S2 EP8: with Camille Leak: Exploring the Intersection of DEI and Trauma
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“Become a witness to yourself.” - Camille Leak In Inclusive Life, we are continually looking at the ways in which we can reach across differences as a path to connection and liberation. We often explore the impediments to being with one another authentically such as defensiveness, perfectionism, guilt, and shame. Camille Leak brings this conversation even deeper. She brings us to what’s beneath these obstacles to connection: trauma. Camille Leak is a DEI practitioner who believes that folks’ inability to be with other people’s differences is their fundamental lack of capacity...
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S2 EP7: with Dr. Crystal Menzies: Finding Inspiration from Maroon Communities to Guide Us Forward
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
One of the barriers for well meaning white folks and BIPOC who want to see a better world is this belief in the inevitability of positive outcomes. Dr. Crystal Menzies When Dr. Menzies drops this pearl of insight into the latest Inclusive Life Podcast conversation with Nicole, Nicole names the “inevitability of positive outcomes” as “a uniquely U.S. American specific ‘cultural hiccup.’” The belief that it’ll all work out in the end suggests a reality that doesn’t comport with the history of revolutions. There’s no one “out there” who is going to save us. Dr....
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S2 EP6: A Roadmap for Black Women to Thrive in the Workplace with Ericka Hines
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
There is something about the research project that feels a lot like love. It began with a personal need and grew into a much larger question: What would it take for Black women to thrive - not just survive - in the workplace? From this question, a massive project took shape. In this project, Founder of Every Level Leads, Ericka Hines and her team set out to understand Black cis and transgender women and Black gender expansive professionals and their experiences. Their goal was to understand them in all of their complexity. Ericka and Dr. Mako Fitts Ward wrote the report based on findings from...
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S2 EP5: Processing the Post-Roe Reality with the Inclusive Life Team
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
This episode of the Inclusive Life Podcast is an intimate conversation between Nicole and two members of her Inclusive Life team, Christina Hernandez and Laura Halpin. We convened to talk about our personal responses to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. We began with our own reactions, exploring our immediate sense of how each of our lives and our loved ones will be impacted. The Dobbs v. Jackson decision impacts all of us, and yet it is vital that we place this decision in a historical, social, and political context: the overturning of Roe v Wade is a massive step in a long history of reproductive...
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S2EP4 Part 2: Fat Phobia is a Social Justice Issue with Dana Sturtevant, HIilary Kinavey, and Sirius Bonner
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“The white gaze is upon us at all times, and the ways in which Black bodies have been destroyed by whiteness are many. But this is just one of them.” - Sirius Bonner One thing to get straight: divorcing yourself from diet culture isn’t just about being fat, loud, and proud. Sirius Bonner, who joins Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant for Part 2 of this two-part Inclusive Life podcast, drives home the importance of rooting our own relationship with our bodies in the broader political context. The context? Fat bodies are subjected to systemic oppression. Sirius deepens the...
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S2EP4 Part 1: Fat Phobia is a Social Justice Issue with Dana Sturtevant and HIilary Kinavey
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“We all eat for emotional reasons. That’s normal. Food is flavored with complex meanings. It connects us with our culture and our ancestry and heritage. We eat to celebrate. We eat to grieve. Food is an emotional thing for human beings. When we dumb it down to its nutritional components and see it only as a vehicle to give us nutrients, we are missing so much.” - Dana Sturtevant If you haven’t yet considered weight stigma as a social justice issue, today is the day you begin. Diet culture is an insidious arm of white supremacy culture that has removed us from our bodies,...
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S2EP3: Joy & Revolution Now with Jennifer Davis
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
"Creativity and engaging in creativity can offer insight into how we move forward." - Jennifer Davis There’s a sturdy and subversive thread woven through Jennifer Davis’s life and work: Where there’s an expectation to do things a certain way, of conformity or straight lines, because that’s how it’s always been done, Jennifer’s life is all about saying, “Nope. I’m doing it differently.” It feels like the “yes” and the path for Jennifer is in the joy, in the curvy unpatterned strokes of her paintbrush, in the “let’s try this and see what...
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S2EP2: Disrupting Business as Usual with Pamela Slim
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“If you’re designing a space for the most marginalized folks, by definition, the entire experience is going to be more inclusive for everybody.” It is a gift to have Pamela Slim as our guest for the official start of Inclusive Life Podcast Season 2. The conversation illuminates Pam’s skills at disrupting business as usual. She points out over and over again the choices business owner’s can make to cultivate one’s business as an ecosystem versus approaching business building as an empire, amassing market power through competition, extraction, and hierarchy....
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S2EP1: The Russian-Ukrainian Conflict from an Antiracist, Progressive Perspective: a Conversation with Dr. Clarence Lusane
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
For many people alarmed at the very visible anti-Black racism at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine two weeks ago, it’s important to understand more about the history of Afro Ukrainians and Africans in Ukraine. This conversation between Dr. Clarence Lusane and Nicole Lee sheds some light. We’ll learn that it is not a new history. Dr. Lusane, who has traveled and taught in Ukraine and all over the world, shared that after Ghana became independent from British colonial rule in 1957, and in 1960 when 17 other African countries gained their independence from colonial rule,...
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EP9: Rest: a Practice to Meet Urgent Times with Jen Lemen
Inclusive Life with Nicole Lee
“There’s a way that we can meet urgent moments without the spirit of urgency. That requires a competency and capacity that comes from deep grounding and regulation. Being able to show up consistently in ritual, rhythm and routine.” This conversation with Jen Lemen feels like strong medicine. With so many of us understandably depleted and exhausted, this topic of rest and sensitively responding to the needs of our bodies is so important and resonant. Jen has learned, through her own relationships forged in times of urgency and danger, to “interrupt” urgency. The interruption can...
info_outlineWelcome to the first episode of Inclusive Life!
I'm your host, Nicole Lee, human rights lawyer, DEI consultant, activist, mom and founder of Inclusive Life.
It is a joy and a privilege to bring this project into being. I believe it’s important.
Because I believe if we want to have a just and equitable society, we are going to have to build it. I believe being committed to eradicating systemic inequities is the highest calling one can have. It’s the most important thing we can do as individuals.
Yet, I believe we must do this work in community. We have to work together.
Why?
Revolutions and movements have changed societies. And revolutions and movements rely upon many people putting in their time, effort and energy.
There is no one coming to save us. It’d be nice to believe that there is a savior or guru on their way, but I don't believe in individual heroes or hero worship.
We have to save ourselves.
But none of us are alone, even though it might feel that way. There are so many of us doing the work. And no matter how long you’ve been at it, I want you to know that we come to this work as imperfect humans. We all have areas to grow. You get to be where you are at.
The Inclusive Life Podcast is not a forum where we are going to be debating that white supremacy culture is real, or that diversity, equity, and inclusion are important. We are not going to waste our time sparring with devil’s advocates.
Instead, we are going to be in dialogue. We will be listening, growing our understanding, building our skills of analysis and discernment, and moving into aligned action. We will hold one another accountable to learn, push beyond our comfort zones, and do necessary repair work.
Let’s link arms. Let’s create something that perhaps has never existed before.
Please join me as we shape a more compassionate and just world one conversation at a time.
Join me in cultivating a more Inclusive Life.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
- What is an “inclusive life”?
- What is Inclusive Life all about?
- The inspiration behind Inclusive Life Podcast
- What to expect from this podcast
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Thank you so much for joining us!
Our conversation continues on Facebook in our Inclusive Life Community. You can also follow us on Instagram and learn more at www.inclusivelife.co.
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