Nature-Inspired Leadership: Embracing Diversity for a Thriving Future, with Nina Simons

Jackie - 00:00:10:

You're listening to the Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox podcast. I'm your host, Jackie Ferguson, certified Diversity Executive writer, human rights advocate, and co-founder of the Diversity Movement. On this podcast, I'm talking to trailblazers, game changers and glass ceiling breakers who share their inspiring stories, lessons learned, and insights on business, inclusion, and personal development. Welcome to the Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox podcast. Thank you for listening. My guest today is Nina Simons. Nina is Co-founder of Bioneers and serves as its Chief Relationship Officer. She is a social entrepreneur, speaker, and author of the award winning book, Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. She was named a recipient of the Goi Peace Award in recognition of her pioneering work through Bioneers to promote nature inspired innovations for restoring the Earth and our human community. Nina, thank you so much for being here today.

Nina- 00:01:20:

I'm delighted to be with you and your listeners. Jackie, thanks for inviting me.

Jackie - 00:01:25:

Yes, I'm so excited to jump in. Nina, will you tell us a little about yourself, your background, your family, your identity, whatever you'd like to share.

Nina - 00:01:36:

Oh, let's see. I'm a 66 year old woman. I live in Northern New Mexico. I grew up in New York City, the daughter of two artists and oh identities. I identify as a she and a her. I grew up believing that my contribution to the world would be through the arts and have been kind of startled to have my path unfold in some very different directions that actually include the arts in different ways than I might have imagined. Ethnically, my background is Ashkenazi Jewish, so all of my lineage really have come from Eastern Europe and before that, other continents. So there's a long lineage of people who have been chased out of almost every place they ever called home, which I imagine may have something to do with my orientation towards equity and justice. Let's see. I think that's sort of the snapshot overview. Now, I live in a very rural place. I'm profoundly connected to the natural world, and I see myself as someone who stands at the nexus of a lot of different spheres of activity and a lot of different devotions.

Jackie - 00:02:58:

I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. Will you tell us a little about your early career? You mentioned that you thought you might be doing something around the arts. Right. Your parents or artists. And I always like to have this conversation with successful people because so often young people think they have to have it all figured out really early. Right. And I love to talk about the journeys and the evolutions of successful people. Will you tell us a little about how you got to what you're doing now?

Nina - 00:03:32:

Sure. It was a very windy road, as you suggest, Jackie. Let's see. Well, I started out working in theater because I thought theater was the best way to change hearts and minds. And what I was really interested in. I called Transformational Theater. That was what I learned to do in college. I loved it. And it wasn't until after leaving school that I discovered how hard it would be to earn a living at Transformational Theater. So I became somewhat disillusioned. I managed restaurants for a time. I found that I had a gift for organizing diverse people towards a common goal, which was part of restaurant management as well as theater work. And I moved out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in my mid-twenty’s. And after a time, and was also working in the arts here. And then after a time, I met my husband to be, and he was at the time a film-maker. I went with him to visit a biodiversity garden, and I had a very transformative experience there. It was being tended by a master gardener. And he introduced us to this wild diversity of plants, food plants and herb plants. And this was back in the late eighty’s. And there were things I'd never heard of. There were all kinds of amaranth and quinoa and gorgeous sunflowers that were seven or 8ft tall and felt like they watched us as we walked through the garden. And he would introduce us to each plant and tell us its Latin name and its common name and how it was related to all the plants around it. And I realized that this man knew these plants better than a lot of people know their own families. And the garden was just a bevy of sensual beauty. It was all colors, and the smells were amazing. And he invited us to taste as we walked through the garden, and there were whole societies of tomatoes and they were warmed by the mid-day sun. And I found myself just in a kind of sensual rapture. And then he started explaining to us why he was growing all these plants out, and that it was an effort to really save and conserve diversity, biodiversity in the food system. And he explained the threat that multinational corporations were having on the diversity of the food system. And by the time I walked out of that garden, I felt like the natural world had tapped me on the shoulder and said, you're working for me now. And it was so shocking, Jackie. I really felt like, what? Not me. I don't have any background for this. I had never tended a garden or done any farming. I didn't have a business degree. And what wound up happening was that my then boyfriend and the Master Gardener formed a company and I became a social entrepreneur. And the company was called Seeds of Change. And I dove in because the call was unmistakable. A few years later, I learned handover fist about how to run an organization, how to raise money, how to write a business plan. And really at that time, the board asked me to become president of the company. And I said, wow, well, I don't have a business degree. The only way that I can do this is if it's okay with you if I tell you when I don't know the answer to something. And they said, that's fine. So I did that. And then my husband was in a hot tub with a friend, and he was a reporter and a researcher, and he was learning all about biodiversity and bioremediation, which is the use of natural systems to clean up the air and water and soil. And he was discovering amazing innovators from all walks of life who had great solutions to many of our most challenging problems. And he was bemoaning to this friend the fact that no one had ever heard of these people. And the friend said, Why don't you have a conference? And Kenny said, I've never been to a conference. It sounds boring. Why would I do that? And the friend said, here's a grant. Go have a conference. And Kenny came to me and he said, would you help me produce a conference? And like him, I had never been to one. And so I brought all my theater skills to co-creating a transformative three day experience. And that was the beginning of launching the nonprofit that was to become Bioneers. There's more. I had a gender awakening, and I started working with women and doing a lot of leadership work. So that's all happened in the 34 years since we started Bioneers. But it's been quite a journey and not one I could have ever predicted.

Jackie - 00:09:11:

Absolutely. That's amazing. And, you know, Nina, one of the things that you said is, if I don't know the answer, can I ask? Right. And one of the things that I find, especially with women, is we feel like we need to have the answers in order to take that next step or that leap. And you really don't. Right. You just need to be open to ask the questions and gain the help that you need to get the job done. And that courageousness is so wonderful, and I just wanted to call that out for those folks again, women especially, who are nervous about taking that leap, whatever that leap is, you don't have to have all the answers. Sometimes it's okay to jump in and figure it out.

Nina - 00:10:02:

Jackie, I so agree. And actually, one of the things I talk about in the book a lot is that I do believe we are all in a time of reinventing leadership. And I think that that capacity to be vulnerable and still hold your dignity and your authority is something that, as women, it's especially important that we cultivate.

Jackie - 00:10:26:

Absolutely. Nina, let's talk a little about Bioneers. What's the mission of your organization, and what do you do as Chief Relationship Officer?

Nina - 00:10:38:

Well, the mission of our organization is rather broad. We serve to educate, inspire, and connect people from all walks of life who are working at the front lines of really reinventing our civilization. We address 13 different domains of activity in the belief that actually it's all one system. And so we can't really address racial equity without addressing business and without addressing governance and without really looking at how do we practice leadership, all those things. And so we have kind of a broad Umbrel, which is a lot of the solutions that we highlight are solutions inspired by nature because we do believe that the human systems, the social systems and our ecological systems are actually all one thing. It's kind of like an environmental and social star search. We're constantly looking for all kinds of people who have amazing innovative and practical and visionary solutions so that we can reveal the world that's possible if only we can amass the political will to get there.

Jackie- 00:12:00:

Absolutely. So, Nina, you founded Bioneers with your husband. I founded the Diversity Movement with my husband and a few others. What are some of the challenges that you find and some of the rewards? Right. So let's hit both in partnering with your husband and what advice would you give to others considering starting a business with spouses or family members?

Nina - 00:12:27:

Well, Jackie, as I'm sure you've experienced, it's a very mixed bag, and I would caution anyone who aspires to it to be very careful what you ask for because it's not for the faint of heart. I don't really think I know any married couple who work together who have not been through some challenging processes around it. And for us, I think our issues had to do with power struggles and different ways of leading. And really, in many ways, I have been through a very long process of what I refer to as decolonizing my heart and mind around gender imbalances. And I think many of us carry many, if not all of us carry some amount of those ingrained cultural biases. And so some of our challenges with each other had to do with me working out my own relationship to my own authority. And my husband also is older than I am. And so we entered into a partnership in which at the beginning, he was really a mentor. And as I grew in my own capacity and self-assurance, that stopped working so well anymore. And so we went through a time where we almost came apart. But frankly, we have a very, very strong mission and values alignment, which I think helped see us through. And we're also really best friends. And so I think, as with any partnership, we have grown each other immensely. And now that we're this far into it, having been together for, I don't know, 38 years, we've reached a kind of honeymoon time where we don't have those conflicts anymore. There is enough mutual respect and true equality between us that, let's see, what else can I say about this? I mean, running a nonprofit for 34 years is crazy hard. And there have been many near death experiences where, as we reflect back on it, I'm not sure we could have survived if there were only one of us rather than two of us. Right. I think it's really strengthened my conviction that leadership needs to be a shared practice, whether it's a married couple or Co-Executive Directors or Co-Presidents. I just think that the hierarchical model of one person at the top is sort of a recipe for disaster. So we're learning from that as we evolve this organization.

Jackie - 00:15:36:

That's so great, and I totally agree. I think we're moving as a society away from I'm the boss, I have all the answers, don't ask questions, to more of a collaborative leadership approach, which I think resonates better with employees overall. So I think that's such great advice. Tell me about the intersection of preserving nature and diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. How do you move between these two ideals?

Nina - 00:16:13:

For me, Jackie, they're all one thing. So if we adopt a mindset that says human activity is a subset of the natural world, then what applies to nature applies to human social systems. So, for example, scientists have proven that ecosystems that are rich with diversity rebound much faster after trauma than monocultures. In many ways, that has been a guiding principle for me. And I think that part of our challenge is to recognize the amount of unconscious conditioning that all of us as human beings tend to take on from a society that is rife with dysfunctional social systems and belief systems. I think we're seeing it everywhere. We're seeing it in business, but we're also seeing it in policing and governance and economy and every aspect of our social systems. And for me, the leap is to recognize difference in all its forms, not just racially, but difference in terms of gender, difference in terms of ability, difference in terms of age and background and class and ethnicity, and to recognize difference as a virtue, not as something to be overcome. Because if we go back to that natural proving that scientists have shown we want to cultivate diversity in all its forms, the healthier system is, is a direct correlative to how much diversity it can encompass and integrate. And so part of what we do with bioners is to model and co-create a space where true pluralism can thrive and where there are some common values that everyone can share while really recognizing and appreciating all the differences among us.

Jackie - 00:18:43:

Definitely. Nature is such an amazing teacher, and there's so much that we can learn about how to interact in our communities, in our businesses, based on how nature thrives, and that's through diversity. So I love that.

Nina - 00:19:02:

Well, the other thing that I think is true, Jackie, and that merit's mentioning is that many of my mentors have been indigenous peoples. And part of what I've learned from many of them is that the way that they maintained right relationship with the natural world was to be in reciprocity with it, to actually treat it with reverence and respect and to relate to our web of life as if they are our relatives, not things to be used and abused in mind. And I think that's part of the nexus that we find ourselves in as a species right now is the need to make that shift.

Jackie - 00:19:55:

Absolutely. That's so amazing. And if I'm thinking about it, Nina time spent in the dirt with the earth is so therapeutic, and I know a lot of our listeners will probably agree with that, just being one feeling, one with nature and the outdoors and it's like medicine. And so I think that is so right. Nina, let's talk about your book. Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. What inspired you to write this incredible book? And give us a few nuggets from it, if you would.

Nina- 00:20:38:

The truth is that the book is comprised of essays that I wrote to deliver as speeches at Bioneers over the course of about 20 years. When I looked at those speeches and I realized, well, some people might have heard some of them online, some people might have been at the conference and seen them in person. But there was so much care and devotion that went into writing those talks. And each year I have felt a huge responsibility to bring forth in my ten or 15 minutes talk what was most important to me in my own evolutionary journey and in my own learning. So some of the book is that, some of the book also brings together what the book does, which I love, is that on the one hand, I've had these opportunities to speak to large audiences about my own journey. But at the same time, I've done a lot of leadership work, especially with women and with very diverse women. And so I've had a journey into how we are reinventing leadership. What does it mean for women to become leaders and to fully adopt that mantle? And how can we, as women, and particularly women in diverse situations, stand for and with each other, to accelerate each other's learning and capacity? So for 15 years I partnered with other co-facilitators and we hosted week long Immersive trainings called Cultivating Women's Leadership. And so what I was able to do was weave together my learning from those experiences with the talks that I had offered. Some of the talks are written in poetry form, some are more essays. There's a whole section that's about women's leadership in the world and how that's proving to affect change, as well as the biases that are still influencing how women leading change are often underresourced under acknowledged. And then the third section of the book is really I mean, the first section is really my personal journey. The second section is about women and leadership writ large. And the third section is about racial equity and justice and my own journey as a woman born into white privilege. My journey into learning about how do we co-create the environment for a beloved community to be possible and to emerge. And so there are some very specific offerings in the third section around. How do you convene in a way that really honors everyone's diversity? How do we navigate that as women in leadership and create the conditions for everyone to be able to thrive and shine? So that's kind of what the book is. I recorded an audiobook version of it. I'm very proud of it because it feels like a very wholehearted offering that really integrates all of my learning, or a lot of my learning about nature, culture and the sacred. And I talk a lot about how leadership itself is changing. And listening for leadership is part of how I learn. Because I think as leaders, we need to be listening a lot more than we're talking these days.

Jackie - 00:24:19:

That is the truth. Absolutely. Nina, one of the things I really enjoyed about the book was the prompts for Deepening Learning, right. And just some of the questions that you ask. It's one thing to and think through someone's perspective, but then to have these really deep questions where we have to think about how we're moving in the world and what we want to do. I thought it was really a great part of the book as well, so I really enjoyed it.

Nina - 00:24:55:

Thank you. That's so lovely. We just had a review for the book that said, this is especially great for book clubs and learning circles, but I also love that I've heard from a lot of people that those prompts and the discussion guides have led them to deepen their own understanding. And my very favorite review on Amazon is from a guy who said, reading this book is helping me understand my wife and my daughters better and the feminine within himself. Because a lot of what I'm speaking to is rebalancing the masculine and feminine in all of us and in our social structures and our ways of leading. So regardless of what gender we might happen to be born into.

Jackie - 00:25:44:

That’s right, Absolutely. Nina, every season I ask a new question. And so this season, the question that I'm asking of my guests is, will you share a transformational life moment and how does that moment inform or guide your life?

Nina - 00:26:05:

Well, I think because of the subject of your podcast, the story that I would choose to share is a major awakening AHA moment that I had around my relationship to equity and justice. So I was at one of those week long retreats and we were in a rural setting, and there was a woman in our training who was an Environmental Justice Leader. She was an African-American American woman who had shown up in this retreat site and suddenly informed us that she had forgotten to bring her inhaler. And she had asthma and we were about 45 minutes from the nearest town or medical facility, but neither my co-facilitator nor I had much experience with asthma and so we didn't know just how serious that was. And we went on about our business through the week. And on the last night of our retreat, we had a big dance party and it was quite wonderful. And in the middle of the night, we were awoken by her roommate who said, oh, my God, come quickly, she's having an asthma attack and I don't know what to do. And we jumped up, ran into her room. My colleague went off to do research on the Internet and I sat with her. And what I had to do, Jackie, because I didn't have the knowledge base or the information in my head of what to do for her. So I dropped into my body for instructions on what to do. And what I got was that I should hold her and rock her and that giving her body that rhythmic experience might help entrain her with me and might help her catch her breath. And it was a terrifying experience because she was gasping for breath, her eyes practically rolling back into her head. And as I am tend to do, I had come to deeply admire and love this woman over the course of that week. So I had a real personal connection to her. And so she's gasping for breath and I'm rocking her back and forth. And then as I listened, I thought, maybe if I hum a lullaby, that will help and it will help her have an auditory away to align with my body's breath. And so I did that. And then I realized I should breathe really slowly and deeply so that again, on a somatic level, she could perceive that. And really, I don't know whether any of those things that I did actually helped, but I do know that eventually her breathing slowed and she caught her breath. And I was so intensely relieved. And when it was clear that she was breathing fully, I was able to lay her back against her pillows and I sank down onto the floor by the side of her bed and I realized I was sobbing almost uncontrollably. And I thought, okay, this is more than relief. What is causing all my tears? And what I realized, Jackie, was that it didn't matter how long I had known about the increased rates of asthma and heart disease in inner city communities because of the industry that was cited there. I knew about it all from my head and it had not permeated my heart. And this experience was the first time that environmental justice and racial equity broke my heart open. Just sat there feeling it so intensely and feeling the injustice of it and the pain of it. Realizing this was a direct result of the systems that we have all allowed and in many ways been complicit with through our lives, and that have to change. And so it was just a huge awakening for me. And I actually told that story at a Bioneers conference, and I realized when I did it, I was terrified. Jackie I've never been so scared to do public speaking in my life. And I thought, oh, this is really interesting. Like, what is this? And I realized it was white conditioning that actually I had never consciously adopted, but that told me, don't make waves. You could make it worse. That the risk of telling this story felt so great to me in my animal body that I was terrified. And as it turned out, for years afterwards, I experienced women of color coming up to me and saying, you know, I saw that video of you telling that story online, and it caused me to believe that I could trust you. And it was a profound, profound lesson on so many levels. So I share that. I was just reading an article last night about settler fragility because I have a very strong affinity for serving the health and well being and recovery of native peoples and the worldview of native peoples and the leadership. And it was all about how settlers, people who have not lived on this land for a long, long time have a really hard time acknowledging that they're living on stolen land. It's kind of all wrapped into the big parcel that I think we as a society are facing so deeply right now of the need to have the truth of our histories revealed and told and shared and honored and some efforts at repair. Because really this country has done egregious harm to many, many peoples of color. And it's time the truth will out and some repair really happen.

Jackie - 00:32:58:

Absolutely. I think I appreciate your sharing that, Nina. What an amazing story to share. And it really is indicative of a quote that a friend of mine says often proximity breeds empathy. Right? And so being able to engage with people allows you to see them as human and not as a concept. Right. And that's so important in bridging the gap and being able to say, no, I need to speak up. I need to stand in the gap, I need to do better. And I love stories like that because it just shows how it can be something small or something big that brings people together and allows you to feel that love and compassion and empathy. And that's so important, so important to all of us.

Nina - 00:33:54:

Jackie, can I share one more short story from 

Jackie- 00:33:57:

Absolutely. 

Nina – 00:33:58:

Okay. It was another moment that I will never forget, which was we began to learn the more that we did these trainings, which were roughly half women of color and half white women, we began to learn the power of gathering in Caucasus and how important that was at some point during this week long retreat. And so there was a moment where we had agreed to gather into Caucasus. We could see each other across a lawn. So there was one porch that had the women of color on it and one porch where all the white women were, and you could see each other across the field. And what I noticed immediately was that the first thing I noticed was that the women of color were all wearing gorgeous colors. They were wearing, like, long dresses, and they had beautiful nail colors and things in their hair and scarves, and they just looked like a group of peacocks, and it was beautiful. And the white women were all wearing white and khaki and gray. And it was like, oh, how interesting. And then I noticed the sound of the difference and the tone, because the women of color would erupt periodically in gills of laughter. Somebody would say something and there'd be this uproarious, right? And the white women were all moping. They were like, Why do we have to do this? We don't want to be separated from them. Why can't we all be together? And so just recognizing the difference culturally and expressively, it was fascinating to me to realize about my own white conditioning, how much I had taken in, about not creating waves, about keeping things calm and quiet, about not expressing emotion very much. Right. I mean, there were just very big cultural differences. And I thought, we have so much to learn from each other and to unlearn from the cultural stuff we've just absorbed without ever being aware.

Jackie - 00:36:21:

Absolutely. And that's so great because you're right. There's so much that we can learn from each other and so much that we can gain from each other and just absorb from each other. And that's one of the amazing things about diversity. Thanks for sharing that. Nina, you have talked about heart-centered leadership and you alluded to that a little earlier in our conversation. Can you tell us what that is?

Nina - 00:36:50:

Well, sure. I mean, in a way, I just described it through that experience. My first book was called Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart. And it has men in it who were examples of leading from the heart. And when I first started being acknowledged for my leadership, I realized I had a very defensive reaction. I didn't like it at all. And I knew from Bioneers that we're all called to be leaders, each in our own way at this time. And so I set about in an inquiry to understand how we are reinventing leadership. And what I realized, and I describe through a bunch of wonderful collected essays in that book, is that there are a number of ways that we're reinventing leadership. But the leaders who I've most admired are those who are leading from an inner assignment. They're not people who are leading because they have a graduate degree or a title. There are people who are leading something because of their love and devotion to an issue, a cause, a vision. There's something that motivates them, that comes from inside. And many of my native teachers have said that in leadership, often the greatest distance is the distance between head and heart. I actually think that we need to be embracing a leadership that comes from love and to not have love be a dirty word in the business world anymore. I think it is the most powerful force in the world and we need to embrace it in ourselves as leaders. One of the things that I've taken a bunch of trainings with Robin DiAngelo and others about diversity, equity and inclusion. And one of the things that I witnessed, Jackie that was heartbreaking in a training that had both a group of white people and a group of people of color was that when we were all together there were instances where the people of color would describe in very painful ways their daily lived experience of how much fear they had when their kids went to the grocery store and were trailed by the cops or the security guards. A million ways that they were impacted by the racialized nature of our culture. And what I saw was that when white people would respond to it, they all responded from their heads, not their hearts. And it was so painful to witness. They were like giving rational explanations or defenses. And I thought, oh, no, this is not how healing happens. Healing happens and connection happens through the heart. And one of the things I love most this is to cycle back to a dangling thread we left about my title in Bioneers is Chief Relationships Officer or Strategist. And really the truth is I think we are living through a time when many of our relationships have been ruptured. And our relationships within ourselves in our most personal, intimate lives, there are parts of ourselves that we've either banished or stuck under a rug or hidden away that we're not relating to. Oftentimes when emotions come up as leaders, we try to stuff them away or we don't feel like we can honor the feelings that we have. And I believe emotions are part of nature's way of speaking through us. They have to be honored and expressed. My sense is that if we could have a national day of mourning for all that's being lost in our personal and collective lives, it could greatly turn down the amount of violence and anger that is being expressed currently in our polarized society. So I think it's a rupture of relationship and that relationship is both individual and internal and external among each other and between us as a human species and the natural world. And really, I think that we are shifting from a culture that's about things to a culture that's about relationship. If we could just turn our attention to mending, our web of relations, that would change everything. So that's kind of my area of expertise, and I love it. And I'm grateful to have a title that I feel wonderful about.

Jackie - 00:42:07:

Wow. That's so inspiring and amazing. Nina, thank you for that. Nina, as we begin to wrap up, what's the message that you'd like to leave with our listeners today?

Nina - 00:42:18:

I think, Jackie, that we can each contribute to co-creating the world we want, whether in our businesses, our organizations, our personal lives, our neighborhoods, our villages or cities, by practicing treating ourselves and each other with reverence, reciprocity and respect. And I think practicing leadership in a way that truly values differences with curiosity and humility is essential. And one of my inspirations comes from an equity teacher named Camilla Majid, and she says we need to cultivate discomfort resilience. And I think that's a wonderful piece of advice, because we're all much sturdier and more resilient than we imagine. The path ahead towards healing this crazy culture we've inherited and transforming it is a long one and a challenging one, but it's also filled with fulfillment and joy and integration. And I think in terms of diversity work, we don't hear enough about the joy of it. We hear a lot about the hardship or the challenges, and those are all true. And there is nothing that lights my heart up more than being among a really diverse group of people who are really intent on supporting and loving and bringing out each other's best. And that's what I want for all of us in our businesses, in our lives, in our leadership, in our families. And so cultivating a culture that's informed by love, respect and reverence is what I would offer.

Jackie - 00:44:28:

I love that. Nina, thank you so much. This has been so inspiring. Thank you for the amazing work that you're doing. How can people learn more about Bioneers and get in touch with you?

Nina - 00:44:41:

There is a URL that I would offer for people to go to because if you go there, it'll put you in touch with Bioneers. And also you can download a free introduction to my book, and that's bioneers.org/ncsbook. And I also have my own website, which is ninasimons.com, the last thing that I would offer is that Bioneers has an amazing newsletter and an incredible radio series and podcast series and a conference coming up. So if you sign up for the newsletter on bioneers.org, you'll learn about the conference, which is happening in Berkeley in April, and I hope we get to see you, and we'd love to hear from you.

Jackie - 00:45:36:

Awesome. Nina, thank you so much. This has been so incredible. Thank you for taking some time with us today.

Nina - 00:45:42:

It's a total joy. Jackie, thank you for setting the table so beautifully and for cultivating this beautiful community.

Jackie - 00:45:59:

Thanks for joining me for this episode. Please take a moment to subscribe and review this podcast and share this episode with a friend. Become a part of our community on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. This show was edited and produced by Earfluence. I'm Jackie Ferguson. Join us for our next episode of Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox. Take care of yourself and each other.