live in California. We're always at the mercy of the winds, the fires and the rains now. So it was that awareness of just being really prepared and really strengthening that personal resiliency that I was talking about. That's how it's really affected me in a positive way.
It was sad also and that it affected us in that a lot of our clients moved away and some of our service providers chose to not do the commute every day to come to. So it did effect us staffing wise and our co like the number of customers we were seeing. But I also think that in all that case chaos and craziness, it was really a call to find that resiliency within myself and that tool kit that I say that lives in internally, that I have this, I own this and I'm a creative person and I'm just going to look at everything in a positive way and say, I know it looks really shitty right now, but what positive can come through this? What can we learn and how can we grow?
Passionistas: Do you feel like you have a particular trait that's helped you be successful?
Claudia: Yes, I know exactly what it is. I don't like labels cause sometimes I think they're kind of, I have not, not that I think they are to me a little bit judgmental, but the ability to be a concatenator — to put ideas together. Catena is like a chain and in Spanish and catena in Italian. So basically it's the idea to be able to link things together, right? To create something bigger. And so I would say that that trait, which my big system thinker friend called me a concatenator, she goes, “That's why you're successful. It's because you're a concatenator.” And I'm like, “Oh my God, what does that word mean? I’ve got to go look it up in the dictionary.” And then I met with her again and I go, “Could you explain to me what a concatenator is?” And she explained it to me and I said, “Yeah, that's really true.” It is the ability to be able to see random things and then put these ideas together and just be okay, be fearless and the idea that it might not work, but when it works, it's really super awesome and cool.
Passionistas: What's your secret to rewarding life? It's really investing in yourself.
Claudia: It's really saying every single dollar that I can spend on coaching, reading therapy, right, whatever, whatever it is that you need, making yourself the first and, and foremost investment because when we invest in ourselves, the payoff is always going to be big, right? Um, for everybody who we're connected with, for us, for everybody who we're connected with and just for the greater world at large, I feel like when you're in your happy place, you have so much more time to be creative and see things in a positive way as opposed to really that the amount of energy that it takes to be in that dark, lonely, isolated place. Nobody wins there, right? So by investing in you and figuring out and taking ownership of you, think that that's the best investment that you can make and will ultimately lead to the most joy and fulfillment in life. But one that is not based on anything or anyone's affirmation of you, like your personal affirmation, like really lives at your core. And to me that's the best thing investing in you. It just pays off and happiness and joy.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Claudia Cordova Rucker. To learn more about her businesses. Visit www.esteticamia.com.
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Tuesday Feb 25, 2020
Tuesday Feb 25, 2020
In 2014, Lindsay Gordon hit career dissatisfaction rock bottom at her job at Google. She started doing any exercise she could find, that would help her reflect on what was important to her and what she needed out of a job. She wanted to share the results of her research with others, so she founded A Life of Options. As a career coach, she works with analytically-minded people who are feeling uninspired or crushed by an ill-fitting job.
Learn more about Lindsay.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Lindsay Gordon. In 2014, Lindsay hit career dissatisfaction, rock bottom. She started doing any exercise she could find that would help her reflect on what was important to her and what she needed out of a job. She wanted to share the results of her research with others. So she founded A Life of Options. As a career coach, she works with analytically-minded people who are feeling uninspired or crushed by an ill-fitting job. So please welcome to the show Lindsay Gordon.
Lindsay: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
Passionistas: Thanks for joining us. So Lindsay, what's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Lindsay: I am most passionate about designing and creating content, frameworks, and experiences that inspire people to have the courage to take action and do what matters to them in their career. Cause I feel like I'm on a mission to relieve the amount of pressure and anxiety we feel about our careers and help people stop doing what they think is right in their career and actually start doing what's right for them.
Passionistas: So what led you to the place where that was what you wanted to do?
Lindsay: I think it was the experience that I had while working at Google, which is a fantastic place to work in many ways and also wasn't the right fit for me. And I found that the messages that I was getting was, well this is the best place in the world to work and of course you should want this, that and the other out of your job. And there wasn't any space for me to feel like it was okay to make my own decision that maybe it wasn't the right fit for me. And so I want to help spread that message that we can choose what works for us. And the thing that works for somebody else is not going to be the thing that works for us. And so really giving people that agency to make that decision for themselves, even though we get a lot of pressure these days about what work should mean to us, where we should want to work, all those types of things.
Passionistas: So now let's go back a little bit. You actually studied bioengineering in college?
Lindsay: I did, yes.
Passionistas: Why did you take that path and where did that lead you in the beginning?
Lindsay: Yeah, I always had been interested in math and science very early on and I loved getting to work with my hands and build things. And so engineering seemed like a pretty good fit for me. And I went to a fascinating tiny, tiny engineering school outside of Boston, only 75 people per class. That's how tiny it was. And it was all about building and design and getting to really understand your user, connect with people and all kinds of fascinating things. So I thought, okay, engineering is great. I also like biology. We'll combine those two. And I got to work on um, some medical devices with Boston scientific. I actually have a patent for a medical device. And so that was kind of where I landed in college. And engineering has always been interesting to me. I kind of feel like it's a nice combination of people, but then also that hands on design and creation work.
Passionistas: Were you doing that kind of work at Google? What were you doing there?
Lindsay: I somehow am on my third career already. So I started off in engineering, did that for a little bit and then kind of fell into doing technical support at Google. And I am one of probably a unique kind of human that actually loves technical support. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love customer service. Um, it's kind of the, again, that combination of getting to connect with people, but also having this treasure hunt. Every time somebody calls you and you know, they say, I have this particular problem and you need to figure out what are the right types of questions to ask them, what are the right troubleshooting steps to take. So I just absolutely love to getting to do. And I did about five years of technical support there.
Passionistas: So you talked a little bit already about the atmosphere at Google, but tell us like specifically what it was like working there and you said, you know, you were supposed to like it but you didn't. So tell us a little bit more about that.
Lindsay: I'm so grateful for so many things about Google. I got to meet incredible people. They have fantastic programs to bring interesting speakers in. I got to learn so much. I got to do a lot of facilitation at Google, which was great. And um, it just, it was a very big place, right? It's a big company now and there is bureaucracy and it's hard to move around. I really wanted to move to the more people side of the business after I had done many years in technical support and I found that a really difficult thing to do.
And um, I also, because I loved customer service and I love designing, as I mentioned, I love designing frameworks and um, exercises and all this kind of stuff. And on the team that I was on, it was a little bit more about metrics, you know, like are you the biggest case closer, um, you know, metrics in the direction of customer service. But I also cared about the people on our team and the people side of that. And so I was always trying to do, um, some other projects and it just felt like I was more expected to do more of the metrics around technical support. So I think I wanted a little bit more creativity, a little bit more ease of moving around. Maybe I would have thrived at a smaller company. And so those were a couple of the pieces that I was feeling that just didn't seem like quite the right fit for me.
Passionistas: So did you leave there knowing what you were going to do next or did you start to think about what your next move was going to be while you were still working there?
Lindsay: I completely fell into running my own business. Like all good career transitions. I did not know that this was in the cards at all. So while at Google, because I had so many of these other interests that I wanted to be cultivating, I started working on our onboarding and training for new hires. And as I was talking to our new hires, everyone was really stressed about, Oh my gosh, I'm new here. You know, how do I have conversations with my manager? What if I'm stuck in technical support for the rest of time? And so I just started talking to people about their job and how, how to think about it and kind of relieving some of that anxiety. And a lot of people said to me, you would be a great coach now, I had no idea what that meant at the time. So enough people had mentioned that.
So I said, okay, I really need to test out what this thing is. I need to go learn about it. So I took one class at San Francisco state about learning coaching tools and I was amazed because I didn't actually know that there were skills that you could learn that I was already trying to do innately. So I kind of accidentally signed myself up for this year and a half long certificate. Loved it. And as I said, my goal was to move over to a more people focused role at Google. So while I was trying to figure that out, people started coming to me and saying, are you taking clients? I have people to refer to you. And I was like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Everybody. Like I'm, I'm not doing my own business, you know, these are my plans. But luckily I said yes and kind of ran it as what I like to call my accidental side business and ran it for about a year while I was still at Google.
I'm a very risk averse person and one thing that I talked to clients a lot about is test out anything that you think might be the right next step for you. So I tested it out by running it on the side for a year as a part time thing. I also tested it out by eventually moving into a career development role at Google so that I can test out do I enjoy doing this? You know, is it something that I find fulfilling? Are people finding it useful? So after about this year of running it on the side, I thought, you know what, it might be time to try this full time and to really go all in and see what it's like to run your own business. And that was about three and a half years ago now.
Passionistas: And the perfect example to the people that you're helping, you know, you're practicing what you preach.
Lindsay: And a lot of times I think we talk about entrepreneurship as something that is very risky and um, read an interesting book recently, I think it was the um, side hustle book. I can't remember the exact title, but they talk about how actually entrepreneurs tend to be very risk averse and if you're doing it properly, you're trying to de risk every avenue possible in order to have the greatest success in doing your own thing. So I like kind of sharing that message to have, it doesn't need to be just, I'm going to quit anything. Everything without having any idea whether I like it. I haven't tested anything out. Actually, there are many ways to de-risk the process so that you can feel really good about running your own thing, if that's the right thing for you.
Passionistas: So talk a little bit about the approach you take to working with a client through your company.
Lindsay: So I'm quite unique in this space in that most career coaches come from a background of hiring and recruiting. But given that I have this engineering background, I kind of think of the work that I do as I am applying my engineering brain to this question of how do we even know what we're looking for in a job that's a good fit for us, and how do we do that in the most practical and structured way? So I've designed a three month process that I take people through that gets them clear about what they're looking for. So we look at, you know, what's important to them in life and how does work fit into that? What's their philosophy of work? What are their values? What are their beliefs about what a successful life looks like? And then we start to look at, okay, let's understand your current role and how that actually fits in with what we're learning about you.
Because a lot of people come to me and they are frustrated, they're stuck, they're aimless, they are convinced they need to quit, they're dissatisfied with where they are and they feel like they should have been further along in their career. And what's interesting is that when I take people through this process of learning all about themselves so that they can make decisions that feel good to them, more than 50% of them don't end up quitting. And it's, it's not that they, it's not that everybody completely falls back in love with their job, which does happen, but people get to see their job a little bit differently. And we take away that like, Oh my gosh, my only option is to quit. And so they can see, okay, even though this is maybe not the right fit for me long-term, I understand what I'm getting for from it right now.
And I can start to work towards what that next step might be. Whether that's an internal transfer, whether that's moving to a new company, whether that's moving to a new field. I had a client who came to me and she was like, I need to quit. I'm done with this job. I might even be done with this field. Like I don't know that this is what I want anymore. Two sessions in, we did a couple of exercises and she kind of like laughed and was like, actually I job is a great fit for me for all of these particular reasons. I was hyper focused on the downsides and actually if I make these two changes, um, I'm really grateful for where I am and this is actually a great fit for me. So I think the, the mindset piece is such a big piece. Sometimes nothing about the external situation has to change for you to have a different experience of your work.
Passionistas: And of the people that do make a major change, do you find that there's like a common thing that has been holding them back from doing that?
Lindsay: I would probably say there are two aspects. One is not being really clear for themselves about what their strengths are. I think oftentimes when we have strengths, we think of them as, Oh, but that's the easy thing that I do. Doesn't everybody do that? Or you know, Oh, well that's just how my brain works. And so when people don't see those things as strengths, then they wouldn't even think to pursue something in that direction. So for example, I had a woman who was working in engineering who, uh, wanted to move to something else, was unhappy there, and she had never thought of teaching as a big strength of hers, but it kept coming up over and over again in these exercises. So she ended up moving internally to another fantastic job that was more teaching the engineering, um, discipline. And so she's over the moon, but just had never considered that before.
And then I think the other thing is not letting yourself make that choice because of the pressure, right? There's always pressure from society, from family. One quick example I'll give there is that I worked with somebody who works in project management and she said, Oh yeah, I've always had a lifelong dream of doing art for video games. But that was never something that my parents allowed me to do. That was a, uh, an approved, you know, thing to study. And so she's studying engineering, she's been working in project management and you know, once we discovered that, it was like, okay, well let's finally explore this if you've been waiting your whole life and thinking about that in the back of your mind. So she started taking small steps towards that, right? Creating a portfolio, starting to work with a mentor, uh, exploring what additional schooling would look like. And then over the course of testing it out over a year, she contacted me recently and was like, Lindsay, I have signed up for two year MFA. I cannot even believe that I am doing this thing. I thought I would do this.
Passionistas: What do you think is the most important steps people need to take when they're thinking about making a career change?
Lindsay: I think the first is identifying the pressure that you feel and just starting to be clear about that because if you can't separate what you actually need and what your desires are from the messages that you are getting from other people, that's going to make it really difficult for you to assess if this is the right move for you. So I've always helped people, you know, let's identify and relieve some of that pressure. And then I think the second step is to start to learn as much as you can about what is working and what is not working.
Because as I mentioned, oftentimes we get really hyper-focused on the downsides and if we can zoom out a little bit and really look more broadly and understand, okay, if I know what my strengths are, then I can understand how well is this job that I'm doing currently in line with those strengths. If I understand a lot about the type of environment that I like to work in, then I can start to understand, Oh, it makes total sense why this particular thing is not a good fit for me because it doesn't match up with the environment. So I really advocate for learning as much as you can about what works for you so that you can accurately assess how the current job you have is matching up to those things
Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Lindsay Gordon. To learn more about her work as a career coach. Visit ALifeOfOptions.com. Now here's more of our interview with Lindsay.
Passionistas: You're obviously very confident, but do you ever get self-doubt and how do you get past it?
Lindsay: 100% my goodness, I like to say that running a business I have had highs that are way higher than any nine to five I've had and lows that are way lower than any nine to five I've had. So I think it's so common as a business owner to have self-doubt. Um, I remember several times, especially in that first year where I just got rocked by something. You know, it is, it is very personal for the product to be you, right? Everything that I've created comes from my mind. It's my ideas. I'm out there selling myself. And so in the beginning it does feel very personal if people are saying no to you. I remember the first time where I felt like maybe the client wasn't getting exactly what I wanted and you know, really shook my confidence. So it's hard. It still happens. I think that's probably something that never goes away. But I'm better, you know, riding the ebbs and flows.
One thing that I have really appreciated and that has helped with confidence is collecting a group of fantastic women who are also running their business. And we meet virtually once a month and just check in, you know, who feels like their business is broken today. You know, who, um, has some great things to celebrate who has some questions, who's struggling with the time of year that we're in and the low volume of clients or whatever it is. But really just being able to share and not feel like I am alone in my house doing this thing by myself. So that's been huge for me.
Passionistas: What's your best habit?
Lindsay: I think my best habit is reaching out to people. So for whatever reason I have been graced with kind of the excitement and willingness to just reach out to anyone that I find interesting or anyone that I connect with and to see how I might be able to help them. How am I be able to learn about their business? Who I might know that I can connect to? So this group of women that I've created, I think it's probably 30 or 40 women at this point, and it's really just anyone who I come across, I could see your name in a newsletter, I could, you know, hear about you from a friend and I'll reach out. And if I think you're fantastic and I want you in kind of my circle of entrepreneurs, I will invite you to this group and to collaborate on workshops with me.
So I think kind of that feeling of connection and building the community that I want has always been something that comes really easily to me. So kind of explain it as I aggressively friend people, but I think I get to meet a lot of interesting people that way and people actually respond really positively to somebody reaching out and saying, Hey, I think you're fantastic. I would love to hear more about what you're up to and how I might support you.
And I actually, when I first started running the business full time, I did not think I was going to like it because of how lonely it was. I am already an introvert and so I'm at risk of, you know, not leaving my house for four days if I'm just working at home by myself. And so because I knew that was something that I was worried about, I really made an intentional effort to build a community. And that's something I help clients do too. If you're worried about anything, like, I don't know if this career is going to be a good fit for me for this, that and the other reason. That's so helpful because then we get to design around that. We get to take intentional action to figure that out, so I definitely knew that that was something I was going to struggle with and I needed to work hard at it to make sure I enjoyed running my own business.
Passionistas: Is there a lesson that you've learned so far on your journey that really sticks with you?
Lindsay: I think the lesson that we get to change our mind, we get to change our career. We get to try new things and it is never too late. I hear the message a lot that, well, I studied this in college. I'm not using my degree. Well, I've already been in this area for so many years and I just, I don't want people to feel that way. I want people to feel like their career is a long and varied path. Who knows how it's going to go. There's going to be a lot of serendipity be open to falling into things.
I think for me, you know, engineering to customer service to running your own business as a career coach makes no logical sense if you were to explain it in that way. And I think people get really wrapped up in, you know, well it looks really chaotic, the things that I've done, but there's a way in which I can tell my story where it has always been about listening to people, understanding their challenges, building frameworks and experiences for them to inspire them to take action. And that's been true across engineering, technical support and career coaching. And so I want people to feel like there's more playfulness and fun and curiosity and serendipity that goes along with career rather than feeling like I have to do this one thing because that's where I landed.
Passionistas: Do you think there's a personality trait that you possess that's helped you succeed?
Lindsay: I think curiosity is probably one of the biggest things that is just constantly running for me. And I'm curious. So I was curious about the onboarding of new hire experience and started talking to them. Somebody mentioned a coach. I was really curious about that. And so I think I love following that curiosity and learning about these interesting opportunities that I hear about and it really opens up a lot of doors. If you follow your curiosity.
Passionistas: What's been the most rewarding part of your career?
Lindsay: As a business owner, I have never felt more creative and impactful. I get to design things and come up with ideas as often as I want. Designing programs, designing workshops, designing exercises for people. I absolutely love that part of it. And then as far as impact, it's an incredible feeling to know that every result that I get, I made that happen through my courage, through my creativity, through my gifts, through my actions, through my requests. And so it's a very direct, I put effort in and I get results. And so it's very exciting to me to be able to feel those two pieces every day. And I think that's my favorite part of being able to run my own thing.
Passionistas: And have you had professional mentors?
Lindsay: Yes. That word always feels so big to me if like, Oh my gosh, do I have an official mentor? Yes, of course. I have had people who have been so thoughtful throughout my career. One that comes to mind is my most recent manager at Google who has been a fantastic support for me and has believed in my business probably before I even did. So he's been fantastic. There are also people who, one person that comes to mind, you know, I, she was a woman who had been running her business for a little bit longer than I had and when I started running my business and have this reaching out thing that I do, I reached out to a lot of other women and said, I would love to learn from you, you know, learn about how your business is going and see if there are ways that I can support you. And one of the things that she did is she said, Oh, I referred you to this other person, but I told them that your rates were higher than they are because you're actually charging too little.
And you know, even moments like that, I consider that to be such a gift. And you know, a moment of mentorship where somebody who was a little bit further along than me was able to support me and you know, teach me something that I didn't know. So I'm always looking for those opportunities to, to be able to do that to another woman who's just starting a business of like, Oh, you're undercharging yourself. Great. I'm going to send you to somebody and tell them that you, your rates are higher. So things like that, there've been so many people along the way, especially in building a business that have been so supportive. And I think we sometimes hear this question of why don't women support women? And from my personal experience, I have not found that to be true at all. I have found the most supportive women who are running their businesses, who are all about let's help each other so that we can all thrive. So I've been really happy to see that be the case and I want to help continue, you know, being somebody who supports others.
Passionistas: Do you have a mantra that you live by?
Lindsay: One of the ones that always sticks in my head is the proverb around the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now. Um, and another one that I use in business that comes from one of my, another one of my business mentor is a business coach. Um, that has been fantastic to work with is it's not a question of if it's a question of when. And so as I go about my business and as I think about the impact that I want to make, it's not a question of if I will make that impact, it's a question of when I will make that impact.
Passionistas: What's your definition of success?
Lindsay: Making choice of the feel good to you? I think doing the things that are important to you, living in line with your own values and for me having some sort of positive impact as well. So I, I, I want to lead a great life that does something great for the world that has an impact on other people. And success is, you know, doing that in line with the way that I want to live life.
Passionistas: What do you wish women knew?
Lindsay: It's okay to do what's right for you? I think is my simple message across my business. I have a, a controversial message that it's okay to have a boring job if it works for you. And I think we need more messages like that where actually we get to choose, you know, identify what's right for you and then do that.
I have a, one of my most earliest clients had a really high paying lawyer job and everyone around her in her community was saying, um, you're being under-utilized. This job was not challenging enough. You should get out of there and be doing something more. And so she came to me and was like, yeah, I'm being kind of under-utilized at my job and I'm being well paid. So I don't really know how to think about this. And once we started discovering what was most important to her, she found that providing financial support for her then young son was the most important thing for her. And so she was able to make this really confident decision that actually this job gives me exactly what I need right now. It pays me really well. It allows me to provide that financial stability and I actually have extra mental energy and time to be able to go and spend it with my son.
And so to see her make that decision, even though everyone around her was saying, you should be challenged more or you should be utilized more, you know, was such a powerful moment. So the more that women can feel like it is okay for them to identify what works for them, even if it feels controversial, even if it's against the, you know, messages that they're getting from society and from their family, I would just be happy if that is part of my legacy of getting women to, to feel like they have agency and can make the choices that feel good to them.
Passionistas: What's your dream for yourself?
Lindsay: To live life courageously, to always be taking action and having an impact in the world and being able to follow my interests. I just want to lead a courageous, exciting, adventurous life that hopefully inspires other people to do the same with the things that are important to them.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Lindsay Gordon. To learn more about her work as a career coach, visit ALifeOfOptions.com. Please visit the PassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and our new subscription box filled with products made by women-owned businesses and female artisans. To inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing list to get 10% off your first purchase, and be sure to subscribe to the Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.
Tuesday Feb 11, 2020
Tuesday Feb 11, 2020
Caleigh founded RoHo after falling in love with a pair of beaded sandals in a craft market in Kampala, Uganda. Breaking through language barriers, Caleigh teamed up with a Kenyan woman named Lydia and launched a company that focuses on social change by empowering women. Profits from RoHo fund artisan development as well as women's and environmental initiatives in Kenya and the United States.
Learn more about Caleigh.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. Today we're talking with Caleigh Hernandez. In 2014 Caleigh founded RoHo, after falling in love with a pair of beaded sandals in a craft market in Kampala, Uganda. Breaking through language barriers, Caleigh teamed up with a Kenyan woman named Lydia and launched a company that focuses on social change by empowering women profits from RoHo fund, artisan development, women's and environmental initiatives in Kenya and the United States.
So please welcome to the show, Caleigh Hernandez.
Caleigh: Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
Passionistas: What's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Caleigh: I am most passionate about making global change. So for me that's RoHo. That's this company I founded, but I just see, you know, I have had so many opportunities in my life and it would be a waste if I didn't do something meaningful with them.
Passionistas: Talk about that. What were those opportunities that led you to founding RoHo?
Caleigh: First and foremost, I come from a low income background, my family in the US and so that kind of gave me firsthand knowledge and insight into kind of what it is like to grow up with fewer opportunities in the US but at the same time, you know, I still had access to quality schools. Um, I, you know, I had really supportive parents who pushed education. We had more resources available to us than the average person across the world. So, you know, as I graduated high school and then I went off to university, I became really motivated to help other people get access to opportunities. What I've seen, you know, in my travels across the world as well as just here in the US is that, you know, poverty, yes, it's a lack of material possession, but it is as well an absence of opportunity.
And so it was my firsthand experiences, you know, kind of growing up that made me realize, Oh my gosh, I have a lot fewer opportunities to access certain things than friends or colleagues or whomever who, who had a wealthier background. But in comparison to the rest of the world, I'm so much better off because you know, at the end of the day I had access to quality education and that in and of itself really has provided tools to help me get out of that place and my family get out of that situation. And so I'm passionate about sharing that with other people.
Passionistas: Tell us about the journey to founding RoHo.
Caleigh: So I was in college and I began studying international development, which is essentially how we bring the poorest of the poor out of poverty. And this can be done through education, through, you know, economic opportunities through access to clean water.
There are all of different channels you can take in order to kind of make this happen. And I decided to study abroad and Uganda after my sophomore year. And so I was working for this local nonprofit. We are helping the poorest of the poor get access to savings and credit because traditional banks or formal banks wouldn't give money or help these people save because it was done on such a small scale. So we created these informal systems to help these communities save. Because studies have shown that however minimal, everyone has the ability to save even people who are living below the poverty line. And so while I was in Uganda, I was living in this rural village. There wasn't much to do, to be honest during the weekends. So I would take a bus into larger towns and cities and I, on one education was walking through a craft market in Kampala, Uganda, which is a large city and Uganda and these craft markets, you know, they're not the most beautiful, they're kind of dingy.
It cracked concrete floors. Most of them don't have electricity. You kind of get the idea they're selling local handicraft type items. But I remember turning and looking over my shoulder because something sparkling caught my eye. And it was a pair of these beautiful beaded leather sandals. And they just struck me because they were such a contrast to everything else around me. And at that moment I knew I was hooked. These were more than just a pair of shoes. I saw them as really an opportunity to break a cycle of poverty. So I returned to East Africa the following summer and I was doing research for my senior thesis while at the same time I was mapping out the East Africa sandal industry and local shopkeepers kept telling me to look for this Kenyan woman named Lydia. So on my last day and Uganda, after I finished my research, which to be completely honest, was like, I will not bore you with the specifics.
It was very boring, but the journey to find Lydia made this whole trip worth it. It took me hours of searching. So I was told where she would be. And then three motorcycle taxis took me to wrong parts of the city and that I was lost. And I'm, you know, I'm like sweaty and just overwhelmed and very obviously a foreigner and this place. And I was trying to communicate things that probably didn't make sense to all of these like motorcycle taxis. Anyway, I curse my inability to speak Swahili and Uganda and fluently. But you know, I finally found Lydia and I kind of joke, it was a very unknown, unorthodox and possibly a little bit stalkerish way on my part, but it was just, is very representative of this whole journey to begin with. So, you know, I show up and it really worked out because Lydia, it was her last day being in Uganda.
She's usually based in Kenya and this is my last day in Uganda as well. So I say it's meant to be, but you know, I show up and I'm sweaty and the shoveled and like I have no idea where am in the city. And I just desperately, I'm sure it was kind of like word vomit. I was like, I love your shoes and I want to know more about them and I want it like who was making them and what does this look like and how can we work together and do something that's really meaningful to the people who are making these products, who are mostly women by the way. And how can we collaborate and make something meaningful happen. And so, you know, we joke, um, because you know, my Swahili and Ugandan were not great at that point. My saw Haley's gotten much better since and her English wasn't perfect either, but we made it work and we say it's because beautiful shoes are universal.
So I stayed in touch with Lydia and worked on developing a sandal line with her that was marketable for consumers in the US and I called this company RoHo, which is a Swahili word that means spirit or kindness, which is what we say we're all about. And so I graduated from college with this idea in mind for RoHo and began living in East Africa. I just wanted to get more on the ground development experience, make sure that I knew what I was doing and had kind of the background to prove it. And so I lived in rural Tanzania as well as Kenya on refugee and child labor programming. But once I finished all of that over in East Africa, I moved back to the U S and really launched RoHo using the time I'd spend any staffer, guy living over there flying to the coast to meet with Lydia and her 42 artisans, 36 women and six men.
And I use that time to really develop relationships with these people, understand the context in which they were working, understand the needs and the community and all of that information help to dictate how we moved forward with RoHo.
Passionistas: But RoHo is more than just a shoe company. So talk about the way you built the business to inspire social change in Africa.
Caleigh: We say that RoHo is more than a shoe and it is now because we've expanded to a number of products. But it also means that we're committed to social change. And we do that typically in three ways. So through our beautiful products or ethical work at our economic empowerment. So in terms of our beautiful products, each product is handcrafted and hand tools by artisans in Kenya. We started with our beaded leather sandals, but we now have a line of Fair Trade jewelry that's made by 280 women in the South of Kenya and a collection of cow hide bags and other accessories that are made in Nairobi by a group of 40 artisans there.
And it's, they come from a partnership with a company that's co owned by a woman, which was really unusual in this area. And then we've also partnered with another nonprofit that's based in Nairobi as well. And those women are all taught tailoring skills and they're all survivors of violent conflict across Africa. So they're generally women who are urban refugees, primarily from Somalia, Congo, and South Sudan. So this nonprofit has found these women in Nairobi once they've, once they've crossed the border and are living living in the Capitol, and they teach them vocational skills. So they have an opportunity to get paid fairly for work that they're doing. So through our partnerships as well as with the artists and groups that I control all international distributions for, we're just committed to ensuring that all of these products are top quality. They're beautiful, they're unique, and that they're really doing something meaningful.
So as I mentioned, we started with our 42 artisans, our sandal artisans, but we're now working with over 400 cross Kenya, which is huge. 95% of which are women, which is very near and dear to my heart. And studies have shown that women will spend more of their income on the households and family. So that means investing more in children, ensuring that everyone is well fed in comparison to men, no shade to men, but it just goes to show that, you know, when you invest in a woman, you're investing in her children and you're investing in their education and their futures. So that's our beautiful products. But I've kind of touched partially on the ethical work as well. So we're committed to our artisans and their well-being. So we pay our artisans wages that are far higher than the industry standard. So that means that with our artisans that I can throw all international distributions for, that means that we're paying them 50% higher than the industry standard.
And with our partnerships, we're working with other groups. In the area who are doing the same thing. So we're committed to upholding the highest standards. And beyond that we also provide education grants to help send our artisans children to quality local schools. So tying this all into the third piece, economic empowerment, we are working to break the cycle of poverty and the short and long term, short term. We do this through fair paying jobs, long-term educational opportunities for our artisans in their children.
Passionistas: Thank you for everything you do.
Caleigh: To be honest, I couldn't do it without consumers who see our products and know that it's, you know, they're more than just a pair of shoes or a beautiful bag and yes, they're beautiful and they're interesting and unique, but it's more than that. When you see a pair of our shoes. I really want consumers to see them as works of art and to know that there were several hands involved in this process and that wasn't, you are wearing a pair of our shoes or dawning a jewelry item or whatever that, that there's a story behind it.
Passionistas: Tell us about how you found the artisans of after your story with Lydia. How did you find these other people and where do you source the products?
Caleigh: It's all been kind of happenstance, but it really couldn't have happened if I hadn't been living over in East Africa, especially Kenya for as long as I was. I just had friends and communications with a number of different artists and groups as I was over there. You know, I'm not normally a big shopper. It's really funny, but when I was in Kenya I just fell in love with the products that were available. So as I would travel around the country for work and just come across different groups. I will say though, I found our jewelry artisans, the group of 280 Mussai women in the South of Kenya, they live just outside of the national park on the base close to Kilimanjaro actually, which is in Tanzania, but they like right at the border of Tanzania and I found them in, I'm based in Santa Barbara and I found them through a nonprofit that's based in Santa Barbara as well that's working in this community in Southern Kenya and I knew it was a friend of mine who was working with this community of 280 women selling their jewelry here in the U S and just so passionate about what she did but was running another nonprofit and didn't have the time to commit to really bringing the jewelry designs up to fruition.
So that, you know, it kind of worked out really nicely that she said, look, I see what you're doing with these sandal artisans and I really want to partner with you. So that kind of fell into my lap just because of the work we'd already been doing with our sand artisans. And there was a really nice, you know, marriage of commitments between what they were doing previously to what we wanted to do. But the other two groups, it was me living over in Kenya and coming across them that really kind of launched those partnerships. And so I'm really fortunate to have spent quite a bit of time over any staff or gut and I loved exploring both countries and it was really forging relationships over there that's really made this possible because you know, it's, it's hard working in a foreign country and there are different ways that people do business and there are different cultural practices and there's just, there's language barriers and the way that things get done are just totally different.
I remember when we did first launch launched RoHo, we had a big shipment of several hundred pairs of sandals that needed to get sent from the coast of Kenya to California. And they were already a week late and the Pope came to Nairobi and this is the first time the Pope has ever come to Kenya ever. And so I had gotten the shoes from the coast of Kenya where they were made to Nairobi, but then all of the sudden the whole city just shut down because you know there were security concerns and this was the first time he'd been to this part of the continent. And so they wanted to make sure everything was working well. But that just meant I had to go back to a number of boutiques that we, who are waiting on these shoes and to a number of our customers and say, I'm sorry it's gotten delayed another five days because the Pope came to Nairobi and it's just one of those things where you have to be working with people who have a good humor about these things and understand that this is not like a typical company where there are deadlines and they are very strictly met. We have to be patient and flexible things. I'm not necessarily known for it, but I'm working on through this company.
Passionistas: How did you learn how to do this because you didn't have any experience right? In this type of business. So how did you learn to do this?
Caleigh: I have been really fortunate in that I am young and I am excited about this and passionate about what I do and I'm not too proud to ask for help. So a number of people who I've shared this idea with have kind of flocked to me in the sense that they have been like, okay, well I know someone who can help you with this. I know someone who can help you with this. I will never underestimate the power of buying someone coffee and picking their brain if they're willing to take the time to do that. That has been just hugely, hugely helpful for me is just saying, okay, I don't know what the heck it looks like to launch a business.
What is search engine optimization and what does that even do? What is it? What's the process of looking for a trademark and on and on and, and it's just, you know, I've been fortunate that my friends and family social circles have all, have some sort of experience in these small areas and I'm really grateful that they have given me the time of day and I can reach out to them with questions. But I'm also fortunate in that Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara County and Ventura counties in California, they have this nonprofit called women's economic ventures and they help primarily women owned businesses launch and get off the ground. And I had never taken a business course in my life. I mean I took micro economics and macro economics and college because I had to, but that was like the extent of anything. And you know, as I mentioned before, my background was in, you know, kind of the nonprofit space and in Africa.
So this business stuff just totally went over my head. But I took business courses through them and that totally changed everything because they walked me through every step of the business process. And at the end of it, you know I had a business plan, a legitimate business plan and a way forward. So I would say I'm really scrappy and very comfortable asking and searching out resources that are available. So for other people who are looking for their passion project or have ideas, I would, I cannot recommend that enough is just being a scrappy as possible and buying people coffee. It's like the best $5 you will have ever spent.
Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Caleigh Hernandez to learn more about how she inspires social change and empowers women in Kenya, visit RoHoGoods.com.
Now here's more of our interview with Caleigh.
Passionistas: Is there one personal lesson that you've learned during your journey that sticks with you?
Caleigh: There are many and a lot of them still working on for sure. I would say today a big lesson I've learned is patience. I'm used to being the type of person where like if I work hard enough for something, whatever I am working on will happen. And this has been a lot slower of a process because of the fact that I'm working on a company where that's 8,000 away and there are language barriers and there's communication mishaps. And what I'm doing isn't exactly mainstream. I mean it's amazing that consumers are requesting from companies more and more that there be some sort of social mission, but it's not an everyday thing. And so I'm competing against mid level luxury brands who don't have a social mission and who aren't allocating a large percentage of sales back into the communities where they're working.
So it's kind of like we're starting at a slight disadvantage in that, in that sense. Although it's very much an advantage in the sense where I have the opportunity to work with these incredible artisans and that's what gets me up in the morning. It's not having a fashion company. I never thought I, you know, if you could see what I'm wearing right now, I'm in jeans and a tee shirt, you know, that's not fabulous. Shoes I have great shoes on. But you know, that's just not where I imagine myself. It's the fact that these artisans are there and they're putting it all into this company. And I've seen the growth that they have had over these years that I've worked with them. I don't want to overstate our impact just yet because we're a nail and very much a startup. But to see the shift in quality that our artisans have made in the products, to see their children grow and stay in school.
Well, when you know, just speaking about our sandal artisans, most of them have the equivalent of like a fifth grade education or below. And with our jewelry artisans, at least half the women are illiterate because there hasn't been a school in this area. So to just know that there are so much opportunity for growth. It both makes me impatient and makes me want to be more patient to really launch RoHo and get it off the ground and make it a common well known brands. You know, I want us to be in the next Tom's, but working on a more intricate level in the communities where we're, where our products are being made.
Passionistas: Looking back at the journey you've been on so far, is there one decision that you made that you think really changed the path that you've been walking down?
Caleigh: Forfeiting financial security immediately was the path that put me where I am today and it's an uncomfortable position for sure because there's not a huge safety net, but knowing that impact and doing something good in the world was more important than me making hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I can go to bed at night and feel comfortable in that decision. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's an uncomfortable place to be sometimes, especially being in a startup and having to make ends meet, but it's also the best decision I could've made. And when I hear other people excited about RoHo and sharing the story or I'll walk down the street and someone will be wearing one of our bags and I don't know who they are. It's like the coolest feeling in the world. And so I just, I see that as like little messages from the universe like, okay, you're going in the right direction. Don't give up. But as I mentioned before, like I am used to immediately if I work hard enough, things just turning out in my favor and this one's a bigger push than I expected, but it also is going to make it so much more rewarding as we grow.
Passionistas: What's your definition of success?
Caleigh: It's ever changing. I would say right now I would say it is balance. I'm working on finding a little bit more balance in my life. So healthy quality relationships with friends and family and loved ones. Some semblance of like financial security and finding meaning in one way, shape or form. I used to think it meant being entirely successful in a career and don't get me wrong, and there's nothing wrong with being recognized for doing good work, but that's not the end all be all for me at least.
Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life?
Caleigh: It is finding a way to fulfill a passion in your life. So for me, of course that's, I found this way to give back through RoHo and not that I suggest everyone goes and starts a company in Kenya. I mean, if you can, if you want to reach out to me and we'll, you know, network but, but just that find something that really lights a fire under you and pursue that.
And that doesn't have to be in your professional career. It could be volunteering at a soup kitchen twice a week if that's what does it. I'd say for me as well, I try, although I'm not perfect at it, to set kind of a work life balance. So on the side and college, I, um, I wrote like crew and I have this really competitive streak in me and so I just, I need some really big athletic outlet in order to kind of blow off some steam when things are really hard in business or personal life or whatever. So for me that has been a really good other source of like passion in another area of my life is just kind of diversifying a bit in a bit. I, so I joined this crew team, so I row with them three times a week. And then I'd say my last thing, which is so silly, but I get so much joy out of like animals.
And so I have a dog who I just love dearly. And not that it's like a passion. Exactly. But I've just found that like having these areas of my life that just are fulfilling in one way, shape or form, it just, I don't know, I feel like things could be worse. You know, it's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good.
Passionistas: So what's your dream for the female artisans that work with you through RoHo?
Caleigh: The typical idea of an artisan in Kenya or some a craftsperson in Kenya. These people are largely women and they are typically women who are paid or earn money below the poverty line. So with RoHo, I see us creating a very solid, stable middle-class for our artisans. I want our artisans to stay with us for years, and I want, I want their children to grow up and have opportunities that day themselves did not.
I want our artisans, children to go to college if they want to go to college, if they want to turn into a sandal beater or create sandals, that's fine too. But I want them to have opportunities not get stuck into a specific role. So I have this vision for how I want this to work. I want our artisans to be healthy and happy and but at the same time I also want them to decide for themselves what they want to do. I don't want to impose my idea of a healthy, happy artisan. I want this vision to kind of grow and develop with our artisans as we move forward.
Passionistas: And what's your dream for yourself?
Caleigh: I want to be a change maker in the ethical fashion space. I want to help influence other companies into being more impactful with the sourcing of their materials and who makes their products.
I want to ensure that, you know, people behind products are really highlighted in a way that they never have been before. Um, I want to encourage minimal waste in the fashion industry. So I would love to continue to be a voice in that space. Not being said, I also want to and share this commitment to these artisans in Kenya. And that's where my background has been and where my heart really lies. So we're in the process of establishing a, the RoHo foundation, which is like the nonprofit branch to our company and I, you know, in the next five years want to be running it. And I want it to be a big thing where we have expanded our impact and our giving and really are engaging with our customers to ensure that they, they too can really experience all that our artisans have to offer and see what Kenya has to offer.
And so we've talked about hosting trips over to Kenya as well. There's a lot I want to do in 2020 we are launching through the nonprofit trips over to Kenya. So often I see people will travel, travel to Kenya and have these amazing experiences of course. But how often the only Ken Kenyon, a lot of times people will interact with will be like they're a driver or their tour guide. And I want, I want people to have a really full and whole experience of the country. And so when we take our trips over there, we'll introduce people to our sandal artisans and we'll put you one on one with one of our beaters and you'll design a pair of shoes. And then of course we'll do the touristy things and then we'll go down South, we'll do Safari, but at the same time we'll, you know, you'll meet our Mussai beating artisans and you'll learn how to bead with them.
So there's just, I just think there are so many opportunities for connections and I want, I want people to get those connections and the way that I have.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Caleigh Hernandez to learn more about how she inspires social change and empowers women in Kenya visit RoHoGoods.com.
Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and new subscription box filled with products made by women-owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing list to get 10% off your first purchase.
And be sure to subscribe to The Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.
Tuesday Jan 28, 2020
Tuesday Jan 28, 2020
Hannah Gordon is one of the highest ranking female executives in the NFL as Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel of the San Francisco 49ers. On Sunday, February 2, her team will go head-to-head against the Kansas City Chiefs in Miami, Florida with the hopes of taking home their sixth Super Bowl championship. Over almost nine years with the Niners, Hannah has taken on initiatives like diversity in hiring, and fan clubs for both female fans and the LGBT community.
Learn more about Hanna.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington, and today we're talking with Hannah Gordon, one of the highest ranking female executives in the NFL. Hannah is chief administrative officer and general counsel of the San Francisco 49ers. And on Sunday, February 2nd, her team will go head to head against the Kansas city chiefs in Miami, Florida with the hopes of taking home their six championship in the Super Bowl. So please welcome to the show, Hannah Gordon.
Hannah: Thank you ladies for having me on.
Passionistas: What's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Hannah: People. I mean, I guess that's kind of a big answer, but if I had to pick one thing to be passionate about, it would be people. And that's why I do what I do because I love working with people and I like observing people.
Passionistas: So how does that translate into what you do?
Hannah: Well, the great thing about what I do is I get to work with every person at the 49ers pretty much every sort of group. And that ranges from our players to our janitorial staff, to our engineers in the stadium, to our sales groups to the groups that I lead, which would be community relations, the foundation, youth football, the museum, risk management, legal, public affairs and strategic communications. And so I think both the experience of leading a team as well as the experience of getting to work with a lot of different people who come from different sort of subcultures. I think oftentimes if you come from a certain type of work. So for example, I worked for a law firm early in my career and in a law firm you kind of have mostly one type of person, lawyers. And it's much more interesting to be on the world where there's lots of different types of people.
Passionistas: Were you a football fan growing up?
Hannah: No, I was not. I was a fan of Barbie dolls and fashion and I thought I would grow up to be a costume designer or something of that nature. And then I discovered that I didn't have a lot of patience for sewing, which sewing requires a lot of patience. And I also wasn't happy with my skills artistically. And so I started focusing more on things like journalism. And when I got to UCLA where I went for undergrad after growing up in Oakland, I really fell in love with sports there. So that was for me, kind of the beginning of me falling in love with football was just being there. I was quite homesick and started watching a ton of football and basketball on television and it was really seeing Hannah Storm host the halftime during the NBA playoffs my freshman year, that I thought, Oh, you know what, that looks like a really cool job. People connection again, you know, you get to sit around with people and talk about sports. And that seems really cool. How do I learn more about that? And so that's how I kind of got into journalism at UCLA and covered the football team there. And once I was in football, then, you know, it was over for me.
Passionistas: Talk about that journey from it being over for you to getting to the 49ers.
Hannah: From UCLA falling in love with football. I had to figure out, all right, how do I stay in this? After I graduated from college? So I started doing internships. I interned my junior year for the Oakland Raiders as a PR intern and that was my first Super Bowl. Um, so this is actually my third Super Bowl that I'm going to. I was very blessed that I was a training camp intern for them, but because I was from Oakland, I would come home on holidays or long weekends and work for them. And then when they made it to the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl was in San Diego and this was back when there was no Pro Bowl was an in between. So there was only a week between when you won the conference championship and you had to play in the Super Bowl. And so they won the AFC championship and they called me and they said, get in the car, drive to San Diego.
And I said, Oh my gosh, but I have class tomorrow. It's the Super Bowl get in the car. So I worked that week. and it was a great experience. It didn't end, obviously the way that we wanted to, but but it was an incredible experience and I did a lot of other internships. I interned for Fox sports West. After I graduated from college, I worked at the NFL players association, which is the players union, creating digital content for their website at a time when people were really just starting to figure out what digital content was. I don't even think we called it digital content though. We just called it the websit, but, but it was creating a lot of new content that they had never had before. From what I called at that time player journals, which were sort of what we would now maybe think of as like an equivalent of like social media or a blog or a vlog type of situation, to a DJ contest.
I did players of the week awards and after I'm working there, I went to the university of California at Berkeley where I worked in their media relations department. And handled football, track and swimming. And then while I was there, I applied to law schools and after I got into law school, I decided to take six months to go work at a sports agency. For those of you who remember the movie Jerry McGuire, I was sort of, exploring that route of being a sports agent. And then I started law school at Stanford and while I was at Stanford, I went back to the Oakland Raiders as a law clerk. Then I worked after law school as a lawyer at a law firm. And then I ended up at the NFL league office in New York for a couple of years. And from there I was recruited to come to the 49ers and this is now the conclusion of ninth season here.
Passionistas: So were there a lot of opportunities for women at the time when you first joined the 49ers?
Hannah: I would say yes, when I joined the 49ers cause it's only eight and a half years ago. Those things have, I've seen a lot of change even in the last eight and a half years. I was talking to a young woman who's the girlfriend of one of our players who's currently in law school, and who has some interest in sports agent work. And we were talking about, you know, early in my career, 15 plus years ago, and she was like, "Ooh, they weren't ready for you back then." And I started to laugh because I forget. I think it's very easy to forget when it's our own life, sort of how much things have changed and how historical that is to young people. I'm like, to me, I was like, Oh wait, I forgot. That's actually a long time ago. Um, and things really have changed.
But from her perspective, I also really appreciated that she had a lot of appreciation for people who came before her helping make that path, hopefully that much easier. So yeah, there has been a lot of change in the last 20 years that I have worked in the business. And, and probably the most rapid change at least in a visible way in certain parts of the business in the last five years, but that doesn't mean there's not still a long way to go. No different I think than every other industry in the United States where the, the area where there still needs to be progress is primarily at the very top. You're not seeing a lot of women in C-suite positions or most importantly in president, CEO type positions. But that's the case whether you're looking at tech or sports or pretty much anything.
Passionistas: One position that is making the news a lot right now is Katie Sowers, who's the assistant coach and the first female assistant coach to go to a Super Bowl. Do you have a lot of interaction with her?
Hannah: I do. I'm very proud of her. She's an awesome person. And when I was referencing that there's been rapid progress in the last five years in certain sectors. The business, that's really what I was referring to is the, the um, pipeline positions in the football side is where you've seen the most dramatic change in the last five years. And that's really because of a concerted effort to create that change league wide. And so you are seeing like for our club, when I started, almost nine years ago, there were no women in coaching scouting or athletic training roles. And five years ago we hired our first female athletic trainer and since she's been here, not only has she been just an incredible person for everyone to work with, but it opens more doors where ever since she's been here. We've had a full season female athletic training intern and at least one often to training camp, athletic training interns.
So again, creating more, more opportunity. And I think, you know, as the great job that she did that helps open the door. Then they, Katie joined us, I believe three seasons ago. And then two seasons ago we hired our first female scout. So we've seen in some of the roles that are not football roles, but are certainly, um, more adjacent to that part of the business, some growth as well. We have, we hired our first, um, on-staff female team photographer, uh, also about three seasons ago. And similar roles in terms of like team reporter and things of that nature.
Passionistas: And the 49ers is the first team in the NFL to commit to interviewing at least one woman inand one person of color for every business opening. And you've been a big part of that initiative. So why is that important to you personally?
Hannah: Well, I think it's important as a business that you have the best people. This is still a talent based, not only industry, but I would think pretty much any business business you're running, talent is, is at a premium and you're not going to get the best talent if you don't overcome people's unconscious bias. And so I was actually just talking with our Executive Vice President of Operations and President of 49ers Enterprises, Paraag Marathe who recruited me to come here. And I was saying that I still to this day often explain the business case for diversity to people in the same terms that he explained it to me many years ago, which is that it's really an arbitrage opportunity. So essentially you have a economic system that is not working rationally, which means if you are rational and recognize that there's a diversity gap, then you're able to actually get better talent than other people have because you're finding the talent that has been overlooked. And Paraag is actually being honored next week just before Super Bowl by the Fritz Pollard Alliance as their salute to excellence award winner for the year. So very, very happy for him.
Passionistas: So now you've risen through the ranks over the last eight and a half years. So tell us how your position has evolved with the team and your current responsibilities.
Hannah: I think the big change for me was learning how to go from being an individual contributor to being a team leader. That was a big, big shift in his daily responsibilities, and so starting out in purely a legal role and really as that individual contributor. I think one of the things that made a big difference to me was I was having trouble agreeing that I should be hiring more people to help before I started adopting other departments. Um, and somebody sat me down and was like, Hannah, you are never going to be able to grow as long as you always think you have to do everything yourself, like you have to learn to delegate. And that really, that really helped me, that really me see things in a new light. And once I learned to do that, it allowed me to keep growing and be able to take on more and more because there is, you know, only so many hours in a day. There's only so much one person can do. If you're focused on doing the work yourself
Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Hannah Gordon. Don't forget to tune into the Super Bowl on February 2nd at 6:30 PM Eastern 3:30 PM Pacific on Fox when the San Francisco 49ers take on the Kansas City Chiefs. Now here's more of our interview with Hannah.
You also oversee fan groups like women of the Niners and 49ers Pride for the LGBTQ fans. So talk about those initiatives and why, again, why they're important to you.
Hannah: I'll start with 49ers pride, which is our newest fan engagement program. That is a program that's as you noted for our LGBTQ plus fans, but also for our allies. So it's not just for one type of person. Cause I think one of the things that really resonates with our fans is that we recognize that they look to see their values reflected in us. And I think as the team of the San Francisco Bay area, we very much do reflect the progressive values of this region. And so for us it was really natural to see, okay, where is there a part of our fan demographic that maybe historically hasn't been focused on or served in, in the overall experience of sports in America in the same way. Not that they weren't necessarily, enjoying being 49ers, but how can we even elevate that experience and create more community.
And so we launched 49ers Pride at a town hall that we did with the San Jose State Institute for the study of sport society and social change. And we had an incredible discussion around a lot of issues of gender identity and LGBTQ plus activism in sport there. And then we launched this fan engagement platform and the response was really overwhelming. The, the videos we received from people in tears just saying how much it meant to them that they'd been 49ers fans for their whole lives, that they'd never felt excluded by the 49ers but they also now really felt included in a way that they'd never felt before. And there was just overwhelming, like response on social media and emails and so many other things. We had over a thousand people sign up and that first week and we followed that up within in June, marching in the San Francisco pride parade. We had over 150 employees, family members, fans, all part of our float and had just the best time, so much fun.
And then this fall we did another event, bringing people together in person again to build community as 49ers fans and we did a away game watch party in the Castro, which for those who don't know is a historically gay neighborhood in San Francisco, and I'm pretty sure it's the first drag queen half time that I've ever heard of, at least sponsored by an NFL team, is awesome. So it's a really fun, cool, way for people to just celebrate and enjoy being 49ers fans and have a community.
And then you asked also about our women's official club. So WON: Women of the Niners is our official women's club. And that's something we've had for a long time. But we did rebrand a couple of years ago, to try to reach an even broader swath of fans. You know, we want to be reaching all of our fans, which very much includes the women who make up almost 50% of our fan base, and given what a kind of a big number that is, it's also a very diverse fan base. So we have women fans who are 14 years old. We have women fans who are 94 years old. We have women fans of every ethnicity, every socioeconomic background, and every level of fan ability. So we have extremely avid fans who want to see us breaking down all the X's and O's for them. And then we have casual fans who are interested in some of the storylines, some of the personal stories behind our players and their families and where they've come from, but who may or may not feel like they've gotten enough of an education in the game to fully enjoy and appreciate the game. And so we try to meet everyone where they're at and ensure that they both feel a part of the 49ers and that they're getting what they need to, to really, enjoy the game and be passionate about our team. So those are those two of our fan engagement clubs.
Passionistas: So what does your week leading up to the Super Bowl look like? What do you do next week?
Hannah: There is a lot happening. The team will leave on Sunday. All other staff and friends and family will leave on Thursday. There's a lot of preparation work that goes into a Super Bowl for participating teams. A lot of it is handled by the NFL. They make it as easy as they can on participating teams, but there's still certainly, our legal team has been cranking away on everything from hotel agreements, us travel agreements. When you have a travel party of about 2000 people that you need to get across the country and then move around in a city that's going to be packed with millions of people, it's a pretty intense experience. So there's a lot logistically that goes into all of that. It'll be, it'll be a busy week, but a really fun week. So the game is on Sunday. People will largely kind of be, you know, there's a lot of different events that happen in the couple of days, the lead up to the Super Bowl, but we're also very focused on, you know, we're coming there with a job to do and that's to win that game.
Passionistas: How do all the departments work together leading up to the Super Bowl?
Hannah: Everybody works together kind of regardless, because none of this happens without a lot of collaboration. So you've got folks from stadium operations who have already flown down to Miami to start setting things up. You've got folks from the football travel logistics side. We're also already there, our community relations team does a lot of support around the family members of our players. So there'll be hunting down early, making sure that we have daycare and resource centers and making sure everybody has all the information they need to have a really wonderful trip and celebrate their family member who's going to be competing on the field. So every it takes, I mean to say it takes a village would be sounded cliche, but it definitely takes a full, a 400 person organization to do it.
Passionistas: So what's the most rewarding part of what you do?
Hannah: I'll tell you two things that happened in the last week that I think sort of epitomized regardless of when we are in season. What's the most rewarding after the NFC championship? Seeing the faces of our players and coaches and staff who were so elated, that was truly rewarding. That's what you're working towards is that feeling of accomplishment and communal experience because it's also the, the feeling that our fans had in the stands. I think if you have not been to a football game in person, it's such a powerful communal experience that doesn't happen in a lot of other ways in American culture anymore. There aren't a lot of places where people come together in person and drop whatever is happening else wa elsewise in their lives or around them and have this incredible really community experience where you're having this shared emotion with 68,000 other people. Um, it's very unique. And so that is one of the most rewarding parts.
And then the other most rewarding part is the work that I've been able to do over the last few years with everything that we do in the community. And about a week and a half ago, one of the events that we did was for Martin Luther King day. We went and did reading with kindergartners and first graders at an elementary school and the little girl who I was assigned to be her reading partner. Oh my God. Like that sweet little face. Like I just like that is the most rewarding part when you, when you, you know, because the reality is like, at first I was like, she's not gonna want to read with me. Like I'm not a player, but it then you're reminded anytime you're with children that they're excited just cause you're an adult just because you have taken an interest in them and that you are there to help them. And so for me, the community work that we do, the joy that we're able to bring to other people, that is the other most rewarding part.
Passionistas: What do you think is the biggest risk that you've taken professionally and how did it pay off?
Hannah: I would say the biggest risk I probably took professionally was when I took the job, sort of the weight in order to take the job with the NFL because I was, I made half as much money at the NFL as I had been making it a law firm. Um, so that's always more risky. Um, and in the process I had actually been laid off in the like wake of like bloodbath of 2009 when law firms, including the one I was at, laid off 20% plus of associates. Um, and so I, I made the decision after that that I did not want to go back to working in another soulless life sucking job. Um, and even though I knew that the job I'd had, I was very blessed to have and allowed me to pay my bills. It paid very well. It was very prestigious, but it didn't feel true to me.
And so I wanted to do something that I felt passionate about and I knew that I was passionate about sports and that was what I really wanted to be working in. Now deciding that I was going to pursue that in the midst of the worst economic recession since the great depression was, you know, maybe not the best idea. Um, but I, you know, I waited until I got the job that I really wanted and that took six months between the time I stopped working, the time I started again. And that was terrifying. But that is certainly the risk that paid off because here I am now. So do you think there's a particular personality trait that you possessed that's helped you succeed in your career drive? I am a relentlessly driven person. Um, and I think that, I mean, you guys talk to Lindsay who I've worked with and so one of the amazing things that Lindsay does is really help you, um, define your strengths.
And so I was able with her to be able, like I already knew that, you know, being relentlessly driven was one of my strengths is also one of my weaknesses, but being able to very clearly say, yep, you know, drive, finish, you know, command competition, like here, here are my strengths. So yeah, I think certainly in sports a lot of us are very competitive people as part of why we're attracted to sports. Um, but I, I would say that, yeah, focus, drive, competition, command. Um, those would be, and, and relating to people. I would say that that's sort of my, my strengths that have, have worked out well for the career that I'm in.
Passionistas: You mentioned career coach Lindsay Gordon who nominated you. She told us that you're really supportive of women who are working in male dominated industries. What are some of the ways you've given women your support?
Hannah: Probably mostly through mentoring others, but also through all of the policy changes that we've talked before from our diversity interviewing policy to the fellowship that we created here. That is a rotational fellowship that gets a young woman who's just graduated from college into verticals where women are historically underrepresented, um, like sales, like finance, like business strategy and analytics because that really helps kind of change the future of what the pipeline looks like in those fields where, um, the ascent to the top is much more rapid and, and is actually viable cause there's a lot of protocols where that's not viable. Um, so I'd say both policy-wise and then, um, I really, I love mentoring younger people and so, um, whether it's somebody who's asking to have coffee, um, or somebody who has either worked for me or whatever it is, um, I love, I love hearing just what's going on in their lives and seeing the excitement they have about whatever is kinda up next for them.
Passionistas: Do you have a mantra that you live by?
Hannah: I do not. I'm not really a mantra girl. I mean, I think they're lovely for like meditation and whatnot. But no, I don't have like three words that I live by. Although someone asked, I'm going to steal someone else's, someone asked our team reporter that question. And she was like, ''Oh, stay ready so you don't have to get ready. And I was like, ooh, I like that. Like that's a good just tip reminder for whatever you're doing. Stay ready so you don't have to get ready.
Passionistas: So what advice would you give to a young woman who wants to get into professional sports?
Hannah: Work really hard and work smart. So understand, and I say this to all young people who are looking to get into sports. The impression that you leave as a young person, um, is very important because this is a small industry at the end of the day and very relationship base. And so you want to be that first one in last one out. You want to demonstrate that work ethic, um, and your commitment to what your, your, your craft and what you're doing. And I also tell you when people, because sports is just an industry and it's not uh, a particular career, right? You could want to be a coach in sports. You could want to be a lawyer in sports. You could want to be a broadcast or in sports. And so you also need to have a commitment to whatever the craft is, the it is the you want to do in sports and to commit to being totally excellent at it because to make it in this business, you have to be the best at what you do.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Hannah Gordon. Tune into the Super Bowl on February 2nd at 6:30 PM Eastern, 3:30 PM Pacific on Fox when Hannah's team, the San Francisco 49ers take on the Kansas City Chiefs.
Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and our new subscription box filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions, sign up for our mailing list to get 10% off your first purchase.
And be sure to subscribe to the Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.
Tuesday Jan 14, 2020
Tuesday Jan 14, 2020
Marla Isackson is the founder of the OSSA Collective and host of the Mind of a Mentor podcast. A former marketing executive for corporations like American Express, WebMD and Barnes and Noble, Marla formed Like a Boss Girls in 2004. The website was created for and about women to help and inspire them to make a living, make a difference, and make it big. In 2018, Marla rebranded her site as Ossa, a podcast network for female thought leaders dedicated to promoting social progress through the oldest form of communication and storytelling: the spoken word.
Learn more about Marla and OSSA.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Marla Isackson. A former marketing executive for corporations like American express, WebMD and Barnes and Noble, Marla formed Like a Boss Girls in 2004. The website was created for and about women to help inspire them to make a living, make a difference and make it big.
In 2018 Marla rebranded her site as Ossa, a podcast network for female thought leaders dedicated to promoting social progress through the oldest form of communication and storytelling — the spoken word.
So please welcome to the show, Marla Isackson.
Marla: Thank you so much for having me today. I'm really excited to be on. I really appreciate it.
Passionistas: Marla, what's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Marla: utting family aside, 'cause I'm most passionate about that. I would say that I'm really passionate about what I'm doing because I really feel that our mission with Ossa or my mission, I should say, is to really help elevate the voices of women. And I've been working at this for a long time, both with Like a Boss Girls and us. The bottom line, I want to make sure women really do have a seat at the table. That's so important to me.
Passionistas: Why?
Marla: Because we have a lot to say. I've been in a situation where I've been invited to the table, but then I'm been ignored through the process of developing Like a Boss Girls and Ossa. I've worked with some incredible women. I've met incredible women and I'm just impressed with how much value they can add to the conversation. So that's why I think it's important for women to be at the table and to be encouraged to contribute. We have a lot to offer. I've had the opportunity to work with some incredible women in my corporate life as well as with Like a Boss Girls and with Ossa I have learned and experienced that women have a tremendous amount of value to add and for women not to be having a seat at the table. It's an incomplete conversation.
Passionistas: Let's take a step back and you started your career in marketing, so tell us about that and some of the challenges you had working with these big corporations.
Marla: I'll take a step further back, which is I first started my life in retailing working for a department store that's not in existence anymore called Abraham and Straus. I learned a lot about the customer at that point. After two years I realized I could leverage that experience and knowledge and start my marketing career. So I've had the opportunity to work for a big company such as Citibank and American express, Barnes and noble and Web MD. And I honestly thought they were incredible opportunities. I felt very grateful. I worked hard. I learned a lot. I am who I am now because of the experiences I had working at these companies. I learned I, it was incredible on the job training. I have to say that and I loved meeting really cool people from different walks of life. It was a great experience. I can't deny it. I'm very, very glad that I had the opportunity to do so.
Passionistas: Talk a little bit about the challenges you faced being a woman with a lot of male colleagues.
Marla: I worked in corporate America during the time when there was a lot of conversation about the glass ceiling. So for example, not to date myself, but when I started working for the bank, I mean people walked around with a little bow ties what women did. So it was just a different world then. It's not that people were overtly hostile to women, but we felt very snubbed. And that was part of the issue. I think things began to change when more and more women were promoted into areas of importance. And then women were encouraged to speak at the table. But I will tell you that, you know, I definitely experienced times in these big companies where we'd be in a big conference and there'd be a lot of people around and I would say something and I would get ignored.
And then a guy would say the same thing and they would be like, Oh my gosh, what a wonderful idea. And that used to irritate me and it didn't just happen to me. It happened to a lot of women. And you know, I remember talking about it with some colleagues and we just were not sure how to crack the code. I mean, we tried different, you know, you know, standing up or speaking with a different tone and voice, but it didn't matter. So we weren't able to crack that code. But I absolutely experienced that situation on a number of occasions. It was really depressing. And I made me so angry because it really took away the value of that. I thought that I was adding to the conversation as well as to the company and that was a problem. There were situations where there are a couple of senior execs, males who, I don't know, maybe a little, we're a little more enlightened, pay attention to it a little bit more.
So I would say something, a guy would say something the same thing I said and, but then the executive would come back to me asking to clarify and add to my point. So you know, I started to see the change, but there were still a lot of situations where that was a problem. You know, there's still a lot of situations where male executives, they'd go golfing and you know, not to say women don't golf, but a lot of us didn't golf. A lot of businesses held when the golf course. So I'm hoping that the generation of today that women are playing golf because that's super important. But it really is a metaphor illustrating the fact that I still felt different. I was the other person. I wasn't one of the crew, I don't even say one of the guys, but I didn't feel like I was one of the gang when we had conversations like this.
Also, many of the senior executives had wives that worked. So I will never forget having the conversation with the senior executive who said, don't worry about it, Marla, you know, your husband makes a lot of money. You know, when, when I was talking about a particular promotion, yeah, that's okay. You know, you'll be, you'll be okay. But he really needs the money. So I'm hoping those kinds of conversations don't still happen, but I will never forget that conversation. I didn't even know it. How do you respond to that? I didn't even know what to say. I was stunned, absolutely stunned. There was situations where I would be, you know, I was hired. This was not a titty bank or American express. And I find out that people working for me, older guys were making more money than I was making. So this stuff went on a lot.
And again, I haven't worked for a big company in a long time, but I certainly hope that there have been some changes that have been made.
Passionistas: Why did you decide to strike out on your own and what was your first project?
Marla: Basically I had great experiences, so the big corporations were incredible just based on the projects I've worked on and the people I managed, the huge marketing budgets that I had. I ended up working for a startup, so I had a bit of that taste of startup and then I worked for a smaller company and I will tell you that honestly I got really exhausted. It was very tiring. I felt like I was consistently having to parrot what they wanted me to say. I didn't feel like I was in control because I wasn't because it wasn't my company. I would certainly voice my opinion when we discussed strategy, but I was not the ultimate decision maker.
And that got me super frustrated and it got to a point where in addition to just feeling kind of exhausted, I also wanted be in a situation where I was affecting the outcome and I was focusing on a project that I felt really passionate about. Not that I didn't love my jobs, I certainly did love them, but I felt it was really time to take that next step and really focus on things that really sing to me.
Passionistas: Tell us about founding Heart of Gold Girls and why you wanted to work with teens specifically.
Marla: That was my first foray into having my own company and I decided to focus on the teen market cause my daughter was a teenager at the time and I really felt that teen girls were not being served the way they should. And this was like very early days internet. So a lot of stuff that teen girls were exposed to was a lot of stuff about celebrities and how to please your man and all this other nonsense.
But I didn't see that there was a whole lot of conversations focusing on really developing as a woman and following your passion and making an impact in the world. So that was quite a number of years ago and I wanted to do something about that. So that's why I founded Heart of Gold Girls and it was a content social media site as well. And we did that for about two years or so. I had a small team of people and then after a while I felt that I could not serve teen girls the way I wanted to serve them. I think, you know, obviously I'm much older and my daughter was not a teen anymore and I just felt like I wasn't close enough to the customer and that made me uncomfortable. So we repositioned to Like a Boss Girls and we were like really the first boss girl thing.
And then all of a sudden afterwards, like everyone is a girl boss, a boss, girl, a boss, babe, whatnot. But basically what I wanted to do was to help women starting out. So either leaving high school or college or postgraduate. I know, again, this is really based on the experiences of my daughter and son. That's a really hard transition to make. It may not be the first time that you're living on your own because a lot of people do go to college, but it's the time that you're really an adult and you have to make some decisions that maybe in the past your parents would make for you. And I felt that that was important and I wanted to create structure. I wanted to create content that would be useful to this population that would really help them make the transition more effectively so that they actually could get to where they wanted to be.
So again, it was a content site and focused on getting a job, money, health and wellness relationships. We covered a whole bunch of different verticals, again, with the mindset of women just starting out in the world who maybe need a little support. The other reason why I did this, again, I'm a like a research nerd and I remember reading a lot of research that when people graduate from college, they often move to towns or cities and they're not from that area and there's a lot of loneliness and not a whole lot of connection. And again, it was as the internet was kicking in, we felt that there was an opportunity to use all these tools to help women feel more connected with each other. And that was another goal.
Passionistas: At what point in your journey did you decide to get into podcasting and why did you do that?
Marla: It was the beginning of 2018 and in a strategy session with my team and we were talking about ways to amplify Like a Boss Girls amplify the brand, extend the brand, have a touch more people. And my team suggested very strongly that I start a podcast, which I really didn't want to do, but I did. And we call it Mind of a Mentor. And again, the structure is about, it does talk about mentoring, but the woman being interviewed is actually the mentor. So essentially she's taking us through her heroic journey, which we all have and talking about challenges, issues, obstacles that they encountered along the way and how they did or did not deal with these issues. So I thought it was a great platform. I would say my first few episodes were horrendous because I was petrified. But then as I got into it, I really enjoyed the medium a lot.
I just said, well this is just a really, really cool, I like the fact that I'm getting to speak with a lot of very interesting women cause Mind of a Mentor does focus on women and it just was really liking the medium. And then I did more research to learn more about podcasting and based on the research, lo and behold, huge opportunity growing channel also found out that women were not monetizing to the level that men were monetizing when it came to podcasting. I think men were involved with podcasting a lot earlier on, so they tended to have the bigger podcasts. And I felt that podcasting was a natural medium for women because I think you can get into both the emotional issues as well as the more practical issues when two women are having a conversation. So did my research, saw that there was an opportunity and decided to take mine to have a mentor to take the concept of podcasting and actually go the next step, which is creating the Ossa platform.
Passionistas: So before we get to Ossa, so tell us a little bit more about the podcast. What types of women do you interview and what have you learned from them?
Marla: I would say that I've interviewed, oh my gosh, all kinds of women. I've interviewed athletes. I've interviewed women in transition, women who have had abusive relationships, women who had seriously horrible childhood. Bottom line is they're all professional women. They all have jobs, they run a business, they have a career. But they've all gone through some really serious issues along the way. And I felt that these stories were really interesting. They're very, very helpful because what they've gone through is not unusual. So there are many women unfortunately who have been in these kinds of situations. So the objective is for someone listening to Mind of a Mentor to be able to say, well, you know, if she could do it then I can do it. And that's the framework.
Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Marla Isackson. To learn more about her podcast network for female thought leaders, visit OssaCollective.com. Now here's more of our interview with Marla.
Passionistas: Tell us more about Ossa and the mission and how it works for both the podcast or and the advertiser.
Marla: In my mind, the best way to help women accomplish and achieve their goals. A lot of it has to do with financial goals. So you've got to make money. Making money is really important. Having that career is really important. And again, going back to the research and looking at the difference in monetization, I saw that there was a really big gap, which just did not seem right to me. So well the overall objective is really to help women podcasters monetize their podcast and extend their voice.
But we actually are a matching platform, which is very similar to when you go online to select a flight. You put in your criteria and up pops the flights that match your criteria. Ossa is a matching site, so we work with brands, they can leverage the platform, put in their respective criteria, and up pops the podcast that meet that criteria. So we make the match. So we're helping brands make more money reach women that they may not have reached before because of the opportunity to speak to a very targeted group of women in these podcasts. And we're also working with women who love podcasting, but maybe had not cracked the code on how to make money. So that was really the objective.
Passionistas: How do you help smaller podcasters grow their audience and appeal to advertisers?
Marla: Basically? We've done a couple of things. Most recently we launched an eCourse called grow your show and it's a really cool, I love it because we had subject matter experts in our community create each module.
So it's a very like organic kind of course, which is you go on, you take each module, you learn tips, tools, resources in terms of what to do to increase your numbers. But you're hearing from women who have gone through very similar experiences and they bring their own flavor to the conversation. So that's something we're very proud of. We just launched that very recently. So that's one thing. When you become a podcast or on Ossa, you can join our private Facebook group and on Ossa, various online guests, webinars, we record the calls, they're on various topics relating to podcasting and we'd push it out to our members are also podcast members. We have an Ossa special Ossa newsletter for our members where we talk about opportunities, new findings. We will bring in, if there's some news in the podcasting world, we'll connect that information. The other thing we do is, you know, getting back to sort of podcasting news on our content site, which we still have, which is pivoted more towards podcasting.
We try to use it as a tool to make podcasts are smarter about podcasting. So my point is the more information tools and resources we can put in a Podcaster's hands, we feel that hopefully they will use that information to actually focus on growing their numbers. And we're constantly thinking of other new opportunities to help our podcast or community cause it's super important to us.
Passionistas: And is there something that you personally have learned as a podcaster from all of these resources?
Marla: I think a couple of things. The first is that everyone has a story and it doesn't have to be dramatic. You don't have to be the most famous person in the world. But every woman, everyone has a story. And the wisdom that's conveyed during these conversations is remarkable about all different facets of life, work, relationships, parents, etcetera. So I'm enjoying the richness of these conversations and I didn't quite think that that would be the situation.
I don't know what I was expecting, but I didn't quite expect this. So that's a big thing. I have enjoyed meeting just overall some amazing woman that I would not have met in the past. So having the podcast has enabled me to reach out and go beyond my job function and connect with women that there's not a chance that I ever would have met them before and it's made my life richer. So I've enjoyed that.
Passionistas: So do you ever feel unmotivated and if you do, how do you get past it?
Marla: I'm sure many of us have seen the cartoons that show the life of an entrepreneur, which one day you're up, one day you're down. When you're up, one day you're down. And I feel that way. So the thing is that I'm like other entrepreneurs inpatient, I'm wanting things to happen faster than they're happening.
I get cranky when I realized that I could maybe move faster if I had more investment dollars. So these are things that can get to me after a time that can make me wake up and say, Oh, what am I doing? Like really, what am I doing? But then I get on a conversation with my team and I get jazzed again because I see the opportunity. So look, it's really hard to sustain that level of energy every day. And there are ups and downs, but I think what I really try to do is think of my overall goal and just try to be a little more patient, which is not easy, not easy.
Passionistas: Do you have a character trait that you think really helps you keep going?
Marla: I am a bit of a perfectionist, which can be good or bad, but I use the perfectionism as I know something should get done.
It would be great if it would get done. So I make it happen and that process leads to me enhancing my business. So that sort of impatience is, as I said, good and bad. I'm very curious. So I'm on the computer a lot. We have to be careful because that could be the big black hole, but I'm constantly doing research about topics relating to podcasting or the economy because I want to be smarter and I want more knowledge that I can create strategies that will be even more impactful. So I think it's important to be curious and I am super curious. One of the reasons why I enjoy podcasting so much or the act of being a podcast host is that I'm very curious and it gives me an opportunity to ask a whole lot of questions that probably would not be polite for me to ask in any other venue.
But because you're having a conversation on a podcast, I'm free to ask whatever question I want. So I enjoy that. So I think curiosity is probably a really big piece of who I am.
Passionistas: Do you find now that you are asking people questions on the podcast, do you carry that over more into your social personality?
Marla: I think what I've learned from podcasting is to pay more attention. So, for example, with my end of a mentor, I asked women to start in their early days because I'm always trying to listen for themes and threads that I can pull in to the latter part of the conversation. So when a woman is talking about what she's doing now, obviously most cases there's a huge correlation to the way they were as a young girl and their focus and their interests now. So that's kind of what I try to do.
I don't know if it extends to my personal life, but I guess overall I try to be a better listener, let's put it that way. I really do. I think that's an important point. I think it's taught me to be a more patient listener.
Passionistas: Looking back on your whole journey so far, do you think that there was one decision that you consider your most courageous and that sort of changed the trajectory of your path?
Marla: I think there were a couple of key points, but I will tell you that in the summer, because this is a fairly recent experience, I was at one of the major podcast conferences and I started to talk about Ossa in a way that I don't know why I hadn't talked about also this way before I elevated the conversation. I talked about Ossa in a much bigger way and I realized that that was a huge turning point because I actually believe that Ossa can be what I was saying.
It could be more specifically. I decided to go all in and that was a really big decision and that was really a result of this conference I went to, which was like, am I going to make it or not? If I wanna really achieve what I'm saying I want to achieve, I gotta be all in and be super passionate about what I'm doing. That was important. That was just the summer actually. That was a very important turning point for me.
Passionistas: So what's your secret to a rewarding life?
Marla: I think it's a couple of things. Number one, it's just taking a step back and just counting my blessings. It's gratitude. You know, life is not easy. There are ups and downs, but I think for me it's always been important for me to say, wow, I am very grateful. I am grateful that I am where I am, that I have such a great family, that I've been able to build a career. I'd never take anything for granted. So I think it's really a lot has to do with gratitude.
Passionistas: Is there a mantra that you live by?
Marla: Yes. And now my team lives by it. So there's a great digital marketing person who's, I think she's amazing. Her name is Marie Forleo. She's very popular. She does these awesome courses and her mantra is everything is figureoutable. And that's, I've adopted that as my mantra. So so many times my team members, maybe they're flipping out about something, they're worried about something and I'm like, chill, everything is figureoutable. We'll figure it out. No one's dying over this. There is a solution. So to me that has gotten me through some really hairy experiences.
Passionistas: What's your definition of success?
Marla: It's two things. It's being able to really touch a lot of women, cause Ossa is a passion project for me. Yeah, I want to make money, but, but there's a passion and a purpose for what I'm doing.
Also being able to say that I've really was able to help women elevate their voices and expand their podcasts and help them make money. That's super important. And in turn, honestly, me being able to make money is very helpful as well. I mean, I'm not a nonprofit, so the fact that I can earn money doing something that I'm so passionate about that I believe is mission driven to me is a win-win. That's my definition of success.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Marla Isackson. To learn more about her podcast network for female thought leaders, visit OssaCollective.com.
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Tuesday Dec 17, 2019
Tuesday Dec 17, 2019
In 2009, Geri McNiece turned her new-found passion for hula hooping into a business. She’s trained over 1,000 clients at her Texas-based company aRoundJoy. She offers handmade custom hoops, in-person training sessions and online coaching to her long-distance clients. Geri’s mission is to help women learn to move the FUN way.
Learn more about Geri.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy andNancy Harrington, and today we're talking with Geri McNiece. In 2009, Jerry turned her new-found passion for hula hooping into a business. She's trained over a thousand clients at her Texas-based company around joy. She offers handmade custom hoops, in person training sessions and online coaching to her long distance clients. Geri's mission is to help women learn to move the fun way. So please welcome to the show Geri McNiece.
Geri: Nice to be here.
Passionistas: So Geri, what's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Geri: Well, my goodness, I actually have been thinking along these lines the last few days knowing that I was going to talk to you and I would say I am most passionate about getting women to move as if they were a younger child. Go back to play and move, like you just don't have an agenda, but to really enjoy and embrace their inner child. And they'd be surprised if they did that. How much joy it really feels like.
Passionistas: Tell us about how that translates into your business.
Geri: Every time I work with a new client, there's either a couple of different ways it can go. It can either be someone who is totally kind of in a zone that they haven't experienced in many, many, many years and they've almost forgotten how to kind of let their guard down and let go. Or I'm working with somebody who is just all about it because they are on this journey themselves of having more fun. They are just jumping in with both feet. So it's either one or the other really usually. And most of the time, unfortunately it's the first one. I'm trying to just let them let go and just experience the moment. And that's hard for a lot of us these days because we're always so attached to digital devices and all of the things that we didn't do when we were kids. When you're a child you explore and you just play for the sake of playing and you're so in the moment. That's what I'm trying to get women to do is to just, you know, let go, leave everything at the door or you know, in this case maybe before you enter my backyard or just let's, let's have a good time and learn how to play because kids do it instinctively.
But playing with a hoop is just that. If you just let yourself play, forget that you're trying to lose weight, forget that you're trying to trim your waist, forget the exercise part of it. It's there. You just have fun with it and let yourself just go. You know what I mean? That's how it translates and I'm so passionate about it because I see at work time and time again.
Passionistas: Tell us a little bit about your life before hooping. What did you do for a living and what was your home life like?
Geri: I was raised as almost an only child because my mom and dad had me after. My sisters were like, you know, 10 11 years older than me. So that was a surprise and I was kinda like the Apple of their eye. My sisters, I was their doll baby. As you can imagine, since I was little like that and they were older. I'm Italian and real into music and dance and so my sisters and I both grew up dancing, performing. I got a little bit more into it because I was kind of the only one at home. I just had a love for dance and performing and that stayed with me through high school. I was known as that girl. I was dancing, I was on drill team, I've taught, I did twirled Baton. I was just real into that kind of stuff. And then life happened. I was performing, I had a summer job in theater. And I thought my home was going to be on the stage personally, but it wasn't it and that's okay. Found a guy and got married and I left all that behind to become a wife and mom and I grew up watching my mother and father have a wonderful marriage. So I had aspirations that that was what I would do in life.
I didn't understand it at a younger age that you know, you really have to work hard to make a living and performance and all that and maybe you're not going to get that marriage and family life younger. You're going to have to do the whole career thing in the performing arts before you settle down. I felt more at home doing the home thing and the raising the family thing. I kind of liked it and I think a lot of that had to play into the fact that I lost both my parents by the time I was 24. So not having that cohesive family anymore. I think I longed for it and the performing became kind of backseat. I missed my daddy, I missed my mother, but I missed my daddy first and then that was, I met my husband about that time shortly after just having that solid rock in my life.
I think I longed for that. Because they were my world since my sisters were older and not having that, I realized the egocentric lifestyle sometime of the performers. You have to, you just all about you. Right. And I didn't really feel at home there anymore cause I didn't have family. I really like having a relationship with my husband and or well soon to be, I didn't know at the time, but as we decided we were going to get married and stuff, things just took a different turn for me so I became a wife and mom.
And I worked in banking. I was a bank teller and I loved opening new accounts. I was just a, you know, a worker bee. I didn't perform. I performed at my desk, let's just say that that got me through many years of work was performing at work. I could put on that hat of whatever I needed to be and it got me awards. I had high sales and all that kind of stuff in banking. but once I became a mom, that's when I noticed a shift to go back home again and so I quit working at some point after my second son was born. My boys are three years apart.
Then our whole world changed. When my oldest son went to kindergarten and the very first day of kindergarten the teacher said, 'Can we talk?' And I was like, sure. But I knew he was very hyperactive. That's what they called it, hyperactivity. That was just the word, the buzz thing. But at the same time, my other son was really polar opposite, very relaxed self-sooth and all that. And so I was a consumed mom. But the diagnosis of ADHD took over for my son, my oldest son, and then about, oh, I'd say within six months, maybe even less, the younger one was diagnosed with autism and he was three.
So then I was a mom of these two challenging boys that had these learning disabilities that were apparent, but then not apparent sometime because you know they can be hidden until you kind of see what the child's doing. So in school I was that mom. this took, you know, another 18 to 20 years of my life to navigate that through the schooling stuff. And so yeah, all this performing stuff was way on the back burner. Like, even though that my love of performing art, performing arts, and certainly dance, musicals and all that, everything was in me, but I couldn't do it because I was consumed with my family life. There was a point where I did a couple of shows for my 40th birthday. That's what I wanted to do, was audition. I got cast and had songs and lines and all this stuff.
And I was like, Oh my god. I was still working at the bank. So I mean, it was crazy. So I knew I loved it still. But then I realized after weeks of rehearsal in a six week run of a show, I was like, no, I can't do it. Geri can't do this anymore. I'm not 20 you know? And it was just real hard. But I still loved being out in the public. And I knew I had talent for something. Whether it was writing, because I started to write when my kids were older so that I could on blogs, mommy blogs. Remember when they first started and we were all stalking our children. That's what I did. And I shared stories and I loved doing that. And I said, there's something in me that I still need to get out there. It's something creative. But I didn't know quite what.
I just, I dunno, I kept it, I kept dipping my toe in the writing, which seemed to be the place that I really enjoyed it cause I could do it at home and reflect on my performing and find other theater nerds and dancers. And we talked on, it was just so fun. But at some point, trying to think when it was, I guess my son was a senior, the youngest. Okay. And there's a whole lot of drama that went on with my older son. But anyway, the younger one, since he had autism, I'm really getting into the blogging about that and watching his journey and his senior year was really tough because he was older, but he was still kind of juvenile because he has the autism and I just documented everything. And at some point I called my blog, I talked about how he was joyful all the time.
And I said, I wish I could have his joy, his joy that he needs to be bottled. He's so happy all the time. He's so innocent and he's got a world out there he's getting fixing to have to navigate and of course we're going to help him do that. I use the word joy and I realized I was around joy every day because of him and so I changed my blog name to Around Joy. It was all focused about my son, I think it was the summer after he graduated. He was a very gifted percussionist. And he's a musically and he was, we were in band and all that high school band and so we were those band parents. We loved doing the whole drum line thing cause he was not only in band but he was in drum line, which is another subsection. It just consumes your life.
Well we followed Drum Corps International and drum corner nationals. Just such a fun thing to follow all summer long as the cores go all over the country. But a lot of them are based out of California. And we got tickets for Christmas that summer before to go to Pasadena for the Drum Corps International finals. And it wasn't until like the summer following. And so we were all excited about that. And of course I was loving it because they, what did they do in the, in the bands they spin what flags and rifles. Right. I was all into that cause I used to be a baton twirler so I was really excited to go see these finals cause all the cores are so good.
And it was about a week before we were supposed to leave for California and I turned on "Good Morning America" and there was this lady in this hula hoop and she was hoping and she was spinning it on her hand above her head. And I was just like drawn in and I was like, Oh my gosh, that's the coolest thing I have ever seen. And I just wanted to do it. And this was before we had any kind of DVR, TiVo or anything. I just flipped it on. And that's the first thing that was on my television and I'm like watching it. And then it was like, well, okay, here's the commercial. And that was it. And I'm like, what the heck? What was that? What, what? What did they just put on my television? So I had to go to the computer and I looked it up and I found out that it was woman out of California and they had a company and they were doing this hoop stuff, this class or whatever, and they sold hoops online on their website. And found that out. So I just was like, okay, I want one of those.
I just ordered it. Like I didn't know what I was doing. But I ordered it and I said, where's it coming from? Oh no. Cause I didn't know where they were. I said, we're fixing to leave town in a week. And this was back before Amazon was real fast. You know what I mean? Like I was worried it was going to come and we weren't going to be there. And so I found out they're in California and I went, '"Oh no, they're not." And so I then I went further and sure enough, they weren't hike in Marina Del Ray, which is, I find out that's in California near where we were going to be in Newport Beach. And I was like, Oh my gosh, you don't even, Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. They even have classes. Oh, they don't have classes while we're there. Oh, I can book an appointment though for a private lesson.
I said, I'm going to do it. Do you know I sent her a contact. Within 30 minutes she's calling me and it was, this is the woman I just saw on the TV. She's calling me and I'm like, there is a God, you know, like Oh my God, he's listening to my prayer. And she goes, well sure, why don't you just call me when you get into town and we'll set up a time. And I said, okay, would Monday work? I was like, yeah, because I knew that we would be done by Monday cause the thing was on Saturday, we had a day to kind of look around and then I could have him drop me off. I'm not even thinking straight y'all like what's my husband going to say? I didn't care. I just knew I wanted to spend that hoop.
Sure enough, I didn't tell him. I didn't tell him. I knew all this time. I told my girlfriend, I said, I'm going to take this hula hoop lesson when we get to California. And she was like, you're going to what? I said, look at this girl. And I showed her the girl on the website, she's like, Jesus, Geri, she doesn't have any clothes on. I was like, but look, look at her arms. They are like rocking, you know, like look at those arms on that girl. So I said, I want to be like that. She goes, Geri, that girl's got to be 30 and I was like, I don't care. I said, look. So I mean I was just all the things, nobody, I wouldn't listen to anybody, all the excuses. I'm like, I'm going to do it. So we get there and had a great time and went to the Rose Bowl, saw the thing. And all this time I'm watching all the spinning going on.
And do you know even that time I hadn't even had a hoop yet. Even that day at the finals, I'm watching every single guard, every single rifle, what do they call it? Flag Corps, Color Guard, whatever you call him. I was watching going, I'd put a hoop right there. Like I would put a hoop in that segment. It would look so good. Everything is circular. And I guarantee after you get off the phone with me and you start watching performances of bands and you start watching performances of dancing and things, they show you the rocket. Everything's circular. You know, I'm like, I'll put a hoop in the middle of that, get that girl doing that hoop. I'm always thinking that way when I watch performances. So anyway, we're at the hotel and we're getting ready at our stuff and I said, Hey, tomorrow you and Kyle, cause we were just with Kyle. Cause Kevin, my other son lives in California at this point.
He lived in San Diego for years. He went off on his own skateboarder or the whole story. Anyway, he was out there. So we were visiting with Kevin a lot and California. So since we ever go in there for the band thing, we said we're going to drive down and pick you up and bring you back and take you with us to the thing. So we drove down to San Diego, got him for the weekend and so my son was there, my other son too, but I said, we're going to tight cKyleback to some San Diego. Come back up here then tomorrow I need y'all to drop me off for my souvenir. And he went, what? I broke the news while we're on the highway and he goes, what? And I said, it's a lesson, a dance lesson. I couldn't get the word out hula-hoop y'all. I just couldn't do it because what do you mean a dance lesson.
Like a, what kind of dance? I said, it's just a dance with like a prop, I guess a couple dance. What are you doing? And I was like, no, it's, it's, it's a big hula hoop. And my sons were in the back seat going, what? They were just laughing their butts off and I said, y'all don't give me a hard time. This is really something I really want to do. He goes, well, what are we going to do, Geri, for two hours or whatever, and I said, just go walk around Venice Beach. So I went, they dropped me off. I said, I'm not going to get another souvenir. I said, I wouldn't want anything. This private lesson is all I want. I was horrible, like I was terrible. The one thing I could do are the two moves that were in the hands. It just felt so natural to me to spin something in my fingers and my hands or whatever, and she says, you're really good at that.
She goes, you know, you have to work on the waist taping low. I said, Oh, well that, but you know what? I said, women back home, they don't know about this, and she goes, well then it's your job to tell him. And I was like, God damn sure will. I said, this just feels amazing. She goes, are you going to pick it back up if you drop it? I said, heck yeah. I said I was shy. I was the poster child for what I wish every client would be for me. But again, I am also the poster child for somebody that could not spin that hoop on her body to save her life. And I went home with the knowledge that I suck. But I was good at a couple of things. Okay. And I loved it, I really loved it, but I was embarrassed. I still have the pictures and every so often, like on the anniversary of my very first lesson, I'll pull out the pictures.
My hand, I'm in the car, we're driving up the coast. This is, we took this nice long draw of a PCH and I just like was sitting in the car thinking how much I loved it, texted my girlfriend, but I'm taking a picture and sending it to her of my hand was bruised because I'd let this hope spin on it. That's the only thing I can do. And I said, but that is a love kiss right there. And it didn't last very long. But I mean, I had all this jewelry on my bruises across the back of my hand. She's like, are you nuts? You love it and it, and it hurt your body. I said, it doesn't hurt girl. I said, it was amazing. So anyway, when I got back home, I was telling her all about it and my husband was just like rolling his eyes every time I use it. He just said, he goes, what is this hoop shit?
You know? He was just joking with me about it all the time. And anyway, I didn't have my hope for another few days. I had him hold it until I got back and then they sent it and I would never practice in front of my husband. I would go in my backyard. And I sucked. Like I couldn't do it. And I was, Oh, it made me so sad. But I did the two things that really made me sing, you know, that was good that I could do. And I kept trying to get my girlfriend to do it. I kept trying to get her to do it and she kept saying no and she thought I was nuts. And so I had a lonely hoop journey for several months. Like nobody would believe me. They just thought I was all crazy and for that very reason I was the girl that put the hoop in the hallway and it sat there and the one saving grace I always said was like, Oh well at least it's not a treadmill.
I can't drape my clothes on it. Towel will fall right off that sucker. But it propped in the, you know, in the hallway and he passed it in the hallway. He goes, do you ever do that? I said, uh huh. I do it when you're not home. He goes, why do you do it when I'm not home? Like he knew like I was gonna say, cause I suck and I don't want you to make fun of me. I said, because I'm creating something. When I'm ready for you to see me, I will let you know.
Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Geri McNiece. To learn more about her custom hoops and training sessions, visit aRoundJoy.com. Now here's more of our interview with Geri and what happened next on her journey to turn her passion for hula hooping into a business.
Geri: I let this lady in California think that I was so in love with it and I was going to really start teaching it at some point like I was going to do it. And she goes, well, when we're ready to start training teachers, you're going to be one of the first people I call. Cause you seem like you're really into it. And I'm like, Oh, I am. You know? Needless to say, I didn't hear from her for a while, so I wasn't practicing. Well when she was ready to come to town because she was coming to Texas, who's one of the first people she calls? Me. And I'm like, uh yeah, I'd love to come to your workshop and it's going to be next week and I'm going to be at this place. And I'm like, Holy crap, I only can do two things. Oh my God.
And so then I brushed up in a week, man. When you got fire under your butt, you will do that thing. When did I push the envelope, see that's what I need. I need people to push that envelope under my butt. Put that fire under me. I learned a couple more things cause she had DVDs in the box. Right. So I learned a couple more things and I got one girl I called, I even did a Facebook, I'll never forget it. I was new on Facebook. Did a Facebook invite. Couldn't get one person to go to this class with me. I didn't want to go by myself but I, and ultimately I took one girl and she had fun but I mean she wasn't into it like me. But after that was over, she told me the instructor, she's like, we have a home program he did to learn this, do it.
I'll give you a $50 coupon off for whatever. I forget what it was but sign me up man. That day I was like, okay, cause I saw what she did in class and I actually left that workshop class doing something more than I could do when I didn't have her in front of my eyeballs. And that is another thing that I learned. It helps to have instruction of somebody in front of you, like you can learn a lot online, but when you've got a person in your back pocket, that's your mentor one-on-one. That's what made the difference for me in the beginning. And that's why I do what I do today because it goes back to my roots. I didn't ever think that I would get to the level that I got at just by myself, like at home, because I'm not that person that has that discipline to just do, to do, at least I didn't think I was.
But I have somebody guiding me and they gave me the tools, just you know, the the information I needed. And then I just zoned in on that one thing that for the first time in my life I said, I'm going to do it. I did it. And look what I did. I mean, I even ended up starting a business. It was just like the first time I'd ever done that in my life. Other than raising my boys because getting through the whole, you know, life, raising an ADHD and an autistic son and having my sanity, that's my greatest accomplishment. For me personally, the growth that it took to start with being sucking. The level of suckage, I just can't even tell you how bad I was when I first picked up a hoop to look at me today. People think I've been doing it all my life.
No, it was such a personal journey and to do it with the intention that I'm going to teach it someday was the way that it made it palatable for me. And so just getting to that point, I'm like, okay, now I'm ready to teach. I took four months I think to learn it and I had one girlfriend who believed in me and she is the one that pushed the envelope for me here. Like she would say, did you make a video today? Okay, to learn to teach this. I had to make a video of myself teaching every single move, like 20, 30 I don't know. It was a lot of moves. Like I'm teaching to the camera, like you're my student, which you know, okay, my performance background fine. That that helped me because I wasn't shy in front of a camera. It didn't bother me.
But just to know that there were some moves, I couldn't do that well, but I had to say, if I am still working on this move, I have not mastered it yet. But here is some points to think about when you're learning this move. And so I would have to memorize, you know, like a script almost. It becomes your vernacular. So you take a bare bones of what the key points are of a, of a move and then you teach it, but you make it into your own speak. And that was the challenge too for me because I wanted it to feel, I didn't want to repeat something rote memory. It needed to be authentic to me and authentic. I'm from Texas, y'all, I'm not. You know what I mean? I'm going to talk and way I talk. But yeah, after getting to a point where I felt like solid, I ended up making the complete, and this is, you know, you're putting it on a VHS tape.
Okay. Like we're talking a long time ago and putting it all together and sending it off to be critically judged and do you pass or not? And I passed with flying colors and they wanted me to become a master trainer and I'm like, Holy crap. And so then I worked for them for a while and it didn't really have my own business, but I have my own name, which guess what? That was aRoundJoy. Now let me preface, I did not start this with a hoop in my hand around joy, but yet I had that night. Is that not a God wink? Come on now and the beautiful name and it has to do with a lot more than hooping. So for me it's personal and the hoop brings me joy. But a lot of other things do, too. It's a beautiful journey. I've been on with this hoop.
Every single job I've ever had in my life, which I've been a waitress a lot. I worked in banking, worked in sales and a clothing stores, good lord, several retail jobs, but all the customer service training. I've had really set me up to be a business person, which I had no clue. And I opened business accounts for other people all those years in banking. So I knew a little bit about the legal part of documents, things that you needed for business. But yeah, I realized every person I'd ever met on my journey was important to my business because I had to start networking to publicize what I was doing. And you don't know who you're going to meet every day in life or why you meet them and then later on you look back and go, Oh, that person. It's good to know. You know? It's been really, really interesting.
Passionistas: So talk about that part of the journey. You decided you liked it. You decided you wanted to be an instructor. You had so many people pushing back against you when you wanted to do it personally. How did you convince strangers to jump in and start hooping?
Geri: Okay. My one girlfriend who believed in me. If it wasn't for her, I just don't know if I ever would've gotten this thing off the ground because she had such confidence in me. She's the one that came up with the idea of let me talk to my dad. He's got some warehouse space and I was like, he does. I didn't even know that. And she said, this is where you need to teach it Geri, cause you can't walk into anywhere and get anybody to believe you. You got to look legit. You know? And he was a business owner and she worked for him. You know what I mean? Small businessman.
If you can convince my father that you could get some people, you know, you got to have some classes to get people, give them free, give them away free. You know what I mean? But I have to have place to do it. I thought I did and I'm glad I did it that way. But yeah, I ended up getting a warehouse and then go into every dang festival. Like go get a booth at some place and you pay for a little tent and you sit under it and you give people your business card or you, you say, come on and you just stand up there, here, put this hoop on. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. I was like, Oh no, no, you've never worked with me. Come on now let's do this. And I had to go out and do that.
Oh lord have mercy. The first three years is just like, come on and take a class here. It's a $5 class. I gave it away. Like you don't even pay it. Just come take it. So it wasn't like this was a huge moneymaker, but I had really cheap rent because I got the daughter discount over there with dad. That's how this whole thing started was on. This is like on shoestring budget. But yet my husband, who he knows I could sell ice to an Eskimo. He's always believed in me as far as when I was working and he saw what kind of awards I got in sales and he goes, and this is even better Geri, cause I know you really believe in it and I've seen what it does to your body. You have a new spring in your step. He just saw how it changed me and he knew I was passionate about this.
We've been together 35 years. He knows if mama ain't happy, nobody's happy. He's a giver. He treats me like a queen. I wouldn't be anywhere without him either. He invested in this. In time and money and he's very handy and built out everything. And the warehouse was adorable. We built it out, didn't spend a lot of money but more than I'd really ever planned on. But you know, having the legitimacy of I'm doing this, like there's this crazy woman who's 40 something years old. If she says I can do it, well I think I'll go to her class, not going to cost me anything. Or I met her on the street, or I'd go to all the music festivals here in town.
Best thing ever that happened while I was just getting this off the ground as there's a wonderful Levitt foundation. We got Levitt pavilion here in Arlington and then another out in California. There's like four or five of them in the country, but it's a wonderful nonprofit that brings music to the community. So we got a Levitt Pavilion where they bring music, concerts, free concerts to the community, and there you go. Uh, what am I going to do? I'm bringing my hoop. Brought my hoop, and would dance to the music and get women to come try it and then hand them my business card and they would come and I would teach classes. That's how I ended up getting people, was really going out in the community. Very grassroots, very grassroots.
Passionistas: So how has hooping changed your life — physically and beyond? Physically?
Geri: It's definitely kept me feeling younger. It centers me, it calms me. It's the one thing that I can do. I never say no. You know how if you go to exercise you're like, I really don't feel like going to exercise. I really just don't feel like it, but I know I need to. I never say that with a hoop. It's like I just, I want to go feel better, give me that thing. I've got to go. It just loosens me up. I don't know about you guys, but when I wake up I have a hitch in my get along or when I get up out of a chair. Do you ever go, I got a hitch in my get along. It's like my hip kind of. Oh goodness. That does not go away, ladies. Okay. Like just cause I hope it's not a magic pill where I don't ache anymore, but if I start moving with my hoop, I don't ache anymore. It's just like taking medicine to me, but it's also allowed me to meet wonderful women all these years. It's 10 years this year. This November was 10 years that I started my business, so for 10 years I've gotten to meet amazing women and done some amazing, crazy things.
I've been in parades. And it's really brought me just a lot of happiness and I think that's the key, right? To just make it every day worth getting up. I'm just happier doing it.
Passionistas: What advice would you give to a woman who wants to start hooping but might be a little apprehensive about it?
Geri: Just give it a try. You don't know because you probably not tried with the right size hoop and you've certainly not tried with, I bet with any instruction because that's just it. You have to know what you're doing. You have to have somebody talk you through it because just watching videos on the YouTube, that's not enough because that's not your body on that screen. That's that person. You've got somebody to go well with your size. Okay. I'm going to give you a couple of things to think about. All right.
It's a lot of visualization in your head and if you don't have somebody talking to you through that, you're not going to get in that right place. Now, if you've had experience. As a child, hooping as a young girl, it comes back relatively quick, but your body is not the same size as when you were that little girl is it? So you may have to move your body a little bit differently now. And that's where I come into because I can go get girl, sister, you got it, look, Oh, I can see it. But here's what I want you to try now because you're going to hurt yourself doing what you're doing right now. So stop, because that is the thing too, is like women of a certain age, let's just say that this hooping looks fun and it is, and it's all the, all the things that you think it is.
As far as the, the lightness of it, you know, it's like, Oh, it makes you feel like a kid again. But our bodies, we have to respect the fact that they're, you know, 40 and 50 and 60 years old. We've got to do things smart with a hoop or you could hurt yourself. That's where you get the bad. Like, Oh, that hurt my back, that hurt my shoulder, or whatever you were doing. You know, you've got to know your limitations and if you have limitations, there's still something you can do with the hoop. It's the best thing ever for therapeutic movement, dynamic stretching like no other. You just go, but you got to let yourself go and go out there and play with it and so get out of your own head. Stop your inner dialogue. Think about it. You didn't have that when you were a little kid. You just did it.
Life has a way of beaten us down and life experience teaches us sometimes we're less than and we don't deserve that. This is what the hoop should remind you of. That's a toy. It's much more than that, but you know it's a toy. It's fun. Let yourself go there. That's where your joy is.
Passionistas: When you, as you say, get a hitch in your get along and you're not feeling motivated, how do you get out of that funk?
Geri: I let myself have a day just be that blivet, you know, just be that. I love that word. Blivet. That's a family word, by the way. We say that a lot when we're having a day like that. I'm just going to believe it today. Okay. And then I get up and I get in my hope. I know it sounds trite and silly, but it's just, it's a physical reminder of good, this is good. There's not one damn bad thing about that hoop and it has a way of just working its magic on you, making you feel a little bit better. Just, I mean, I'm just holding it in my hand. I'm not even spinning it on my body. I'm just kinda like, you know, just like moving my shoulders a little bit, holding my hoop above head, starting to gently move my body because in movement there is healing. It really is just gotta move and no big ostentatious movement. I'm not having to get up myself up and put a bunch of clothes on and go to the gym or go make some massive amount of change to get myself out of the funk. I just got to pick up my hoop, make a little bit of gentle movement, and if that's all I do that day, that's okay. But I know the movement helps me get out of my head. Okay? So it's just a little bit of extra movement and some days I don't feel like doing a lot, but I make myself do a little bit and then I lay back down.
Passionistas: What advice would you give to a young woman who wants to follow a unique passion like you have?
Geri: Do it. God puts that idea in you for a reason. I truly believe you're not going to think of something randomly for no reason at all. You're just not. You're not going to have a passion for something without a reason. It may be something that you do on the side, which is how this started for me. I said, you know, this could help me get in shape because Lord knows I have all these years. I wish I would have found the hoop when I had my boys, Jesus. Oh, but I didn't. But it fulfilled a passions in me. Right? I love to dance and sing, but of course the singing is out there. But I mean I love to perform to music, love to dance to music. But I also, you know, had a passion for keeping myself healthier cause I lost both of my parents so early.
Right? So I want to keep myself active and I just couldn't get into anything and I had a passion for this. It's so different than a traditional gym exercise, but it blended my passions and I had to, I had to to visit it. So at least visit it. Dip your toe in that passion, pursue it. I'll tell you what, if it's meant to be, doors are gonna open that you don't even, you didn't even try to get them to open. The things are just going to, it just happens. It happens. That's when you know you're on your path when you're just doing the thing and things just happen. Like you didn't even seek it out. It'll happen if it's supposed to.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Geri McNiece. To learn more about her custom hoops and training sessions, visit aRoundJoy.com.
And please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our subscription box filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing list to get 10% off your first purchase. And be sure to subscribe to The Passionitas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.
Tuesday Dec 03, 2019
Tuesday Dec 03, 2019
Lydia Ricci is an artist who transforms scraps from junk drawers, supply closets, and the occasional neighborhood trash can, into miniature collage-like sculptures. These "tiny tributes to times past," as she calls them, are made from paper, glue, broken staples, and the back-side of almost anything. Her Lilliputian pieces, including a pull out couch, a row of airplane seats and more, are currently on display at the Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Texas and in the Philadelphia International Airport.
Learn more about Lydia.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where Amy and Nancy Harrington. Today we're talking with Lydia Ricci and artists who transform scraps from junk draws, supply closets, and the occasional neighborhood trashcan into miniature collage like sculptures.
These tiny tributes to times past as she calls them are made from paper glue, broken staples, and the backside of almost anything. Her Lilliputian pieces, including a pullout couch, a row of airplane seats, and more are currently on display at the conduit gallery in Dallas, Texas and in the Philadelphia international airport.
So please welcome to the show Lydia. Ricci.
Lydia: Thank you very much.
Passionistas: Lydia, what are you most passionate about?
Lydia: Making lots of different things and I'm goal oriented, so yeah, getting a lot of things created, I would say is what I'm most passionate about. That could be a meal or a piece of artwork. It doesn't always have to be in the form of finished art piece.
Passionistas: But let's talk about the art. How did you get started and how did your passion translate into your art and always made something on the side?
Lydia: I mean, if I was at a job, I still made a little collage to capture the day, or I used to do print making at night, so I've always needed some other outlet during the day to feel completely accomplished. Even though my day to day life is graphic design, which I would say is a very creative outlet as well. But I don't feel like it was ever enough. You know, I'm working for clients, I'm getting their vision accomplished, so I would make something that would kind of document, I guess it's equivalent to someone creating a journal.
But I would typically always documents certain moments in time, maybe in the past or the future perhaps, but often in the present. And so then I don't know why collaging was always something I maybe I don't have enough confidence in just drawing straight, you know, just pen and ink or you know, sketching. So I always kinda created a 2D collage, you know, just a flat piece of work, some glue ripped up, this, that. And then all of a sudden making them 3D.
I was trying to capture my fear of driving. I moved to the suburbs after living in New York. I lived in San Francisco for about 10 years. I lived in Pittsburgh for four years and I lived in Brooklyn for five years and so it was time to move out to the burbs and still take the train and stuff. But I had to drive once a day and literally I'd wake up in the morning and think about driving.
I’d drink coffee and think about driving. I think about, you know, a young kid, I'm nervous about my young son, but I was obsessed with health, you know? Okay, so I'm going to go in the right lane, I'm going to turn here. It was crazy to kind of deal with that.
I made cars, cars that were relevant in my life, so I made the green Dodge. I think it's one of the first cars I ever remember being driven around in and I don't know if I have good memories about it or bad memories about it. It's just a quintessential car in my life and it took me, you know, a few weeks to make this a little bit during the day between projects and things like that. I carried it home and I remember I put it on the mantle and I'm thought I'm going to make another one.
And I did. And so that kind of kicked off making things. But then I realized I was making them out of all of these artifacts that I kind of had collected two or three boxes of that. Then it turned into four or five boxes that turned into half of my studio now. So these boxes became very valuable medium for the projects.
Passionistas: Describe your art for someone who hasn't seen it.
Lydia: They’re small sculptures of everyday objects, kind of the stuff you forget that's around you. It's been around you for, you know, it could be today, it's right next to you or it was 20 years ago.
And what I realized too, it's in all the photos that you have in all around your house, it's this object that in many ways was around for more memories maybe than some people. So there are these tiny objects that can fit in your hand. They're not completely in miniature. You can see they're all different scales and they're, for lack of a better word, collage assembled of the ephemera, which is a word I've just learned in the past few years from boxes and old paper, old bits and bobs, old tape, old tickets, staples. I don't want you to really see what the object is made up, but I believe it holds a bit more memory because it is made of the materials that big also been in our lives for just as long. And that you would probably throw away.
Passionistas: So did the materials relate directly to the objects? Do you use something from a record album to make a record player?
Lydia: No, I really don't want you to get caught up in necessarily what it's made of. I think it helps me like an old mattress was made out of really old utility bills and there was something about this, you know, I mean even buying a good mattress and like what you think to spend your money on and the mundane this of being an adult. And paying bills and buying your first bed in time decided if you want to queen size, you know, I'm just mattresses through your lives. So in a way it has a lot of layers of meaning, but I don't want it to be a trickster aha.
Like, 'Oh, I see that staple making that.' I don't want you to get too lost in what the medium is because it really, your eyes really do meld everything together. But for me it's what drives the whole. The materials really have to be right and not just in surface and sheen and all that.
So I have this typewriter that, I think it's from the sixties or seventies I don't know. But all the keys in there are floppy disks. You can't tell. No passerby can tell. But I know. And it really felt right in the process of making it, the floppy disk went into the typewriter and you know, the evolution of how we communicate and how that changed.
Passionistas: So why tiny art? Why did you decide to do the scale that you did?
Lydia: It took about three or four years and someone said, Oh, you make miniatures. It never even occurred to me. Never even occurred. I had no idea I was making small objects, I was just making things and I think I was making them so they felt comfortable to me and they don't relate and scale to each other at all. Every object is at the scale that's right for it. Okay. And I don't know what that is. It's just what's right.
And sometimes I'll even make something and then be halfway through it and realize it's too big and I'll literally have to chop it in half and start essentially start over. And that's just my own editing process. But I don't, no why? They're the scale. They are again, to feel some control over them and to relate to them in a maybe a more intimate way, but it was not conscious.
Passionistas: And how do you decide what your subject is going to be?
Lydia: I walk a lot and I think a lot and I think about what's happening today or yesterday or what I'm obsessing about or working through. And then I realized that there's an object that kind of summarizes and it's typically something I've been wanting to make. So it's like, it's so strange how the two worlds collide. I made a can opener recently. I was coming home from a work day, it was summertime and the kids were on their bikes and it's new, you know, they're out on their bikes in the street now and they're wearing their helmets and that. But I could see it, I'm out behind them.
I think we were going to go return something at the library and I'm like, ‘Oh shit, there's cars. And it just, the one son didn't look enough my opinion enough. And I realized I am obsessing about of course cars and these bikes in the fact that they're getting to this next level.
And I made a can opener that next day mainly because my whole thought with can openers is how dangerous they were. And you have to be careful. And that's what everyone said when you picked it up out of the drawers. Like, ‘Oh, you know, you might cut yourself, God forbid.’ And it was that same thing about just getting used to using things more independently and independence in general.
Passionistas: How often do you make a sculpture and how long do they take?
Lydia: There's no set schedule. I really get grumpy if I haven't had the opportunity to make one in a couple weeks. Okay. That's the longest I can really go is two or three weeks. I actually think I get a little depressed, but I also get nervous, like I forgot how to do it.
So it's this weird process that happens every couple weeks where it's like, if I've gone too long, I'm insecure in this. And so I had to sit down. And so then once I start, it goes very quickly. But an element that takes a lot of time is finding the right material for the objects.
So it's like if I have the memory, I start feeling that elated, feeling like I know what I'm gonna make, I'm gonna make the toilet, I'm going to make the toy. And I have to even tell myself, ‘Oh, that's so dumb that you're making a toilet.’ But you know, it really makes sense because that's about, you know, and I'm kind of going through that dialogue and realizing no, it's right. It's right for right now. Like it's time to make the toilet. And then I'm like, which toilet are you making? And I'm like, ‘Oh, I need to make the blue toilet’.
But then I don't know if I had the blue paper, I have to like find the blue paper in my collections cause I don't like to buy anything. It doesn't feel right to vine. But I'm like, I've got to have the blue paper in the thing and then if I want to make it that night, I'll even like go into my kid's room and like start looking through their stuff and they're like, you're not gonna rip anything of ours apart, are you? I'm like, ‘Oh no, no.’ You know, like I can get a little desperate by six o'clock cause I'm like, it's getting dark. And I, you know, I know the library gives some stuff for sale, something like that's free. So I'm kinda like, ‘Oh, I can go there, you know, and go to the basement.’ And you know, if I, I'm like no, I have to find it in my piles.
And once I get like kind of the basic amount of materials to get started, I would say it takes two or three days. It depending on how much time I can devote, I work mainly at night and it's not even efficient. But once I start, you can't do much else in my office cause it's a very messy process because again, I can't find the blue paper. So there's, everything has been destroyed.
Like sometimes you can open the door and then you know, there's a dog and a cat element and the kids get scared. They're like, are we allowed to walk in here? I'm like, yes, it's okay. It's a little safe. Or sometimes it's not safe because there's sharp things. So then it's two or three days, maybe four days of any free time. I just get up there and work and then when it's done I shoot it.
And that's a very satisfying part of it. Shoot it and go for a walk to figure out the words very succinctly because those are the words about the little writing that goes with them is as important as the piece itself. And then I clean up and I feel like, okay, now I have to think about the next one. So yeah, it definitely crescendos. I would say so, yeah, every two weeks, but about a three or four day stretch for each piece.
Passionistas: We read that you would go shopping for materials in your dad's house. Can you tell us about that?
Lydia: We grew up in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and it gets moved to the house when we were five. My dad's still in the house. It was a huge, it's, you know, it's a suburban house and you know, by a mall, but he really has held onto a lot, whether it's in the garage or the ad, it used to be everywhere.
He's recently done a major overhaul of cleaning. His girlfriend moved in after, I think they'd been dating 25 years. My mom died when I was in college and we cleaned up some stuff. But you know, there also wasn't a major organizing figure in the household. There was more of a hoarding, you know, and someone asked me if they could call him a hoarder and would he be offended. And I said, not much offends my dad at all. I said, let's go on the sentimental hoarder. And it's true.
But once he caught on that what I was grabbing and he lives, you know, 20 minutes away he'll pop by and you know, there's a box of, I mean here's an old cigar box with your mouth guard and some egg containers from the refrigerator and a hole punch, you know, and a box of tax records and he'll just drop it off. So he kind of understood pretty quickly that I would take anything and I think that since it wasn't going to waste, he would drop it off and that kind of helped him clear out his house a little too. But there's good stuff there. There's still good stuff there in the attic.
Passionistas: A lot of your stuff seems to have a retro vibe. It is that conscious?
Lydia: It's funny. Again, that's something else someone pointed out to me and I look around, I'm like, Oh yeah, I guess I've spent more time with those objects, but I'm not necessarily capturing a retro memory with them. So I feel like they feel very present to me. Well the dishwasher, it's a more retro dishwasher, but that's, you know, just all about relationships and struggles and dynamics and stuff like that. So again, it's a very present memory with perhaps a retro.
And I did pick on all of green dishwasher so I could have gone more modern and you know the hairdryer that you put over your head, and again, I'd still go under those to get my hair colored, but I did the retro one. I think they're just more attractive. Again. Yeah, I think I've seen them longer without even realizing I had been looking at them longer. I'm not restricting myself to that. When I do go looking and I searched for an example, I do kind of pick something with a little more character. I don't know if I'll ever do a cell phone, never say never.
Passionistas: So you photograph in front of white and then you also do little vignettes and you also do videos. So talk about that process and how that evolved.
Lydia: I always do a document on the white first to kind of put the succinct memory and it's the first time I, in my mind I've put the piece out there and then as I've lived with the piece longer, whether it be a movie projector or a box fan, I'll look up at them one day and realize, Oh that's the vehicle which will help me say this. Like today I'm going to use a phone for a few things. I've been talking to our friend and we were commenting on how quickly an hour goes and then I was saying, ‘Oh, I'm going to talk to you.’
And I was just thinking about this time of communicating on the phone and you know how sometimes it goes by quickly and sometimes it doesn't and we don't do that as much anymore. So the white starts and then the backdrops kind of fill in the bigger memories or when I want to tell a little bit more like you said, of a vignette or a bit more of the story and I realize motion is important.
The emotion can do something. That reading or just seeing, it's sitting there can't like you put that mattress, you move that onto the floor next to a TV. We've all been there. You know, versus on the box spring you roll that AV cart in versus just seeing the movie projector. It's a visceral reaction. That's a path of exploration that I'm really trying to go down much further is figuring out the movement and engagement and the kinds of stories I can keep telling. Cause again it's a cash register. Like there's only so much movement there can be around it. Does it need to be this ornate scrap made cash register to tell the story? Why not just show a picture, you know? So what is it about these objects that I could zoom in on or use them to kind of tell the story in a way that wouldn't have been told another way?
So it's interesting. Yeah, the backdrops, you know, I'm telling the story, but I like to be universal. I want people to be able to relate to it and I kind of carve away of the too many descriptors so that it is more relatable, even though they're very personal, these anecdotes and moments, if there's just enough information there, we can all kind of travel together through the moment.
Passionistas: So you recently had a short film at the San Francisco film festival. Tell us about that.
Lydia: That was awesome. Okay. First of all, film festivals are damn fun. Okay. And there's free drinks and food. I'm a such a sucker for free food and drinks. It's insane. Free bag of God. It could be hand soap or a stupid breath mint and I am giddy. Okay? Giddy. And throw a pair of socks in there. Whew. It's also, I like going out to dinner too, and I'm a very good cook, but it's the simple things in life. So the film festival was fantastic. I did not realize how magical it would be to see, okay.
The film is essentially a culmination of many of the moments, you know, they're assembled together, but also if you haven't met before I open up the film, I'm like, okay, well no one knows me, so I can't just show these anecdotes because you know what? Some people can't tell that the objects are small, there's something kooky about their scale, but you can't tell. So there's something neat about them being miniature and that you can approach them in a different perspective. So I add some video of me making the objects, I show some moments of the scrap piles. But what I also had that I think is really interesting is I had to give a talk about my inspiration or something and I went through, my mom kept such good photo albums, amazing photo albums, and I have them all in my office.
So I'm going through to look for a picture of one of the cars. Well, I'm going through these photo albums, realizing half the things I documented are actually in these photos. Now granted I did not look at the photos and make them from there. But even to the point of the fish tank that our two journals were in. Okay. That my sister convinced me that my journal had died first, even though we never named them, never paid attention to them, but no one died. And of course it was mine. So I have a picture of her and I excited about this. I have so many pictures. I have the chase lounge, you know, but it was about the dog tippy, the dog sitting on it. So of course we have to document the lounge chair. We have put the car in the snow, the green Dodge, we have the car out front in the spring, you know, behind us. So these objects were with us all the time. So then I started putting some dialogue in it and it was horrendous.
So these friends that helped make this movie, they wrote a song. The title already of the movie was that I had made, was called, don't you forget about me? So they wrote a different song and I had been talking about how these objects are with us all the time, but we don't realize it. So it's a beautiful little song. It shows some of the photos where the objects are. But you would think that I saw the photo and made the object, and I'm going to tell you that it went opposite. I made the object and found the photos.
We even have a photo of the AV machine of my girlfriend and I, and there's an AV machine in the background. It's crazy. So anyway, the San Francisco film, the fact that it got selected and it was amongst all these other animations, it was amazing. It was like going to see awesome, inspiring animations and all of a sudden yours pops up in there. And it was really neat to see a huge vacuum cleaner skid across the screen. It was fantastic. And I did not expect that. I was like, Oh, I'll go. It'll be nice and it was magical.
Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington, in your listening to The Passionistas Project and our interview with Lydia Ricci. To see Lydia's incredible creations visit FromScraps.com. Now here's more of our interview with Lydia.
Passionistas: It's one thing to start making these sculptures for yourself and at home. It's another thing to get them in galleries all across the country. How did you do that? How has this become such a phenomenon?
Lydia: I would say I'm really at the beginning of that. I've gotten some nice feedback that I don't know. I will say one of my biggest helps and everyone's antisocial media. It's changed my life. I freaking love social media. I feel like I'm comfortable connecting with communities I would have never connected with. I've put myself out there in a way that I don't know if I would've ever been able to do that.
I don't think galleries would have embraced me. I'm not an artist artsy. I'm a little awkward in that world. I've gotten some lovely shows and opportunities and I'm hoping for more of that. But if that's not my path, at least these movies and these other way to relate to people and connect with people and show people my work and see theirs, I mean, cause everyone that follows, I follow that. You know, I'm like, I'm looking and I'm looking at what they do and I'm inspired.
I think that I would say my biggest help was social media and also not being too afraid of the imperfect and just be, you know, okay. Just put it out there and see what happens. I do think my work has gotten better, knowing what's better for social media versus what's better for a show and stuff, but to not think everything has to be so important and just say, ‘Oh, this is kind of goofy.’ Like I'm going to talk about how I had to put toilet paper on the seat and it got stuck. You know, like I'm going to put that out there today and see what happens. And people enjoyed it and it wasn't too lofty, but it was sincere. And I think that that connected with people, which has gotten me more lack of a better word audience, but also I would call it more of a community.
It's a community because people, when they get excited about something, like we all talk about, I think I put up a wheat bench and a spray bottle and I did some Windex and he probably get, you know, you can't spray mirrors with Windex, you know, and there was like a whole discussion on the best way to clean a mirror and it's with newspaper and Windex by the way. So yes, I have a show coming up in Dallas, Texas at the Honda at gallery and they reached out and I'm going to go to Dallas, Texas for the night. I've had one in New York with Marcel Jamey. I just was in Philadelphia at this huddle gallery with Brian, the guy that runs a Brian Jacobson. He and I, nine made my studio there for a month. I worked on site for a month and we called the show, come talk to me and it was in the paper and people came from all over and talk to me while I worked.
So I think the fact that I'm not just limiting my, not limiting but like the art world is not like woo Lydia Ricci, you're a darling right there by note. That is not happening. But I think I'm relating to enough people that there's conversations and we're having a good time.
Passionistas: What are you currently working on?
Lydia: I'm working on another movie, but it's going to be no more than four minutes again, but I'm going to tell one story again since you haven't seen the other one, which is more of like a compilation, like it's more of an introduction in all the little anecdotes. This one is a day in the life. I have a lot of kooky stories I would say. And because I have a horrible sense of direction, I've gone to cities, I've done a lot on my own. You know, I moved myself out to San Francisco when I was 21 so this is a story about my trying to find a job and I mean I don't want to ruin it, but it does end with me selling my pantyhose.
Okay. So spoiler alert. Yes. So things happen when you're just out in the world and need help from people, you know, and, or don't. Okay. Even better. I've gotten a little more street smart. That's not really true cause I still get into the same conundrums on a daily basis. I think also maybe when you don't drive and you walk everywhere and you take the bus and you take Uber, like you really, I'm out in the world. So I think that helps with things tend to happen. And I'm going to try and document some of them and I don't know if it's going to go well right now. Verdict's out. Okay. And it might not go well. Okay. So, so then I think I'll just stick to more of the simpler ten second things. And I think that's okay. Like I'm not positive this is my path is to make something longer.
I'm not sure that's gonna work and I'm perfectly reasonable about that. I'm working on a little book that's out that little pitches out in the world. So we'll see how that does. And like I said, the gallery thing and then I would like to get the work in an editorial or commercial capacity. Like I would like it to illustrate an article when we all, and in our article in the times I would like it to be in a fun magazine with, I'm wired with something else, I editorial and I can make anything. And I feel like they can illustrate other people's stories too. And that might make me some money. I'm not gonna lie. So I come from the idea that when sometimes when people give you parameters, I don't always think it's restrictive. I think it can be a challenge that enlightens you and forces you to go somewhere and maybe that you wouldn't have gone.
I was in a, a wonderful show with D. Thomas Miniatures there in New York and it was called badass miniatures. And at first I was gonna make a bowling alley or something like that. And then they sent this really neat note about, you know, the word bad-ass and aches and just do something that might make people look twice or be uncomfortable in this.
And so I thought about it, I'm like, I did the OB GYN table and I love that piece. It's, and no woman can look at that without kind of like getting a little bit, you know, cringy but then, you know, then I'm like, Oh, I don't want this to get all, I don't want to turn myself all serious. I'm not trying to put this. So then I put the like the fuzzy animals on it to kind of roll it out. And then I talk about the paper coming down and it's like, ‘Oh my God, it gets stuck to you and there's just no way you're going and they forget about you in there.’
Like you go in there and you're like, well at least if I'm in here I should lay down for a second. And you try, you can't. And you can't just have this Zen moment on the OB GYN table. There's no way possible you can try, Oh I'm going to elevate my legs cause that's good. And then you just can't put your legs in those syrups before. You have to know. It just seems wrong. It seems wrong.
Passionistas: [LAUGH] It is wrong.
Lydia: [LAUGHS] It is wrong.
Passionistas: You do so much. Do you ever feel unmotivated?
Lydia: Not unmotivated, but insecure is more. I would say I'll work my way out of a funk. You, they'll do something, but I'll be like, no one's gonna like this. Why am I doing this? What's the point of this? So that's my dark spot when I get there. Then I question if I can.
Lydia: Like I said, I said that whole cycle of like, Oh, is this going to be nice instead of like, this is stupid. Like there's already enough miniature toilets in the world and I have to really talk myself into the why. Why am I staying up late? Why am I taking the time? You know, what is I, you know, I grew up in a very practical, my dad worked for the government for 30 years. You know, he left at six 30 or six o'clock in the morning. He'll even lets it off. You know, he's supportive, but you know there is a question of no one does stuff just to do stuff like are you going to get paid for this? There's that question every once in awhile. So not being practical or functional throws me into a tizzy too. That's where it can stunt me a little bit.
And then sometimes you know, you just make stuff and you feel like it's stupid, you know, and that is scary. And then you go back and it's like you've still put it out there and then you go back and you look four weeks ago and you're like, Oh, that wasn't stupid. I wish I could have told myself that wasn't as bad as I thought it was. But you can't be. Try and remind yourself. And also if I feel like I'm in a funk, I'll cook more or I do other physical things more like I'll clean the bathroom, I won't clean it. I don't like cleaning the kitchen as much, but I will. I want to say I'll organize my office and I just don't even know how to anymore. It's never going to look meticulous and that's going to solve everything. So, and I do make my bed every morning. I'm one of those people that even though I'm messy, I'm very goal oriented and productive. So even on my worst day of feeling like unmotivated, I think I'm still getting, I had a friend say, she's like, you get more done in your morning than I do in my week. And, and she wasn't being, she's not lazy. She's no Slack. I just, in a way kind of have to keep moving.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project and our interview with Lydia to see Lydia's incredible creations, visit FromScraps.com.
Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and new subscription box filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing list to get 10% off your first purchase.
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Tuesday Nov 12, 2019
Tuesday Nov 12, 2019
Debbie Arcangeles started her career as a photojournalist and traveled the world to teach art to kids. She’s admitted to starting businesses where she followed the money and not her passion and didn’t always have great success. Now, through her project The Offbeat Life, Debbie shares the insights she’s gained on her adventures with others in her podcast, mentorships and a website full of resources to help you live the offbeat life of your dreams.
Learn more about Debbie.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
Tuesday Oct 29, 2019
Tuesday Oct 29, 2019
Mae Chandran overcame a difficult childhood in China, and fled from a dysfunctional family life in the US. She went to college in California where she met and married her husband. After having two children, she left a successful career to raise them, vowing to give her family the happy home life that she never had. These days she enjoys watching her children flourish, gardening and cooking, and has won the international silver award in a UK marmalade contest.
Find out more about Mae Chandran
Read more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington. About a year ago we interviewed Sashee Chandran, the innovator behind the premium beverage line Tea Drops, and during our chat she spoke about her mother Mae, who is her biggest cheerleader and a constant source of support. We were beyond excited when Sashee nominated Mae to be a guest on our podcast.
Mae overcame a difficult childhood in China, and fled from a dysfunctional family life in the US when she went to college in California. After marrying her husband she left a successful career to raise a family, vowing to give them the happy home life that she never had.
So please welcome to the show Mae Chandran.
Mae: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.
Passionistas: What are you most passionate about?
Mae: I think I'm most passionate about food and cooking. I'm passionate about gardens and my little babies. I call them. So many things I'm passionate about. I have a lot of interests. That's what keeps me going. So cooking and gardening and of course my family.
Passionistas: Take us back to the beginning and tell us where you were born and where you grew up.
Mae: I was born in Canton, China, Southern China in 1948 just after the war and since I was a baby of that era in China. It was a very difficult time and my parents had me late in life because my father came to make his fortune. He went the way of Cuba and then he came to Massachusetts and my mom was still in China. Usually the husband goes abroad, then leaves the family behind. And so my mom was there. This is like after world war two people fled to Hong Kong. So I was three years old when we went to Hong Kong. I mom was there and we live together. She was called to come to America and in 1952 she came, I was four years old. She left me behind with her friend. She took care of me and it was very difficult because you're four years old, but it had to be because when you're a baby, when you're a woman, you're not worth much. My father saw my birth papers because it was worth some money because of that, I didn't have identity and so I couldn't come with my mom, so my mom had to leave me and I knew she was leaving, but I didn't want to give her a lot of trouble.
I was very sad, but I took her to the airport with a lot of other people and then she went in the, I had no idea when she was going to see me next, but the lady she left me with was very nice to me. She was okay. I remember she used to always say I was like three or four stripped down to your waist because I want to show your mom pictures. And I never know why she wanted to do it that way. But I realized later she wanted to show my mom that I was eating okay. And I was okay when my mom left, you know, in those we don't talk on the phone or anything. She just left. I didn't know when I was going to see her. I was so sad that nobody could talk about my mom because I would cry anyway.
I live with this lady. She was a young widow, like all people in Hong Kong, they want to do better. So when an older gentleman came to Hong Kong, he was searching for wife. So she took the opportunity to go with him. So I somehow found out and later on I went to see her mother-in-law and I remember going to this dark room and she was in a bed by herself, and then she shouted at me and said, I use leaving. Me too. Everybody's leaving me. So I started crying. I didn't know what she meant. Anyway, after my friend left, my parents had to scramble and find someone else to take care of me, so they found this family of six kids. I was the oldest. I think at that point I was about maybe seven and I was probably the same age as the other girl, and this family was very different.
I was like the little maid. I had to do a lot of the laundry and whatever, and they didn't really care for me because he has six children and they probably just wanted to take me because they knew my parents would send money. So they took the money. And even though the husband was very nice, I remember when I first met him, he took my necklace away, my little Jane necklace. My mom came me, he says, I don't want you to lose it, so I'm going to keep that safe for you. And then when you go to America, when you join your mother, I will give it back to you. So I said, okay. And then I live with them. And the mother, she was a terrible woman and if you thought she was terrible, her mom who used to visit was horrible. There are some of these people in the Chinese people, they say your face turns ashen when you get mashed.
She was one of those people. She was a terrible person and we just dread her coming. But other than that I was kind of left alone. I said when they needed me to do things for them, I would roam the streets and it's amazing. Nothing happened to me because I would just go everywhere in the neighborhood and Hong Kong, you know, it's a very populated place. So I would just go and in my literal imagination, I was going to school at that time, I would tell people that my parents live in America and they're very wealthy and they're going to come for me and this stuff. And the bus driver was saying, Oh, so tell me what it's like in America and I will make up all these tall tales. I just wanted to be maybe self-important. So I live with them for about three years and I was hungry a lot of times and I slept on a hard plywood near the door and I could feel the rest come running up and down.
As a kid. It's kind of normal and you don't think, Oh wow, yuck. That was how I lived for a few years with them. Causes wasn't a happy childhood. But anyway, I live with these people. Then the mother-in-law lived with us, you know, and Chinese family, they all live together. She was a horrible person. So they will use me a six, seven year old kid and go and spy on the other person and then report back to them. So I was doing this for them. Then I didn't know you're not supposed to do that, but I did. So they were horrible people. The only person nice was the father, but he was never around. He had to work. Then shortly after that, I had a uncle who used to come. He came into the scene and he was taking me to immigrations and I didn't know why I had to go to immigration.
They would ask me questions. Apparently what happened was this, I didn't really know the full story, but my mom who had come to America, she was going crazy because she left me. She was having hallucinations. So somehow they had to yet me to America, but I didn't have my papers. So they decided was to come co a story that I was the orphan child. I hadn't lost my parents and I'm a junkie, you know those ships somehow it sink and I was the only survivor. I don't know how this story came about, but that was the story. So they would interview me and I would go there. They would ask about this. Every time they asked me about my mom, I would start crying. They couldn't go anywhere with me. I remember the ladies said to the other people or don't ask her anymore, and they just gave me some candy to entertain me.
So I didn't really have to answer too many questions. So I was going to America and the husband of this people I was living with, he was true to his word. He gave me back my J a necklace and he said, here it is, but the mug Kinlaw law was so Cru. She said, you know what? I hope your plane crashes when you go to America. When I came to America, I told my mom that, and she confronted her and but she denied it. So anyway, I was so happy. I had met this man who was going to accompany me. He was Mr. Wong. He was a middle aged man. He was dead to get married. So he married this beautiful woman. She was about 18 and they bought me my suitcase and I had two outfits, I think to my name and one pair of shoe P accompany me.
The bright had to stay behind them because of maybe paperwork. And we stopped in Honolulu and I remember it was beautiful there. And he called my mom and I talked to my mom for the first time ever since she left me. And I swear her voice sounded like an Angel's voice to me at that time. I was so happy. I was gonna see her. And then we landed in California and I still remember to this day the smell of the citrus in this motel we were staying. And that's a memory that's sort of ingrained in me. And we finally arrived in Boston, Logan International Airport. And my brother was there. My brother is 17 years older than me, so I remember he, my mom, my father was there and a young girl who was 15 named Betty to this stay with friends. She lives in Honolulu now and they were there to pick me up.
I knew they had a restaurant, we went to the restaurant. But it was nighttime and there was nothing. What I imagined was just like two tables and it was so dark. And I kept asking my mom where all the customers, she says, don't say that. Don't say that, cause that's bad luck. Can you say that in Chinese? You're asking where the customers, you're not supposed to say to them like that. So I just had no clue. And then the next day I remember she said, go and watch the moving pictures. I said, what do you mean? And then she turned on the TV for me and is moving pictures and it was like a miracle. Oh my God, I never seen this. So I was so happy to be in America, to be with my mom. And even though I looked back, that place was so dinky.
I know that it was a very small restaurant. We would make maybe $50 and the waitress was still 10 so it was very beginning. Then my parents bought this other restaurant around the corner on Brightman street. This was on main street. And then we moved there and then life became better materially. However, it was not a happy childhood because you know when you're a girl in that era, you know buddy really and my father treated me like nobody. That was the first time I ever met him. I never saw him. He was like a stranger to me and my parents did not have a good marriage. In fact, they hate each other and that hatred. He sort of hated me because he didn't get along well with my mom. There was always this terrible in harmony between them.
My only salvation was school. I loved school because to be home and that environment was not pleasant. Then my brother got married, he went to Hong Kong and got married to a young woman and you don't know Hong Kong people there. I like rats 25 square miles and you get all these millions of people so you become very aggressive. Your grabber and that was what my sister long was. She came from a large family, I think seven children and she was I think 19 and she was 10 years older than me. From the moment she came, she demanded the business. She wanted the restaurant because the restaurant was doing well now because we had moved and in those days, you know, Fall River was 90% Catholic. So we did really well on Fridays when they didn't eat meat, they had to come to the restaurant or eat the Champaign sandwiches. So she demanded that restaurant. And because my mom and my father never got along, it's like this, like Lincoln said, a house divided cannot stand.
So she demanded the restaurant and she got it. And my mom was very sad because I was the enemy, you know, I was going to get nothing and what can I do? I'm 10 years old, you're at their mercy and I see my father caved in. Well first of all he was a very weak man and my mom did not have a mind of her own either. And the reason why my father relinquishes so easily is because in the Chinese culture, your oldest son is supposed to take care of you. And that's what he thought. They would look after him. The only person who loved me was my mom. Everybody else wish I wasn't even there. And definitely my sister in law looked at me as just a threat to what she can get, and my brother had such a weak spine. He just listened to whatever she says.
Instead of being the protective brother, he should've been. He just treated me terrible. I was always under his thumb, whatever I did anything wrong. He would say, I'm going to tell your teacher I was teacher's pet. I did so well in school, but that was what he said. And I went to my mom and I said, mom, you know, this is my brother. He's always saying this to me. Why don't you say something to them? My mom said, he's only doing what's good for you, but I knew that was a pack of lies. Right then in there, I decided, I'm getting out of here the minute I can't, I'm getting out because my father thought nothing of me, even though I did so well in school. He said to me one time, you know, even if you do very well and you become famous or never think anything of you, you can't imagine a parent saying that to you.
But it happened. So when I became a college age, I got accepted into almost all the schools because I was such a great student. He was very angry. I want to go to UCLA. So that was it. That was good by a good riddens. And the minute I came to California, I felt very sad because my mom pleaded with me not to come. I was her only comfort. Her only friend in a marriage that was horrible in a family that did not love her. But I know to survive I had to do it. And she asked me, aren't you going to be lonely? And I said, yeah, I will be. But I knew this was the only way out. So I came out to California and she told me at that time, and she told me, okay, you go into California, I want you to go to all the Chinese functions and meet a Chinese boy.
Don't shame the family. That was a big thing. My God. If you marry outside of your family, you bring shame. And I knew that was such a stupid concept. Well, I'll tell you, well, my first dances, my second year, I meet my husband at a Chinese dance. I did what she told me to do, but I met the wrong person and then I tried to tell my mom and because I thought, you know, I should tell him that I'm kidding. Married to him. I didn't know how to say Sri Lanka at that time. It was salon. I didn't know the Chinese word for salon, so I sent India, so I say, I'm going to marry somebody from India. He said to me, why do you want to marry somebody from a third world country? So he disowned me completely, which was not nothing new for me, mom of, because a mom is a mom.
She was at the wedding. But I'll tell you, that's why I tell my kids, you guys are so lucky. I had so many obstacles. I had to first come here and then, Oh become my family. Then I had to somehow get married to Bala and both sides were not happy. His mom was very upset and he was the oldest, so he had to go back. Yet the system married yet everybody settle. And so by the time we met and we got married, was seven years had elapsed. I had to finish school. I met him when I was a sophomore. I had to finish school, he had to go back and then he came back. So it was not easy at all. Up to that point, my life was not easy. My only hope was a happy family to grow up in a normal family. I always thought it was weird because we lived upstairs in the restaurant and I said, why can't I be like, uh, I used to read this book.
You are Susan and term with the dog Flip and live in a nice white picket fence house and I'm living in top of the restaurant. And when I got to like 12 and 13 I had to help out with the restaurant and work in the restaurant. I got scars from peeling potatoes and all. I never really had it easy. And when I met people who were happy, it was so foreign to me because here I'm in this dysfunctional family and even what I was, my childhood was so crazy that my only dream was to have a good family and that's why Sashee asked me the other day, she says, “mom, did you have any other dreams other than a happy family and be married?” Yeah, I did. But in my opinion, having a happy family is everything. So I knew that as a child, my only hope was a happy family to grow up in a normal family.
So I knew that as a child, that was really the driving force for me and I think I've achieved it. I worked for Morgan Stanley as a stockbroker and it was fun, but I'm never going to send the one I'd find with any of these jobs. I was entrepreneur, I was at the swap meet and I'm grateful I had it because it gave sheet an opportunity to deal with the public. She was only seven and my son was 12 he was the little manager in one of the computers store and he eventually stopped working for Google because of his knowledge of computers and everything. So I took the job because I probably thought I would work on the weekends and spend the rest of the time with my kids who are young. But it's a very time consuming effort.
But I'm grateful I did it because my kids got the most out of it. I'm so proud of my kids. I don't think I had anything to do with this. Assess both of them. I'm very proud. My son, he's the sweetest boy. I can't imagine having two great kids like this, but it was like a gift from God. If God had given me a book of all the kids that were going to be born and asked me to choose a boy and a girl, I couldn't have done better. Really, I could have. I'm so grateful because for whatever reason, Bala and I think about this all the time, you know, we think of karma of your past life, what you have to do, what of whatever reason. I had to go through so much stuff in order to be where I am. So maybe it's okay because what I am today I became because of all my past, I so appreciate the moments I have. Nobody can appreciate my home more than me, my retirement more than me cause I know what it could be.
Passionistas: We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington and you’re listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Mae Chandran. To see photos of Mae’s beautiful gardens, delicious culinary treats and beloved family, follow her on Instagram at MaeC Chandran. Now here’s more of our interview with Mae.
Passionistas: It's one thing to say that you want to have a happy family. It's another thing altogether to actually create a happy family. How did you do it?
Mae: Well, you know, my dream was always a happy family. Really, truly, I knew that I was born to be a mother. I just knew that because I knew I could not make any difference. I am a very smart person. I was a good student and all, but it didn't matter. That's the outside world. I knew that I was born to be a mother and my nurturing on my kids. There was nothing greater than that. I know some people, some women are not. They don't feel like I do and it's okay. But I felt that way.
I felt my family was everything and I was going to create this family. I didn't know how my children would grow up. I had challenges like everybody else. I think I got lucky. Two great kids. And Bala was working so hard, we didn't have time. I was the one at home and when Sashee was born, I quit because I was so toward when Prakash I was at work, I was thinking about him and when I'm home I'm thinking about my work and I would talk to the babysitter, asked the babysitter was INI. Finally my supervisor, whom I didn't respect at all, came in and says, you know what, if you can't run your job and take care of your kid, you shouldn't be here. I know every day what your kid eats. So I said to him, I shot right back. What about you in your tennis partners every day?
I know who you're playing with. What about that? Well, of course, you know, he didn't forget that when time for review, well, I worked for Getty Oil Company. This was the old boys network. Women were frowned upon. Friday by noon everybody was drunk. All the guys, if you had a DUI that was more forgivable then a woman taking care of a baby, missing work. I remember talking to this manager. He was very ambitious. He knew where he want to go and he called me to his office one day. He told me a few things about me taking a break to go and eat cause I was pregnant. I was always hungry and then about my son being sick. I had to take some days off. He said, you know what? You can't do that. I see you have twins, don't you as a parent feel what I am going through.
You said no, he didn't understand at all. You had to be one of the guys. You had to be able to talk sports about flat tie. When it comes to sports, they would talk about football every Monday they would talk about everything else was some work they would go drinking. I was not part of that group, but today it's so different. It's so conducive to mothers. I saw a Google, they have a nursing session for the mothers. It was so different. And my daughter, you know, I'm so happy that she is just a superstar and she's going all the way and just really proud of her. So when she asked me the question, is that all you ever wanted mom? I said, yeah, I want to be a business tycoon. But that didn't happen. But I had you guys and y'all gonna be the business tycoons, so you have fulfilled my wish.
Family creation is God's grace. I think if you spend a lot of time on your kids and give them the right values, they're going to be okay. And that's what I try to do. I mean, I know some great parents whose kids went astray, so I don't know why. So I just feel maybe, you know, you can have luck too. Maybe I was lucky, but I'll take luck. I'll take like any day.
Passionistas: One of your other big contributions to society are those delicious scones and the incredible marmalade that we were lucky enough to taste earlier today.
Mae: Appreciate it.
Passionistas: Oh my God, we appreciate you treating us. So tell us about your passion for food and specifically about the marmalade and how that came about.
Mae: I really don't even know how I became interested in my family to his bone. And 10 years ago I read about something about it and to me, I like to take on a challenge because marmalade is the granddaddy of all, like jams and preserves are not as complicated.
So I started experimenting. I'm a person, if I pick on a subject, I read everything about it. So I did my research, I did all the YouTube. So I did it. And then I did my own, I knew some of the basic steps and so I did it and it came up pretty good. So I saw this marmalade awards contest in Cumbria UK, England. So I was thinking, Ooh, maybe I should enter that. I swear in my mind, I know people are gonna think I'm crazy, but I swear I was English in a former life of recent incarnation. The reason why I say that is because I love all things English. I visited Wadsworth country, the poet, and I just felt immediately a connection. And I'm reading right now about country and manners, Jane Austen's time, and I'm just fascinated by it. So I'm fascinated by all things English.
So I saw this awards contest, but I felt I wasn't good enough. Then finally after two years gone, I say, you know, it's now or never, I'm going to enter this contest. So I entered and I couldn't believe I won the international silver the first time. I mean, yeah, they have a lot of categories, but they also have over 3000 entries from all over the world. So you're competing against the best of the best. I was very glad. And then the judges will give you a score card and tell you the color, the consistency and the tastes and so many factors they tell you. And that was very helpful to me. So I entered again this year and I again won the international silver. Now I said to myself, I can break this barrier. I got to go for the gold. Now there is a woman who teaches, who's an English woman who has won the double goal, which is the top prize.
However she got it. When there were only 50 entries. So I see. I don't know if she's the right person for me, so I'm trying to find a teacher who is a master that will give me edge to get the gold. So I was on Instagram and I found her. She's Japanese. She's one that double gold, not this year, three, four times consecutively. I said she's the one for me, but she's in Japan, so I'm going to write to her. She teaches, I want to study from her and see imbalances, but you don't understand Japanese. I said, that's okay. You know cooking is a universal language. I'm going to observe her and see what she does. I know she won on the rule book, you know the vegetable and the Seville orange. What are unusual combination. So I want to learn from a master because I want to break that barrier.
I want to aim for the gold now. So anyway, that's how marmalade came about. So now I have made hundreds, hundreds actually of marmalade and I have raised a lot of money and my temple. That's why the marmalade you ate today was actually a samples because all my ones I have made officially have sold out. In fact, one of my friends came and we had a shower for my daughter in law and they were some consolation prizes among them. I had given my marmalade and they were also Tea Drops, so she took a Tea Drop. She says, well, I know may has plenty of marmalade. She wanted a job from me. I said, I'm sorry Judy. I am out a marmalade because I sold out. Come on, why didn't you grab it when you had a chance? So now that's become very popular.
You see the American people don't have a taste for marmalade. They don't even like marmalade family. And I think it's because it's so poorly made. I mean you eat the marmalade compared to the British style so different. So I love marmalade so much that when someone gifted me a group of Seville oranges, this was eight years ago, I planted a few seeds because it's very difficult to buy Seville oranges, which is traditionally English and very expensive. So I planted this seed and I was doing a happy dance in April because I see buds and they've grown little tiny Seville, oranges. I'm going to get a harvests, the orange that I been wanting to do because it has that bitter taste that the traditional English marmalade has to be made from, but there's so many ways of making marmalade, so that's how I got started and to me make it marmalade is very interesting because it's not only a science, but it's an art.
We know when it gels, we know when it's sets. Okay, and it takes an expert to get it to that setting point. I know that technically I'm adequate, but what is it that is beyond that where I can catch in the gold? That is the 64,000 question and that's why I'm going to pursue my study with this lady in Japan. I'm going to Japan. I'm going to study it.
Passionistas: What's your secret for a rewarding life?
Mae: My personal opinion is spirituality without God. I call her Divine Mother because a mother forgives everything. Without he. I would want to live because let's face it, the world is not an easy place. We have challenges and things happen. We don't know why. I mean good people, things happen too. There's no answers. I mean even you alone, you know, we as human beings, we go through up and down.
So you have to have that anchor for you to keep going to, and that's what my thing is. I talked to Divine Mother all the time. Bala always says, well, what do you talk to her about? I said, I talked to her like, she's my friend. She's always with me. You know, if I see a Rose, I said, well, what do you think to my mother? Or whatever. I mean, it's very easy for me to talk to her. I developed this when I was in my spiritual search. I started talking to her. She never answers me, but she does answer me in ways that you see something and you say, Oh my God, you were thinking about me. You might call Divine Mother God, whatever. There is a higher power. So I know that to be true for sure. And without it, I would want to be in the world.
You know, in life you have to have justice, you have to have that and only God gives you justice. I see so many injustices in my life, even in everything. And if you say this, no justice, why do you want to live? But I know in the end there is justice. So that keeps me going. That's the only thing that keeps me going. Because people, even your children, even your husband, they're bound to sometimes disappoint you. Everything disappoints you. But God can never disappoint me. I think that's number one. Number two, you have to live a good life. You know, when I found out when I was a kid, Marilyn Monroe committed suicide and I always say, well, why couldn't she move somewhere and just live a normal life. But I know it's impossible now in order to live a good life, you must do good.
You must be able to sleep well. You cannot be unfair to people. Take advantage of people, cheat people, and then expect God to reveal himself to you. It doesn't work that way. So you have to have a clear conscience. I think the most important thing in life is to be able to live with yourself. I think to get along with yourself to be is the most difficult thing. Forget about your husband and you can always leave him, but how do you leave yourself? I know Marilyn Monroe could never leave herself.
And number three, you must take the precautions in life. Don't smoke, don't drink. I mean, you drink socially fine. I don't drink at all, but that's my personal preference. You must live a clean life. So you must think good. Do good. Live a simple, healthy life. Keep things simple. I have friends who are drama. Queens is unnecessary. Life is simple. We make it complicated. Let's stick to the facts. Just stick to the point. And life is easy.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Mae Chandran. To see photos of Mae’s beautiful gardens, delicious culinary treats and beloved family, follow her on Instagram at maechandran.
Look for our quarterly subscription box The Passionistas Project Pack. Each box is filled with products made by women-owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. And we’re excited to announce that our featured Passionista for the first box is Sashee Chandran, who inspired us to go into the subscription box business.
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Tuesday Oct 15, 2019
Tuesday Oct 15, 2019
Two-time Grammy nominee and the award-winning author — Holly George-Warren has written 16 books including the New York Times bestseller The Road to Woodstock and the new biography Janis: Her Life and Music about rock icon Janis Joplin. Holly is also working with Petrine Day Mitchum on a new documentary called Rhinestone Cowboy about the story of Nudie, the Rodeo Tailor.
Find out more about Holly George-Warren.
Read more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to the Passionistas Project Podcast. We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with two-time Grammy nominee and the award winning author Holly George-Warren. To date, Holly has written 16 books, including the New York times bestseller, “The Road to Woodstock” and the forthcoming biography, “Janice: Her Life and Music” about rock icon Janice Joplin. Holly is also working with Patrine Day Mitchell on a new documentary called “Rhinestone Cowboy” about the story of Nudie, the rodeo tailor. So please welcome to the show Holly George-Warren.
Holly: Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Passionistas: What's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Holly: Wow, gosh, what time is it? Every time it changes on the hour it seems like, but of course right now I'm most passionate about, I guess both Janis Joplin and Nudie. As far as my work life goes, my head is wrapped around both of those people. And interestingly enough, Nudie actually did make some outfits for Janice in 1970 so there's a connection with everything. And of course my other passion in my personal life is my family, my husband Robert Brook Warren and my son Jack Warren, who fill my life with joy and excitement and share, uh, my love for the arts, film, music, the outdoors, etc. So I'm very blessed.
Passionistas: So tell us a little bit about what first inspired you to become a writer.
Holly: I think music really did first inspire me beginning at a very, very young age. I grew up in a small town in North Carolina and literally I'm old enough to have discovered music back in the days of am radio. And in my town it was so tiny. We had very, you know, little radio, just some gospel, I think country and Western. This was in the ‘60s. But I discovered at night after like say nine o'clock on my little clock radio that I could tune into w ABC in New York and WCFL in Chicago. And that just blew my mind. It opened up this whole world for me of all these different sounds and styles of music. Cause that was in the day of very eclectic radio. Playing a DJs, they, they didn't go by strict playlists or anything like that. And I literally started just kind of writing, I think inspired by the music I was hearing.
I started writing a little bit about music and I of course started reading biographies also at the same time. So that was the other major I would say inspiration for me. I started reading in elementary school these biographies of all kinds, everyone, you know, from like George Washington Carver to Florence Nightingale to Abraham Lincoln biographies and became kind of obsessed with reading those books. And you know, I just love to read from a young age. So I think those interests kind of combined that. Um, by the time I got to college I was writing quite a bit and uh, always did quite well with my writing assignments in school and then found myself writing more and more about music, going out and seeing bands performing live. And then that's what I did when I moved to New York city in 1979 I started writing for all kinds of fanzines and underground magazines that existed at that time in the East village.
About then, it was kind of the post punk scene I guess, but I had been inspired by the original punk rockers, you know. I got to see the Ramones and bands like that in North Carolina before I moved to New York. So I've just started writing about the scene, which was not that well covered at the time. Talk a little bit more about the scene at that point. Back in those days, in the late seventies in New York city, there were only a couple of clubs where you could go out and see bands that had, were kind of either following in the footsteps of the original punk scene in New York and London. And a few of those people were still around New York and playing. So there was this great resurgence of kind of DIY homemade magazines, sort of called fanzines that all kinds of people that were into the scene started writing articles for.
And it didn't have as many gatekeepers as say the big glossy magazines of the day, you know, even Cream magazine, which was kind of an upstart as compared to say Rolling Stone was pretty restrictive as far as who could write for those magazines. And I would send out queries and tried to get assignments and never hear back anything. But in the meantime, just people out on the scene who were playing in bands, booking bands, going out to see shows every night we're putting out these music magazines that pretty much anyone through, you know, string a sentence together and had a little bit of knowledge about writing. But a lot of passion basically. Again, passion was very much the key word of I would say the music scene, the people on stage and then also people writing about the music. So that's really what got me started and I started getting published in some, again very small run underground, a little music magazines.
Passionistas: Then you did eventually start to write for Rolling Stone and you became an editor of the Rolling Stone press in ’93. So tell us about the road to that and your experience working there.
Holly: It was quite the fun road. It was circuitous because I did get swept up in the whole band scene and actually started playing in bands very early. I played, I used to call it lead rhythm guitar. So again, playing in different bands over pretty much throughout the 1980s and while I was doing that, I didn't write quite as much, but I felt like it was a huge tool for being able to write about music to actually be in a band. You know, we went on the road, we toured around some of my different bands, I did several recordings. So I learned what it was like to work in a recording studio.
And just the whole life of being a musician became a real thing for me. So I felt like I could write about musicians with much more authority. I never considered myself a real musician. I still was a fan, but I, I could play a mean bar chord. And I started out with a fender Mustang and then I moved up to a fender Jazzmaster of the vintage one from the late fifties so I was pretty hip. Let me tell you. In the meantime, I did start getting some real jobs to pay the bills, including, believe it or not, I became an editor at American Baby magazine, which funnily enough, almost everyone that worked there was childless. And that was really my first nationally published articles was for this magazine. Um, how to know when your child is old enough for a pet or, you know, I did a research article where I went out and interviewed parents of quintuplets and quadruplets and triplets, you know, um, but I, you know, really kinda cut my teeth writing for that magazine.
I learned how to be a journalist, you know, a real journalist. And then gradually through meeting people and also being a total rock and roll geeky nerd who was constantly reading every rock biography that would come out. And also I was really into, it was weirdly enough through punk rock, I got totally into old timey country music, like the Carter family. And honkytonk music like Hank Williams and I loved, uh, Patsy Cline, Wanda Jackson, the queen of rockabilly. So I got into that kind of music pretty much while I was a full-fledged punk rocker. And again, I think passion is the line between those two, the thread that connects them that, you know, both of those kinds of music, that earlier country that were raw primitive kind of country music as well as punk rock had that passion was very obvious in the music and that I loved it.
I was totally into all that kind of music. And in fact, I saw George Jones at the Bottom Line in 1980 which blew my mind. So anyway, so I started learning more about that kind of music by just reading books all the time and eventually heard about a job as a fact checker at Rolling Stone press in the 1980s they were doing this big rock and roll encyclopedia and needed someone to double check everything. You know, these established writers who I'd been reading for years, Rolling Stone, like people like Dave Marsh had written. And so that was my first, you know, I was getting to call up Question Mark of Question Mark and the Mysterians and asking him, you know, was it true that he came from another planet and called up, you know, all these people.
In fact, funnily enough, I handsome Dick Manitoba, the singer, the Dictators, I called him up to check some facts about this notorious horrible fight on stage, basically abroad between him and Jayne County at CBGBs. And then literally when I was playing in my band, we were rehearsing and this music building famously where Madonna once lived before she got an apartment near times square I was in, had gotten a taxi to get home with my equipment and there was, who was driving me, but you know, Richard, Manitoba, handsome Dick himself, who I had just caught up and asked him about his career as a fact checker.
So anyway, that kind of got my foot in the door at Rolling Stone, which led to me over the years doing freelance projects for them. And till finally in 1993, well actually ‘91, they hired me as the editor to do a couple of their Landmark books, had deals with Random House to do new additions, “The Rolling Stone Album Guide” and “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll.” And so they hired me to kind of be the editor to work with uh, Anthony DeCurtis and Jim Hinky at the magazine to guide these books, which are these massive, massive researched, you know, a lot of people involved, you know, a lot of moving parts to do these new, uh, additions. So that went really well. So in 1993 they decided to start up a new book division, which had kind of fallen by the wayside and they hired me to come on board and run that book division. And that was a great experience and that's what led me to start writing for the magazine. I started doing assignments for the magazine, record reviews and things like that while running the book division.
I learned so much from working on those kinds of big reference books. You know, and again, we had amazing writers that I got to interface with and on “The Illustrated History of Rock and Roll,” too, I got to work with everyone from Peter [inaudible] to Mark Marcus to the late great Robert Palmer. Again, Dave Marsh, you know, many, many writers. And then I got to assign a lot of new chapters and in fact I wrote a chapter, Anthony DeCurtis became a real mentor to me. He was an editor at Rolling Stone that was in the trenches with me on these book projects and he assigned me as the writer to do a big piece on the changing role of women and rock, you know, beginning with Patty Smith, et cetera. Up to that current time. I think, you know, I covered, I think Sinead O'Connor at that point was maybe one of the newer artists that was, uh, the focus of my chapter.
But that was a real huge, exciting thing to get to be part of. And then I got to do another very cool book with a wonderful writer editor named Barbara Odair, who came to my office. She was working at Rolling Stone and then at US magazine back in the day when it was owned by Winter media and said, “Let's do a whole book on women in music with every chapter written by women and every, as much as possible, all the photography done by women.” So we did this really cool book called “Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock.”
And funnily enough, one of the chapters I did for that one was this big piece on Nico, who was my first ever famous person I ever interviewed when I was, you know, living in New York city. I was still waitressing at the time. And Nico, of course from the velvet underground fame was kind of down at the heels. Editorials at the time, but having to go to a methadone clinic across from where I was working and would come in every day afterwards and have an amaretto on the rocks and cheesecake. So I got up my courage and asked her if I could interview her and I didn't even have a platform for my interview, but she said yes and got to spend some time with her and interview her and use part of the interview and a little fanzine back in the day. But then I got to really expand and write this whole chapter on Nico and use this interview I'd done 10 years earlier or even earlier than me, I guess 12 years earlier for this book “Trouble Girl.” So that was really exciting. Yeah.
Passionistas: So you were writing about women, you're interviewing women, but what was it like for you as a woman starting in those early days in the punk rock scene through this time where you've becoming a more established rock journalist? What were your experiences like both as a musician and a journalist, as a woman in the music industry?
Holly: Well, when I met people face to face and worked with them, say for example, Anthony DeCurtis and Jim Hinky, who sadly just passed away just a few weeks ago or a month, a month or so ago. They were very, very encouraging and very supportive. They really encouraged me to write and gave me assignments, et cetera. But before that I really found, and maybe it's true whether you're male or female or whatever gender, you know, but if I just blindly sent out queries or blindly tried to get gigs writing, when I first moved to New York City, it was a disaster. I mean, people either ignored me or just blew me off or said no or you know, it was really hard to get the foot in the door without actually working with people and for them to see what my work was like. Now, I did have the good fortune early on to meet some people that had worked with punk magazine and part of, there was this whole cool kind of resurgence of comics.
This really great artists. Peter Bag had joined forces with John Holmstrom who had done punk magazine. And Peter and I, a Peter's wife and I work together, you know, at this restaurant. So Peter knew that I, you know, at this time I was just going out and writing about stuff on my own and pitching it to a few people I knew actually from North Carolina had moved to New York, but then they started giving me assignments for this. These magazines they started, one was called Stop and when it was called comical funny. So they, you know, they really encouraged me. So, you know, I can't say that I experienced gender bias or anything like that. Once I knew the people, I think maybe I was just, it's hard to know. I mean I did definitely get a lot of rejection. A lot of people that I pitched didn't really take me seriously and whether it's they didn't really know my work or because I was a woman, I don't know.
I mean I, I did frequently find myself being the only music geek, you know, blabbing away on all this arcane kind of Trainspotting rock and roll history trivia with, you know, I'd be the only gal in the room blabbing away about that, you know, with some guys and stuff like that. There weren't a lot of women doing it and there weren't that many women around Lee for me that I crossed paths with to kind of support my endeavors at that part of my career. However, I very fortunately met a couple of women when I was a fact checker at Rolling Stone Press who were very, very encouraging and really I would not be talking to you right now if not for them. And one was Patti Romanowski who was the editor of Rolling Stone Press at the time, who hired me as a fact checker back in the ‘80s. She went on to write many as told two books with everyone from Mary Wilson to Otis Williams at the temptations. And that book has recently been the basis for this very successful Broadway show right now. So Patty was fantastic.
And then her boss, the woman who ran rolling stone press with Sarah Layson who became, you know, really made my career because after she left Rolling Stone Press, she started a book packaging company and became a literary agent and hired me continuously for her book company. And then she became my literary agent when I left Rolling Stone. No, actually before I even started at Rolling Stone, my first ever book, which I uh, got my first book deal around 1990. So it was even before I went to Rolling Stone actually, she became my literary agent and my first ever book, she connected me with my coauthor Jenny Boyd, who had been married to make Fleetwood and her sister Patty Boyd, you might know the name was married to George Harrison, Eric Clapton.
And Patty was a really interesting person who had kind of dug out a new life for herself. After her marriage with Mick Fleetwood ended, went back to school, became a psychologist, got a PhD and wanted to do a book on creativity and in musicians. So she hired me to be her co-author and we did this book called, well, it's available now. It got repackaged again and republished in England called, “It's Not Only Rock and Roll,” but it was basically about the creative process of musicians based on interviews with 75 musicians. So that really started me on my path as an author. That was my first book and that came out and a ‘91 Simon Schuster, a Fireside Division. So Sarah did that and then she became my, you know, agent. I wrote a few other books, a couple while I was at Rolling Stone and then when I left there in 2001 I've been writing books ever since. And Sarah has been my agent for all of them up to this my Janice Joplin book.
And she definitely is one of my, you know, if not for her, I would, you know, like I said, I would not be talking to you right now.
Passionistas: You're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with award winning author Holly George-Warren. To find out more about her latest book, “Janice: Her Life and Music” visit HollyGeorgeWarren.com. Now here's more of our interview with Holly.
So clearly you have an extreme in depth knowledge of the history of women in the music industry. So how do you think the music industry has evolved over the years in terms of opportunities for women?
Holly: When I first moved to New York as far as women performing in bands, that was just starting to really happen thanks to the whole, you know, punk explosion with bands from England, like the Slits and the Raincoats, the Modettes, you know, I saw all those bands, that little tiny clubs and it just was a much more welcoming atmosphere for women to pick up instruments and play in pants.
And like I said, I started playing guitar in bands. Then of course, you know people like Tina Weymouth and Chrissy Hynde, I mean Patty Smith of course. So as far as getting the courage to get up on stage and play and then just, um, to have other like-minded souls out there that wanted to be in bands with you was very, uh, it was a great time to be in New York and gradually there became more and more venues, places to play. I got to play at all of them from, you know, CBS to Max's Kansas city, peppermint lounge, Danceteria, you know, all these great classic clubs in New York, you know, late seventies, early eighties. And as far as the music business, I mean, you know, at that time we were like screw the music, but you know, we were punk rockers, man. We were underground. We didn't want anything to do with that.
In fact, when I started even working for Rolling Stone in ‘93, I would tell people like, yeah, I'm working for Rolling Stone so I can afford now to write about the bands I really love. For it cause I was still writing for this really cool magazine called Option, which, and I'll if you remember that magazine, but very cool magazine based on the West Coast. And so I'd still write about people that would never ever get covered in Rolling Stone, but all different types of music. And again started writing about some of the early country music pioneers and rockabilly people like Wanda and people like that. So I didn't really interface that much with the mainstream music business at that time.
You know, I basically had good experiences on that very low level. Again, this was the time of the Go-Go's had come around and the Bangles, my band Dos Furlines, went on a tour of Canada with a couple of other all women bands and it was, you know, it was a male promoter and everything went really great.
Once I started moving up the food chain, once I was at Rolling Stone, I started working on producing some CD packages with labels. And again, everybody I worked with were male, but they were very supportive. They were really into what, you know, my ideas were. So I didn't really have any problem with that. And you know, gradually I started meeting some very cool women that a lot of women I discovered had been really behind the scenes. So I started meeting some of those women who had been working at labels for years. Some of them had left, it started their own publicity companies, some of them were in management, et cetera. So, and then I, you know, finally got to meet a few of the women who had been pioneering women, female journalists. But again, there weren't that many. It was very cool to see. And then, you know, like I said, Barbeau Dara and I did a whole book with lots of great, great women writers.
The scene I think helped, um, a lot of women find their, you know, their niche a lot. You know, a lot of women were total big into music just the way I was. But you know, finally, all these channels that opened up for them to pursue it as either a writer or you know, an A& R person manager, publicist, a photographer, lots of great women photographers. And again, I was, I loved meeting women who started in the business in the ‘60s into the ‘70s. So I loved getting to meet them in the ‘90s and just, I wish I would've known them or could've somehow met them when I first started out in the ‘70s, late seventies, even early eighties to get encouragement from them. But you know, they, they were really kind of behind the scenes. They weren't that obvious. And some of them became very good friends like Jan new house ski, uh, fabulous, wonderful.
A writer who was one of the early women writers for Cream magazine. And, uh, I got to know her and work with her and you know, Daisy McLean, who had written for Rolling Stone, um, back in the glory days of rock journalism where they were all these junkets and you were flown all over and wined and dined by the labels and all that kind of stuff. And she had some amazing stories to tell about being in the trenches. And Ellen sand or another wonderful writer who her great book called, I think it's called trips, was just reissued last year. And she was a very early writer. And when out on the road with, you know like LEDs up one and covered a Woodstock and a lot of Janis Joplin gigs, Forest Hills tennis stadium wrote about that. And so again, just these great writers who were hard to find when I started out.
Passionistas: You have an interest in all these genres. And you've written about such a wide range of music from country to punk. What makes a topic or an artist compelling enough for you to dedicate a book to the subject?
Holly: I guess if there's a complexity to the person and arguably perhaps all artists are a complex people, who knows cause I don't know about all of them, but I've been really attracted to writing about people that have had to really struggle, who've had to break down barriers to be heard, who have, you know, a lot of facets to their personality. And Janice is my third biography. My first one was Gene Autry, the singing cowboy who was a very complex man and very much a groundbreaking artist going way back to the beginning in the late 1920s broke through in the early thirties. And then Alex Chilton, who of course a lot of people know from big star, but it started out as this pop star at age 16 and the Box Tops and just had this incredible career in life.
I become passionate about them, their music, their lives. I never lose that passion. I mean I still get excited if some crazy, you know, online radio station plays, you know, a Gene Autry song. Same thing without, I was so thrilled. I went to see once upon a time at time in Hollywood and to hear a very deep cut box top song on the soundtrack of a, of the new Quintin Tarantino films. So two to train. By the way, I never lose the passion for the people that I like. Literally moving in with one of my biography subjects, you know, for several years. And you never forget your roommates, right? Most of them.
Passionistas: Tell us about why you chose to write a book about Janis Joplin and what you learned about her that you found most fascinating from writing the book.
Holly: I have to say part of it, I mean, I really believe that my subjects also choose me somehow. Again, following my passion, I ended up in a place where it just kind of comes together and with Janice for years, of course I had loved her music. She was definitely an inspiration for me growing up again in this tiny town in North Carolina, that didn't have a lot going on for me as far as the kind of things I was interested in. And now again, I might be like one of my biography subjects, but I think I saw her on the Dick Cavett show and just her whole look and attitude and sensibility and not to mention her incredible voice. I'm like, what's that? I want to be that. She was probably actually a little did I know at the time wearing this outfit that Nudie made for her. Of course. I was one of those people that was devastated when she died in 1970 and in 1971 I had joined the Columbia Record Blub and got Pearl.
I still have my original copy. So just a fan and then once I was working at Rolling Stone and started doing projects with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Hall of Fame did a really cool symposium on Janis back in the nineties, I think it was ‘97. And Bob Santoli, the head of education, VP of education and programming at the time invited me to be part of it and I'm, I got to go to Cleveland and give a talk about Janice's influence on contemporary women musicians, but the best part was I got to meet Janice's brother and sister Michael and Laura. I got to meet Sam Andrew, her a guitar player, Chet Holmes, who was the manager for Big brother and the Holding Company and started the Avalon Ballroom dances there back in the ‘60s some other people to her, John Cook, her road manager. So I got to meet all these people.
Then lo and behold, they did an American masters, American Music masters panel on Janice or weekend symposium on Janice again in 2009 I believe it was. And once again this time, um, and powers and I were asked to give talks about, Janis kind of a keynote thing with Lucy O'Brien, a grade a woman, rock journalists who's based in London. So the three of us kind of gave a joint keynote and again got to meet all these amazing people. So I just kind of got to learn more and more and more about Janice and about her music. The thing that really got me was I was asked to write liner notes for this two CD set called the Pearl sessions that Sony was doing in the early teens. And for the first time they had gone into the vaults and pulled out all this talk back between Janice and Paul Rothchild, her producer, who was known for being a very authoritarian producer.
Like he worked with Joni Mitchell and one of her first or I think or second album. And she's like, no, I can't work with him. He's too bossy. He tells me what to, you know, so she wouldn't work with him. He famously produced most of the Door's albums and he would make Jim Morrison like redo his vocal like 10 times or whatever. But he listening to them in the studio together, I'm like, Oh my gosh, this woman is calling the shots. Janis Joplin is telling Paul Rothchild like, Oh wait, let's slow it down here. Wait, let's try a different arrangement on this. Let's have this guitar part here. I mean, she was basically producing the record with him. She's never gotten credit really for being this very thoughtful orchestrator of music and hardworking musician. She created a very different image of herself in order to sell herself as a persona, this rock persona.
And she was very successful at that and I think I, and almost everybody else bought it, but I realized from listening to these recordings that there was a whole other side to her, this musician side, that she wasn't just blessed born with this incredible voice that she just came out of the box singing. She worked, she really worked. And that very much intrigued me and that made me more interested in wanting to spend four and a half, five years working on Janice's life story and trying to make a write a book about her that shows her trajectory as a musician because you know, there had been some other books, some very well researched. I'm Alice Echols wrote a great book about Janis with a lot of research, but I felt still that somehow or musicianship and had not ever been acknowledged the extent that it should have been.
So that was kind of my goal for this book to really find out who her musical influences were. What did she do to improve her craft, or how did she discover her voice? What were the obstacles she had to overcome, all those kinds of things. So that really fired me up. And again, my wonderful agent, Sara Liaison, who had actually been the agent for Laura Joplin's book that she wrote called “Love Janice,” which told her story of growing up with Janice as her sister and used a lot of letters that Janice had written home. She reproduced a lot of the letters in the book and my agent told Laura about me and I had met her back in the nineties and so I was able to come to an agreement that, again, similar to the Autry book, they would allow me to go into Janice's personal files or scrapbooks or letters, and I could use all that in my book, but without any controls over what I wrote, they would not have any editorial approvals or anything like that. So again, that's, that's how that came about.
Passionistas: And your other current passion, you've touched on it a couple times, but tell us a little bit more about “Rhinestone Cowboy,” the story of Nudie.
Holly: I think there's kind of a pattern here. You can see that none of these, I'm no one overnights and station or whatever. All of my projects really, they come from years of passionately pursuing something just really for the love of it, more than with any sort of goal in mind. And that's kind of the same story with Nudie. As I mentioned, I was a collector of Western where I worked on the, “How the West Was Worn” book and that's when I really learned about Nudie, who was this very showman, like couturier the Dior of the sagebrush or whatever they used to call him, who catered to early on cellular Lloyd Cowboys, people like gene Autry.
And Roy Rogers was a huge client and then all the stars like Hank Williams making their incredible embroidered outfits. Then he started putting rhinestones on the outfits. I'm for a country in Western singers. And then in the late sixties people like Graham Parsons, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Janice, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Elton John all started going there, getting these really outrageous over the top and bordered and rhinestone suits. So I learned about him gradually and then it turns out through doing “How the West Was Worn,” I met Patrine Day Mitchum, who herself had actually hung out at Nudie’s back in the ‘70s, knew him and he had tapped her to write his memoir with him. So she has hours and hours and hours of taped, uh, recordings with him telling his fascinating story about being an immigrant as a young boy from the Ukraine to New York, all these ups and downs. He went through very colorful stories that finally landed him in Los Angeles in the late forties and started his shop and started making outfits for all these Western swing performers.
Tex Williams was his first. So we teamed up and started talking literally back in 2002 about, Oh, we should do a project together about Nudie. Should we do a book, because should we do a film? And so literally, all these years later now, we've actually started working on our documentary. In the meantime, I had worked on several documentaries over the years as a consulting producer and producer on lots of music documentaries that have been on PBS, etc. So I had that experience. And then Trina has worked in the film industry over the years as well. So we were able to kind of combine our passion for Nudie and his incredible clothing and some of the other outfits were made by some other great, also immigrants from Eastern Europe. This guy named Turk who was out on the end. VanNess was the first one. His shop opened in 1923 and then back in Philadelphia on the East coast rodeo.
Ben had a shop beginning in 1930 all three of them in Nudie where they came from. Eastern Europe was young boys, young men, and then also the whole story of the immigrants from Mexico. Manuel who still at age 86 is designing these incredible outfits in Nashville. He worked with Nudie and Heimaey Castenada who is still right there in North Hollywood, making incredible outfits for Chris Isaac and Billy Gibbons and Dwight Yoakam. So it's a bigger story. Even then I realized as far as it's a story of immigrants coming to this country and creating the iconic American look, the rhinestone cowboy outfit. Right. So go figure.
Passionistas: Looking back on your journey so far, is there one decision you've made that you consider the most courageous? That sort of changed your trajectory?
Holly: Oh, I guess it was just picking up and moving to New York city with, I had a little audio cassette player. You remember those? It was even pre Walkman. I had that. If you could set mix tapes or suitcase and that was it. 500 bucks, maybe 700 I don't know. Just kind of moved to New York and I mean, I think, I guess that was the smartest thing I ever did because basically in New York I made lifelong friends. I met my husband, he was playing in a band, the flesh tones. Um, we were on a double bill. My band does for line. So that's how we met in the 80s all these passions, some of which I had as a young girl growing up in North Carolina, I was literally able to materialize into projects, into a lifestyle and into a livelihood. I mean, gosh, I mean, how lucky am I that that happened? Things that could have just been a hobby actually became a way of life and an occasional paycheck here and there.
So I feel very, very lucky. And I think moving to New York city, almost at a whim, I went to school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. So I had two sides of my personality, the former hippie Janice wannabe, and the punk rocker. So when I was going to leave Chapel Hill, I'm like, well, I'm either gonna move to New York City or Key West. So I think it's a good thing. I moved to New York city.
Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life?
Holly: Again, and I teach, I tell my students this, whatever you do, if you can pursue it with passion. You guys nailed it with the name of your podcast. Because if you can approach even, you know, path things with passion, you know, with anger or … of one with passion, I think, you know, whatever it is, if you can just engage and be passionate about things that's going to enrich your life. I mean it can maybe take its toll on you too. But I think how that kind of feeling and motivation that you're driven by the passion of whatever it is that you're thinking about or wanting to learn about or whatever, you're going to do a much better job with whatever it is you're pursuing.
Passionistas: What's your definition of success?
Holly: I guess success is not only attaining a goal that you had for yourself, but within that goal also having happiness and a good state of mind about it. Because I think horribly, you know, in our culture, a lot of people that find certain success, you know, material success or even career success, there's other aspects of their life that is not working out too well. So that's not really success is that I think you have to put all the parts of the puzzle together so that they're all kind of working out together to really be successful. It's tricky. It's difficult because life has a way of throwing lots of curve balls at ya.
Passionistas: So what advice would you give to a young woman who wants to be a journalist or an author?
Holly: First off, subscribe to your podcast. And seriously, I think surrounding yourself or finding out about or listening to other people who are passionate about things that you're interested in doing or even if it's something different, but people that their passion is driven them to be successful or to work towards attaining success, that that can be very inspirational and motivational for them. And then also not just do things through rote or whatever. You have to really find something that energizes you and does and passion you to want to pursue it, and I think that's really important and not do something just because you're supposed to or someone tells you you should do this, but you have to really find things that are going to bring you fulfillment.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Holly George-Warren to find out more about her latest book, “Janice: Her Life and Music,” visit HollyGeorgeWarren.com.
And don't forget, our quarterly subscription box The Passionistas Project Pack goes on sale October 30th. Each box is filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing list@thepassionistasproject.com to get 10% off your first purchase.
And be sure to subscribe to the Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.
Tuesday Oct 01, 2019
Tuesday Oct 01, 2019
Carolyn Koppel founded Aaron’s Coffee Corner while sitting with her son Aaron in his hospital room. Her mission is to provide 24/7 access to free Keurig coffee to the family, friends and caregivers admitted to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of Ann & Robert Lurie’s Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Find out more at AaronsCoffeeCorner.org.
Read more about The Passionistas Project.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. Today we're talking with Carolyn Koppel, the founder of Aaron's Coffee Corner.
Carolyn left a career in Hollywood to return to the Midwest where she worked at the Shoah Foundation and Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios. Most recently she founded Aaron's Coffee Corner, while sitting with her son, Aaron, in his hospital room. Her mission is to provide 24/7 access to free Keurig coffee to the family, friends and caregivers of patients in the pediatric intensive care unit of Ann and Robert Laurie's Children's Hospital of Chicago.
So please welcome to the show, Carolyn Koppel.
Carolyn: Hello. Thank you.
Passionistas: What's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Carolyn: I feel that of course, right now I'm passionate about this project and getting coffee to people that really could use it, but I think in general, as I look back on my adult life, I've tried to work with organizations and people that do good, which I didn't really think about, but it turns out that it's a running theme in my life and I'm pretty proud of it.
Passionistas: Why do you think you're drawn to projects that help other people?
Carolyn: I think it's just my upbringing. I think I grew up pretty happily and my parents were always very kind to people and I think that my family has nurtured that. And as I went through middle school and high school and college, it's something that I carried with me. I think it's just my upbringing. I'll give that credit to my parents.
Passionistas: How does that translate into what you do in your day to day life?
Carolyn: Well, right now my day to day life is nothing that I thought it would be like 14 years ago when my child Aaron was born. So over the last few years I've thought about what can I do? Should I get a job? How can I get a job? Because there's a lot of medical appointments and there's a lot of time off if parent gets sick, how do I tell people that I need a really flexible job that can allow me to care for my globally delayed and medically fragile child?
So it's been a journey to try and find something that I can do. And along the way I've volunteered on a parent board, um, for a local organization here called North suburban special education district, which my son is a part of and has been a part of. And I slowly got back into the idea of filling my time, trying to help somebody else because after you're in a situation like I am, it takes a long time to kind of settle into your life. And I think that just over the last few years we've had a little more regularity so you can kind of look outside of what your craziness is and say, Oh, other people have it worse than me. And I think that when I started going to the hospital, I think that played a big role in how I was going to handle life with Aaron.
And that I always looked around when I was in the pediatric intensive care unit and thought, Oh my God, look at these people. They have it so much worse than we do. And I think that always rang true that no matter how frustrating and how difficult and how ludicrous you feel your life is, somebody has always got it worse. So it took a long time to kind of get to the point where I'm like, okay, well it's always going to be like this. Let's see how we can help other people because now I have things a little under control and let's open it up and see what we can do for others. And that started to happen about four or five years ago, but I couldn't really find what I needed until I was so frustrated in the middle of the night in a hospital room that I couldn't find some coffee. And that's really how we got here.
Passionistas: Let's back up a step. Tell everybody about Aaron and why you're in the hospital so much.
Carolyn: So my son has something called dihydro perimeter ING dehydrogenase deficiency. And it's not necessarily uncommon to have this disorder, but it is to have it from birth. So his symptoms started showing very early and at about 18 weeks he had a seizure and then we knew something wasn't right. And we took ourselves to that hospital and we needed to get transferred down to Lurie's children's because they didn't know what was going on and they had to get the seizures under control. So this disorder was known to people. And when Aaron was admitted to the hospital, he was there for about, I think the first time, about eight days. And they just did a battery of tests and they were trying to figure out what was wrong.
And they did EKGs to see about his seizure activity. And they took all kinds of blood tests and one test from that very admission kept coming back positive. And I remember that genetics factor coming in and saying, well this is something we're going to have to test again because I've never seen it in my career. So we're gonna send it to the Mayo clinic and have the, his blood tested it and then we're going to see what they say. And then it came back from the Mayo clinic and they said there's one man in the Netherlands that's doing research on this particular disorder. You did test positive for it and can we have blood samples from your whole family and urine samples and send them to him? And when that was confirmed, we knew what his diagnosis was. So a lot of kids that are medically fragile and globally delay, they don't have any kind of diagnosis.
So we were lucky right there that we had something to hold on to. And the way that we knew that this was what he had was because there was a drug called five plural are soul, that men in their forties when they get prostate cancer, sometimes we're treated with this drug and it had horrible side effects including death. So this man in the Netherlands had created a urine test that could test before they had this treatment to make sure that they can get it. And that's the test that Aaron kept coming back positive for. So they pulled it back around and they said, we don't have very much information on this disorder, but we know that children haven't lived past the age of three. So that was his diagnosis and his prognosis very early on, at around under a year. And that's a shock. Let me tell you what he suffers from I guess.
So he has epilepsy. He suffers from unmanageable seizures. He's globally delayed. He is not verbal and he is non-ambulatory, which means he is confined to a wheelchair. He doesn't really have the use of his limbs. So I guess he would technically be classified as a quadriplegic. And he has excellent hearing and a really good sense of spell. So he's fed through a G tube. He's on a number of medications, which he also takes through his G-tube. And as a result of the disorder, besides the epilepsy, he has lot of pulmonary issues, breathing issues. He's had pneumonia a few times. And one of the many reasons we've been in the hospital so often is that it doesn't take very much for him to get. And when he does, he has a really hard time recovering from it. So he's just a really sick, handsome little guy, you know, and, and he's just a love.
He recognizes voices, he smiles when he's happy, whether you know why he's happy or not. It's always good to have him smile. And I think that he is surrounded by so much love that he emanates it back. He really is a lucky kid and we're lucky to have him.
Passionistas: We're sorry that you've had to deal with all that.
Carolyn: Oh, it's okay. It's all right. It's turned out to be a pretty good life unexpectedly.
Passionistas: Let's go back and talk about your path to getting to here. So you studied journalism at the university of Wisconsin Madison, and what were your goals at that point when you graduated and what did you do?
Carolyn: Well, my goal at the university of Wisconsin was to get out of the cold when I graduated. And my parents had already had that idea and they deserted me while I was living while I was in college.
So they took off or Arizona and I went and shacked up with them for a year and I worked as a stringer producer. So there was a company in Arizona and we would do work for the Phoenix suns and for lifestyles of the rich and famous and for ESPN and all those kinds of stringer things. That was anything that was happening in entertainment tonight. Anything that was happening in Phoenix, we would run out and do a little bit and I would be the person holding the little microphone and asking the questions off camera. And a friend of mine had already moved out to California and she's like, well why don't you come out here? And I'm like, okay.
And I had another friend from Arizona that happened to be going to California for a summer program and she and I ended up being roommates with a couple of other girls and I got a job. I was, the first thing I did is I went to limited express to make sure I could work for them while I was there cause I had to have a job. And I had done that on and off. Like through school I had worked at limited express. So that was my first thing. And another friend of mine said, well why don't you come in and interview and see if we have a job for you at Viacom? And it was via con television. And at the time it was Dean Hargrove and Fred Silverman and they were doing all of these shows that old people like “Jake and the Fatman” and “Matlock” and “Perry Mason” “Diagnosis, Murder.”
It was awesome. And I ended up working for a woman who was the script production office manager, Donna and I was a script coordinator. So the first thing she had me do was learn how to type better because my typing skills were not up to par because I thought I'd be a broadcast journalist. From then on I was in a pretty good place. I was like, this is cool. I have a great group of friends, we're all in it together, we're all starting out. And it was a really great experience and I had done that for about four years. And I remember a friend of mine asked me to go see a movie and the movie was Schindler's list and I remembered that at the end of the movie we were on the universal lot and we had seen it in a screening room. And at the end of the movie it said that Steven Spielberg was starting a foundation to interview Holocaust survivors.
And I was like, Oh well, if I remember correctly, he's my neighbor on the universe a lot. So let me send him some universal mail with my resume in it and a letter. And that got me introduced to the show foundation. And by then I was in California for five years and I was known as the crazy aunt from California. All my nieces and nephews were being born. It was like a machine out West out East. And I was like, I should see if I can give them an idea and see if they'll give me a job. So when I sent them a letter, I said, I really do believe that you're going to be wanting to locate in Chicago, Illinois and I'm from the Midwest and I'd be more than happy to run your production office from Chicago. And they said, well that's a little far off because you know, we're in one trailer in the back of Amblin entertainment right now and we have to get set up here.
And I said, well, I'm happy to volunteer or whatever you need. And so eventually I volunteered there and they offered me the job in Chicago. So I became the Midwest regional coordinator for the show foundation. And that brought me back here. After that project was over, I went on to Harpo and an interviewer that was working for me on the show foundation said, Oh, you should meet my friend at the Oprah Winfrey show. She's a producer. And I said, okay. And I had coffee with her and I told her what I did and she went back to the office and told her, her boss, one of the producers and said, you know, you're starting up this new project, maybe she's the one for you. And I went in and I interviewed for that job and I got it. And it was the very beginning of Oprah's angel network, the original version of it where we raised money for kids to go to college and we built houses with habitat for humanity.
So between the Shoah foundation and recording these visual histories of what had happened to these people during the most horrific period of time in their lives, and to show at the end how they've survived and how they've created new families and continue to do good in the world. Then to go top Harpo and give back to communities. It was just kind of a theme I was on and it was great and I was like, okay, what's the next thing? And I had been at Harpo for a little while and the angel network had kind of morphed into something else and they were opening up Oprah online, they creating their own website. So I moved over to that website and I helped them start that website. And I learned a lot about things that I never thought I would know about, like HTML and all that kind of stuff and how to create a website.
But it wasn't really hitting the Mark for me. And I enjoyed my time there, but I had met my husband by then and he's like, well go look for a different job. And I think he found out about my next job, which was for adventure, which was an educational technology company right in the middle of the bubble. It was all very exciting and I was the operations manager and it was great. And then the bubble burst and I was four months pregnant and I look like I was eight months pregnant and one of those people that as soon as I got pregnant I looked like I had been pregnant for 17 years because I looked so pregnant at the beginning and I was like, I can interview for jobs because who's going to take a pregnant woman? And then I had my first child and everything was working out all right, we bought a house, my husband was working, did I really need to go back to work?
Not really. I was lucky and I did some work here and there and a little production work and then Aaron was born and that's when things kind of took a little different path. And so I became the primary caregiver and I think all of those lessons that I learned from all of those jobs, I think that's the secret to really getting through life is to remember what you've learned and bring a little of that to your next project and bring all of that to your next project and to build upon it. And I think that by the time Aaron came, I kind of knew this was going to be okay and it's not horrible, but we don't know what's going to happen. And once he hit three years old, we started having a birthday party every year. We just had his 14th birthday party and my backyard this weekend.
And I'm telling you, there's tons of people that come in there, his therapists and doctors and nurses and our family and friends that have supported us for 14 years, you know, that have gone through the highs and the lows and the hospitals, hospital visits. And I mean it just makes you realize how lucky you are. I think that they always say maybe a Maya Angelo says it. If you find it in your heart to care for somebody, then you've succeeded. So if you keep your heart open and you try and do the best you can for somebody else, you're going to get through the next door. And that's kind of how I got to where I am. I just, I love being in broadcast journalism, but I really loved helping other people and being a part of a bigger project and I think that's just the path I took, which turned out to work well for me. And I'm using all those skills now. So it's pretty remarkable.
Passionistas: We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Carolyn Koppel. To learn more about her mission to provide 24/7 access to free curd coffee to the family, friends and caregivers admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit of Ann and Robert Laurie's Children's Hospital of Chicago, visit AaronsCoffeeCorner.org. Now here's more of our interview with Carolyn.
Passionistas: How did the day to day skills you learned when you were in production apply to your life now?
Carolyn: We're going to take a little downturn for, for a minute. And I say that with as light of an attitude as I can, but when you're told that your child is not gonna live past three, so for those first few years, you're not sleeping, you're listening for him to breathe and not to have a seizure every night. And then when you wake up in the morning you're like, Oh my God, we made it through the night. You know, cause you always think it's going to be nighttime when something happens and you're gonna walk into that room and something horrible will have happened and there goes on for many, many years. And once he hits three, you're like, how long is it going to go on? How do you plan for it? So you're going to be here one year and then gone the next. It's like when you get classified, you get the hanging sticker that says you're driving a car that has a handicap ramp or something, that little hang or the blue one.
And then they're like, you know, well maybe you should have a license plate. And I'm like, no, because if I get the license play, maybe that's like superstitious and then something horrible is gonna happen. So there was a lot of that year after year, like I didn't want to think too far ahead, but here I am with a ramp van with a license plate that says we're handicapped. So you have to jump over those hoops to get where you are. And I think that's just a positive attitude. If you let go of what you think you're supposed to be doing with your life and then you're going, okay, well what am I supposed to be doing with it? Every time you do that you get a little further down the line. And I think I took that from all of my experiences in working with people and just volunteering and stuff like that.
So I think I might date today. It really played a role in just moving forward everyday move forward and see what happens. And here we are. I mean it's kind of worked, you know, we have these moments where he gets RSV or he gets pneumonia and we're in the hospital and we are at that point where people are talking about do not resuscitate letters and what do we have in place to move ahead with his treatment? Or do we put a breathing tube in so he can recover from his illness? Or is the breathing tube something that's keeping him alive? Like is it because of his underlying disorder that he needs some breathing tube? So you're making those distinctions and you're looking at your child who's on all kinds of machines in a hospital and you're like, okay, what if we have to bury him next week?
And those are not the kind of thoughts you want going around your head. But it's very practical and I'm a Capricorn and that's how I think. So I think the first thing that we did when those things kind of started happening, we were concerned about my older son Eli, who's 17 now and terrific and I was like, who is he going to talk to if something happens to Aaron? Because he's not gonna wanna talk to me or, or my husband stuck. I don't want to touch him. My sister, he needs like a third party. And I remember doing that early on, he was probably eight or nine and I thought, okay, we have that taken care of. We have a place for Eli to kind of process his feelings, but we have to, um, plan for things that you just don't think you need to plan for. And there are things that people don't want to talk about.
Like you just have to, uh, compart mentally maybe and say this is where he'll be buried and when it happens, this is how we'd like it to happen. But those change, all those things change as you go through the process. I think that just understanding that it's going to be okay. You don't have a lot to do with it. Right? And you just have to understand it and not accept it, but understand it and move through it because it sucks. Don't get me wrong. So I think that's what gets us true to this situation where I was like having a little self pity party and I was really upset that I couldn't find some coffee at 10 o'clock at night. What's wrong with that? And it was really frustrating and that's at one of those times when you have a sick child, you kind of know that something's happening, right?
Like he was not his normal self and he was having seizures that he didn't usually have and he was having some seizures that he hadn't had for a long time. So things were changing and you know that it could be growth, you know, it could be diet, it could be age, they have all these reasons for all these changes to happen and you end up going into the hospital a couple of times a year to have things checked out and that's where we end up. We end up in the hospital because everybody wants to help and the best possible way, except when you go for an EEG and people don't realize that there's a lot of times when you go into the hospital and you don't have full nursing care, you're on a floor and you're there and he's having all of these electrodes attached to his head and you're responsible for hitting this little alarm when you think he's having a seizure.
So they can watch the video and look at the EEG printout and kind of determine if it's a seizure, if it's neurological, if they can say that it's a seizure or not and how to treat it, but you're the one for three days. In Aaron's case, we were there for three days this last time so we could be sure to catch what was happening and you're the one that's for doing it. You give him his meds, you are awake, you're watching the activity as it goes through, and then when you go to bed, there's somebody that comes into the room and watches it on the camera so you can't leave the room. You can't go down to elevators to get a cup of coffee or one elevator to go to the cafeteria because it's not open and room service is closed and then you just getting pissed, right?
You're like, I have to stay up until midnight to turn him his last time. So Aaron, since he doesn't move, has to get moved every few hours. And the longest time that he sleeps on one side is from midnight to about six in the morning depending on when my husband wakes up. So I always have to stay up until midnight. And I was really frustrated and I'm like, why isn't there coffee ever in the hospital when I need it in the mornings before the rounds happen or the doctor start check again at seven o'clock in the morning and I've been up since five, why do I not have little more access to that? And I started thinking about it and I thought, well let's ask Keurig to help. And so that night, I think it was 10 45 I wrote them a letter and I said, it's 10 45 at night and I can't get a cup of coffee and how can we work together to make that happen in the hospital.
And I had big visions of every floor having a Keurig machine for the families and it would be great and super easy. It seems so simple. And the rest of our stay happened. I wrote the letter, I put it aside, I went back to my job as seizure alarmist and couple of days later we went home and I'm like, Oh I wrote that letter, I should go read that letter. Maybe I'll send that letter. So I went back and I read it and I told my husband that I had written this letter and that I'm going to mail it out to the CEO of Keurig. So I did and I didn't hear from anybody and I was like, maybe I should send it to like the whole board of Keurig. So, cause it was Christmas time and who's really reading their mail and they're probably all off on vacation.
And so in January, I think I sent it to all the board members listed on the cure USA website. And in February I got a phone call from this man, so I'm looking for Carolyn capital. I said, does this Carolyn? And he said, this is John Barrett from Keurig. And I'm like, it is not John Barrett from curate. And he's like, yes it is. And I was like, I was just trying to figure out how to start a fundraiser at Lurie's and how much a pure coffee machine would really cost. I'm doing all the research right now. And he's like, well, we'd like to help you out with that and as like you are kidding me. And he's like, no, whatever you need, figure it out, we'll help you. And so from that point I was like, I had already been complaining to people for two weeks and making sure that I was in the right.
Nobody was going to disagree, that I don't deserve coffee when I want coffee. And I was getting a lot of really good feedback. I could have been because I was a little aggressive, but I knew that I was right. So I got in touch with Lurie's and I said, listen, I have this offer from Keurig and wouldn't it be great if we could get a machine on all the floors? And they're like, hold on there we are a huge hospital and we got to figure out if we can do it. And I, I got a few notes and this is when you learn that no is just the wrong answer. And if you keep complaining and keep talking about it, somebody is going to hear you and say, Oh well why can't we just try that on one floor? Because I had already gotten it down to that.
My big dream had come in like how about a pilot program for three months? Can you give me that? And they're like, I don't know why we can't. That's a really reasonable thought and let me explore what we can do. So when this was all happening, it was my son's 13th year and in September I knew we were having a bar mitzvah. So in my mind, without telling a lot of people when I was up to, I was like, Oh, that would be a great way to kick off Aaron's bar mitzvah. You know, if people want to give money, we've always given money to make a wish. When I think Aaron was five, so Eli must've been around 11 we went on a Make-A-Wish trip and it was to this day, the best trip we've ever taken, I'm very grateful for that organization. And at every birthday for Aaron, we've always asked people to donate to make a wish.
And I thought they've gotten enough money from us. We've paid that trip back. We sent a few kids on their own. We are all good with them. Let's see if we can switch directions and put our energies into this project. And so I had all of this formulating in my head and I kept getting no. So there were a few more phone calls and then one woman, Barbara Burke from the founders board. I think at Lori's called me up to give me the final no, and I kept her on the phone and she's like, I'm going to find out why we can't do this. I have a Keurig machine in my own house. It's very easy. I'm like, I know. So what's more? He got on board, it moved really quickly and we were able to set up a website through Lurie's about what we were doing and we were able to get it all done before labor day weekend in September and at his bar mitzvah I got up and told people what I was going to do and all of a sudden people were donating and people were sending me pictures of how they were using their mugs because everybody got a mug at the bar mitzvah and they'd fill up with pants or they'd show me their copy and I had an enormous help from, she's down my social media coordinator, but she's been Aaron's babysitters since he was one years old.
She just said, we should put it online and this is a social media thing and you need an Instagram and a Facebook and a Twitter. And I'm like, I don't know how to use any of that. She's like, I'll teach you. And from that moment on, we've really snowballed when I was first formulating, and in my mind, people are going to give you money to give coffee to people. It's not for research or it's not for, you know, blankets or something for the kids. And I'm like, I'm done with the kids. Kids get tons of stuff. I don't think people realize that it's the whole family is part of the experience. And if you can bring a little comfort to the family in the smallest of ways, it's gonna make the biggest difference. And I always felt like if we could help the families, we were helping the child because you create less stress, you create a little peace of mind and it makes you better at navigating all of this unfamiliar stuff.
All of the machines. Your child is all of a sudden hooked up to the medicine that I V bags, the noises in the hospital, the family that wants to desperately do something for you and they don't know what to do. You know, these are all ways you can help the whole community that supports you to make it a little easier. And I, I think it's a great idea and I just wish, you know, we can take it to a second floor and then a third floor and eventually as we continue, we can create grants for smaller hospitals. Set could use a Keurig machine, maybe don't know, pick you because they aren't big enough to have a pediatric intensive care unit, but maybe in their emergency room, you know, maybe we can spread a little bit of the comfort and help a lot of people. It doesn't take much.
And I think the simplicity of it is really what's people are like, wait, what? You're just going to give them some coffee? I'm like, yeah, yes please. I think that people don't realize one in the hospital, it's expensive. So let's say that all of these years, until about two years ago, we got a Illinois medical waiver. So it helps us with everything. Like the 20% the deductibles, it goes through our insurance and then it goes to this waiver program and they help pay for it. So for the first 12 years we paid to have our house redone so we could have a wheelchair in the house. We had paid for diapers for 12 years. Those are big diapers and they're not like little Pampers. You can run to the store for wipes, gloves, you know, Chuck's for the bed, we have a really nice laundry machine because we do it all the time.
We've spent all this money that people think, Oh that's like everyday kinds of stuff. But I don't think everybody has like a $700 a month bill for one medicine every month. Right. And they think, Oh well you have insurance and that's with insurance. So it's like paying for college but not saving for college for all of those years. And you're trying to save and you're trying to move money around. And that is stressful on its own. So these people that find themselves in the hospital in an emergency that we're counting on that. Like I been doing this for a long time. I know that when I used to go into the hospital and I got up $536,000 bill, I needed to pay 10% of that to the hospital. And that's a lot of money. So for years I was on a constant payment plan and I think that people, one, they need to know about those payment plans.
Any hospital will take a payment plan and you should ask about it and get on it and only give them what you can afford. If anything anybody hears today, that should be it. But it's stressful. Money is stressful, sickness is stressful. So when you have those things mixed together and you find yourself in a hospital and you're like, can I really afford a $4 cup of coffee at Starbucks down the way? Maybe not. Maybe I could get a free cup of coffee down the hall and be back in time to talk to the nutritionist or the doctor. That's coming around. And if I'm gone for a couple of seconds, the nurse can say, Oh, she just went to get a cup of coffee. She'll be back in moments instead of finding out where the doctor is on the floor and what time rounds usually are, and then to rush out, get your copy and something to eat and then get back to your room so you don't miss anything.
It's a whole different like universe inside a hospital. And it's even more difficult and unnerving to be in a PICU because a pediatric intensive care unit, just like when adults go to an intensive care unit, things are not good. So the best day, and I've said this before in the PICU, is the day you leave the pick queue and you want to leave the PICU. So it's just a different way of thinking of it and really simplifying it and saying, we appreciate what you're going through. We been there, we're a family that has experienced it, and we want you to know that it's going to be okay. It might take a little while. The journey is a long one and you just gotta stick with it.
Passionistas: Is there one lesson you've learned so far on this journey that sticks with you the most? If you have a good idea and you hear no a lot, that you should take a risk and just keep trying for yes.
Carolyn: I think that's a really big lesson to learn and that these things take time. You know, it takes a long time for somebody to say yes and it's worth it at the end when you hear yes, just don't give up. It's not anything great, but it's hard to do in practice is to not give up and just not take no for an answer. Because when you don't stop, there's going to be a door that opens up and somebody's gonna say, Hey, I'm there with you. And I think that's important to keep in mind and, and learn about yourself. Stick to it. If miss, I don't know. It's been a good journey. Hard, difficult, sad, glorious, fun. I mean all of those things. But it's still a journey. And at the end, we're all going to meet our end and the Aaron's going to meet it in its own time surrounded by people he love living a life that has been glorious because the people around him are glorious. What more could you ask for really? Right. So it's all gonna be good in the end.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Carolyn Koppel. To learn more about her mission, to provide 24/7 access to free Keurig coffee to the family, friends and caregivers of patients in the pediatric intensive care unit of Ann and Robert Laurie's Children's Hospital of Chicago, visit AaronsCoffeeCorner.org. And be sure to subscribe to the passion Eustace project podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests.