 My name is Nyasha Green. I am a full-stack WordPress developer, a mentor, a teacher, a podcaster, and a writer. And I'm just so excited to be here today and honored. How cool is it to talk after a senator? That's pretty amazing. My mom is going to brag to all of the aunties from home, so that's going to be pretty cool too. I can't wait. But yeah, I'm really really, really honored to be here. And my talk today is titled Charity Begins At Home, Why Communities Are Stronger Together. And Charity Begins At Home is something that my grandmother used to always say. This talk is actually dedicated to her, my family, and my community of Camden, South Carolina, where I'm from. So my grandmother Ruby was an incredibly kind woman. And if she were still here today, she would be nearly a hundred years old. She grew up in rural South Carolina in the segregated South in the 1930s and 40s. And she was widowed early, the mother of nine children. And through everything she went through, it never jaded her to the world. Everything she did was done in kindness. And a lot of people didn't understand that. And when people asked her why do these things for people or why undertake so much, she would look at them funny and say Charity Begins At Home. We take care of our communities and we take care of our family. So a lot of what my grandmother saw in our community at home is what I see in the WordPress community. So that's why today this speech is for her. And that's her and that's also me and her. She was hanging laundry and I was pushing as her helper. So what does WordPress have to do with grandmothers? Well, first of all, there are really a lot of really awesome grandmothers in the community, but also just as my grandmother believed in the strength of fostering community and helping people, I see that same spirit in the WordPress community and I also want to contribute to it. And the strength of in WordPress is not just in code, it's in its people, its diversity and it's really a borderless place. And I want it to be even more inclusive and even more borderless for everybody. So that's one thing why there's that correlation. So I want to talk about some of the really good things I love about the community. Again, it's without borders. Every line of code, every plugin, every theme, it's a story of people coming together and creating something larger than themselves. I've been able to meet people from all over the world and make friends from all over the world and it's truly been an amazing experience and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. There are so many helpers in the community. If someone has struggled, I've seen people come together throughout everything. If someone's been laid off, I was laid off in the summer, WordPress came together, took me out to lunch, networked for me. I had never been laid off or let go from a job ever in my life. I didn't know what to do and so many people reached out to me and said they wanted to work with me and offered me support and got me a job and I'm working again now. So that was something I really loved and appreciated but I've seen people struggle financially with mental health, with their physical health and I've seen the community not miss a beat and get together and say, how can I help? When I first was brought into the WordPress community, I was a coder and my mentors, Kenneth Elliott and Sean B. Broom from Columbia, South Carolina, said, do you want to come in and code for WordPress with us? I was like, the blog? I don't want a blog. I have a Twitter now. This was a while ago and they were like, no, we're making websites and I was like, okay, I can do that. I can do that. But when I got in, I just was so amazed at how talented so many people were. We have coders, writers, teachers, speakers, translators. We really are an amazing group of people and I just really, really loved that. So the community is amazing. We all know that. That's why we're here. But things I want to talk about that we could probably maybe work on a little bit. Communication. We're all not new to WordPress. Maybe not. We know sometimes there's a little bit of a communication issue throughout the community. And sometimes it's hard for people in the community and even ourselves to listen or learn from mistakes. So that's something I want to help with and help the community grow with. Transparency. Sometimes it's just being nervous, but it's hard to work and speak and write in public if you're in certain aspects of the community. It's seen as taboo, but I think transparency is something that would also make us a stronger community. And gatekeeping. One of my new jobs this year was as a LinkedIn learning instructor. I'll be teaching WordPress blocks for LinkedIn. And just because the learning curve of WordPress is so much, it kind of looks like at times that there's gatekeeping, but that's something I also want to break down and help. So I'm not here to yell and I'm not here to complain. I'm here to talk about how I want to help. So my big thing I want to highlight is a communication because as the senator said, that's very important in the community and it's not a WordPress specific issue. It's all over the world. So a little thing about me is I mentor coders who want to become full stack engineers from all over the world. I have mentees in Nigeria, China, Croatia, Canada, Mexico, all over. As long as we have a camera, a mic and internet, we can talk. And everybody has a story to tell and a listen to teach. And I want to tell you a story about how I who considers herself a great communicator needed to work on my communication skills. So I have a mentee. She is from Nigeria. And so we would talk late at night for her or early in the morning. That's the only time we could get her schedule to connect with mine. And I always would ask my mentees, so what's going on? What's happening to prevent you from coding or getting your project done or applying for jobs today? And she said, it's been a little tough because I've just been so hungry. I'm starving every day. And it's just really messing up my coding. And I quickly, the helper of the doer, I jumped into action. I was like, oh my God, you need food? What's going on? Did you lose money? Do you need money? Do you need to go to a bookstore? Where are you exactly? Do you need to call someone? And she was like, Naisha. And I was like, no, no, no, no. I can do something. I can help. I can call someone. She was like, Naisha. I was like, no, no, no. Let me do something. She was like, Naisha. I was like, okay. She said, Naisha, it's Ramadan. I'm Muslim. And I'm fasting. I could taste nail polish because a foot was in my mouth. And I said, oh, I had, I have Muslim family and friends. I knew it was Ramadan, but I did not think about asking my mentee what cultural or religious background you have because I was always taught you shouldn't talk about that. Does anybody, is anybody a fan of Charlie Brown, the Charlie Brown specials? I love the Charlie Brown specials. They are a yearly tradition household. Every year we watch the Halloween special, which is coming up, the Great Pumpkin and the Christmas special. I love the little sad tree. And so one of my favorite quotes from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is that there are three things I've learned. You don't talk to people about politics, religion, and the Great Pumpkin. And so me being Southern born and raised, I was always taught that you don't bring up certain topics and you don't ask certain things from people. But I learned that if we're not learning about the people we're working with and talking to, we'll mess up and we'll miss things and we'll make mistakes like that, like not knowing that they're not starving themselves on purpose. So when you listen to someone and they're telling their story, make sure you're hearing them. You're not just listening to them. So these are some of my ideas on a ways we can build a stronger community. One, we can embrace different ideas. Change is very scary. Full site editing? I see arguments every day about full site editing. I learned WordPress when Gutenberg was first introduced. So that was an interesting, funny and enlightening experience. And I see it repeating itself. It's hard for us to embrace change sometimes, but sometimes change is good. We love Gutenberg now, right? Okay, all right. I'll keep going. Being an ally, it's hard to speak up. Even for me, the people who know me know I'm a loud mouth and I keep going. And from my story, you all know I'm a loud mouth and I'll keep going. And it's still even hard to speak up for myself sometimes. What has really helped is other people coming in and saying, hey, I'll help you with that. We should be doing that for everybody. That's going to make relationships so much stronger. We should embrace different people. I'm so honored that Michelle chose me to be the keynote speaker. I want to see more diverse people who are keynote speakers. We have so many in the community. Everybody's here. Again, everybody has a story to tell. And one of the most important ones is to live as you climb. The saying is from Mary Church Terrell. She is an African American civil rights leader and women's rights suffragette. And she would say you need to live as you climb. On your way up the ladder, if you're making gains and you're becoming successful, you need to take someone with you. If we'll all make it to the ladder, it'll be enough room for all of us. We might have to take turns going up the ladder, but just bring someone with you, hold out your hand, and we can all be successful together. I want to highlight some organizations I just truly love that are doing good work. This is not all of them. If I miss your organization, I'm sorry. But these are great organizations. The WordPress community collective is trying to get contributors to the WordPress project sponsored. We know that financial barriers can prevent people from contributing to the project, and they seek to change that. They're wonderful. Black press. It's for members in WordPress who are of African descent, but anybody can join Black press because it's for allies, too. If you don't see your group represented, we encourage you to join Black press. Take from what we're doing, elevate your group as well, and we will also help elevate your group. Master WP sends speakers to WordCamp US every year. Again, financial barriers, Yoast Diversity Fund does the same thing. Underrepresented in tech, Ali and Michelle are two of the most incredible people I've ever met in my life, and we have, they let me join their wonderful organization. We have webinars coming out on what it means to be under represented in tech. Not just by race or gender, but by sexuality, by ability. If you're not, if English is not your first language, your age, there are so many underrepresented groups that need to be elevated and uplifted in this community. And one of the ones you may not have heard about is Develop Carolina. It's based out of South Carolina, and it takes people who are to just learn how to code, and it gives them a coding job. It pays them fairly, and it gives them six months of work. So, and then if they're really good, they hire them on, and if not, they have six months of engineering work, and they can go on and get full-time jobs. So these are just a few of the organizations I see doing the work to build the community up, to help people and to uplift them. Also, I want to talk about the different WordPress projects. So WordPress is cool. If we have a project in our passion, we could just throw WP on it, and we got a website. We have a project. I co-started WP Foodies because if you follow me on Twitter, I talk about food all day, every day. I'm probably going to talk about food today. And we co-founded it on Twitter. We started with the hashtag WPFoodies, and then the site was built in cadence. And I said, you know what? We're using WP. We're using the people in the community. Let's give back to the WP Photo Directory. That's contributing. So try to take your projects that you have on the side and try to figure out ways we can contribute that back to the project, because we are WordPress. We hate FSE. Go contribute. Try to change it. I love full site editing, by the way. Please don't hurt me. Another idea I had was there are many boot camp graduates, most of my mentees, and these are a few programs they come from. They need a path. They need a guidance. They don't know what part of tech they want to go into. Why don't we bring them to WordPress? We need contributors. Every person, every team says, we need help. They're out there. If we grab these boot camp graduates and bring them into WordPress, we get them in the make, especially all these React developers with blocks, React, more contributors, more community, layoffs. So I told you all I was laid off this summer. There are so many workers that are being laid off. And just because they're not in WordPress doesn't mean that we can't try to pivot them in, give them opportunities to network, give them opportunities to get jobs. That's what happened with me. The community came together to help me network and get a job. And I'm very thankful for it. But it's so many people, thousands that need to help it, too. And we need help, too. We need contributors. And finally, why Naisha? Why do this? I want to open doors. My grandmother, again, she would be nearly 100 if she was still alive. But her sister-in-law is still alive. She just celebrated her 90th birthday two weeks ago. That's her in the middle in the black and white. That's my aunt, Mook. Her real name is Earlene, but we're a nickname family. She was the first person in our family to go to college in 1954 and segregated South Carolina. She went to Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina. She was my grandfather's baby sister. And 1954, wow. Instead of my aunt going to college and saying, well, I did it. I'm the best in the family. Bye. She said, how can I help my community? How can I help my family? I don't want to be the only one here. This slide has, everybody on the slide besides her is her niece, her nephew. She's the aunt to every other person. She's my mom's aunt, my great aunt. My nieces and nephews great-great aunt. And these pictures span 70 years almost from 1954 to this year when my niece and nephew graduated high school. I want to open doors because these incredible people who are the older people in here, they did it for me. And I did it for my nieces and nephews. And I could just, I could tell a story about every person. My aunt, Mook, named me. That's why I'm Naisha. She named me after her favorite African student. My aunt, Carolyn on the end, that's my mom's baby sister. She delivered me two months early when my mom was sitting home from the hospital because they said it was too soon. And she made sure I was safe. And she's the reason I'm alive and here today. Incredible people, over 70 years, all spanning from my grandmother's and her peers, I'm saying charity begins at home. And this is the legacy we have today. My grandmother left this earth and before she did, she opened as many doors as she could to me. And one day I want to open these doors to my grandmother, my granddaughters, and my grand nieces. And I want to do it with WordPress. And I want as many of you all to help me as you can. Just don't ask me to deliver a baby. I mean, I'll do it if I have to, but please don't. Come to me last. So I'm Naisha. If you want to contact me, I'm at Naisha Green, my first and last name, dot com. On Twitter or ex, I'm at Neither Creator. At me on LinkedIn. Again, I have a course coming out. Please watch it. But yeah, that's my talk and it's nice to meet you all. Questions for Na? If you do, you can, she'll be here all day. I will, if you're shy. She came with me, she can't make the world up. I know. I thank you so much. That was the best I ever could have all. Thank you.