Show Notes:
Tues + Tim: Welcome back to season 5 of Find The Outside: The Podcast. We're going to continue what we started in Season 4 and do quite a few interviews with awesome people.
Tim: I'm all right. We are rebuilding the business on the other side of COVID. We took the kids to go see my Mum and Dad in England and then we went up to see Toke in Denmark and then some other close friends of mine in Copenhagen and things like that. We definitely had a real surge of work before I went away where we landed, what I think, are some really significant and really exciting gigs… and then you go away on holiday and then you come back and you're like right, now we got to do the gigs. So that's a little bit of where I'm at. The time away was wicked. It was just full of people I love who I haven't seen - Ole Qvist-Sørensen from Bigger Picture and his wife Natalka and their kids, to seeing Mille Boyer and then going up and seeing Toke and Monika in the north of Denmark, then back to the UK seeing my Mum and Dad and my brother and my nephews and having all the cousins playing together, Harry Potter World… I mean, you know, we did it.
Tues: My summer has been BIG! In June, I went to Puerto Rico and got engaged to Gibrán [Riviera]. That was lovely and wonderful and big and life changing and then in August my oldest child left for college which I'm still just kind of figuring out. Eily [Tues’s daughter] and I are figuring out what life is like without one of the central figures being in our house every single day. I went back and forth between grief and excitement. And, then I just got back from Burning Man. The thing that was amazing to me is last time I went, our camp did an action. We led a march up to Burning Man's Board to invite them to actually make their radical inclusion principle, mean racial inclusion. Burning Man's like 70,000-80,000 people a year and usually less than 1% are Black. So we did this first political action on Burning Man. We had signs and flags and all of this stuff and the Burning Man organization didn't show up!
Tues: We went to an art installation called “Black! Asé” which was developed by the Black Burner Project. She always has a group photo for all Black Burners every year - this year it had to be at least 500; some people estimated up to a thousand. It was amazing. It's like to just go and have all of these melanated folks dancing and being happy to be Black at Burning Man. People at our camp have been working with the Burning Man organization, the Black Burner Project's been working in the Burning Man organization. You could see change happen in 3 years and it was astounding. My particular Burning Man was incredibly loving and inclusive and radical this year, so that was great and I'm just back and just kind of settling in.
Tim: It [Burning Man] really is this incredible experimentation place in alternative viable futures, isn't it? I mean that's really what people are really looking at. How could we be different? How could we govern differently? What could we do that would accelerate our path into a future that is more equitable, that it is more kind, in greater relationship to the planet, that has alternative economies?
Tim + Tues: We've got a pretty sweet season on the podcast coming up. [We’re] looking forward to our interviews with:
Zaid Hassan. He’s one of those people I knew really early in my career. I kind of started out this line of work with him and then we've kept in touch with each other over the years, and I quote him and I often use the same quote every single time I quote him which is, “most efforts at change fail because people fail to see reality.” Some of the interviews last year were people who I'd met early on in my career who've evolved and really leapt on and to be able to circle back and bring those people back into our worlds, I mean, it's quite exciting isn't it?!
Báyò Akómoláfé. When I read what he's written I think oh this person is a futurist. There's no doubt, for me, that he's calling in a future. There's just no doubt that that is what he is doing with his writing and his thinking, and his way of being in the world and expressing what is happening. I can't wait to talk with him about how he both conceives (his conceptions are so brilliant and different) but also then manages to make that into some kind of poetic deep language that is just on the edge of accessible but moves us into a future.
We also have Andrew Grant-Thomas on the pod with us. Andrew Grant-Thomas went from doing racial justice philanthropy and academic work to launching this effort called Embrace Race with his partner to help parents and their children have conversations and healthy development around race. He’s this big brain person who's taken all of this knowledge and skill into families and children, right? He’s super awesome, super funny, and super humble.
We've also got Richard Beard coming up this season. He wrote a book called Sad Little Men which is really looking at the kind of the impacts of education of the elite in the UK and then how that plays out in relationship to leadership. He's written some very provocative literature around the role that these people play in society and what happens to them as a result of the education they go through.
Gabe [Donnelly] and I [Tues] did an interview with Jamie Gamble who is a Developmental Evaluation expert, kind of a big name in Canada and across the world in Developmental Evaluation. Again someone who was so knowledgeable, so curious and so humble. He was happy to ask Gabe and I questions about where we're practicing developmental evaluation as well as share what he's doing and kind of share it from a place of, "this is what I'm learning, this is what I do.”
Cyndi Suarez is back. Cyndi wrote the Power Manual - just to remind folks if you didn't hear our first interview with her - she talks about power and she's running Nonprofit Quarterly so she's doing a lot of writing and articulating and influencing the field right now through her writing.
We also have Quanita Robertson and Tenneson Woolf. These are folks both of us have known for a long time but don't necessarily intersect with a huge amount and they're working cross-racially, across gender and across nationality. They’re delivering very deep complex work. So I always love how generative those conversations become when we get to work with other teams like ours.
And, not like our team but still long term colleagues and working across gender would be Chris Corrigan and Caitlin Frost. They’re working a lot in complexity. Caitlyn talked about her work with “The Work” being about working with inner complexity.
The Well-Being Blueprint [Alexander and Natalie] - these folks are coming to us with both with a national project around increasing well-being, which is then partnering with a national project around the full on abolition of these systems.
We’ve got Sean Rutland coming in who's the CEO of Hutch Games. Hutch Games is a game startup that just sold, 18-months ago, for $375 million. They've currently instituted the four day week.
Tim + Tues: So friends, I think we're up for a really good season. We can't wait to enjoy the ride with you. That's some insights into what's coming and then also if you what to do more than just listen to us, if you actually want to come and engage with us we’ve launched the “Activating Equitable and Enduring Change” Leadership Cohort, again. It starts in January 2023. Join us!
Resources:
Learn more about, and follow, The Outside by visiting and liking all of our channels:
Website: www.findtheoutside.com
Facebook & Instagram: @findtheoutside