we are as a community university of washington's communication leadership master's program our program very much explores topic in communication and leadership practices within the us and around the globe with a particular emphasis on trying to understand emerging trends and issues and how to respond to them using tools at our disposal in communication and leadership practices uh connects which is the event you're joining hopefully for the duration of the next uh three days is our public event every year that we put together you will be joined by students of our graduate students of our program alumni and faculty as well as professionals from all around the u.s and around the globe who join us to explore the topic we identify each year and just to give you a sense of how we identify these topics we see this annual learning event as a platform for us to explore a pressing issue of our time and to hear from those who are tackling with the issue directly to learn from them we want to make them public these conversations so that these really emerging and important topics are accessible to all wherever you may be and we have a chance again to learn collaborate understand and respond together we see this as a part of the public mission of our graduate program and we're again very thankful for all of you making time to learn with us in terms of the format of today i will give you an overview in just a few minutes about the agenda but i just want to uh share with you that we designed this event very much as we do our classes in our graduate program so some of you may be in those classes or have taken classes with us but some of you are just meeting with us today just uh sit back and get ready for a engaging critical and thoughtful learning environment as you would um in a graduate program and be again very much structured it to be interactive and uh filled with information both practical as well as that will situate us around the topic and give us some introduction to it as well uh i am a kenya shin i am the director of the communication leadership program i teach classes around leadership as well as around communication issues and responsive classes that prepare our students to tackle our world as it changes in our in front of our eyes at any given moment um i'm particularly interested in this topic as someone who led an organization and who navigated this particular crisis with the pandemic or and many crisis before that as well uh with the really thoughtful community that wants to understand that wants to build practice not just for the moment but for the future as well but like many of you too this has been a challenging moment for myself as well uh we've been navigating at this moment not only understanding the novelties that were put forth for us for us to understand for us to respond to but to do that in a moment where we actually didn't have a lot of time to structure our work and to create time many of us are actually doing multiple responsibilities and this has been a very interesting moment for for us and for me personally uh to think about how to create next generation practices in a graduate program and with organizations that we partner with at our program around well-being but as well as also communication around health as well which will be a topic also will be start exploring today and continue exploring uh tomorrow before i dive into uh today's topic and give you an overview of today's learning i wanna uh also uh introduce uh my colleague and my alex hi there i'm alex stonehill um i'm communication leadership's head of creative strategy and i'll be uh supporting akin today and then um leading the conversation tomorrow about uh communication and leadership during a health crisis um part of my work is to develop applied learning opportunities for our students with partners and i've spent the camp the pandemic working closely with student teams on public health campaigns with partners like the department of health i'm also married to a newly minted licensed mental health counselor so i have a newfound and growing enthusiasm for thinking about uh the intersection between mental and physical health and well-being in the workplace as well so i'm very excited for today's conversation and now that ken and i have introduced ourselves we'd love to encourage everybody who's joined to introduce yourself in the chat um you can put your name where you're joining us from uh anything about what you do for work if you'd like to and then um a real short micro prompt just uh tell us a little bit about one word that comes to mind when you think about the idea of well-being at work um so it could be communication or coffee or i think for me it would probably be frequent naps but any word that that comes to mind when you think about communication uh sorry when you think about well-being at work um and as you're doing that i'll pass it back to akin to tell us a little bit more about what we'll be talking about today so let me overview uh the agenda for today for all of you so uh we can get a sense of it and i'll be doing that uh throughout too uh so um today uh we are going to involve uh the conversation with very important speakers who are doing really interesting work in uh well-being as it relates to their sectors and uh you will get to hear from them um uh so we're going to start with our speaker presentations and you're seeing the overview on your screen now i'll also introduce each of these questions just as in terms of the logic each of our speakers are addressing a portion of our conversation with a key question and a key topic and i will involve them in a conversation to explore that so that we have a breadth of information covered as it relates to emerging well-being practices and technologies uh emits us our non-profit leaders emerging the tech company founders advocates of uh wellbeing practices at work as well as faculty of our program as well um after you hear from the speakers uh we are going to have a short q a and then after that we have a breakout room discussion where you can you have a chance optional of course if you have the time to connect with those who are joining you at this event as audience and reflect on today's learning and also identify particular ways maybe you can apply today's learning to your places of work i want to encourage you all and i'll do that throughout the conversation as well that as i'm speaking and having a conversation with the speakers please feel free to use the chat as a platform to react to what you're hearing so this could be your thoughts as well as sharing your questions i will try to integrate some of your questions so if you want to me to clarify something or ask something more to the speakers you can share it at chat but if we are not able to get your questions during the speaker part we'll also incorporate them to you during the audience q a portion as well so i just hope that you can all be engaged during the chat with your questions thoughts and comments uh as you're part of this learning experience as well um during the breakout room sessions i said we'll reflect and uh we will reflect because upon completion of this learning experience for the next two days and of course you're all welcome also to our keynote event while we focus on uh listening uh practices particularly at this moment um you will get to receive a uw badge so i'll turn it over to alex to tell us a little bit about uh the badge possibility that you can get with this event yeah fantastic so this is our second year offering a badge as part of connects um and it's a fantastic way to um you know go beyond just the learnings that you get out of attending the event to sharing that with the world um so by attending today's session and tomorrow session and then completing a very short reflection on the things that you learned in those two sessions and how you might apply them to your future work you'll be able to earn a uw-branded badge in health and wellness communication that we've put together in partnership with uw continuum college and badger so we'll be sharing more details about that throughout the session and especially when we go into breakout rooms later so that you can really use that as preparation to make that reflection kind of as smooth as easy as possible after the fact um as we can mention that the session is being recorded um so you can always go back to that for for notes or revisit it later or hopefully share it with other folks who weren't able to join um i also wanted to mention that the event is being live captioned so uh please do take advantage of the captioning services if that is helpful to you um and i'm seeing some really fantastic introductions thank you all for introducing yourself and uh for your um free association with uh well-being at work or seeing some fantastic things uh mindfulness um a lot of emphasis on breaks being important which is fantastic because we'll be talking about specific intentional tools to facilitate uh work breaks um and a lot of the the very relational elements that we think about in in our program connection community human-centered um these are great thank you all for joining and um i think we're ready to get started with our first speaker right again anything you want yeah exactly so i think very much what you're sharing uh you know i i saw also uh our speakers uh sharing their thoughts about how the one word that comes to mind i know a grant shared much needed uh when thinking about this topic when we're talking about well-being as well as movement and uh from melissa and we'll hear and uh think with them throughout the day so uh we have a fantastic line of a lineup of speakers you're seeing them on your screen right now um and i will introduce them all individually as we're engaging with them but i want to thank all of them again for joining us uh today we're going to learn from them both definitions and as well as applied practices um they're all very much advocates of four well-being at work uh across their spectrums and across their work um so i want to start with our first speaker today um lara bradshaw and lara bradshaw is a faculty of uh our program and uh she is uh going to be talking to us about a little bit about what well-being and wellness means and and share the history behind the ideas well i wanted to really engage today as we were curating speakers for today laura because her class in our program around wellness narratives very much situates what we're talking about in this moment across a long uh media history of how we understand and approach the core topic uh we are exploring today and i particularly want to ask uh lara today and ask laura to help us define start our session with maybe common definitions as well as maybe situating this moment on a broader history and maybe collectively also i have a chance to identify what comes next particularly acknowledging the pandemic as well so hello lara uh good to have you here today hi i'm i'm really happy to be here and excited for to hear the other panelists as well uh and yeah to start to answer your question uh or a series of questions uh you know i we taught i taught a course uh in the fall right about wellness wellness narratives and i think one of the main you know one of the kind of the roots for the course was really adding more context to wellness uh because i think right to a ken's point that wellness actually has it has a long history the course itself was more centered more u.s specific and we you know we explored wellness more i would say in the last 120 years or so and one of the kind of roots we used a number of texts to explore it in authors to look at that but one of the key i would say components to wellness we were looking at a historian named tj jackson lears and he right he writes about wellness or at least this time period and the turn of the 20th century as the therapeutic ethos and you know what what's interesting about that is that basically he was looking at this intersection that was happening between basically advertising religion business and basically how there was a consumer turn towards how we think about how we relate to products and so you know suddenly you saw this language around you know soap or um you know food like different sorts of foods or you know different sorts of technologies right where you know if you used to write a particular soap it would help beautify your skin um but it was this kind of this narrative right that was emerging around consumer objects and products basically helping you kind of achieve this full realization of the self and you know it's an important point because it we see this right if we look especially from a u.s perspective and there's a there's a
global perspective to this as well but if you look at it from a u.s perspective this narrative is very much embedded in a lot a lot of our products and a lot of our i think conscience and unconscious thinking around wellness but you know to get at definitions you know there are you know depending on who you speak to and point which point of view you're going with for wellness you know there's there's different definitions um you know with a world health organization right in 1948 as part of their definition of health they actually used well-being as as part of the terminology even defining health uh and you know you could look at the cdc as well right they actually you know they look more at well-being uh you know especially from a public health policy lens right and really trying to understand the social connections right and and housing and all these different impacts right to well-being you also could look right at uh you know there's a i think it was in 2014 there's a the global uh global wellness institute has and they're a non-profit right that has different definitions that they work with but they look at it more holistically right as preventative but also um very uh inner interconnected right looking at mental emotional physical uh basically all these different areas spiritual areas of wellness and they see it as something you know that's connected to the individual right the person right can make individual changes but it's preventative as well and there is a policy component so there's i i think to say that wellness and well-being can become very interchangeable and it's a it can be kind of a slippery term but you know i i think especially in this kind of modern moment that we're in i again it depends who you talk to but i think from a popular culture lens right you might there's a tendency to think of wellness uh in a particular light right as more but maybe potentially consumer oriented right have a very i think in the class what immediately came to mind was like goop or you know like um drinking green smoothies or you know doing yoga and not to dismiss those things but right that there's a certain connotation right that emerges when people talk about wellness and maybe to expand on that exactly right the wellness and well-being you mentioned they can be used interchangeably uh could be contextual because we have a particular imagination and maybe we can start with that uh and where that comes from you started talking a little bit about group and uh smoothies and uh those types of things media representation and how we talk about things very much structure our expectations and our imagination um but one of the things that i've been exploring is um and i've been thinking about is the kind of lack of shared uh terms around well-being but but perhaps an origin of that is in media representation so can you share with us very quickly a little bit about before we move on to wellness and well-being maybe in the work context about the types of kind of consistent representations that gave us an idea of what we should expect from wellness and well-being across medium yeah that's such an important point in question you know and i think again when we talk about wellness right it's it and and coming from like a media communications kind of angle it's the representation piece and technology piece is so critical uh you know i think you know one of the points that we you know in the course that we talked about right we looked at turn of the century 20th century as far as you know understanding these intersections with advertising and image like image representation of health um you know another important point if we're gonna look especially if we go more to you know if we get into mid-century right invention of television um especially as we kind of get into you know the 1970s 80s 90s right there you see this interesting emergence with television and wellness um and i think specifically through like the talk show format and then later on right more 90s to early 2000s reality tv uh and as a part of i think a really important point to consider with wellness and the way we we talk about it now it's become so ubiquitous in our culture and and kind of the narrative is thinking about you know with the talk show format it really introduced audiences to a therapeutic language right how to talk about the self how how to talk about trauma how you know and you think about you know if you watch older you know oprah winfrey you know oprah shows and from the her early days and even later on too right it the the guests right that they were featured very much centered on kind of this domestic right this inner domestic conflict that suddenly became right opened up to a much larger audience millions of people um where there was a more of a shared understanding of uh different family problems and complexities around you know childhood uh and so there was this language that emerged and and you you see that with you know the talk show format in particular becoming a way to address it and a way for audiences to maybe if they couldn't seek therapy right themselves they could watch it right they could participate in that sort of way uh you think about it with reality tv as well right and there's so many shows that have that have really emerged um and it you know it's one of those things when when i worked with the students within this class you know i think there's a tendency not to really think of reality tv as like a you know as influencing our lives right because it's uh you know lots of people watch it you know and it's just you know and sometimes it's often thought of this thing that's on in the background right it's like junk or you know but you think about the wellness narrative right and how much it's proliferated and kind of is in underneath the surface of so much of our thinking and culture uh you know you there's you know just about you know for a while anyways just about every other reality tv show have felt like it was right trying to solve some sort of problem around mental physical emotional health right rather that was survivor right and you are not survivored by them the biggest loser survivor too but the biggest loser in particular right where you know you're actually trying to basically change your body size and right and the whole point was it's a competition show but the whole point right was to kind of reach a different self a better self right through the loss of this excess body weight and you could say that also about you know various shows about you know clutter in the home right getting rid of these objects that were in the you know they were an obstacle in the way of living your best life and we still see that now with um you know the magic of tidying up and and these narratives still proliferate but this i would say more generally and what you know other researchers and scholars have talked about with the makeover trope it's so ingrained and how we think through this kind of re like coming to the other side of things right becoming better uh and so i i think from a media representation lens that's that's something really critical to think about and as we're evolving into it i want to bring in also the lengths of the wellness and wellbeing practices at work i i would love to hear your perspective because you're talking a little bit about kind of like our personal lives and this history around you know um maybe attaining a better life or some ideal type of life being represented and people are thinking about that as a way of kind of a goal an achievement etc across again different types of media but what about well-being and wellness as we understand it as it relates to this history at work how is that understood and how does that kind of play in in this history yeah that's a great question you know and i i'm excited to hear the other panelists take on this because i you know the the question i mean the obvious one right the elephant in the room around burnout right uh is a big big piece to to thinking about wellness in the workplace and of course burnout was with us way you know much before the pandemic started uh but i think you know it we look at the time that we're in right um especially with you know you have you have this culture narrative that's emerging around burnout right every basically every other media headline uh is highlighting this and you know and and rightfully so too i mean i think there's there's a lot to think through with it um but also you know you have a discussion around the great resignation right or you know what was it in december it was like 4.3 million people left their jobs or it was something right pretty pretty high as far as numbers but i think you know that you have you have these elements that are emerging right in which people there's a shift happening in the way people view work and how they want to live their lives uh and then you know the last couple years especially have made more clear or at least i think depending right and there's there's disproportionate impact right on different communities but it's made clear right that uh what how you know how work has impacted us and how uh it might not necessarily be balanced but it's more you know you we've seen you know the number of women having to leave the workforce right for child care responsibilities or how it falls right on on to a lot of a lot of women and men too but you you suddenly see right this uh larger conversation happening around caretaking right which which is part of wellness but doesn't necessarily get thought as part of wellness uh and and health as well uh where you know you have you have people really trying to better answer uh you know how how do i live a life in which work isn't everything uh which you know i'm not spending you know and so many of the earlier narratives around work you know you think about in the 1980s and 90s in particular especially in the us like more of a you know i i think about like working you know 80 hours a week right like or this narrative around overwork busyness uh and how right that's attached to being better right it's being seen as better or at least for a while uh and i think what we're what we're seeing now is this challenge to this narrative right that and it actually people are exhausted and it's hard you know and i think burnout becomes a tricky term too because it's you know it it it's not exactly a medical term but it's it's recognized right as occupational um and but yet people have a number of of medical related conditions you know connected to this and you see the rise of mental health discussions and and physical ailments but i think you know it's a larger collective drive to reassess these older narratives around overwork and not in and really balance and and and values too in which those that narrative around more culture is changing and people are really wanting it to change exactly and we'll we'll be exploring also today as we move forward too kind of types of systemic change needed across organizations to make that happen and as we're in this moment navigating with uh the pandemic um particularly rethinking as you're saying you know rethinking work and what's acceptable how are we responding to this moment the disproportionate impact that has based on who you are what you have to do um we also are correct me if i'm wrong seeing a proliferation again of consumer products uh and also uh technologies that try to remedy uh this uh new moment um so i would love to hear a little bit about your thoughts around uh technology technological responses uh to kind of uh try to remedy again where you know we started with tv we're at a moment of big dock social media and a variety of emerging technology tools that directly uh try to have solutions for wellness and well-being problems so i would love to hear your thoughts on this moment and how it relates to those yeah yeah that's a great great question too you know and i think we're we're in the midst of it trying to figure it out right um and that's that's what makes this moment so fascinating you know on many many levels we you know we have this technological emerging tech kind of expansion happening right as as we go through a pandemic as we write as we have confront kind of these changing narratives around work and our lives i think that the technological question is really really important and you know we and it hasn't been that long right as far as you know you think about just social media how that's impacted us and that's really only been in the last you know 20 years or less then where there's been this shift in in the way that we think about connecting with people the way we make friends what we consider community uh you know and and how to reflect that and show that um i i think you know it's interesting to consider you know with i think about with the crash in 2008 right and uh basically after that you had like pinterest or you had different you know companies emerging right we're very much centered on really trying to create you know basically have a a way for people to kind of curate their lives uh and you know i think there's this narrative right around curating your life and showing it in the best possible light right which you could argue right this is very much centered in the narrative around instagram and and other social media right but i do think there's you know the the the conversation around around technology and how it's impacting us uh it's very much you know i think people are finding ways in which there's a necessity in using the technology right to stay connected and form communities and to your point about you know i think if you look especially on instagram and tick tock too there's uh just a pl like there's so many wellness narratives and and curators and and and really content producers that are engaging with the platform and often there's a number of you know a number of people who are challenging right who have accounts that are challenging the way we think about wellness and technology even using these platforms but you know the bigger questions you know around you know how how do we uh continue on especially in light of you know i think the fatigue around um you know around apps and productivity uh you know the conversations around zoom fatigue right and the studies that came out from stanford about how it you know hurts your eyes and and here we're on it but but then right but it's become part of we've have to grapple with this uh and and i i there isn't exactly i think we're figuring out the science and we're figuring out what you know what going forward makes sense for as far as how how technology impacts us and how we how we engage with it uh and how we really form community as well exactly i mean from the way you're describing it we're defining what that better life or that ideal life is at the moment and uh and we've had a lot of certain things less of other things uh i'm thinking about a lot of zoom in the past year and less social interaction and that's ebbing and flowing both at work and in our personal lives too so we perhaps ourselves don't have a clear description of what we exactly need or how how we can balance that as well um i want to pause there for a minute because again i want to encourage you all to share your again thoughts and i'm seeing some of them pop up as well as your questions uh but um we'll again incorporate them some at the end but i want to turn over to alex to see if you want to share a question or if you have a question uh for lara at this point yeah i'm seeing some great uh folks chiming in and referencing what you're um what you're saying about there being more wellness narratives you know through these technology tools that we sometimes think of as being detrimental to mental health and wellness um so we could see that the culture shifting there and that's certainly something that uh came up for a lot of people um yeah and i'm curious uh because i know that you mentioned the great resignation and that is definitely on a lot of people's minds but both as as workers or or non-workers and um for for employees and for companies um and and i'm wondering do you think that that is a symptom of people being more aware of well-being um and valuing their well-being more and kind of understanding more you know what what is good for them or not um or do you think of it as more as um you know the conditions of people's work perhaps becoming worse or maybe maybe it's both how do you think about that i i absolutely think it's both you know i do think there is a much there is a lot more awareness now as far as work culture as far as you know i think there's a there's been and it's very recent too but i i think there is a shifting narrative around you know what people value right and and and conversations more publicly happening around around systems and institutions and you know i think you know not necessarily dismantling certain certain ones but i think it's a conversation around is this working like the way our you know our in the us anyways right is the way our health care system is set up is this working like the where the way our caretaking system is set up is this really working and this gets part of the conversation it has to become part of the conversation on wellness right because i think again this is how people are thinking through how it impacts their lives uh but also to the point of working conditions right we're seeing a lot more uh in general like with the pandemic again it made very clear at least you know for frontline workers and right and people really uh having to uh really you know be be on the front lines as far as you know the last couple years um really managing uh the workload and public interface uh you know it's brought to light as far as you know what you know what is fairness right now as far as working conditions and how do people navigate that uh but i i do think they're it's a it's a really good conversation to have because i i think both conversations are going on as we speak thank you lara i mean that's such a thoughtful overview and i thank you again for introducing us to this topic again uh for those of you i am still also seeing a lot of reactions in the chat lara we'll come back to you at the end in the q a and we'll gather more questions again feel free to share your questions at any time they could be directed to one of our guest speakers or all of them as they're kind of navigating intersecting topics too and at this point uh i want to transition to our next guest speaker who very much actually ties into where we just left off with lara and talking about systemic kind of changes uh that we need in order to ensure that the types of practices that we adopt can be shared across types of organizations so victoria santos will talk to us a little bit about um kind of this notion of systemic change around practices and how to adopt them uh across organizations as well and i uh actually particularly thought of uh victoria's work because and just as a side note we've uh chatted with a number of our community members in our program in our graduate program but across the industry as well about inspiring figures who are trying to change systems and do really uh cutting edge work in this and victoria's name immediately came up her work at uh bypoc executive directors coalition of washington uh is very much a a kind of a call to action around wellness and wellness practices um and just as a side note uh uh the bipark executive directors coalition of uh washington brings together uh a variety of bipark leaders um over 200 if i'm not mistaken non-profits in washington area to talk collectively and to find solutions collectively and to create an agenda and advocacy around this very topic uh around not only how we ensure well-being and wellness for different constituents but how to create it in a systemic and sustainable way so i want to welcome you victoria thank you very much uh for joining us today thank you so much and thank you for inviting me to um to be part of this uh conversation um as you mentioned i'm here representing the bypakid coalition of washington state and i just want to tell you a little bit how that started because it's really so much rooted in this conversation and i want to thank laura also for highlighting some of the things that she spoke on and i want to expand on some of those things because um you know we're we're the moment has been so perfect to to launch um the bai [ __ ] coalition we before the pandemic happened and before a lot of the killings of our black and brown folks and particularly george floyd and others um before that happened we've already seen that a lot of executive directors and senior leaders in the nonprofit sectors were just leaving the sector and when we started asking and sharing with our colleagues like why is this happening we were finding that a lot of the the directors were um overwhelmed burned out um you know doing substances to try to like you know manage um that their families were falling apart a lot of you know breakups and we were just really getting concerned uh for our sector so a group of us came together and said let's let's have a meeting let's call people together let's have this conversation and we were just getting ready to launch a retreat um with washington nonprofit support and what ended up happening was that the pandemic hit and then also all the killings were happening and we said okay we can't wait we need to call an emergency meeting and when we call the emergency committee over 150 uh leaders responded and that's when we then came together and we did it on zoom and we asked you know what are the priorities what do you want us to um to advocate for collectively and there were two primary issues that came up one is the under resource of bipolar you know and not having the resources that they need in order to continue to deal with the pervasive um and structural racism and dealing with all of the issues that we were dealing that would continue to be dealing with right that was one so advocate for more resources to come to bipocaly nonprofits and then the second piece was to really look at the issues of wellness and well-being and looking at how the this whole um leadership structure in the non-profit well in general it's across the board right because the way that the leadership structures have been functioning is still very much from a single person as the the charismatic leader right and then that takes all the glory and all the bonus i mean when you have a leader that's getting and this is not in the nonprofit sector but in the corporate world when they're getting millions and millions of dollars for bonuses and then you have you know someone that's working at like making the actual product that's getting you know arguing whether they should get even fifteen dollars an hour you know that's that's what we're talking about right so for them you say okay let's advocate for more resources and then there's also advocate for wellness and well-being and and to that end that's what we've been doing for the past two years is really bringing bringing the community together having those conversations bringing in consultants doing workshops and really trying to figure out how we're going to change the narrative because we need to change the narrative and this is where communication is so key because you know it helps to shape how people perceive their work and how people perceive their you know their role in it right so we have to change the narrative and then we all we have to create a movement around this and that's what we've been doing and it's such an impactful movement that's not only trying to again create the conditions for these leaders but also as you were just saying change the conversation a little bit as well so um i just to highlight a little bit um and i want to then uh maybe focus a little bit of the programs that you're igniting at your organization as well that are i think applicable across sector uh too because they're trying to solve systemic problems is um can you talk a little bit about i mean i i really appreciated you kind of situating this work and this is really important for all of us to understand that the types of kind of well-being concerns and wellness concerns for communities across but particularly for communities of color preceded the pandemic heightened there has been a lot of trauma and a lot of wrong going on in our world uh in in terms of kind of creating an equitable and a system that acknowledges this uh kind of uh this diversity of experience that and that's not the same for everyone um so i really appreciate that but can you talk a little bit about i know you've dived deep in with these leaders and you started talking a little bit about kind of the uh systemic shortcomings that stand stood in the way of their wellness and well-being uh can you elaborate a little bit for us um what those were you know uh what type of things were missing or what type of kind of systemic short comings there are now uh that they're navigating well you know laura touched a little bit on on this piece around for instance rest being earned right not deserved right so there's this this this piece of like oh i have to work i mean even the way we have um vacation time i mean the amount of vacation that most people get in the nonprofit sector is so little right that this doesn't give you enough time to even get there get some rest or if you're going to go somewhere if you're not going to do a steak vacation get somewhere by the time you get there you spend a little bit of time and then you have to go right back and it's very little you don't have enough time to decompress right so and then the other piece is that if you you have to work really really hard in order to prove yourself like there isn't this there isn't this and this that continues directly to burnout right it's like constantly being surveillance constantly being watched constantly being um rated in a way that's not about how we're gonna improve your uh your work how can we bring you tools and resources so that you can thrive in in in the work that you want to do but it's more about like penalizing right say still taking a penalistic approach in terms of rather rather than having an assessment that's actually working for both the organization and the individual it's also um not caring about families right it's like really it's about the bottom line the bottom line of the organization rather than thinking about oh you have to take care of your grandmother or you have to take care of your mother or you are the sole caregiver for your family or you have you just had two children we have had this this battle around family leave in this country because it's not taking care of the family it's it's has actually helps to disintegrate the family so then we ask about like oh why do we have such a high level of divorce for those people who who tend to get married you know not me but uh or or um you know why do we have people is so many people hospitalized how much why do we have so many people suffering from high blood pressure why do we have so many people suffering from alcoholism all of these are symptoms of a society that is not valuing family children elders right so this is extremely impactful for black and brown folks and people who are you know abide by communities because we tend to be you know very family oriented not that everybody isn't but we are very family oriented you know and and in the stressor continues not just from the individual but it continues on to the family right so we're trying to deal with that we're trying to help people not realize that and by changing the narratives i mean like realize that actually to be in a family unit and into value family and to really help to keep work in proportion as something that you do not something that you are right because a lot of time what we tend to do is that we fuse our identity with the work and therefore then the work becomes everything and then when we lose like in this pandemic how many people lost their jobs when we lose the job then we become our mental health issues increases because we see ourselves as a function of that work rather than as an individual that's here to fulfill a particular role of a particular purpose in life right i don't want to get too deviated from that but that's some of the things that we're trying to um to work through to have people think in way of wellness also not from an extractive capitalist way i mean like yeah goop i hear is a great product right but let's talk about what are some of the products and some of the things that we actually created from our own it's our own heritage our own family background our own experience that doesn't take you know fifty dollars for a little container of eight ounce or something right so so let's let's talk about like maybe not living in an extractive society how can we grow i personally come from a family of people who are healers and herbalists you know where did i you know i'm i'm trying to recoup that the history right can we what plans can i grow and actually um alexander you mentioned that you know reagan jackson from uh young women empowered you know and um young women in power is amazing in the in what they're trying to do with young people in that they're they're growing they're growing food in a farm they're teaching young people how to grow food they're teaching them also how to grow herbs because we can grow a lot of herbs and things ourselves to be able to use that for our own health and well-being so we're trying to say okay we don't need to be extractive let's not talk about uh rest being earned risk anyone can have rest so we give grants small grants called respite grants for people to take time off and i'm going to talk later more about what we're doing with our sabbatical program we um overwork is not a virtue and we're um talking about taking care of families so those are some of the ways that we're trying to disrupt the system and it's so much about the system right i mean paid family leave is a is a thing missing in the u.s systemically it's based on who employs you whereas uh globally actually there are different versions of how it's approached that can be used as examples of how to approach and how to put families first or how to kind of prioritize that that's not that's not contingent on where you work right and i think that's also an important thing to acknowledge now to the equity piece if it's not systemic you're very much at the mercy of the organization you work for or who you work for and who you who you work for impact there's not a common shared experience around kind of say family paid leave or other practices around rest and well-being some places of work may be good for that and we every year see kind of top 15 20 places to work but majority of the people don't work for those organizations and it really depends what they do at that organization in terms of what they have access to as well so thank you very much for you know highlighting uh this at this high level um but i actually you started gesturing towards it and i really want to give this example because uh the programs that you're creating are very much about again pushing for some systemic change but also creating changing the narrative as well i know about the respite and rest program you mentioned it quickly um so i would love to hear a little bit about what you're doing in the respite and rest program as well as your ongoing work on sabbaticals uh and advocacy around that as well could you share a little bit more with us sure um let me contextualize those two things in terms of our partnership with the philanthropic sectors um what's happened when we you know after we put in the call um to the the bypass we also put in wrote a letter and had um you know calling on the philanthropic sector to actually release the amount of money funding that they give from five percent to ten percent five percent is the legal uh requirements that most foundations have in terms of what they can give to non-profits so we ask for them to increase that to 10 then we also say rather than just giving like year funding please make a multi-year funding and so you know anything from three to five-year funding for nonprofits and uh and then we said you know and make it operational general operation rather than just um uh you know specific things so to that end we've had several partners that have signed a letter we have about 11 partners that have signed a letter and we have these meetings with these funders to talk about how to get other people in other foundations to sign on to this call this open letter in addition to that we said you know let's start making head waves to give funding to people to just take some time off to take a rest they don't have to go through major hoop jumping they don't have to like write major reports you need it we'll give it to you so the sadderberg foundation stepped up and gave us uh gave us some money and we opened it up to the bypades and immediately people responded like i can use this and it was so quick that we actually had to like close down the the applications and uh and and then just just put put things on a holding pattern because there was just such a need and what people were saying was just it it just makes me want to cry a little bit because it wasn't a lot of money we were just giving two thousand dollars okay but what people were saying they were going to do with this just like blew my mind like this is one of the eds who um who started an organization to help women who are dealing with breast cancer because she herself had breast cancer she was going to take a vacation she was going to take a vacation and go and visit her family that she hadn't seen in like two years right because of the pandemic there was other people who like just saying i'm just going to stay home and write i feel like i need to write a story that's inside of me that needs to come out i'm just going to take some time and write that story and it was everything from like that from you know one end to the other so we saw that that can make a tremendous difference at the same time we knew that a week was not enough right a week is not enough so we decided to um to start a sabbatical program and the sabbatical program is basically um it's in a pilot year right now we're raising 1.2 million dollars and that 1.2 million dollars is going to be divvied up into 20 organization each of them will receive 60 000 and the 60 thousand dollars is to provide three months completely place about pay sabbatical for either a senior leader or an executive director to take some time and and take a break we say you know ideally it's through between three months and six months but we did the research and three months sometimes it's too much and at that point the person is like you know i think it's time to go somewhere else you know and by that point the team is so functioning probably well without them it's okay right and if that's what happened that's what happened right that's that's a good thing but um for three months it's enough time for the person to decompress to stop checking their email to stop trying to call people to try trying to find like go through the whole thing away they can do it without me you know feeling and then be able to settle into themselves and then let things emerge let their creativity come back because actually what we found is that sabbaticals are really healthy not just for the individual it's actually also really healthy for the organizations there's a lot of leaders that have had that their inspiration is kind of like gone because they're just in crisis survival mode you know so you give them some time their creativity comes back and then they're ready to come back refresh and continue to work on the organization but what we're also found is that the sabbatical is actually really healthy for the organization because if we do it right if we get a consultant in there to work with the the staff the the roles and responsibility of that senior leader gets distributed to the other staff members okay and that's other than if you give some put some money in there for the staff members to get some support and get a stipend and maybe get some coaching when that person comes back they don't come back into the same role they come back and they look to see what people like of the roles that the new roles they assume what they don't like what comes back to them what stays away and there is a different empower sharing that happens in the organization so if we could use sabbatical as a way of helping to redistribute the roles and as a way of increasing capacity in the organization is actually a win-win for everyone exactly i mean this is really important i really appreciate you doing this work and sharing this work because this is such an important model i think rest relaxation you mean sometimes creativity without systemic structures in place uh is a luxury uh so so being able to do kind of take the time to reflect even thinking about what's next but also finding yourself in a situation where rest is appreciated not frowned upon i mean go going back to uh lara's early conversation or your fantastic examples one question i want to leave with for now because we'll come back to that the final q a uh is um we're getting a lot of questions about kind of thinking about this work that you're doing with so many organizations and how we can encourage this type of work in our own workplaces no matter where it might be we have guests from all around the world and also all around the us and across sector as well so a question for you i mean based on your experience and your ongoing work how do we encourage our own workplaces to implement these kind of programs that you're talking about so that it's shared across the board you know we actually i'm going to be um holding some conversations with some like individuals like the director from one america roxanna and also with jody from um the director from community rice and both of them dirty took a sabbatical that was actually paid by a foundation called xenomere and rosanna took a sabbatical as part of her transition into her executive director role um from one america and they have implemented a sabbatical program within the organization in that every staff member after five years of work can be can can be eligible for a sabbatical and so we're going to be creating a toolkit of how to implement sabbaticals within your organizations and we're going to have it on our website and i'll actually um let's see i can drop the link to our website uh actually i don't here we go he's in the chat that people can use but the main thing i would say also actually one more thing and that is that we are encouraging the foundations to actually give money to their nonprofit uh you know organization that they support for health and wellness programs and also for sabbaticals so the thing is to do is to really and when i was um on the uh co-executive director of young women empowered what we did was i was ready i was like okay it was i was going into my 10-year 10th year and i was like okay i need a sabbatical i need to step away i need a break and we started thinking that through and so we had a conversation with our board members and we institutionalized it in our policies and our organizational policies and basically i think you know with that if there's the will to really support your employees well-being and their families and we know now especially as i think laura was mentioning the the great resignation that part of that is really a re-evaluation of our priorities you know and and and so if we value our employees we need to take care of them and that goes from anyone we're focusing on the on senior leaders and directors because we have to start somewhere but i would say that that goes for everyone in the organization so if you can create policies that have a certain amount of time that people have worked there they can have a sabbatical and just include it as part of your budget and when you do your annual budget it will able you you can make it happen it can happen thank you so much victoria and again i want to encourage everyone uh we will have victoria again at the q a portion at the end of the session as well to continue with your comments and questions that you're sharing in chat uh and we'll come back victoria to the conversation at the end with all our guests uh so at this point i wanna kind of take us to an another direction i'm so um you know inspired by victoria's work in the organization's work too and invite one of our other speakers who's going to tell us a little bit about kind of the ongoing work around uh altering how we aspect how we approach our work and creating technologies and tools that allow us to kind of reimagine our our work cycles as well as our general cycles as well um so uh melissa painter is the founder of breakthrough uh and breakthrough is a particular technology that you're going to all actually get to experience right now uh so melissa before we dive into the conversation and talk a little bit about what breakthrough is um which is again um we'll discuss in the conversation uh melissa is sharing a a link for the breakthrough and we want to invite you all to take two minutes to take a micro break using breakthrough um so that as we're talking about uh what breakthrough is and where it comes from you can have an experiential uh uh knowledge point for it as well as you can take a micro break now so i'm going to ask all of you just to take those of you participating as well as our guests who want to do that as well to just take two minutes and we'll wait for everyone uh so until we'll take from now until two past or so three past i used again we'll repeat the link again in the chat just click on it's a it will allow you to take a moment-based micro break uh as we've now spent an hour thinking so i know this is part of the thinking as well melissa so let's just pause and i'll pause myself too and mute myself and reconvene with melissa after you experience what it means to kind of give me micro breaks with movement uh to your work interior in this case to your learning um so again uh the link is in the chat i think everyone had a chance uh for a micro break at this point and uh that's part of our conversation today too we wanted to include the perspective of uh those who are building tools and technologies uh that gives us a sense of uh kind of an altered sense of well-being and also try to reimagine how we approach our work uh so i'm joined by melissa painter founder of breakthrough hi melissa thank you for joining us today so happy to be here um and thank you all for play testing breakthrough um it's amazing to hear what victoria was just talking about about taking breaks and and what that can gift us in terms of our thinking our creativity our worldview we also deeply believe in that but obviously we've been focused on something of a different scale so breakthrough was born out of an insight that collectively we've gotten really bad at taking small breaks during our work day this is a global problem it's been brought on by our relationship with technology but it's particularly particularly acute in the united states for all the reasons victoria was just describing and it's acute up and down and across all different kinds of sectors so when we work on breakthrough and we talk with a lot of different organizations and companies about what's causing burnout what are the rhythms of the days that people have etc we're confronting enormous burnout in very purpose-driven organizations like non-profits where people are sustained by their sense of purpose and
2022-03-03