Ep. 1: How We Got Here
* Subscribe using your preferred podcasting service by clicking the “subscribe” link in the above audio player*
-
This first episode of the Road to Repair podcast kicks off with your cohosts sharing how the three of them came together to birth this show. They each share a bit about their own personal backgrounds and how this work has taken shape in their lives.
Highlights:
• Context setting and a round-robin get-to-know-you session with your three cohosts
• Milestones marking your cohost's individual journeys into this work of repair: Jessica's formative experience with "The Wiz," Nikishka's father's informative rants, and Andrew's diverse backgrounds across race, class, and culture
• How this show came together, through a pandemic and major life transitions, along with a teaser of what lies ahead
-
JESSICA NORWOOD (she/her)
Named to Essence Magazines “50 Entrepreneurs to Watch” list, Jessica Norwood is a financial activist, investor and social entrepreneur. She is the founder of RUNWAY, a financial innovation firm committed to dismantling systemic barriers and reimagining financial policies and practices–all in the name of Black liberation.
Jessica is a former board member of the historic Highlander Research and Education Center, the same place that trained Dr. King, and is trained in nonviolence organizing, anti-racism and popular education facilitation. Today, Jessica serves on boards of Emergent Strategies Ideation Institute, Zeal Multi Media Worker Cooperative and Society of Clotilda, whose work unlock the spirit of imagination and creativity needed to repair broken systems and practices.
Widely recognized for her groundbreaking work in economic disruption, Jessica is an Center for Economic Democracy fellow, an immediate past fellow for RSF Social Finance Integrated Capital Fellowship, winner of the prestigious Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship, a former BALLE Fellow for local economies (Common Future), a lifelong Fellow of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and Southern University College of Business for Emerging Leaders, as well as the Political Power and Social Change Fellow of the Hip Hop Archive at the Hutchins Center of Harvard University. Her innovative work has been profiled in NPR, Next City, Essence Magazine, Conscious Company, Fast Company and NY Times Best Selling author Edgar Villanova of “Decolonizing Wealth” calls her work the “medicine” modern philanthropy and investment need. Jessica splits time between Alabama, California and Jamaica.
NIKISHKA IYENGAR (she/her)
Nikishka Iyengar is an entrepreneur, strategist, writer and community organizer working at the intersection of equitable development, racial justice and climate action. She is the founder of The Guild, a worker-owned cooperative focused on building community wealth and resilience through real estate, entrepreneurship programs, and access to capital for marginalized communities. The Guild’s flagship initiative and fund Groundcover is focused on creating community-owned and community-controlled models of real estate as a way to build self-determination for marginalized communities.
Nikishka was a fellow at RSF Social Finance, Common Future, and The Aspen Institute. Each of her fellowships were focused on creating community wealth building and alternative economy strategies to close the gaps in racial and gender equity. She currently serves on the Community Advisory Board of Olamina Fund, a $40M fund seeking to address the racial wealth gap. Nikishka was recognized by GreenBiz as a "30 under 30" leader (in 2016) in sustainability and has had her work recognized (and bylines) in multiple publications including The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Next City, and Curbed. Nikishka is currently based in Atlanta and is mama to a curious and energetic two year old.
ANDREW X (he/him)
Andrew X cultivates a liberatory praxis of centering historically-marginalized communities rooted in the pursuit of self-determination and cultural healing with a focus on the intersection of regenerative agriculture, food systems, ownership of land and labor, social enterprise ecosystems, holistic design, and systems change. Andrew currently works as an independent consultant, focusing largely on BIPOC-led enterprise & land projects, and is writing his forthcoming book (yet to be announced).
Previously, he served as a worker-owner at LIFT Economy where he produced the Next Economy Now podcast series and served as an instructor in the Next Economy MBA program. A glimpse into Andrew’s unique perspective and analysis during that window in time can be heard in this interview on the Planetary Regeneration Podcast with Gregory Landua, in this interview on the Next Economy Now podcast, and of course throughout his many interviews on Next Economy Now. Prior to that he served on the Board of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis while earning his degree in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems, pioneering original research as a McNair Scholar with departmental honors. He loves being immersed in the natural world and nourishing community. He currently resides on unceded Coast Miwok lands in the San Francisco Bay Area.
-
IPCC 2021 Climate Change Report
Tools for Systems Thinkers, Leila Acaroglu
The Pandemic as a Portal, Arundhati Roy
Next Economy Now Podcast & LIFT Economy
-
Jessica Norwood 0:00
"And it was something about the way that The Wiz talked about home that I, maybe cellularly, understood meant returning to Africa, returning to our roots, returning to our true selves, returning to nature. Going back to something else, something that felt ancient, but also felt new and possible. I wanted us to be able to go home to return to a right relationship to the planet and the people around us."
Road to Repair Theme Song 0:32
You ready, we gettin' down to business. Investing in existence. Shifting from a system steeped in extraction, that steady sappin' our peoples and planet to cash in, slashing. Widening gaps in our access to land, wealth, peace, satisfaction. Imagine basing relations on more than transactions. It's time for new pathways, and we need to shape them through our inner landscapes, our relations, our approach our dedication, we're on the road to repair as a commitment to transformation.
Show Intro 1:05
Welcome to the road to repair a podcast exploring our journey out of a business as usual economy tour, collective healing and liberation. We're your co hosts Andrew X, Jessica Norwood and Nikishka Iyengar, and we're very excited for this conversation.
Nikishka Iyengar 1:29
Welcome, dear listeners to our first season of The Road to repair. Think of this podcast as the beginning of a happy marriage or partnership between the worlds of business and social justice. And like any strong partnership, it's going to involve a lot of rigorous introspection, good communication, and a deep, deep alignment of shared values towards shared goals and outcomes. For so much of our collective lifetimes, these two worlds of business and social justice have been at odds with each other, right? And they continue to be, thanks to the ways in which our dominant economic system of capitalism has worked to reinforce and uphold other systems of oppression from white supremacy, to the patriarchy, to imperialism and so forth.
So, social justice movements have always had to push back against and try and course correct almost from the outcomes that the business world was producing. then somewhere along the way, beginning in the late 60s, questions about the ethical responsibility of business as an institution began surfacing in the mainstream. Fast forward a few decades from then, there is now a whole industry based on social impact corporate responsibility, sustainability and impact investing. Those are some of the terms or sectors that you might have heard or familiar with by now.
But if it wasn't clear before, it should be by now. We are in almost at the end of the year 2021 and 2020, with the global pandemic had revealed all of the ways in which the current "business as usual" economy is wholly inadequate at solving the biggest issues of our time. When I say the "business as usual" economy, I'm really referring to capitalism with a few bells and whistles, which is really what this industry of social impact has been about, right? It's involved pushing for small reforms without any fundamental transformation, resulting in the same deep inequities across the board. And not only is this "business as usual" economy inadequate when it comes to solving the biggest issues of our time, it's actually the main contributor to these issues in the first place.
At the time of making this podcast, the IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, just put out a report that confirms that we've already warmed our planet by 1.1 degrees Celsius, and various climate crises are unfolding around us. Globally, wealth inequality continues to deepen, with 1% of the world owning nearly half of the total wealth. And then if we zoom into this country, right, the racial wealth gap in this country, if we did nothing differently today, would take over 250 years to close. And zooming in a little bit more when we think about wealth, land is so fundamental to wealth creation and in the U.S., thanks to the the ways in which white supremacy is so deeply entrenched in every institution, including land and housing and finance, 95% of land is owned by white people. This podcast is less about the stats and the problems, and more an exploration of our journey out of this mess. What does imagining and experimenting towards post-capitalism look like? How do we embody the change that we so deeply desire to see?
Throughout this series, we interview practitioners that are tackling this work of repair, as we call it, on four fronts: the personal, the interpersonal, the institutional and the systemic. But in this first episode, we want to give you all a sense of who your co-hosts are, how we as individuals really got into this work, how we as co-hosts came together for this project. And how we're thinking and holding how we want to transform these various systems happening all around us, beginning with the personal. With that, maybe we should each share about who we are and how we got to our individual work and journeys. What do y'all think?
Jessica Norwood 5:45
So for folks who are just listening and hearing my voice for the first time, I am Jessica. Jessica Norwood if you nasty, shout out to Janet Jackson. And I am from the Deep South Alabama. I'm the daughter of civil rights leaders who turned politician and an entrepreneur from Chicago, who really understood that the next steps in what we would talk about is this justice movement needed to include economics. And I think, in fact, this is right at this point where Dr. King, what he was advocating for this economic inclusion when he's assassinated in Memphis. So as a black woman, from the south, from Alabama, growing up as the daughter of a politician and a daughter of an entrepreneur from Chicago, you know, I'm also thinking as a business person I had inroads across into politics, so a lot of people know me from that work.
I faced a lot of barriers to getting the kind of support that I needed to make my business grow, particularly around capital. And what you start to realize is, if you just kind of lift the hood up a little bit, that those barriers that I was facing getting access to capital was really not about me, or my worth or my worthiness, or my business, it was due to a legacy of racism, inside of banking, and inside of the investment field, and something that we call and you'll hear us talk a lot about this racial wealth gap. And I will tell you, I hate saying the word racial wealth gap, because it makes it sound like the gap is just some kind of polite thing. And it's nowhere near polite. This gap really sums up every violent thing that's ever happened in America, to Black people, and to white people, and everybody else too. It talks about lynching, and Jim Crow laws, and redlining and all of these things that predatorily happened to Black people every time they tried to make a move to build wealth for themselves.
This gap meant that great ideas from Black founders never got the financial support that they needed to, quote, unquote, get off the runway. And if you hear me talk about my company, I am the CEO and founder of Runway. And that's what we mean, we're really talking about how we support these founders to get reparative capital, not just the regular kinds of loans and debt that you hear about out in them streets. No, we're talking about reparative capital that actually understands the systemic failures that Black entrepreneurs are facing. And we understand that when we support growing more businesses, we actually are creating jobs, sustaining communities and growing more wealth, because we tend to find that more entrepreneurs of color are hiring other people that look like them, putting those businesses, those buildings, and communities back into usage. So we think it's really important.
I started it, Runway, because Black founders, like myself, needed capital, with terms that made sense, that were patient, that understood community and lifted up a lot of the values that we're going to talk about throughout this podcast. And, you know, I kind of came to this idea of thinking about reparative capital, because as I mentioned, growing up with a politician dad and an entrepreneur, mom, and I always had this aspiration, or this idea maybe about why these communities, that looked like mine, majority African American. And if you look at anywhere in the south, you'll see a lot of communities just like this one, and even some in the north -- majority African American talented people who go off and lead incredible companies and great lives, but why couldn't these communities thrive? What was happening? What was the barrier there. I was always curious about it growing up. And I remember as a young girl going to a stage play in Chicago, and it was called The Wiz.
Okay, if you're from Chicago, you know, The Wiz was the jam. And I never forget this day. I was very cute. Let's just start there, I was very cute. And I went with my cousin's all of us little girls and our cute dresses. It felt like Easter almost, like we were decked out. And we went downtown, my aunt took us, my aunt Madeline, shout out to my aunt Madeline, took us to see this stage play The Wiz. It has music by Quincy Jones, Stephanie Mills was acting in it. And in the movie version, Michael Jackson, okay, is the Scarecrow. I mean, full stop Michael Jackson, in a movie, you want to know about this. So this is how I felt as a little kid. And I went to the stage play, I love theater still do to this day. I am obsessed with just culture and arts and really powerful storytelling. And this was my first time seeing Black actors and Black musicians and all of this but the story, it was a story that really stuck with me all these years, because it was a story about trying to get home. And this wasn't the home that the Wizard of Oz talked about. No, this was home home. And it was something about the way that The Wiz talked about home that I maybe cellularly understood, meant returning to Africa, returning to our roots returning to our true selves, returning to nature, going back to something else, something that felt ancient, but also felt new and possible.
And I was on after that I mean, lit up inside out. I wanted us to be able to go home, to return to a right relationship to the planet and the people around us. And I've committed a lot of my life into doing that kind of work. And so in these episodes, I'm going to talk about relationships. I'm going to talk about what it means 'right relationship'. And Runway uses this language as a manifesto really to help guide us in how we receive capital, how we put capital out in the world. And one of the places and people that I learned from so much around this is my dear friend, adrienne marie brown, who I get a chance to interview. Please, please, please check out that episode, because she's so amazing. And we have this brilliant conversation about love and Black imagination that you do not want to miss. But what I love so much about adrienne and what adrienne talks about is that intersection weaving of imagination that I felt when I was at The Wiz. The storytelling and the power of what we have inside of us to tell new stories, and the ability to look at nature and things around us as a way to help us to think of how do we organize ourselves the systems and resources around us in a way that is in right relationship?
Nikishka Iyengar 13:25
Yes, that right relationship piece is really the crux of this work of repair, right? And, Jessica, I'm so glad you just talked about The Wiz and your experience of it. Because in case our listeners haven't picked up on it yet, from imagery on our website, and podcast art, it is very much a calling in of those themes. The Wiz came up very early in our podcasts meetings, so you'll definitely see that pop up in all of our art. Y'all definitely need to check out Jessica's episode with adrienne too. It is just beautiful. And adrienne's work has also really been important to my own journey towards tapping into an imagination that is liberatory and aligning my work, my practice, how I show up in this work with that liberatory imagination. So I'm really excited for y'all to listen to that episode.
To share more about how I got into this work of repair, let me I guess start at the beginning real quick. So I was born and raised in Mumbai, in Bombay, like we called it, in India, in a family where history, politics, economics, social justice, were sort of all topics at the dinner table pretty regularly. The thing that growing up in a place like Mumbai does, if you're lucky, is it radicalizes you at an early age to issues around economic justice and class disparities. Of course, if you're not as lucky you basically just end up super numb to the poverty and all of the accompanying caste and class and other sort of injustices at that same intersection. The other thing, a place like Mumbai, or just India, I guess, in general does, is radicalize you or at least it radicalized me around misogyny and sort of very stark gender-based violence at an early age, right. That's just sort of the reality of growing up in a place like that.
Growing up, it was my mom and dad, my sister who's four years younger than me, and my grandparents, so my mom's parents. And the six of us lived together in a two bedroom, 900 ish square foot apartment. Our living room would double up into a bedroom at night, and some nights my grandparents would sleep there some nights, my sister and I would sleep there. Some nights, my sister and I would wrangle my grandma into sleeping in the living room with us and staying up all night telling us bedtime stories. And it was a very cozy, sweet, pretty modest childhood looking back. My dad worked in the merchant navy. And so he would be gone for half the year like he would leave for four months to go to sea, would travel pretty much across the world, and then be back for four months. And then so on and so forth. And this kind of went on until, yeah, pretty much I left for college. Being a sailor for him meant an opportunity to immerse himself in a lot of other cultures, and then basically bring that home to us. So that was a huge sort of privilege growing up with that. He was also a huge history buff. And so a lot of our dinner conversations when he was home would eventually become these like, I don't know, huge political debates or history lessons. I guess, as an example, to give you a sense of just who my dad is as a character, you know, we could ask a very simple question, and you know, like, kids? My sister and I, just sort of our childlike curiosity about things that were just around us. Like a very simple question "Hey Dad, how come we have so many slums around us?" you know, shanty towns, "how come we have so much poverty around us?", like, it could be what felt at that moment in time as kids like..."this is a pretty straightforward question, right?" would spin out into this big lesson on maybe, you know, colonialism? And the remnants of it.
Or if we had literally any question about any sort of global topic that would pop up on the evening news or something, it would mean that he would be launching into a "well, it all started when the white man discovered gunpowder" kind of conversation. And as a kid, you're like, "What are you talking about?!" It would sound so wild and it would sound like he was both over simplifying a thing, like we we watched a thing on TV and now we're asking a question about it and he's like, spinning out into this this start of civilization kind of story. It sounded like an oversimplification, but also sounded like maybe a cop out of trying to get out of answering our questions. And, you know, I asked a lot of questions as a kid. But of course, now, as an adult, I'm like, damn, Dad, you were right. He's gonna get a kick out of listening to this if he listens to it. So that was my dad, a provocateur in a lot of ways but also, I think, yeah, responsible for my analysis around white supremacy and imperialism and questions about all of those things at a pretty early age.
My mom, when I was growing up, was very much a working career mom, which was, you know, not quite the norm back then in India, or, you know, in my extended family or peer circles. She worked in tech, so she worked with IBM, Apple and HP, Hewlett Packard, primarily with those two companies across like a 30 plus year career. She wasn't, quote, unquote, a homemaker. And something that stands out to me about my childhood is that the traditional gender norms that exist in I guess, most families, because it's definitely an American thing, too. But especially in Indian families, like, those just didn't exist in our household. That was a blessing, I think, to witness as two young girls, my sister and I, to be able to witness that in our household because that was not the reality around us. For a significant chunk of my life, for example, my mom made more than my dad, and my dad was often in, you know, like the kitchen or cleaning or just sort of doing the labor of running a household. So yeah, that was that was a good thing for us to witness growing up. And then, you know, one thing my mom did that has been a huge blessing to my sister and I to this day was sort of really investing in building a village around us. Mutual Aid was something we practice a lot as a family. It was both, I think, a cultural norm but also out of necessity. And to this day, my mom's friend who are still, sort of our aunties and uncles, are a huge presence in our life. Their kids are some of my best friends. And now we have kids of our own. And we've taken our little Mumbai village global. It's really sweet to see how things have unfolded. So anyway, that was a lot on the personal front.
When I was in high school, we moved to Singapore, for my mom's job. And then I left a couple years later for college, and I'm like condensing. There's a lot there between The move from Mumbai to to Singapore. I came to the US when I was 17. And I went to the University of Texas at Austin. I was initially a Genetics major with the goal of becoming a genetic scientist and researcher, but quickly realized that was not my calling at all, even though I was a huge science nerd. And I pivoted to economics and finance to, I guess, really get back into some inquiry around questions of economic development that had surfaced for me as a child growing up in Bombay. My time outside the college classroom was spent, as a student organizer working on everything from climate to economic justice campaigns. And it was really a super interesting time to be an economics and finance major, right? This was like 2007-2008. And things were collapsing in real time around us. So yeah, a lot of the curiosity I had, a lot of the frustration and anger at the status quo went into student organizing for me. And then post college when it was time to graduate and look for a job....yes, looking for a job was a big thing. But for me, it was, Okay, do I go back home to India? Or do I stay here in this country? And I think over the period of those four years that answer became like, clearer and clearer to me for several different reasons that I wanted to stay back in this country. And so there were maybe like four jobs available for us. Because I needed a visa, I needed an employer to sponsor a visa to stay here. So it was the H1B visa. The options were investment banking, or management consulting. And we had literally just, we were still very much in the like, sh*t show of the financial collapse. And so I definitely knew investment banking was not remotely going to be part of my career at all. I knew that pretty clearly. I wasn't super gung ho about management consulting, but it felt like it would give me the opportunity to at least try different things. And so that's where I went, I worked at Deloitte Consulting for five years.
And while at Deloitte, I had the opportunity to support some some partners and managers in building up Deloitte's practice on environmental sustainability and social impact. So we were working with large fortune 500 companies on their climate action goals and strategies, emissions reductions, corporate water stewardship, just social impact in their supply chains, things like that. And so I got to, just like deepen my skill set around, doing that kind of consulting work and helping brands and large companies be more responsible. But I think through the journey was also an eventual realization of things we talked about a lot in this podcast, right? Where a lot of what sustainability and corporate responsibility and social impact has been about has been sort of small, small in the grand scheme of things, changes to business practices with this, like larger fundamental continuation of the status quo. Which is accumulation at all costs, growth at all costs, the deepening of inequities, social inequities, economic inequities, planetary inequities, that translated or manifested as a result of that business as usual, economy, like I said, before. It became pretty evident that like, yes, corporate responsibility is a BandAid on a bullet wound. It actually might not even be that. It's actually a distraction from what is actually needed, which is a fundamental transformation to our current economic system of capitalism. And so all of that sort of learning became clear over time. And I'm very grateful for my journey in the corporate world, because it took that to understand that there's no changing from within. That was my takeaway. That we really need to build and invest in alternatives. And so that's what brought me to the work of The Guild, a company I started back in 2015, which is really all about imagining a sort of alternative an economic development model that centers marginalized people, that facilitates self-determination of marginalized people for marginalized people. Right now our work is focused on creating community-owned and community-controlled models of real estate. That's been my journey over over the last decade.
Andrew X 25:28
Alright, so who is this character, Andrew X, you're listening to on the show, I'll just be upfront with you about the fact that I only just recently dropped the surname, which I formally went by Baskin that my family's carried for many generations. And I'm not going to go too much into that. But just to share, I am approaching a lot of this work personally, and in the work from a very sort of liberatory or decolonizing mindset. And you might wonder where that comes from. So just to share a little bit of the story, the aspects of my identity. I was born and raised at the intersections of culture that blended some stark differences in race class religion, that, for me, kind of yielded really an ever elusive sense of belonging, that have constantly challenged me to broaden my perspective, to learn from others, and also to transcend dogmas and indoctrination and to really think for myself, which, for many of us in this work, I think that is a common thread, because it's not really taught to us in school. So most of us tend to find it or seek it out or something to that effect. In terms of what is my actual identity, like race, class religion, my biological mom came from kind of a poor white background, my father was kind of from a Black middle class background. As with many American families, kind of like a broken family that prefigured situation, the woman that my dad remarried, my mother who raised me, shout out mom, also had like a similar sort of dichotomy in her family of a mother working class and upper class Jewish father. But anyway, I grew up in the suburbs, in Folsom, California, which is there's this kind of diasporic aspect that from my family, which actually comes from Mississippi, by way of around Newark, New Jersey, and, you know, now to California, but I think that's true for many, many families in the African diaspora in this country. I was also raised in a Jewish context in Jewish community, and again, had a Black father, white mother. And so like, there's just there's a lot in the narratives and intergenerational stories that are deeply informing how I am approaching my life and my work.
Between some of those, I guess, you say, traumas and social justice values that I was raised with, I was always really shaped to sort of question authority, to not have blind faith. And that applies to like health care, education, so on and so forth. Really acutely feeling a lot of the disharmony and some of the systems; sensing the need for repair. Sensing the layers of disconnection within myself, within my family and abroad, and really at the outset of my entrance to the quote, unquote, road to repair, is really a reclaiming agency in all aspects of my life and health, my love life, my work life. And these kind of themes of like love and violence at the most intimate level, you know, exist in my family and understanding the relationship between these experiences and our larger context, mirrors some of those themes that exist at the personal as well as at the systemic level. And my nerdy, proactive self-directed learning self, really kind of keyed in on attuning to solutions. having kind of a solutions-focused approach, grounded in an ever deepening understanding of the obstacles that we face. We'll get a little bit more into some of the, you know, nerdy stuff of systems thinking in a bit. But that's a little bit about sort of my background, personally. And my entrance into the road to repair really started out a level of needs, decided that I wanted to learn how to grow my own food that ultimately wound up getting formalized in a whole path around sustainable agriculture and food systems with a focus on economics. And really revolves around deep intentions and desires for self-determination for myself, our communities, so on and so forth. So as I formalized my study at UC Davis and sustainable agriculture and food systems with a focus on cooperative economics, I was simultaneously kind of creating a framework to try and support some of the educational aspects of walking this path which involved systems thinking and ethics. And both of those inform each other in very important ways, kind of taking the premise that in order to really approach a lot of this work, those are competencies that are fundamentally needed to have the perspective to kind of arrive at solutions that are actually really viable.
And to connect it back to some of the crises that we're facing as a society right now that we mentioned earlier. Much of that, this is maybe an oversimplification, but much of that could be characterized as the dissonance between, quote, unquote, western mind and say, indigenous mind. Whereas western mind seems to kind of tend to take a little bit more of a reductionist approach or like linear mechanistic, whereas what I'm generally saying indigenous mind is, you know, a little bit more systems thinking, understanding interconnectivity. But one of the two tends to, the Western mind tends to kind of perceive itself as superior to some of the other perspectives. And so this is very dominant both within our academic system, it's highly reductionistic. And that, in many of these dimensions, where we're having system failure, we could point to the fact that we're kind of not understand not operating, as if we're dealing with complex systems. And there's many different types of systems, there's kind of simple systems, complicated systems, complex systems, we are in a paradigm shifting moment. Shifting that is really necessary. And I want to introduce a term that I coined that helps to, I think, articulate some of what happens when we don't take on this perspective. And it's 'nexus blindness'. So it's just like, it seems like a nerdy term, but it's important to have so we can name it. And that's just where we don't see the connection between two or more things that very often happens can be when we don't see the connection between two or more things, people, places, cultures, etc. Because in reality, everything is interconnected. And so it helps us to remember and point out where we might be hyper focused and have blinders on. It reminds us to zoom out and take a little bit more of a holistic perspective.
Nikishka Iyengar 32:37
So with that, Jessica, do you want to tell tell the people how we came together, you always say the best, I'll let you kick it off.
Jessica Norwood 32:48
It is part dramedy part, comedy part cray cray, for sure. So at this point, the pandemic is really... we're just finding out the fullness of what's happening. And I will put this as probably like June 2020. And here comes Nikishka, like, "I'm gonna do an interview". And, you know, it was an interesting moment to be doing interviews at this point. And what I think she might have intended, Nikki, you can correct me, might have intended for like, a 30 minute, 45 minute call turned into three hours, because I was in a state of WTF. Completely. And I think what was really present for me at that particular time, was that I was certain that we were not going to be who we once were. The work that I was doing was certainly about to change. I didn't know how much, but I knew we were at an evolutionary moment in time. There is this language that's, you know, been moving around. Calling this moment a portal, I think, really speaks to what it means to be teleporting or quickly jumping ahead evolutionarily, and rightfully so. We were at a time where, you know, George Floyd had just been murdered. before our eyes. We were starting to see footage of Breonna Taylor. There was so much going on happening in the world. And here we were the three co-hosts, kind of coming together and talking about that, and it turned into maybe these podcasts really become us trying to make sense of the world. And certainly all of our prep in our sessions felt like that, because there was a heaviness going on outside of the microphone that we were on, that was really calling for what is this new way forward? What is the world actually in need of right now?
What is the medicine that the planet is calling for, and each of us in our respective ways talks about finance, and capital, and community and relationships. And the way that we must steward those those gifts that happen, and how we learn from the planet, and the world around us on what it means to be in right relationship to those things. So we're all holding our own medicines inside of all of that. And I think in this moment in time, it was like, how do we put this out in the world to explain what we've been working on, what we've been uncovering, the shoulders that we actually stand on. Because there's so much scholarship and work that I think is wrapped up inside of the Road to Repair. And so we kind of got here in a really funky, crazy time portal that I will call the pandemic. And it brings three hosts together that maybe under other circumstances, we would be kind of busy doing our own things, maybe, you know, head nodding each other, but definitely linking up to give as best we can, a narrative of what's currently happening, what got us here, but most importantly, what we think gets us out of here. And what that spirit of repair is about, and how people are doing it in the world. And so that's how I kind of land it all up in the soup. What about you, Nikki?
Nikishka Iyengar 36:41
Yeah, and the interview, you're referencing, Jessica, it was supposed to be, I think, a 45 minute interview that turned into the three hour deep conversation. At that point, I thought I was I was writing a book about how we can really bridge the worlds between, you know, business and social justice in a way that truly transforms our underlying material conditions and systems. So not in the way that sort of social impact as a field or impact investing as a field has been shepherding this work. I think that's what the pandemic revealed -- the pandemic revealed so much -- but one of the things that it revealed was business-as-usual, fundamentally, is not going to work. And those of us that are in this space, in this industry, in business, have a huge moral responsibility to get us out of here, especially if we're touting metrics or goals around racial equity, around inclusion, around sustainability, all of that. If we want to have transformative impact, we're gonna have to start with some truth telling, and then shift in to this deep work of repair. And like you said, Jessica, so much of this work of repair is building on scholarship that already exists. We actually have the tools, the practices, the frameworks, to move out of this "business as usual" economy towards collective healing and liberation, we have the tools. It's just about how we use them in this moment, when there's so many forces coming together and working to either reinforce each other or separate each other, that we use some existing frameworks and lean into them and embody this work of repairing. So in this podcast, we're really, we're talking about the what, and we're talking about the how. And yeah, Andrew joined us early in this in this project, and became one of our wonderful co-hosts and partners so Andrew, maybe you want to talk about how you got here.
Andrew X 39:02
Sure. Thanks, Nikki. So, hey, Andrew here. You know, there's just such a deep need to catalyze the conversation that were bringing on this show. Nikki recognizes that, Jessica recognizes that, Nikki is working on her book, Jessica has a ton of you know, intellectual capital around all of this. So to many of our friends.... backing up a little bit, formally, I produced a podcast called Next Economy Now. There's a little bit of overlap between kind of the general intent of that and the conversation that we're bringing in this show. But really, I would highlight the difference is as Nikki and Jessica kind of named, that there's this kind of moving out of the quote unquote, business-as-usual economy, also known as the extractive economy, or, you know, just kind of short sighted. Inevitably, we're going to probably use a lot of jargony terms. So trying to be as inclusive as possible with how I'm describing this. But this conversation is actually kind of going one step beyond, like moving away from the business-as-usual economy, the, quote unquote, doing well by doing good. And there's certainly a place for that. And also, at the same time, in and of itself, it's sort of wholly inadequate to address some of the underlying conditions that historically, currently are deeply problematic, and are taking our world to a really unsustainable place on many different fronts -- ecologically, economically, socially interpersonally.
And so I came to the table from, you know, some of the background of my work with a team called Lift Economy, which was where I produced that podcast. And Nikki and I actually had met through that context, initially through the premise of a pilot fund called the Force for Good Fund. And Nikki and I... when we met, we really hit it off and have stayed in touch. And at some point, I learned about Nikki's, you know, intention to create the book, and we just proposed, like, hey, you know, maybe it would be helpful to open this conversation up to a wider audience for many reasons. And I can bring my podcast experience to bear with that. So that's kind of how I came to the table, in this journey. And also just, I was kind of secretly crushing on both Jessica and Nikishka, in what I had observed in their incredible work, which has been super inspiring, and I'm sure you'll learn more about it through the course of this show. But that's a little bit kind of how we all came together. So, you know, we really want to extend the love that has been living between us extend a huge, huge, warm welcome to each of you listening, joining us in this journey on on the road to repair.
Nikishka Iyengar 42:28
Thanks, Andrew, I think that crush has been growing threeway crush amongst each of us. And I'm just really grateful for the ways in which this little project has brought us all into deeper relationship. Folks listening in may not have the full context of everything that went into this labor of love. But it was a whole lot. Navigating a whole pandemic, for starters. I lost childcare all of last year and had a screaming toddler with me 24/7, who actually inside of the pandemic made his his little transition from infant to toddler hood. And Jessica had a cross country move. Andrew had several work and life transitions as well, it was a lot, y'all. But one thing that's been so beautiful is the ways in which we really embodied our individual and collective values throughout this process, how at times, we've stepped up and let other folks take a step back to attend to personal things, to attend to life. How we've navigated conflict and differences of opinion, how we've just made space in this entire process to truly be in right relationship with each other. Right? Like Jessica said. It's also why this damn thing took almost a year and a half to put out. But hey, it's the embodiment for us.
Andrew X 43:54
So listen, y'all, that is going to wrap up our time for today and I just want to say, we're really bringing.....we've been working at this podcast for many moons, as you heard for the past year, and have a lot of thoughts and intentions and everything, and are trying to get this conversation out there and just want to invite in the road to repair, you know, everything that we're talking about in our own production of this show. We're just calling in compassion. And I think it's important to name that this isn't about perfection. It's really about us collectively forwarding this conversation together. And so hopefully, this has been received in that spirit and hopefully over time throughout the season and in subsequent seasons, this will be of greater and greater service and value to all of you tuning in. We really would love your support and helping us to steward it in that direction. So any and all feedback suggestions for the future season, potential online events that we could do, we just so welcome your input and invite you into this conversation for the show. And as I mentioned earlier, we want to kind of be as inclusive as possible and, you know, try and bring every one along. Inevitably, we might not either go into it enough enough depth that you might like or might lose some terms but please help us keep it inclusive. Feel free to reach out to us through our website, the roadtorepair.com
Jessica Norwood 45:47
I want to say the next episode coming up is my home girl, my good friend and the boss with all the sauce Nwamaka Agbo. So you definitely want to listen to this episode coming up. And obviously our favorite co-host Nikki is doing the interview, it's going to be amazing. Check out that episode. That's all I gotta say, and period.
Show Outro 46:14
Thank you for joining us on the Road to Repair. Our greatest hope is that this show will have a transformative impact for those of you tuning in. The Road to Repair podcast is produced by Andrew X, Nikishka Iyengar and Jessica Norwood, with amazing post-production support from FRQNCY media. Music for the show was produced by Andrew X in close collaboration with artists and sound designer Zachary Seth-Greer and the luscious vocals and original poetics of Naima Penman. Shout out to sofahood for all of the amazing artwork. You can check out more of all of their great work on their website, which you can find links to at theroadtorepair.com We always love the social media shout outs and you can help this message ripple out to those who might really benefit from it by rating this show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts. And if you feel called to you can make a donation to support the show at www.theroadtorepair.com. Thanks again for tuning in and stay tuned for our next episode.
Road to Repair Theme Song 47:13
We stand with the land. We are far more than a commodity. We join with the water, our bodies are not property. We're reclaiming our shared sovereignty and shaping an economy based on reciprocity, cooperative, accountable ground in justice and ecology. The Empire is toppling who want to be about this prophecy. We've been summoned to the summit, trust, we here for something. What is now possible? Who are we becoming?
