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SUMMARY: Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman, an unwavering advocate for intersectional wellness and CEO of Nichole Gabrielle and Co., LLC. shares her transformative journey from law to leadership consulting, and back to blogging. We delve into the challenges of disability in traditional workspaces, visionary steps towards truly inclusive workplaces, and creating liberatory communities. Nichole challenges us to consider how ableism might infiltrate our business practices and invites us to turn our professed values into actionable, everyday guides. Join us for a conversation that redefines community and courage in leadership.

Discussed in this episode:

• Nichole’s exploration of feminism and womanism 
• Why working as a lawyer and have a disability became incompatible for Nichole
• The journey from lawyer to blogger to DEI consultant and back to blogging
• Finding a truly liberatory yoga practice and how it helped Nichole shift her thinking
• Nichole’s vision for inclusive workplaces
• Why return-to-work orders are ableist (and may not be financially wise)
• How ableism may be showing up in your business
• Why it’s liberatory to be in aligned community
• The problem with turning community into an industry
• How to reimagine community through a womanist lens
• Having difficult (and political) conversations as a business thought leader
• Turning values from words on a website into a guide for every choice
• Science fiction as a pathway to reimagining a more liberated world

Resources mentioned:

• “All the Black Girls Are Activists” by Ebony Janice
• Melanin and Moxie
• Spoon Theory
• Susana Barkataki
• “The Power of Sitting in the Mess,” Nichole’s Fearless Fire talk
• Sins Invalid
• “The Myth of Normal” by Gabor Maté
• “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler
• Feminist Book Club

Becky Mollenkamp:

Thank you for being here, Nichole.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

I’m so excited to be here. This is a long-awaited conversation, and I’m just really excited that we get to have it.

Becky Mollenkamp:

Before we dig into all the juicy, good stuff, tell me about your relationship with feminism.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

I have actually within the last year been questioning whether I’m a feminist or womanist. And for people who don’t know, womanism is a movement that was started by Black women really because they felt like feminism was too white. It felt like feminism didn’t have a space for them. And Ebony Janice, an incredible writer, talks about this in her book, “All the Black Girls Are Activists.” And she talks about womanism and the ways that womanism actually allowed her to show up for other women in ways that feminism excluded her. And so I’ve been grappling with that notion because I’ve always felt like, you know, we grew up in the girl power kind of era and this. You know, my mom was working, women were already in the workforce, and it was a really empowering thing to see, to grow up with two parents who worked and to see that, you know, women could do anything. You know, there were women going to space, there were women everywhere you looked. And it wasn’t until I got older that I really started thinking about how, wow, a lot of these women doing really cool things don’t look like me. And then as I got even older and more recently, I realized, wow, not only do they not look like me, but they also are not dealing with a lot of the issues I deal with as a person who now has chronic illnesses and disability. So it’s been a really interesting process for me to connect with, what is the feminist movement doing and who is it excluding? And I think that’s the central question I always ask, is who are we leaving out? And how can we fix that?

Becky Mollenkamp:

And I love womanism and have felt like maybe it’s not my word to use, which is why I also stay with feminist. But I think of womanism as being very similar to intersectional feminist, although I know there are differences inside of that. But I love that you brought that up and I would love for people to do more reading around it. Speaking of the things that you’re now sort of focused on and the areas that you feel like there are exclusions happening, and I totally agree. It’s like, who’s getting left out of the conversation? I think a place I would love to start with that is that I saw that you call yourself a quote unquote recovering lawyer. And I see so many people who leave, especially women, and I think also folks with other marginalized identities, leaving the legal profession and burnout that they experience, the recovering attitude they have about that. And I wonder, can you speak just from your own experience about what you saw inside of that industry that is perhaps problematic and creates this exclusion?

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

One thing that’s really interesting about my experience and perspective is that I’ve worked both in the public and private sectors. And so I have found those two sectors to operate very differently. But the kind of recurring thread that I saw in both places is that you were just supposed to give and give of yourself and never say no. And when I was in the public sector, it kind of, it was different because you felt like you were connected to this cause. And so you wanted to give of yourself because you believe in the cause you believe in, you know, I, I worked, um, representing human trafficking victims. I worked representing people who dealt with sexual assault, with people who have dealt with child exploitation. I’ve worked, I’ve done a whole bunch of stuff where I felt like I need to be doing this. Either this person has to be held accountable, or this person needs my help. And you kind of run yourself into the ground that way because there are always people who need help, and you’re not trained or taught or even no one really models how to take care of yourself. It’s just go, go. And the more you do, the more you’re rewarded. Even if that means you’re sacrificing yourself. In the private sector, that was only amplified. it was really, you literally are rewarded on how many hours you bill. And that means that if you’re doing pro bono work, you, depending where you work, sometimes there’s a cap on the number of pro bono hours you can do that will count towards your yearly limits or your yearly accrual. And so for me, a person like me who’s in the private sector, who still wants to do pro bono work because I care about it, will do that work, right? And a person who cares about community like I do, and who understands that I was, you know, as an Afro Latina, I was part of less than 6% of women in the country who get to have the position I have. And so for me, I felt like I had to open doors for people behind me, so I spent a lot of time community building. I spent a lot of time talking to people who wanted to be lawyers, talking to law students about what does this look like, and encouraging them not to quit even when it gets hard. And none of those hours count. So all of that is kind of outside of the work you’re doing. And then at the end, they kind of scrutinize and say, well, did you do enough of the paying work that makes the firm money? Did you do enough of the work that we find particularly valuable to our bottom line? And I was at a firm that really does care about pro bono work. But at the end of the day, they’re still for-profit businesses. And so you find yourself really saying, I can’t say no, especially as a junior lawyer. I can’t say no. Or if I say no, I have to go count how many times I say no to things. Because if I say no too much, then people are gonna start wondering if I’m really committed, they’re gonna start wondering about my work ethic and things like that. And so it was a really tricky balance. And for me, that only got worse once I developed my neurological disorder. And so I was then saying like, look, my doctors say I can only work this amount of hours. And I know that most, you know, before I was working, you know, 80-hour weeks, 80-plus-hour weeks, but like I can’t even come close to that right now. And it became a question, at least in my head, and I don’t think this was a question. I know this isn’t anything anyone ever said to me, but it felt like, do I still have worth if I can’t produce at this level that I was producing? Do I still, am I still contributing if I am no longer, if it’s just this minuscule percentage of what you expect everyone else to do? And that’s just never a great feeling to always feel like you are underperforming or always feel like you are, you know, no matter how hard you try, even if you’re giving 110%, what you’re doing isn’t good enough. And eventually it made me leave. I just, it was too much to be able to try and give 110% when really what needed 110% was my own body and my own immune system of how do I take care of myself so I get my health back. I was at a place where for close to a year, my husband had to carry me to the bathroom and he had to help me sit up and relearn to feed myself, relearn to walk. And so trying to balance those things and trying to even explain to more senior lawyers, actually, I can’t go over this number of hours, even though that number seems really small to you, because I will stop, like I’ll stop being able to function. Like I will need help feeding myself again and my hand will stop working. It’s just such a foreign concept to so many people that it was just too much.

Becky Mollenkamp:

What journey did you go down? Because I know, I think you’ve had some changes since then. I believe now you’re doing more of content creation around these issues, around accessibility, disability, inclusion. But I don’t think that’s what you immediately started as you left. So tell me a little bit about that journey from saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I can’t perform the way you want me to perform, so I’m gonna leave the legal industry.’ And then what did that journey of healing and to where you are now professionally look like?

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

It has been an ongoing journey. I don’t even know that I’ve arrived. I don’t know if you ever arrive. But even the step into entrepreneurship was really kind of by accident. I started a blog called Melanin and Moxie, and I just wanted to share what my experiences were. I felt so lonely. All my friends were lawyers, so they were all at work while I was just home being sick and I was just really tired of being sick. And I decided, you know, I’m gonna start blogging. And very soon after that, if you go to my blog, you will not see that many entries. Very soon after that, I started getting people asking me to speak and asking me, hey, do you do facilitation work? And I’ve always done facilitation work. I’ve been doing facilitation work since college. Even in high school, I was trained as a mediator and a peer mediator, and I did things like that. So in college, I did facilitation training and I would lead workshops and things like that. And so I was like, yeah, I do this, you know, and I have training in it. And so people were like, all right, we need help here. Can you help us? And I was just like, sure, not only have I done this, you know, in college and things like that, but now I have the advocacy skills from being a lawyer that helped me understand how to get people to see each other’s perspectives and how to get people to at least come to the table and have a discussion. And so I just said, yeah, sure, you know, how can I help? And that quickly became our business. You know, my mom, my husband and I run the consulting business and we still do some clients, consulting clients who need help with largely DEI-related things—diversity, equity, and inclusion. But mainly like when a place says, look, we have an issue with our culture, and we just can’t quite fix it. We don’t really know what the problem is, but we’re seeing people leaving. We’re having trouble with retention. We’re having trouble even getting our people engaged and staying engaged. And that’s when they would call us and say, can you help? And those are my favorite conversations to facilitate. Those are my favorite things to do. So I would say, sure. And we would put together a team and just go in and help. It was great. I love doing those conversations. What I saw happen very quickly after George Floyd’s murder and kind of a lot that came with that summer, everyone wanted to talk about DEI all of a sudden. And it got this formal label of DEI, right? I had been doing this work forever. It never had a label. Now it’s called DEI. And everyone’s asking, do you do DEI work? And I did, but what I found was that it was so trendy that a lot of times people were doing it without the full commitment or without even understanding what it meant to do that work. Decolonization work, liberation work, whatever you wanna call it, it’s not something that you’re gonna hire someone and you’re gonna do work for a year and then you’re liberated and everyone, like this is ongoing work. It has been happening for centuries. It will keep happening for centuries like literally until we are all free. And that was one of my frustrations was just that I felt like we kept being hired by people who didn’t really know what it meant to do the work, and they wanted to check boxes and I’m not a checkbox kind of person. And so I started saying I have very limited spoons. So for anyone who’s part of the chronic illness community, you will know that Spoon Theory is an idea that, you know, of how you can measure your energy. And so I often, you know, where a person who is fully healthy and fully able-bodied may wake up and have 14 spoons in a day and then maybe able to recharge themselves with a quick nap and expand their spoons. A person with chronic illness like me, if I wake up with 10 spoons in a day, even if I try and replenish after I’ve used some, I’m never going to get that many. And so I have to decide where do I use my spoons, and how much energy does it take to shower? How much energy does it take to pull my hair back? You know, a silly little example this morning, I was trying to do this creative braid thing I had seen on TV and my arms were just not having it. They were like, you can have the energy to do this or you can actually join the podcast and do the things you have to do today. And so it just, I had to give up and that has been a really big adjustment for me. It was not something I ever thought about before I got sick. I always just pushed and pushed and pushed, and then I would crash, sleep a couple days, and then do it all over again. And so learning how not to push that way and how to listen to my body has been part of the journey that I’ve really only tapped into as a business owner because now it’s how do I show up for my clients if I’m totally run down? And if I have to go to the ER, I’m out of commission for a while. So how can I put myself in the best possible position so that I have as many spoons as possible for my business, but also for my own life. And I think when we talk about work-life balance, we often overlook really what is the energy that we need, you know, not just so that you can show up in your life, but like, so you can actually really enjoy that. So you could be present instead of just dragging yourself through the time that you’re home with your family. And so that’s really when I decided to start shifting some more. And I said, I can’t keep doing this client work at the capacity we’re doing it at because I’m giving too much to the clients and too little to myself. And that’s not fun for me anymore. And so I decided to pull back. We take a more limited number of clients now. And to start really doing the thing that I intended to do in the beginning, go back to the blog and revamp it as a platform, instead of just a blog. How do I create Melanin and Moxie as a, basically, multiverse? How do we create a community? How do we create advocacy content and amplify people’s voices so that people understand what it’s like to live in the margins, to be a person who has to show up with the moxie, the chutzpah. I’m part Jewish and part Christian, so Yiddish is something that I have grown up with. And so like how do you have the moxie, the chutzpah, to show up in spaces that aren’t created for you? And what does it look like to navigate? And so that’s where I’m putting a lot of my spoons these days.

Becky Mollenkamp:

Let’s talk about your vision for workplaces. You’ve done work around DEI. You burned out sort of in the space of capitalist, for-profit, churn-and-burn kind of space. What’s the vision that you hold as somebody who does have issues around chronic illness and disability? How are workplaces falling short and what is the vision you hold for what they could be doing?

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

I think that workplaces are so afraid of change, and that’s why they fall short. And that’s one of the beautiful things about being in the entrepreneurial creative industry, is you literally see people who are tapping into their creative energy and their imaginations and saying, what could things look like? And I would love to see more workplaces asking that question. What could things look like? And how do we play with getting there? Because yes, you actually have way more capital. You have access to way more resources. So experiment, use those resources to experiment. Why are we so afraid? There are companies out there that can have enough money to make billion-dollar mistakes in their processing or launch a team that they think will make them money and then it doesn’t. But we don’t apply that to actually people, to our people process. When we lose a billion dollars on our people process, we’re like, oh no, something’s terribly wrong. Everybody rush back into the office. That’s going to fix it. Right? No. Like we have to listen to our people. We have to figure out what is it that helps people thrive and succeed? And so I would love to see businesses taking those risks, asking those questions, and also really being thoughtful about how are we measuring things? I think too often we measure things with statistics that don’t match up to what we’re actually trying to find out. We measure things based on what we know already how to do, instead of what we actually need. And so I would love to see places. Great example, places everywhere are saying, we have to enact these back to office policies. And my question is why? What research did you do? I know the real why that no one wants to say is that you’ve signed contracts and you don’t wanna lose the money on the contracts that you have signed. My question to you is what research do you have that shows that the money you’ll lose on that contract isn’t actually made up for in either productivity or people actually liking your company more, people recommending your company more. What are these other factors that you are overlooking because you are fixated on the things you only know how to fixate on right now instead of opening your mind and being a little more thoughtful? And so those are the things I think off the bat, companies could change like tomorrow, right now. They could be saying, and they would be building better companies. They would be building better workplaces. I truly believe that hybrid workplaces that give people the option to go into an office or work remotely are the way of the future. I believe that they are the way to make people happier. And they’re the way that you include people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. I mean, during the height of the pandemic, you had 33% of the workforce, more of the workforce, because disabled people were able to participate in ways that we aren’t usually able to participate. And now, as we’re starting to see that drop off because of these limits and what people I don’t think are thinking about is when you create these limitations, A, you’re not thinking about all the steps it takes for me to get into the workplace, all the energy it takes for me to get up, get dressed, get there, find transportation, get someone to help me transport myself and then get into the building, climb the stairs, do all of these things just so I could sit inside a building and work. And now I have less energy to do the work. I still have to save energy to get home. And basically that means most people who are in situations like me end up having to apply for disability again, or more disability hours. And as most people know. Social Security is, you know, the pot has grown smaller and smaller. It is really, really difficult to get increased hours or to get disability. For some people, it takes years and years. And so I wish businesses were thinking more about that. How do we make this space for people?

Becky Mollenkamp:

What was that process like for you of learning to shift out of the capitalist norms around productivity, definitions of success that are so reliant on productivity to become now this more fierce self-advocate for saying, hey, the way I show up is valid and my definition of success is valid, the way productivity looks for me is valid. I know how difficult unlearning all that stuff can be. So what did that process look like for you? The unlearning and now being where you are.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

It is so hard to unlearn things. And I think particularly in the last three years, the idea of unlearning has become more popularized. And I think, you know, around 2020, it became really trendy, this idea that you have to unlearn this white supremacy, you have to unlearn the patriarchy and all of these things. And then I think people started trying to do it. And we’re like, oh no, this isn’t fun actually. I don’t like this. And there was a lot of that for me. I did not like unlearning. I just, I mean, I started a business because I was bored of paying attention to being sick. I was like, all right, well, I have to start a blog. I have to start, you know, let me take on something. So I feel like I’m contributing. And that is such an ableist idea of that you’re not contributing unless you are actively working or gaining money or you’re not contributing. It’s such a capitalist idea, an ableist idea. It’s so full of isms, right, that we are taught. And it took a good while for me to start saying no. And it really took my body like screaming at me, for me to start listening. And a really great team of doctors who were really compassionate and really understood my drive and that I was, you know, programmed to just go, go, go. And helped me start seeing, well, wait, what is this doing to your body? And are you saying these things are more important than just your existence? It still really confounds me sometimes when I say this out loud. I started taking a yoga course. And it’s funny to me because, you know, Nichole before getting sick would have scoffed at this. Nichole, when she first got sick, did scoff at this because so often people are like, well, have you tried yoga? And like, no, yoga is not the cure. It will not fix all your things. I do not believe that. But I did find a really, really great teacher who brings in great teachers to teach with her. And she, her name’s Susana Barkataki. And she looks at yoga through a decolonial lens. And that’s when I really realized. I think that’s when everything came together for me. It wasn’t yoga the way, it wasn’t appropriated yoga that we see out in fitness studios. Like I did try that. It didn’t help. In fact, it made me worse because I was pushing myself to do these moves that my body was like, ‘please don’t do this.’ And I was like, but everyone else is doing it. And like they said, if you can go deeper. And you know, I also have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome which is a, I have hyper, it shows up in different ways in different people. The version I have has to do with hypermobility. So I can push my body in ways that really aren’t supportive to the rest of my body, but feel normal to me. And so I had to learn, wait, your body thinks this is normal. Like your body thinks this like eight, 100, whatever. Let’s say this is a 60-degree angle. It thinks it’s normal. And actually, like normal is right here, straight up. And so I had to learn, okay, well, maybe I need to stop pushing my body at this point, but this normal isn’t comfortable to me. And so I need to be somewhere in between. And I have to experiment to figure out what that’s like and where is the programming of my brain to teach it what is comfortable versus what is good for me. And is there an in-between? And so when I started studying yoga with Susana is really when I started thinking about, wait a second, this is exactly the work that I care about. How do we look at things through a lens of collective liberation? And how do we use things so that… How do we be in a community? How do we be in touch with ourselves in ways that encourage a better world? And that really changed my own journey of, okay, maybe I don’t need to push myself. Is this serving the greater good? Is this serving my greater good? Is this serving, you know, how am I showing up? And is it in line with my values? And that really opened a lot of space for me to say, no, I’m not doing this to myself. And no, I am no longer going to just keep going on with these ableist views that I have. And I’m going to open my mind and start listening to other people’s experiences who we don’t normally pay attention to. And I’m gonna change the way I show up because of that.

Becky Mollenkamp:

I love the collective piece because I want to shift into talking about community anyway. And that’s another theme that has really come through this podcast. Feminism or womanism is about the collective. And if it’s not, then it’s really not feminist or womanist. And so I think that’s so important. I think a piece of what we talked about right before we started recording was that this is our third attempt, I believe, at this interview that you had to reschedule a couple of times for medical issues, for health issues that were going on. And you were talking about that being a piece of that collective experience and about community done right. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

I think this is such a great example, and I think it’s an example that people can latch onto and practice themselves. I will start with the comparison of what the programming tells us. So as a lawyer, you have a meeting, it may get canceled, it may get rescheduled once, but if a person tries to reschedule more than once, you probably are like, okay, this person isn’t serious about this opportunity. And I know this happens in lots of fields. You’re like, oh, we’re supposed to have a call and they canceled. And I remember being as a junior lawyer being like, oh no, I can’t, I can’t, if I cancel too many times, this person’s not even going to talk to me. I’m going to lose this chance. But I think that womanism tells us that, and I think womanism and actually like liberation theory tells us you will never lose the chances if you’re in, if you’re aligned in the right places. And I think that the people who really are committed to the work are people who are going to say, wait, no, put your health first. Like, don’t just push through. If you’re not up to showing up today, like I would rather do this with you when you can actually do it, and when it’s of service to both of us, rather than a transaction of like, no, it’s of service to me right now, so I need you to do it. And I think it’s really rare, and that’s why I was so appreciative that you were so understanding, because I think it is really rare in our society to find people who will tell you and genuinely mean, no, take care of your health, and when you feel better, this will still be waiting for you. Or if this thing’s not waiting for you, I’ll have something else for you. I know that sometimes, you know, in business, some projects, like they do need to move on, or they still go and so yeah, maybe you’ll lose that chance, but I’m not going to overlook you. I’m not going to write you off because you are taking care of your health. And I think that is something that’s missing even in entrepreneurship. I think a lot of people start businesses and then just mimic what they learned in larger corporations. And so a lot of like small businesses operate really with really terrible practices because they’re not thinking about people first. And I think that when you find the people who are willing to put the people first, who are willing to say, do what you need to do. I mean, for goodness sake, we are still living in a pandemic. I know the CDC has declassified it. I think that’s for capitalist reasons. As we can see with the COVID numbers going back up and COVID deaths increasing every day, but nobody’s talking about that because that is not useful to our capitalist agenda. But if you look at that, we’re still living in a pandemic, we’re still living in, we’re living amongst multiple genocides in the world. And so the fact that we can even show up and operate and do other things requires us to compartmentalize and to say, to some extent, and some of us do it more than others. So what does that mean for us as a collective if we’re constantly, like, not actually taking time to tend to the terrible things that are happening to our people, our comrades, right? And that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, is what does it mean to really want change, to really want to change these systems that we work in to be inclusive? And I think it’s so fitting, I don’t know when you’re listening to this, but I think it’s so fitting that today is a global day of solidarity for Palestine because that’s effectively what they’re doing. They’re using all of the womanist structures and practices to say, no, what does it look like to do things differently, to operate outside of these systems and to instead say, we’re interrupting life as normal because life is not normal for a large part of us. And that is, I just think, really powerful. That’s, you know, if you, anyone who’s read Octavia Butler, that’s everything all her books are about is, you know, what is it like to live in a world where we do things really differently because it helps more people? Yeah, and I just think we have that power and we’re just starting to wake up to it.

Becky Mollenkamp:

Yeah this will be airing months after the day you mentioned because for my own health and mental health and wellness, I record these very far in advance because I don’t want that stress of feeling behind and pushing and all of that. But I love that you brought that up because I do think it speaks to the collective. Before I say that, though, I just want to mention that this idea of if you missed a certain number of calls, I feel like one of the things people associate that with is a lack of professionalism. And ‘professionalism,’ and I’m using air quotes, is bullshit anyway. And it is deeply caught up in a lot of racist and sexist notions and ableist notions as well. And so, and I don’t know if I had always thought of the ableist piece of that, because I’ve certainly thought a lot around the racist piece of that, the sexist piece of that, but the ableist piece is there as well. Because there are reasons why people may not be showing up. And that doesn’t mean they’re unprofessional, it means that they are humans with human experiences. So I love that you bring that up. And I think it’s important for us to think about that, especially as founders who are running businesses, many people who have employees and also have clients to think about where are these ableist ideas showing up in spaces that you may not be thinking about, which is like even on those seemingly small-scale pieces of someone missing a certain number of calls, and then you deeming that as being unprofessional or that coming up in your critiques of them in their employee reviews without maybe understanding the fullness of their life experience. So thank you for bringing it up. And you talk about collective care and community a lot. And in fact, one thing I wanted to mention because you mentioned earlier about doing public speaking, it’s a little old now, but I still am gonna link to it in the show notes. I watched your Fearless Fire talk called “The Power of Sitting in the Mess” and it’s so wonderful. A big part of that is talking about community and collective care and what it means to have community. And one of the things you mentioned right before we started to record that I’m really excited because I was like, stop talking. Let’s do this in the podcast because I want to know more about this. You talked about community becoming a business. And that’s fascinating to me because I have been a participant in that, having run a membership in the past and charging for community. And also I do, I think there is something to be said for the fact that I feel particularly skilled at creating space. I do it on a one-on-one level as a coach and I love creating community spaces. And a lot of the spaces I create are free, but I also do think there is something to be said for being compensated for your skillset. And if your skillset happens to be around creating space, I think that is valuable. And I do hear what you’re saying about this idea of commoditizing community and that is, it feels a little problematic. So tell me about that. Like, how do you balance those things of creating community and also saying there is value in, and that we should honor the work that goes into creating space.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

One of the things that’s challenging about it is that it’s so tied to understanding that we have to unlearn other ways of business and society. Valuing community, whether it’s paid or unpaid, and I’ll touch on that in a second, but valuing community also means that we have to put boundaries where we’re told not to put boundaries. It means that some days I’m not going to be able to show up at work because I have to help my neighbor get somewhere or I have to help my partner do something. And that has to be part of an exchange that we’re willing to accept and it currently isn’t. So, right now what happens is that in kind of the more general for-profit spaces and even non-profit spaces, general business spaces don’t accept that trade-off. You have to make that trade-off on your own time. And so your community stuff happens on your own time, work is whatever I need from you. And I think instead what we need is a society that looks at all of it as community. When I’m at work, I’m still in community with people. I am still asking, it shouldn’t just be like, oh, I contact you because I need something, and you help me when, you know, I don’t know, you think you might need something for me in the future. That does not make a good work environment. How can we rethink society as always being in community and how can we rethink all of the things we do as not individualistic as part of a larger whole? And I think the problem with community isn’t so much with the way community is moving now, and is not so much paid communities versus not. I mean, I also think of myself as a community builder and I am also a coach and so I understand, I fully believe people should be compensated and that we should look at community-building work as something deserving of being compensated, not something that you just do on a volunteer basis. But I think the problem is with community becoming an industry, there’s an entire community industry now and a community arm. And I know a lot of people who work in that industry. I know a lot of people who are doing good things in that industry. The problem is that industry as a whole is starting to be an arm of business that just replicates other parts of business. And so it’s like, well, what’s our ROI? Where are we seeing benefit? Is this not working or is it not working? And if it’s not working, then why are we doing it? And so again, we start putting profit before people. And then what’s the point of community if profit is driving it? So you’re never actually really prioritizing the people. You’re always, in the back of your mind, thinking about that profit and the return. And I think it actually works the other way. I think the trick of it all is that when you invest in people, you actually get your return so much more. You just have to look at return a little differently. It might not always be in dollars. Sometimes investing in people looks like having really loyal customers. Sometimes it looks like having people having access to spaces you didn’t have access to. But I think as long as we turn it into a industry, we have the threat of community just being something that’s transactional and capitalist and that isn’t really about heart.

Becky Mollenkamp:

It’s bringing those capitalist norms into community. I’m really digging this. I love this idea and thinking about it because it is so transactional and not relational. And what is community if not relational? And when you turn into this capitalist venture, then you have to ask yourself, is it actually community? Is it just business and it’s not community? Because I agree with you completely. It certainly doesn’t feel like feminist, womanist business, I mean, feminist, womanist community, if it is rooted in, how much are we making, you know, if you’re bringing all of that stuff into it and even just the pieces, forget about the money part, but the hustle culture stuff being brought into it, the ableist sort of notions being brought into it, the anti-fat bias being brought into just all of the things that we’re fighting against. When you’re bringing those things into community, are you really having community? Because I think it talks to some of what you’re talking about before too, about when we think about community and when we’re doing it wrong, who’s left out right? And so, and that we know the answer is always the most marginalized in any community are the people who are excluded. So as you’ve been, because I know this is something you’ve just been, you said it’s kind of like where your head is at right now. What’s on your heart is thinking about community in this way and reimagining community. What are you reimagining then for how you want to see people approach community, and in a way specifically, I think all of the things are good, but specifically I want to make sure I hear about the piece of inclusion of making sure that people aren’t being left out.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

I have always been a person who’s been really into social media. And it’s funny because my husband hates social media. And so it’s really funny, because I’m always like, no, it’s this like great tool. We just use it wrong. And he’s just like, maybe, but will it ever be fixed? And I will go back to this example right now of what’s happening in Gaza, in Congo, Sudan. I think that we’re able to use social media to expand our reach and to hear perspectives that we would never have heard. We are able to use social media to hear from people with all sorts of disabilities. I think, you know, I talk about the disability community as if it’s one community because that’s what’s easy for people to understand, but it is so nuanced and disabilities are complex, they are varied, and there’s a lot of disagreement within the disability in air quotes community, because not everyone has the same needs. And so, you know, even my understanding of disability of chronic illness has evolved in the last four years as I’ve been seeking out creators who have different disabilities and different illnesses than I do. And I’ve been learning a whole lot from taking advantage of that ability to be in these different spaces and to be in conversation. And I think that’s really one of the things that we can do better is to look at our resources and say how can I be in different conversations than I’m used to? And I think social media is one of the ways books, movies, like all sorts of media are great ways for us to analyze. What am I taking in? Is it always from the same lens? And what can I learn from taking in something else? And so I’ve been reading from authors around the globe places in the world that I maybe learned about in World History in ninth grade and never thought about again, right? I’ve been reading and saying, well, I don’t know anything about this place. Let me learn from an author who just one voice, two voices, and just start there and see how your own experience changes as you start thinking. Because what I have found, and I hope other people will find by doing this, is it starts really impacting how you show up yourself. I’ll give one example. There’s a really awesome group called Sins Invalid, and they do all sorts of multimedia presentations, plays, et cetera, around disability. And they another organization, a British organization, that really is trying to work for change and liberation. And on one of their calls, there were people who could not, their way of communicating was just really different. It wasn’t really through words. And because, you know, one person, for example, had a hole in their throat. And so they had a device that allowed them to breathe here and make some noises. And they had their own kind of translation device to put this into words. And it takes more time. It was really impactful to me because I saw, wait a second, inclusivity often takes more time. And that is in direct opposition to capitalism in so many ways where we’re like, go, go fast, go fast. Even the phrase people use, what is it? Fail fast so that you can try again, right, sometimes you have to slow down to be able to include other people. It just takes longer because you’re making the circle of people bigger. And so making that space may require slowing down. It may require extra money for services, translation services. It does require extra money to hire people to do signing other ways that we can say, how can we include people in this conversation? And I think once you start, it can be overwhelming because once you start listening to other voices, you’re like, whoa, we’ve left out a lot of people. And you’re like, I have to make lots of changes to start including people. And then you’re, you may not have the tools to do that. And that feels really overwhelming. But I think if you just start, and you can start by amplifying and telling other people, I think that’s really powerful. Saying here’s what I learned or here’s an example of someone that I saw left out. Here’s something I saw that was done well. Here is a book that really stuck with me because I never thought about it that way. And you share that. I think we really undervalue the actual impact of stories, and of sharing, and of advocacy because maybe you don’t have the reach, but someone you know has the reach or has the ability, or maybe collectively we have the ability to come up with a solution that is more inclusive. And that’s when we start getting our creative juices going, when we start problem solving with people who care about the things we care about.

Becky Mollenkamp:

On that piece that you mentioned about learning from others, this is not related to disability, but I saw myself inside of that, of saying, when have I been intentional in taking in other and one issue for me was sex work, because I know that for a good portion of my life, I had very definite opinions that it wasn’t feminist. And it took me finally allowing myself to open my mind, learn from people with lived experience instead of projecting my own thoughts onto others, to say sex work is work, it’s valid and needs to be safe and protected. And I think we can do that in so many ways. And that actually brings me the last thing I wanted to really hear from you because I saw something that you said that you make space for hard conversations. That was a quote that you put out there. We live in a time where we are very divided. Certainly in the US, I think this is also for people living elsewhere in the world. They may see their own countries inside of this, but certainly here in the US. We are very polarized, very divided. There are a lot of big issues out there. You talked about Gaza. That’s certainly one that people are finding very difficult to speak on because it feels like you can’t speak on, you can’t say that you’re antisemitic without people saying, oh, but what about Gaza? And you can’t say you support a free Palestine without people saying, oh, well then, you know, what about Jews and are you antisemitic? And it’s very complicated. You know, abortion is very much in the news and is very challenging for many people to talk about. So I know this is a business podcast, but these are things that people are having conversations around inside of their communities. Also, as business owners and thought leaders, often we are being pushed. I know I have recently been very challenged to make public statements around Gaza and other issues. How do you do it? How are you making space for hard conversations? What are the keys? How do you do that, especially in these really polarized times?

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

One thing that I want to be really clear about, and I think too many people overlook the influence of capitalism and patriarchy and all the societal structures on this view is, everything you do is political. So we need to stop saying that like I don’t mix business and politics. I don’t mix family and politics or this and politics. Every decision we make is political.

Becky Mollenkamp:

And every time we choose not to talk about politics, that was a political decision.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

Exactly. And I really think it’s, I’ve been having this conversation very frequently. And it was a little surprising at first because I just said, well, you made a choice, even with my in-family conversations, I’ve said you made a choice by saying this thing. And I got so much pushback of like, no, I didn’t make a choice or I didn’t choose this or I didn’t choose that. But everything we do, we make zillions of choices every single day. And we just have to start looking at it that way and really start thinking about this. I really love Gabor Maté and his work. He wrote the book, “The Myth of Normal,” really he talks about just the ways little, even discrete things that we may think of as little, impact our brain. And this is really relevant to my disability. I have a neurological disability where my brain basically reprogrammed itself. And so all sorts of things impact us. And if we can start looking at everything we do and say as a choice, I chose to get dressed today. I could have showed up on this podcast not dressed. I could have shown up with my hair not done. All of those things are choices, and they’re all political. Choosing to pull my hair back, choosing to put on hoops. There are people who are gonna watch me and make assumptions of me because of the color of my skin, the texture of my hair, the way I’ve done it. All of those things are political. And when we choose or pretend that they’re not political, what we’re doing is doubling down on the norm. And so I think that first, that’s the first step, is just understanding that we are making choices that are entangled with politics. And we do it all the time. And so then if you can say, if you can accept that, then you can start questioning, are the choices I’m making aligned with the politics I believe in? Are the things that I’m taking in and the people I’m supporting aligned with just my beliefs, my core values? Too few people spend time on thinking about what are your personal core values, what are your business core values, and I will say that most businesses now will tell you or they will have core values. What I find is they cannot tell you what they look like in action. And that’s where and help people say, well, what does this look like in action? Are you living your core values, or are they just pretty statements that live on your website? And I think if you do that as a personal practice, what are my core values, and what does that mean for the choices I make? That’s how we start moving to a different way of being and doing. That’s how we start moving towards saying, well, I believe in inclusion and so I am going to start, you know, seeking out people with, who have maybe, who show up in the world in ways I’ve never imagined, who have intersections I never even thought could exist, right? I, to some people, am an enigma because I grew up Jewish and Christian. I’m an Afro-Latina. And now you add on to that, I support Palestine. So to me, right? Like even if you look at current legislation right now that’s trying to go through saying that, you know, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Well, like, are you saying that I hate myself? Because it’s like, what are you saying about me? You’re saying I’m a person that you never conceptualized. This law didn’t conceptualize my existence to be able to be both Jewish and say, don’t believe in Zionism. And there are just people, there are plenty of people who are saying that, who are Jewish and saying that. But it’s a concrete example of ways that we make decisions that exclude people or don’t even imagine people who already exist. And so I think we have to be really, really mindful at looking at our practices as business owners. And what are the foundations we’ve established? And what do they actually mean in practice? And then say, oh, wait, when I look at this in practice, is it what I meant? Does it do the thing that I hoped it would do? Or is the consequence of the way things are set up actually going against my value, going against the spirit of what I meant it to be. And I think that’s where it all starts, just with those, starting those questions and being open to the answers. They sometimes hurt. They like sometimes are really frustrating because you’re like, I spent all this money and time and energy doing this thing. And now when I look at it, it’s not what I wanted it to be, or it’s the opposite, or I believe… It’s really hard to have someone tell you like you did something hurtful. It’s really hard to learn things about yourself that aren’t flattering, right? But if we can do that, we can grow. When I first started learning, oh wait, like I’m being really ableist. Anytime I have a Zoom meeting that I do not enable, have the ability to enable captions, right? Did it feel good to learn that I was making that mistake? No, but I can learn and grow. Okay, I can adapt. I can enable captions. I can do these other things that, you know, I can have an interpreter on the line. I can find ways to make things more inclusive. And that’s where it all starts, just with that willingness to investigate and be curious.

Becky Mollenkamp:

Anyway, I love all of that. And we’ve talked so much that I forgot to, because I was so engaged, I forgot to say that we’re going to discuss our three tips too. And for you, we’re gonna talk about how to manage chronic illness and disability as a business owner. And we’re gonna do that as the bonus content that if you sign up for Feminist Founders Substack or newsletter, which is free, come join us in the community. You get the free content, the bonus content for this, and also get to meet some amazing people as we talk about community, other people who care about these kinds of issues who are also just like you, trying to reimagine business and say, what does it look like to do things outside of all these capitalist norms that have us thinking very transactionally instead of relationally? All right. To finish up, Nichole, I want to ask you for a resource, either a specific Octavio Butler is great, or some other resource that has been valuable for you.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

“Parable of the Sower” is a great place to start with Octavia Butler, but take some time out and listen to some science fiction. I was never a science fiction person, but there is so much value in science fiction and there’s so much value in this structure. I was an English major, so I’m a bit of a nerd about this, but there’s so much value in science fiction, particularly if you can read science fiction written by someone with a marginalized identity. And this is, you know, Octavia Butler is one of the greats. And so for some people, it can be a little hard to get into some of her work. So this is why I say like any science fiction written by someone with a marginalized identity, because what you will find is that inherently the genre is reimagining the world. And if you start consuming things that show different ways of being, over and over again, your mind starts being reprogrammed to see different possibilities where they aren’t otherwise. And so I think that’s been really interesting. It’s kind of the way all three of those things tie in. If you really want community. I mean, this sounds like a great space, so join the Substack. But also, I think that’s why book communities and books are so amazing, is that we get to imagine things, we get to talk about them, we get to say like, how does this fit with what we believe or does it not? And we get to be critical about that. And it’s a great way to have these conversations.

Becky Mollenkamp:

I love that last season we had Feminist Book Club on. Go back and listen to that with Renee Powers. She’s running a book club that is very much intersectional feminist. They read so many amazing authors of color. And I know they do science fiction. I’m signed up for the non-fiction version, but for people who love fiction, they’re doing great things. So awesome, thank you. And then finally, an organization that’s doing great work in the world that you’d like to highlight.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

The reporters on the ground in Gaza right now have been on my heart every single day. And not just because of what they are enduring, but because they show us that, first of all, individual action matters. Individual action, collectively, when we each take ownership of our actions and then do it arm in arm with other people, can really change the world. And because they show us that witnessing, just witnessing and bearing witness to other people’s lives is a powerful testimony and a powerful act of solidarity. And so that’s what’s been on my heart every day and saying, how can I just bear witness to someone else and be a voice in a space that person doesn’t have access to? And so that, I thought, I think that’s been really powerful. And the fact that they are all much younger than I am and doing these amazing, really world-changing things has just really, really gives me the chills every time I think about it.

Becky Mollenkamp:

In the face of unbelievable devastation and pain and threat to their own lives, it is remarkable. Well, thank you for that. And again join the newsletter for Feminist Founders if you’d like to get the bonus content that Nicole and I are about to discuss. And thank you for being here, Nicole.

Nichole Beiner Powell-Newman:

Thank you for having me.