RWYH 13

Episode 13 Transcript

Change Starts at the Root (ft. Taquelia Washington)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Taquelia Washington:
Embedded in that survival are practices of interconnectedness. Embedded in those practices are survival of centering joy in the midst of pain.

Aimee Hanna:
Welcome to Remember Why You're Here, a podcast created by the Center for Innovation and Resources, where we host conversations with experts in the field
about what started their journey to do work around abuse and healing.

CIR is a small nonprofit with big goals. We organize events aimed to fulfill our vision that all professionals who serve children, families, and communities will have
the knowledge, skills, and training to act in a holistic and culturally responsive manner. To see more of what we do, visit cirinc.org.

Crystal Cardenas:
Taquelia Washington, pronouns she/her is a licensed clinical social worker and a certified professional coach with over 20 years of experience centering racial
equity in the fields of education, mental health and organizational consulting.

Taquelia brings all of herself, including her identity as a queer Black woman to her work as a teacher, coach and facilitator. She strives to create healing spaces
where people can feel empowered to tap into their fullness of being. Taquelia is the sole proprietor of EmpowerMe services and the co-director,
co-founder of Radicle Root Collective.

When she is not working, Taquelia loves to spend time with her family, eat yummy food and commune with nature. You can check out Radicle Root Collective and more of what they do at radiclerootcollective.com. Spelled out R-A-D-I-C-L-E-R-O-O-T collective.com.

Hi, Taquelia. Thank you so much for coming on our show today. It's been a while since we've worked together. I have a lot of fond memories from when you did a
series of trainings. I really appreciate you coming on today and joining us and catching us up a little bit on what you've been working on.

Taquelia Washington:
Yeah, absolutely. It's my honor. Thank you so much for having me.

Crystal Cardenas:
For the listeners who don't know you or only know a little bit about you, will you tell us a little bit about your life's journey and how it has gotten you to where you
are now.

Taquelia Washington:
So my life's journey. When I think about my life journey that has gotten me to where I'm at right now, it truly starts in utero and even before that
because my life's journey, I truly believe, includes my ancestors as well.

And I feel like for me, a lot of what I do in this world is so much bigger than me. I feel like it's something that both I have stepped into, but it also feels like a
colleague that's so much bigger than me. I identify at the core as a healer.

And I think for me, when I think about my journey starting in utero, when I think about my journey starting with my ancestors, there's a lot of my work that centers on both my own healing, but also the healing of my people, the healing from my family, from my lineage that has pulled me forward in this work. My specialty was working specifically with youth of color, specifically with youth of color that were in continuation schools that were also a part of other systems; foster care, juvenile justice, et cetera.

And as I was doing that work with my babies, what I kept bumping up against was the ways in which our systems that they were a part of just continued to exasperate their symptoms. And so while I was doing such beautiful work with them individually and sometimes with their families, I just kept bumping up against the limits of that.

And so at some point, my journey included doing direct mental health services, but then also got called into wanting to do more teaching, more education to try to impact not only service providers that I saw doing and perpetrating harm in my community, but also wanting to impact the system that we're doing the work.

And so now the work that I do, I've co-founded and co-direct a collective called Radicle Root Collective, where we partner with organizations that are really wanting to transform their organization to center racial equity. We work with a lot of nonprofits that are doing social service based work that are providing mental health.

We're doing a lot of work with school systems, a lot of work with other types of for-profit and nonprofit organizations that are really impacting the livelihood of communities of color, and just having these beautiful opportunities to support them, to transform at the different levels of their organization.

Looking back, I feel really blessed. I feel really honored to have the opportunity to have served in so many different capacities over the years, and I can see how they're just limitations no matter what pathway you go.

Crystal Cardenas:
Thank you so much for sharing that incredible journey that you have been on and continue to be on. There's just so many things about what you said that resonated as you were talking and shifting to systems and organizations. I just try to always have that perspective of by changing this one person's mind, we're impacting such a larger group.

I truly commend you for the work that you're doing, and I'm super excited to hear a little bit more about Radicle Root Collective. So with Radicle Root Collective, you utilize a decolonized approach to assess the organization's needs. Will you talk a little bit more about Radicle Root Collective and what the decolonized approach entails.

Taquelia Washington:
Absolutely. So we at Radicle Root Collective, we fall under the umbrella of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But for us, we are striving to reimagine the field of diversity, equity, inclusion. And our tagline is this idea of healing from the root.

And so radicle, our name, is spelled R-A-D-I-C-L-E. And the word radicle, it's a garden metaphor. And so the radicle is the first root that comes out of a seed when it's ready to plant into the Earth.

And that is a metaphor to how we conduct our work. We believe that every individual has already everything that it needs inside of itself, but it's really waiting on the conditions, the soil around in order to be able to root and grow.

And so part of what we're trying to do in our work with our organizational partners is to help them to plant new soil, new conditions in their organization that's going to support the wisdom, the magic, the brilliance specifically of their members of color to be able to root and grow.

And we believe that through doing that, not only are we impacting the folks of color that work in that organization, not only are we supporting the organization as a whole to transform its conditions, but we're also-- the ripple effect is going to benefit the communities that we hold nearest and dearest to our heart, which are communities of color.

And so we think about using a decolonized approach. When we think about decolonization, that can be a really broad term. For us, specifically because our work is focusing on racial equity, we're really looking at white supremacy specifically and we're looking at the ways in which white supremacy creates toxins in the soil of our systems, of our society.

And those toxins is what doesn't enable the magic and the brilliance to be able to grow. And so in our decolonized approach, what we're striving to do is we're trying to teach organizations how to be in a different way outside of what we're often taught through white supremacy ideology. We look at white supremacy as an ideology that permeates the fabric of our society.

And so we are striving to teach organization practices that decenter white supremacy, that help us to go back to practices that happen prior to colonization, that are more inherent for specifically folks of color in terms of our lineages and our ancestral practices. So even looping that back to my own story, right? I talked about how for me, my story begins with my ancestors, right?

I identify as Black. I identify as African-American. And part of what that means for my family lineage is that I'm of a lineage of people that were stolen from Africa and brought here to what is now known as the United States and used-- our bodies were used as labor for this land.

And despite that or in spite of that, I come from a lineage of people that survived. When I talk about what has led me here, I can't talk about what led me here without recognizing and honoring all of what my ancestors had to do to survive even the middle passage, enduring those conditions.

And embedded in that survival are practices. Embedded in that survival are practices of interconnectedness. Embedded in those practices or survival of centering joy in the midst of pain, right? Collectivism. Things that are now called mindfulness, where we focus on the moment, where we use our breath, where we use dance as a form of healing, right?

There's all these practices embedded in that. And I think in each of our lineages, we have those practices that have helped our family system, that have helped our lineages to survive. And those practices are often those practices that we call decolonized practices.

Crystal Cardenas:
I think about this work. Are there ways that you're measuring that success?

Taquelia Washington:
Yeah, absolutely. So it depends on what we're honing in on. And so in the assessment process, each organization is in a final report, and the final report highlights what we call areas of tending. And then the areas of tending are what we're targeting in remote tidier process to create transformation.

And so some of the areas that are tending are harder to assess from a more quantitative perspective, and it might be more from a qualitative perspective that we're measuring. So in an organization that I'm working with right now, we're in our third year of working together. This is an organization that does early childhood education.

They have the spouse racial equity values. But what we found in our assessment is that their values aren't being anchored internally in their work, but only externally in their work, the work that they're doing in the community.

Crystal Cardenas:
So what that looked like on one piece of the assessment is that the staff were actively avoiding having conversations explicitly about race, even though they're working predominantly in communities of color. How many of their staff reported having pretty high levels of discomfort and higher levels of avoidance engaging in conversations with their peers about specifically race?

Taquelia Washington:
And so with something like that, what that then looks like in terms of potential interventions is us designing learning and dialogue series that are helping them to first understand the discomfort and normalize the discomfort, but to also look at how the discomfort and the avoidance actually are techniques that upholds white supremacy.

But then also creating structures for them, such as community norms and agreements that they can use to be able to create a framework for them to be able to engage more in these conversations, and then taking them through the repeated processes that kind of scaffold them into different levels of risk to be able to deepen into the conversation.

We talk about having an inside-out approach. And so whenever we come in, we invite participants to first talk within themselves about their own identities, their own lineage before they even start to talk about the communities that they work in.

And then an outcome measurement of that would then be, again, like a qualitative assessment that we're inviting folks to then reflect on. Where is your comfort level now? Where's your willingness now to engage in these conversations?

For this organization, we also did an intervention that was designed specifically for the leaders, helping them to really think about how are they as leaders creating opportunities for folks to be able to engage. How are they modeling engagement? Oftentimes what we see is that conversations about equity, racial equity are kind of tied notice. They're outliers, but they're not integrated, right?

It's like, we're going to have this training once a month, but we're never going to talk about it again. So we're supporting these leaders to do-- to look at where are the organic day to day opportunities that you're missing to actually root into a racialized lens?

And so that way, the work became even more integrated and the leaders at the end of that initial year were demonstrating just a lot more competency in being able to lead these conversations, but even looking at supporting their agenda creations. You could see concretely where the opportunities were for them to be able to deepen these conversations with their staff. So those are examples more qualitative measurements that we do in our work.

Crystal Cardenas:
I love that. Because I think sometimes what I hear these terms, I feel like so many of these terms are coming out all the time. Like diversity, equity, and inclusion and I'm like, but what does that mean? What you were saying in lineages, how do you integrate multiracial identities into this work?

Taquelia Washington:
And just to clarify, when you say multiracial, are you thinking individual to identify as multiracial or--

Crystal Cardenas:
Yes.

Taquelia Washington:
Absolutely. So from a broad framework, what we believe and what we are teaching and inviting people to reflect upon is this idea that white supremacy ideology is an ideology that is so pervasive that it impacts all of us, no matter our identity. No matter if we identify as white, if we identify as Black, if we identify as multiracial.

And the question becomes in the skin that you live in your intersecting identities, how has this ideology impacted you? How has this ideology shown up for you in your lineage, and how does that live in your body? How does that live in your current practices today?

And so we are striving to create accessibility for reflection for every participant that engages in our process. And we oftentimes also lean into what we call a racial affinity groups as follow ups or even as a separate intervention design.

And in our affinity group work, we are supporting people to group together by racial affinity to be able to deepen in connection with other people that have a shared identity around the topics that we're exploring. And so when we do racial affinity groups, we offer a group that's specifically for folks that identify as multiracial to provide folks that identify under that large category an opportunity to be able to deepen.

And I don't personally identify as multiracial, but I have had lots of conversations with the folks that do identify as multiracial and there's lots of nuance in that. And there's some themes that we hear about the way in which this ideology of white supremacy pushes people to feel like they have to choose within the context of this binary, right?

We're taught under white supremacy, there's a binary. It's either this or that, right? And what is the potential impact of feeling like you're living in a binary where you have to choose where your identity actually doesn't exist within a binary, it exists within a multitude?

And so there's a particular type of healing that we find that multiracial people are able to do in community together when given the opportunity to be able to deepen. And there's nuances, right? Because there's some people that are mixed race that have a white parent. There's some people that are mixed race that have two BIPOC parents. And so their healing might look a little different depending on the nuances of their identity.

Crystal Cardenas:
Thank you. And I think the struggle is we're trying to always be in a box. And it's so ingrained that it's hard to step away and not have that be the first instinct of like, which box am I supposed to be in? So when you do these trainings, what frustrates you the most?

Taquelia Washington:
When I think about what frustrates me the most, I go a little deeper in it because I think ultimately what frustrates me the most are the things that pained me the most. Sometimes it starts with the frustration, but underneath the frustration is just deep pain.

And all of that is interconnected for me because this is my work, but it's so much deeper than my work. It's also a part of who I am, right? When I think about my why and I think about my son that I'm raising, it's deeply personal.

And so when someone says something-- it's less about when people say things that are hurtful or harmful in a space. It's more when people demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to be reflective and accountable for a harmful or hurtful thing that was said or done. Particularly for me and the skin that I'm in as a Black woman doing this work, it's deep work to be doing as a Black woman.

Because what that means is that just by the pure presence of my body, I'm already activating people's nervous system in the space. I facilitated group processes where people demonstrate patterns of behavior that are really deeply anti-Black.

Whether they consciously realize it or not, it showed up in the space. And it's both frustrating but also painful in that way. And so I think that those are the more difficult things for me to be able to navigate less so in the moment, but more so in the aftermath.

Crystal Cardenas:
Yeah. And I also can understand that in terms of I've gone to a lot of training CIR puts on. I've been here 11 years. We've put on a lot of trainings. And I think one of the things that I struggle with is afterwards, I think about this person shut down during the training, right?

So we know they're not trying to accept any of the information or at least be reflective, like you were saying, and then I think, now they're going to go out and serve the community. They're going to continue to serve the community in a mental space like this and how much harm can that do.

In relation to what you were just saying and kind of connected to the frustrating piece, another thing that-- it's just how-- the reality of how change happens. And so I have lots of moments in my work where I'm doing deep work with individuals or deep work with smaller groups, let's say a leadership team and I'm bearing witness to these beautiful moments of transformation that's happening.

And then the time that it takes for those moments to then equate to systems change is a long process. And so it feels frustrating on one level to be able to one, see the work that folks are trying to do, but also knowing how change happens over time and the slowness of change, especially within these really complex systems that are so embedded with white supremacy practices. It could just take a while and so it's hard to bear witness to that.

Going off of that, I was going to ask you, a lot of the professionals we work in government agencies. And I know there's a lot of hesitation from government agencies because of the amount of policies they have, because of the liability-- there's always the concern of liability, right?

What are your thoughts on that? Have you worked with them or have you had these kind of conversations where you're like, I understand that the system is huge, right? Because we know that. But also how-- we have to start somewhere and how does that happen?

Taquelia Washington:
Yeah. Our approach isn't for everyone and not everyone is for our approach. And so what I mean by that is that some people, some organization, based on lots of different things, when they hear about our conceptualization of white supremacy or they hear about our inside-out approach, they immediately know that it's not an approach for them.

Other times, there's organizations that seek us out but in talking with them, we realize that they're actually not a good fit for our work. There's certain conditions that we're looking for that we found actually create more optimal opportunities for transformation. And so some of those conditions are leadership willingness or buy in being resources for the work.

And for us, the resources are both about financial resources, but it's also about the time commitment for the it as a resource, right? We have organizations that are like, we have one hour every three months to dedicate to this.

It's like the work that we do can't actually be contained to one hour every three months. And we offer different types of partnerships. And so we have three different types of partnerships. One partnership, we call a seed partnership and it's a much shorter-- it's a short term contained offering. And so that would be really great for organizations that are looking for a learning and practice theory.

So let's say they want to learn about embodied leadership, right? We can then come in, we can do our training on embodied leadership to help them look at that as a practice. We can do our multi-session practice with them, and then that's their offering, that's their seed that they get to water and do what they're going to do with it.

So that's a great fit for some organizations. Other organizations may want to look at or root partnership or doing more depth of work with one part of their system. And so maybe their leadership team or maybe their DEI committee, right? So there's a part of their system.

And then we have our soil partnership. And the soil partnership is kind of what I was describing as a goal to our name, where we're really partnering for a multi-year process designed at transforming the soil of your organization.

And in that, you're signing up and you're committing to a longer partnership, understanding that this initial work where we're starting with ourselves as the part of that, but then you will be able to support you and being able to integrate your internal learning to then look at your interpersonal teams and how to practice these practices with each other.

And then we can take you to look at your other parts of your system and how to integrate these practices to transform the different parts of your system over the course of multiple years. So depending on the entry point, organizations may find they're falling in different points.

Crystal Cardenas:
I love that because I do think that you-- like you said, it's important to have to be there, but I also think sometimes people need time to digest what this would truly mean, right? Because at Sierra, we like to say, have the healthy conflict, right? When you're having to say something that someone might not want to hear to help them improve.

Taquelia Washington:
Yeah. We have a whole series that's become a lot more popular over the past year on generative conflict. And it's been both a part of our soil partnerships where we're finding that organizations need to start with this idea of how do I navigate conflict in a generative way as a foundational skill to be able to enter into these deep conversation with each other.

But then even our seed partnership, sometimes organizations are coming to us like, you need to increase our skills and our muscle to be able to navigate conflict in a generative way.

Crystal Cardenas:
Yeah. And I think it's so interesting because it's something that I feel like is also one of those things that people don't want to talk about or address, right? It's conflict. The tension and the conflict is there, whether or not you want to acknowledge it, so let's just get it on the table.

Taquelia Washington:
For us, generative conflict-- navigating generate conflict, it's a liberatory practice. Under white supremacy ideology, we're often taught to avoid conflict. But if you can learn how to navigate conflict, if we can learn to normalize conflict as just an inherent part of being in relationship, if we can learn those practices, that's one practice plus many that can actually contribute to our collective liberation.

And what we find is that there's so much socialization embedded in our conflict practices. If we were to look at our racial identities, if we were to look at our families systems, if the communities that we grew up in, there's so many layered socialization patterns that are embedded in that. And so being able to reflect on that, to be able to learn about your colleagues in these deeper ways, that in and of itself, plus the practices that you learn can shift culture.

Another big component of our work, which I kind of alluded to before is just like the wisdom of our bodies. And all of these stories, all these experiences from both our lifetime and the lifetime before us live in our bodies in each of our nervous systems are responding to the tension in a different way based on what lives in our body.

But for some of us, when tension arises, our nervous systems get flooded and we go offline, right? For some of us, when tension arises, we get into that fight mode, right? For some of us, we might get really anxious.

Our nervous systems are responding in different ways. And I think the more insight we can have around that, both in terms of our behaviors that we exhibit, but also like what's happening in my body. Like how do I even notice when tension is arising in my body? How am I able to work with the activation that's happening in my nervous system in a way that's going to support me in feeling a lined with how I want to be responding and showing up in these moments?

Crystal Cardenas:
I mean, you're spot on with all of that because they're all connected, right? Like the nervous system-- and I was always an anxious child. And now fast forward, when I finally had a tough conversation with my family and was like, I have anxiety.

I can't be the only one in our-- there's 40 of us, how am I-- and then it was like, I do too and I do. And I'm like, all of you all just hide it and don't say anything? I felt like I was on an island all by myself. But no, you all have it.

Taquelia Washington:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's adaptive, right? Like when we start to think about our own nervous system responses, when we start to become curious about the nervous responses of our family, then we become curious about what did we have to do to survive.

That led our nervous systems to get kind of like stuck at this level of anxiety, or disassociation, or-- wherever we're at, it served a purpose in our lineage, and for some of us, it continues to serve a purpose because we still have to be in survival mode.

But for others of us, like myself, I am outside of some of the survival patterns, the physical survival patterns of my lineage. But I'm still carrying that internally, right? I'm still carrying the high levels of hypervigilance, the high levels of anxiety that probably helped my ancestors to stay attuned to what was happening in their environment.

And I'm now at a place in my life where I am not constantly surrounded by immediate threat. But my nervous system doesn't always know that, and so what do I have to do to try to soothe my nervous system so that I am able to show up at my most optimal, which can be hard in a world like we're living in right now.

Crystal Cardenas:
Definitely. Definitely. I admire what you're doing. I guess what I want to know is how do you keep going. What is it that helps you look past this huge mountain and see the other side?

Taquelia Washington:
Absolutely. There's some days that it's harder than others. There's some days where my fun default is on the really hard days to fantasize about working at a flower shop. I don't actually grow flowers, but in my head, working at a flower shop would be easeful and joy filled all the time.

And so on my hard days, I question like, why are you doing this? That's my fantasy. And whenever I get to that point, my why keeps surfacing. My why is all around me. And my why helps to anchor me to keep going in this work as a Black woman that used to be a Black girl growing up in this society. I do this work for my former younger self. I do this work for my nine-year-old Black son that I'm raising with my wife.

I do this work for every single kid that I've worked with in the community. I could see their faces and I can see that as messed up as some of these systems are, some say burn it down. Like why are you working in these systems?

And I both simultaneously agree with burn it down and also simultaneously believe that while these are the systems that are here and while my babies are still having to be a part of these systems, I can't walk away from them.

My work is to be inside of these systems that have also caused me harm and try to do whatever I can to try to create transformation so that hopefully, it's going to create some type of positive ripple effect for those babies that I care most about, right? For my kiddo and his friends and the school that he's a part of, for my former self. And then there are moments where I get to see the fruits of the labor, right? And I hold on to those moments.

Crystal Cardenas:
I love that. And thank you. Thank you so much for the work that you do. And thank you for remembering the babies and keeping it going, because we do need you and we need you to keep bringing along and building up your team, your communities, your people so that they can also continue that work.

As we come to an end, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners or any advice that you want to give to young professionals starting off in this world that can sometimes feel a little overwhelming?

Taquelia Washington:
Absolutely. One, this work comes at a cost. I'm constantly gauging where the benefit and the cost are in terms of a balance and if it ever gets to the point where the costs to me outweigh the benefits, that's when I know that it's time for me to shift gears.

And so I would encourage folks to look at that and to really be in tune with the cost to their own spirit and to be in tuned with the benefits and really just looking at it that cost ever outweigh the benefit. And within the cost, knowing that there's always a cost in this work. What are we doing, what am I doing to actively take care of myself as a part of this work?

And for me, actively taking care of myself is both about individual practices that I'm doing to take care of myself and to cultivate my own spirit, but it's also about how am I in community with other folks that I'm able to be in community care with. And it's also about how am I in as much right relation with the world around me as also a form of community care to try to balance out the costs so that I don't feel as depleted in the work.

Crystal Cardenas:
I love that. I want to say that I appreciate you saying that because I don't think I ever heard anybody say that to me as a young professional starting off with these huge dreams and aspirations, to outweigh the cost. And I know that when I got to that point in my career, it felt like I was so alone in that and saying, maybe I need to pull back. And you almost feel like a failure for saying I need to pull back, right?

Without the context of somebody saying really do need to outweigh it and you need to take care of yourself and someone else will pick up the work. You have to think about yourself. So I really appreciate you saying that and I hope that our listeners, that resonates with them as well. Thank you so much for our time today, Taquelia. It was such an honor to have this conversation with you today.

Taquelia Washington:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

Crystal Cardenas:
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Remember Why You're Here. To access the transcript for this episode and to learn more about what we do at CIR, please visit our website at cirinc.org. Until next time.