LINDSAY FOX: Telling systems leaders that they have to do the healing work in all of this, and that they personally have to do it, and they have to create space for their employees, clients, whatever it is to also heal, that’s where the revolution happens.

ALEC PATTON: This is a High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton. And today’s episode comes to you from Rodrigo Arancibia. Rodrigo, who got today?

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: Yeah, man today we got Lindsay Fox from the United Way in Fresno Madera counties. She’s the CEO and President there. I was just super excited and super elated to sit down and talk with her a little bit about what she’s learned in her history working with communities, listening to communities and what we can actually do to help communities heal in this new time. So I was super stoked to actually get into the mix and listen to her, and so hopefully you guys will enjoy it.

ALEC PATTON: Now, I need to ask. We’re an Education Podcast. United Way is not a school. What was it that made you go, this is an interview I got to do?

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: First of all, I think education, in itself, K-12 needs to do a better job of working collaboratively with their CBO partners, their community based organizations. And I think there’s a lot of lessons learned for K-12 partners and educators at large of what happens outside of the school walls and how we work with our communities.

For me, she has a wealth of knowledge starting from the policy level all the way down to the practitioner level, mostly in after school programs but then also breaching into this community based world. I felt like she had such a rich wealth of understanding of what it takes to listen to communities. And so the hope is that folks will be able to listen to what Lindsay is sharing and then take some of those practices of empathetic listening and take them into the communities and help our communities heal. That was the impetus of having this conversation.

ALEC PATTON: And how do you two know each other?

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: We first met each other at the BOOST Collaborative, at the BOOST Conference a couple of years back. And we had done some collaborative work, statewide work, with My Brother’s Keeper. And so she had done– she had led some of the work with the Sisters Inspiring Change and I was leading some of the work with the brothers for My Brother’s Keeper. And we had some collaborative working in that space. And since then, man, it’s been really awesome to see how she’s actually impacting that Fresno Madera area. It’s not a super diverse community and her being one of the leaders of color, a few leaders of color, a few women leaders of color in that space, I felt like that was one of the voices that we definitely need to elevate, for sure.

ALEC PATTON: Cool. All right. Let’s roll it.

LINDSAY FOX: So my name is Lindsay Fox. I am honored to serve as the President and CEO of United Way Fresno and Madera counties. I was raised in the Fresno area actually in the rural Fresno county, not actually in Fresno but in and out in the rural part of Fresno County, and there’s stories behind that I’ll come back to that really kind of made me who I am. And spent about, gosh– I guess it was about 10 years in the Sacramento area, which was where I really got into policy, which is the love of my life and after school programs, which is the second love of my life.

And my goal has always been about improving community. And I was raised by a couple of educators, an elementary school teacher. And my dad was the Dean of students at Fresno City College. And so education was always the sort of lens that I look through things on.

I spent a lot of time with my parents on their school campuses and really came to understand– I’ll never forget when I was in fifth or sixth grade, my mom was a fifth or sixth grade teacher. So the kids in her class were my age and they were my friends, they were my cohorts. I went to school in a completely different context. So I went to school in Clovis Unified. She was teaching in Southeast Fresno. And I remember going– I can’t ever tell this story without crying. So I remember being at school and it wasn’t the first time I’d been at school with her because I was at school with her all the time. But I– for some reason, the kids being my age was– One day I just had this realization that there was a system that was in place that was inherently inequitable. And that the education that I was receiving, not that far away from where they were, but seeing light years difference. It seemed like we were in different countries, but we were in the same county maybe five or six miles away from each other.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: Wow.

LINDSAY FOX: And I was getting to experience their education firsthand because my mom was teaching year-round school and I was off for the summer. And at that moment in time, as an 11 or 12-year-old, I was like this isn’t right. And not only is this not right, it seems like it’s a really, really big problem. And I’m going to have to do something about this problem. My job on this Earth was to fix it. And there’s so many points in time where you see things kind of come to fruition and things come full circle and things like that. And so today, the office that I run, my United Way, is like a stone’s throw from my mom’s old school.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: Oh, wow.

LINDSAY FOX: So it’s like this is where I was meant to be. And I would never– I couldn’t– I didn’t know when I was 11 that there was such thing as United Way CEO. I didn’t know that there was this whole state system of support. I didn’t know how the education system worked. I didn’t know any of that. But I had a sense that I didn’t want to be a teacher. I knew I didn’t want to be in the classroom. I knew that there was a bigger system that had to be fixed and that that was what my role was to try to fix that system.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: Now, now. In your experience, I trip out because you, at a very, very young age, you had policy experience and being in that policy mix. And there’s a lot of information, a lot of teeth cutting that you get in that experience. Is there something that you can look back in that experience working either within policy that was an important, real kind of a foundational lesson that you got out of– just the importance of listening to the community?

LINDSAY FOX: I always joke about my experience in the state capital working in the assembly, as you know, there were just some really key lessons that I learned. That was my job essentially out of college so it was where I sort of learned how to be an employee, learned all of the things about how you interact, how you do your job. And it’s part of what I attribute my hustle to today because it is such an intense fast-paced environment. And I was taking on a lot of responsibility for a 22-year-old at that time.

And so there’s a lot of really interesting lessons that you learn in that space. it’s not necessarily fake it till you make it but the confidence of walking into a space and being like I belong here as opposed to walking into a space and being like I’m not sure that I belong here I’m going to sit in the back of the room, I’m going to creep [INAUDIBLE]. Those kinds of lessons get you so far in life. But in relationship to really about this listening to community piece, the biggest lesson that I learned was that when the community representatives, so I’m not talking about community members, but those organizations and people who represent the community come into your office talking about what the community needs. That’s when you need to start asking a lot of questions. And I didn’t know that at the time. I had had no interaction really with community based organizations or advocacy organizations.

So so much of this is about translation, right. And I don’t mean like language translation I mean like literally translating a need to a solution. And so even if you can identify the need, you don’t always know that the solution is the right solution once you start working through the details of it. And I was just like I feel like there’s something amiss here, which was part of the reason that I left the state capital. Because I felt like I needed to be working in a space where I could be more directly connected to where the rubber met the road on all of this and not feel like I’m sitting up here with all this wood paneling in the state capital and I have no clue what’s happening outside.

And so when I took on the foundation consortium role I went to every single County in California. Because I wanted to constantly have that input from multiple sources and to be validating, right. And to know that the solutions really are meeting the needs. And even though they won’t always be perfect and they won’t always meet all the needs that at least we were putting the needs of people in front of the needs of an organization.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: Can you talk a little bit more about what are some ways that we can make sure that the solutions actually meet the needs?

LINDSAY FOX: What I would say is that what I’ve learned over the past 22 years that I’ve been doing this work is that number one, it’s iterative. This isn’t the type of thing where you say, OK, here’s what we’re going to do, we implement that thing and then we’re done. Right and we never have to go back. For me, it’s all about the implementation side of things, right. That often gets ignored in the public policy process. So the implementers are the bureaucrats. And many times we ignored that part of it and that’s where the real kind of tensions come in in the details. So it has to be iterative. You have to think about it as a process that’s continuously having to be refreshed.

And if you think about what’s happened during COVID– and I was looking at a data set the other day, and they were like well, that was before COVID and I’m sure like things are pretty much the same. I’m like I’m sure they probably aren’t.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: They are absolutely not.

LINDSAY FOX: I think I’m going to not make any decisions until I see what the data says after COVID or during COVID since were not after COVID, but during COVID.

So that’s kind of one way to think about it because not only is the policy context changing, but the way that people approach the world changes. And so we have to actually adapt to that, right. And then the other piece is that the listening process people think is going to really straightforward, right. Like you came and talked to Lindsey and she said that what she really needs is solar paneling on her house and so you’re going to go write a bill and we’re going to have solar panels on more people’s houses. No, no, no, no. People’s stories and what’s happening in their lives aren’t easily pinpointed to a question like what do you need. It’s sometimes it’s a 25, 30 minute conversation with strangers that have just come up to me or we’ve just started talking to just get their story. And I’m not ever asking them what’s the solution or what do you need. It’s just it’s like kind of messy diatribe.

And then our job as policymakers is to say, OK, here’s where we are. Here’s the whole sort of mess that they’re dealing with. What are the points in that mess that we could maybe start solving for? And then it’s coming back to them even, in an ideal situation, and what we’re trying to set up is more systems where then we’re actually centering people in the solutions, too. So it’s like tell me your story, but then let’s see if this iteration of a policy solution even suits you. Because part of what happens is when things don’t suit us, when they’re not to our actual user experience, we start using them in weird ways that they weren’t intended. And once we start doing that, then you have to ask yourself what’s wrong with my solution, and how do I fix that. And it’s probably because you didn’t really like test it out on the user to see

And I think that the COVID response in education and for almost any employer is kind of an interesting dynamic around that to see how people actually act in these situations and what they’re truly up against. It’s like, oh you’re totally using that wrong. Yeah, I get it, your mask is on, but it’s under your nose so like that’s not how the [INAUDIBLE] face is supposed to be.

[LAUGHTER]

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: We talk a lot about this in the improvement process, right? And I think what I’m teasing out here is, listening and doing empathy interviews and listening deeply is one part of the process. And then there’s another part of the process where you’re actually asking and then not so much of an interrogation but more exploratory in your questioning. It feels like in education we haven’t necessarily gotten to either of those components. We’re doing some of it through surveys and the surveys aren’t necessarily great, and the response rates are terrible. There has to be something about putting in the investment of spending time talking to people and pulling out the real stories from that. That has to be something that you’ve seen across the board as beneficial. Yeah?

LINDSAY FOX: Oh, absolutely. It’s actually– it’s my favorite thing to do. it’s absolutely my favorite thing to do.

So part of your question I think is about scaling, right?

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: Yeah.

LINDSAY FOX: How do you get a system like education or like a United way or like a local government in the mode of just being like that, right? Because it can’t just be one person doing it. It actually has to be built into and cooked into the system. And I’m sure that there is some smarter researcher than me, because I’m not a researcher, out there who could kind of tell you, well you would need this kind of sampling, this [INAUDIBLE] number. That’s not really what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about more is with some of our programming around our free tax preparation program at United Way for example, is you’re getting 5,000 back. We want you to spend it wisely, right? So let’s park somebody who’s a financial advisor in my lobby so that when you come in and get your taxes done then you can go talk to this financial advisor. we’ve tried all kinds of iterations of that. And finally, this year my team, actually without me even influencing them on this, has been doing a series of follow up calls with people to not only ask about their experience with our service but actually to get more details about your story so that we can start figuring out where is the human habit here around these things.

And what we’ve discovered was we want people to act a certain way, and this is very typical of government agencies and big organizations. We want people to act a certain way but people, in fact, act very differently. So we want people to file their taxes when we open on March 1, but if I know I’m getting money back, I’m taking my paychecks down to the H&R block, and I’m getting my taxes filed as soon as possible so I can have that money in my pocket. And I didn’t decide how to spend it the day that I got it. I decided how to spend it six months ago. So that’s just one example of how taking something to scale means it can’t be me having one off conversations with our clients. It has to actually be embedded within the system and then the system has to be able to respond to that.

So I’ve seen many education entities say, we want youth voice, right? We want youth engagement. So we’re going to do this, that, or the other thing to get youth involved and let them present at the beginning of the board meetings and whatever. But if the system actually– if you haven’t cooked it in a way that one: is actually operating at scale and two: then can truly infuse that into the system to change. It’s like, what’s the point? Like don’t ask anybody what they think then.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: So when you talked about the importance of listening to the community, how can we listen to the communities and learn about what they need to heal? Because my sense is that your community, just like our community is going through a lot of healing right now or trying to go through a lot of healing. Can you share a little bit of what y’all are doing in Fresno and how you guys are leading some of that work?

LINDSAY FOX: The work that United Way does has always been centered around things like race equity. It’s just that we became a little complacent about how important that was and how centralized that was to what was really happening, right? We know disproportionate outcomes based on the color of your skin. And during COVID we were all like, hey surprise, guess who is hardest hit by this. And in some ways COVID– in public policy we talk a lot about focusing events and COVID very much for us we’ve treated it as a focusing event for many different things. And one being really about how do we just make racism go away in our community.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: Right.

LINDSAY FOX: And how do we center fighting against racism and fighting for equity again and COVID, as devastating as it was, did open some people’s eyes to, Oh, this isn’t actually a cool thing. This is worse than what I thought it actually was and particularly when you look at things like the racial wealth gap, which is what our focus is.

So in our work we’ve really decided to focus on several things. One is listening, and so we’re spending a lot of time just either listening to ourselves, right? So just hearing ourselves, so internally listening to each other but then also externally listening the people in the community who are impacted by all of this. And then three: really helping organizations, particularly educational institutions, listen to their students and particularly their black students. Some of that work started well before COVID. So I don’t want to discount that oh, all of a sudden like we’re like these race [INAUDIBLE]. We were doing that work before. It became– the lens changed. And it became crystal clear and it became the thing that was at the center of everything. So one is listening.

We’re also really focused on learning. So as United Way we really see that a part of our job is to help educate and give the community resources around just some of the basics. And that learning piece is an ongoing piece and really has to be centered on feeding yourself. I may bring you the food but you’re going to have to feed yourself. Because I really had this overwhelming response from community leaders. What am I supposed to do? What should I read? Give me the book. And there’s no one book. Because this is like going to be like a weekend process. This is going to be– you’ve got to commit the rest of your life to being on this journey because that’s what we’ve committed to. And then the other piece is really about championing and making sure that we’re using our platform at United Way to lift up black leaders, black-owned businesses, businesses owned by people of color, people of color who are doing incredible work in different organizations but have been totally marginalized by our system.

And then the fourth piece: so those three things aren’t necessarily revolutionary, right? Those three things make a lot of sense to every single leader that I talked to about what our agenda is related to race equity and related to rebuilding after COVID. The fourth piece is where it’s like, I’m going to need you all to sit down. You might need a Kleenex. I’m like, you’re going to have to heal. And so telling systems leaders that they have to do the healing work in all of this, and that they personally have to do it, and they have to create space for their employees, clients, whatever it is to also heal is– that’s where the revolution happens, right? All of that other stuff has to happen but it’s really the focus that we have on healing and making healing a really important part of what we’re doing or at least what we’re trying to promote.

And part of what happened to me, I don’t even know if I told you this before. But my board had given me a short sabbatical. Maybe really shouldn’t be called a sabbatical. But after George Floyd was murdered and I had all these white men calling me like, I want to do something. Tell me how to change my county. Tell me how to change my organization. And I’m like, Oh I don’t know what to– this is a lot of pressure. I took a sabbatical. And I was like, what I’m going to do is I’m going to develop this plan for my organization. I’m going to update our plan around the work that we’re doing related to wealth creation. And I’m going to come out with this whole five year strategy on what we’re going to be doing. But I know that I probably have some work to do myself. So I’ve got 48 hours. I’ll give myself the first 48 hours, and those first 48 hours are dedicated to me doing my work. That’s what I called it to myself at that point. Me doing my work. I think I even wrote it down: me work. 48 hours.

3 and 1/2 weeks later, I’m still doing my work. And I’m like, I feel like I just figured something out. And then the realization that I had to go back because my board was watching me, my staff was watching me, and the community was all watching me do this and like waiting for me to come back. And I remember being like, no, no, no, you actually have to own that because that’s the part that everyone misses. We’re not going to destroy this thing if we don’t work to fix ourselves. If we don’t first deal with all of the things that are broken within ourselves. All of the hurt that we have, all of the stuff that we’ve done wrong, we’ve got to deal with all of that first.

So, yeah, that’s the fourth tenet of what we’re doing. And it’s the hardest part. It’s absolutely the hardest part.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: This is an amazing point that you’re bringing up. We can’t do the actual work until we do the self work and the mirror work. And that polishing of the mirror is as important as any other type of work that we have. So any advice for folks about how you can either systematize or even introduce this concept of healing as a community or healing as an organization?

LINDSAY FOX: To me it’s about space, right? So when you do it on your own, it’s about creating that space for yourself to be safe in like, oh, let me remember like every relationship that I’ve had and the nuances of every relationship that I’ve had. And was this about that and was this about that and how did all of this play out? And so it’s totally doable by yourself. Get a journal. Get some kind of racial trauma healing book, and just start in on it.

And then for leaders or people who are leading teams, it is still creating space. And so you know we’ve done a couple of things. One is with our own team, , I think, we’ve been really fortunate to work in a field like youth development that kind of leans into this a little bit more. That we’ve had these conversations. That we talk about being different. We talk about being leaders of color. We talk about the system and the system being inherently racist. But there are lots of people who look just like you and I who no one has ever given them the permission to ever even have the conversation. And it was heartbreaking in my own team to hear, you’re the first person who’s ever had this conversation with me. You’re the first person who’s facilitated this conversation with me. Because I started having the conversations as soon as I left the capital and started working that foundation consortium. I got a crash course in what diversity– at the time we called diversity and equity. But that’s not happening everywhere. So just creating space for people.

The other thing that we’ve done that I think that we’re going to do a lot more of is creating space and convening people in safe spaces where they get to be with people who look like them.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: You mention our favorite space the out-of-school time space, the after-school time space as a functional ecosystem for healing to happen. Can you talk a little bit more about what you’ve seen in your experience about how important expanded learning or after-school time space is? And how that can be used to help communities heal and students and teachers and the whole ecosystem heal?

LINDSAY FOX: Yeah, I think that part of the narrative that I would put out on this is the whole reason that I got involved in after-school school wasn’t like after-school for after school sake. After-school for after school sake is a great thing. Don’t get me wrong. After-school’s just inherently a great concept. We poll great, right?

But for me, to do the callback, coming from that 11-year-old mindset of, this thing is totally broken. And when I came into the after-school space it was right as we were in the throes of No Child Left Behind. So for me it was less about after-school programming and more about after school as a platform to do so many of the things that one: I got in my regular education that kids in Fresno Unified were not getting, two: that no Child Left Behind was leaving behind, and three: this other very complex but simple idea around relationships and safe spaces and how we learn and how we relate to each other. And that in its highest form and in its best form that’s what after-school is. It’s much less about what the programming is and much more about, here’s the opportunity for relationships, both with other students who you may not be in class with but more importantly with an adult and having that caring adult and having an adult mentor who looks like you. Because after school programs are generally staffed by people of color. And so where you may go through your whole day. I mean I went through my almost entire education career K-12 and did not see a leader of color or a teacher of color.

So if you can exit that and come into this space where it’s like, Oh, not only are these people fun, they look like me, and they actually care about me. That is actually the secret sauce. That is what we need more of in our lives is that because that opens the door to all of the other things that we need to do.

RODRIGO ARANCIBIA: Right.

LINDSAY FOX: So I think that after-school– I learned– I don’t work all that much with after school anymore, unfortunately, but I talk about after school and youth development all the time. And especially now when we’re doing so much, when I have people’s ear around this thing about both healing. We can talk about social and emotional learning and this piece around listening. And we talk about engagement. All of the principles are the same. Because what I always knew was that even though I didn’t work directly with the students at after-school. I primarily work with the adults. All of this stuff for youth translates for the adults. It’s all the same stuff. We need to listen to them. We need to give them– and why are you going to expect that the person who was traumatized by the education system and is now an after school provider and has all this racial trauma, all of the sudden, miraculously healed from it and now knows how to support someone. So all of this stuff totally translates and so it becomes a safe place for everyone.

After-school is a phenomenal concept. Just calling it after-school or out of school time or whatever we’re calling it these days, it doesn’t seem like it’s enough because it needs to be called something else.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ALEC PATTON: High Tech High Unboxed is hosted by me, Alec Patton. This episode was edited by Brent Spirnak. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. Huge thanks to Rodrigo Arancibia and Lindsay Fox for this conversation. Thanks for listening.