 Welcome back. Hey, we're so glad you're here. You found your way to us, The Nonprofit Show. Today we're having a fascinating conversation or at least we believe it's fascinating and hope that you do as well. It's all about social connections and discourse in our sector, so in the nonprofit sector. And to talk to us about this, we have with us Jared Seid, who has joined us. He's the Executive Director for Center for Counsel. We're gonna hear from you Jared in just a moment, but before we jump into this, again, fascinating conversation. We want to remind our viewers and our listeners, perhaps this is the first time you're joining us. Are you found your way back to us? We're glad that you're here. Julia Patrick is here. Julia serves as the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And I'm Jared Ransom, your nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. Super honored day in and day out to serve alongside. Thank you to our amazing presenting sponsors that allow us these opportunities to talk about things like social discourse and what that looks like in our sector. So a huge shout out of gratitude goes to our friends over at Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, nonprofit thought leader, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd, as well as nonprofit tech talk. These companies believe in you and your mission and they're here to pour into you and that mission to help you do more good. So word of advice, encouragement and invitation, please check them out. They're amazing people. We think they're amazing. And again, thanks to them, we're allowed to have these conversations. If you missed any of our previous episodes, nearly 900 have been produced. You can find them by downloading the app on your smartphone. Also, you can find us on streaming broadcast as well as podcast platforms. So I just shared that I binge watch. I think it was something on prime recently. And the good news is you can add us to your queue, not quite on prime, but you can add us to the queue of many other entertainment platforms. So that's how you wanna spend your nights, your weekends or even your days, no judgment. We invite you to do that. So Jared, we are thrilled to have you here with us. So our viewers and listeners, again today we have in studio with us, Jared Seid, Executive Director Center for Council, welcome to you today. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation. I appreciate everything you guys are doing, how you support the sector, how you host and encourage these conversations. It's really critically important that we find each other and engage. And using a platform like this is so convenient. Who would have funk it that we would be spending so much time opening our laptops, but that we can find each other and find these critical conversations and folks who really care is really brilliant. And I applaud you for creating a forum for these conversations to continue to emerge and nourish all of us in the sector. So thank you. Thank you. I love that you said to use the word find, to find one another because it's really hard to look outside your own windows when in the nonprofit sector we're so frenetic and frantic, frantically trying to work with our own topic and our own mission and to actually open up and look around us and see what's going on. Sometimes that's a challenge. So talk to us about your work because it's very interesting. You're based in Los Angeles, correct? But you do work all over. All over. All over the world. You're from Rwanda and Bosnia, Herzegovina to New York, Florida around the country and in Los Angeles where we're based. Yeah, and I think it is something to find one another. I appreciate you're saying that, Julia. I think at its heart, this work is really about understanding how we can make the world a better place, how we can leave the world better than we found it, how the generations to come will benefit from the work that we do now and how effective we are in serving our mission. And in that way, we are all aligned and we can sort of come alongside each other in trying to work together in different spheres. And I think it's always important to remember that we're all on the same team, team humanity. We got to really recognize that each of us has a contribution to make. Center for Council is an organization that teaches communities and organizations and individuals to create these structures of belonging. We'll talk more about that but I will just say that our work involves trainings in the practice of council. Which is intended to promote communication, to enhance wellbeing, to build community and maybe most importantly to foster compassion in the world. In council, individuals learn to come together and set aside disagreements and judgments and all the noise of the outside world and really just show up to listen attentively and to speak authentically. And that is surprisingly difficult to do in our fast-paced world. I was gonna say this is so needed. And one of the things Julie and I have talked about over the last four years is the pandemic's plural. And really looking at the divisiveness of our communities, of our families, of our leaders and really looking into this. Some of that divisiveness does bring us to some loneliness, isolation, pulling us into moments of despair. Our mental health crisis is through the roof, right? So can you talk to us about the impact that loneliness and isolation might bring to someone? You know, according to the US Surgeon General, the nation's top doctor, we are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. He has issued an advisory. When the Surgeon General issues an advisory, you know, it's when we understand that smoking is bad for us. Right. Or a maze crisis. This is like serious. Half of the American sort of public experiences loneliness. We know this to be extraordinarily pervasive. And the bottom line is that human beings are wired for social connection. And we've become increasingly more isolated, which is a problem. Social connection is as essential to our long-term survival as food and water science is now showing us. And that is kind of a wake-up call for us. The lack of social connection in our lives has serious health risks. And obviously there are, you know, mental health implications, anxiety, depression, even drug abuse, the substance abuse kind of epidemic is very much related to the feeling that we are isolated. But apart from all those sort of mental health implications, there's real health impacts. You know, our immune system suffers. There is greater risk of hypertension and diabetes and stroke incidents and Alzheimer's and all kinds of, you know, there are studies that actually suggest that the lack of social connection is as bad for us as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, literally in terms of our health. And that's an incredible statistic and that science is now supporting this and that the Surgeon General's office is now recognizing this and saying, you know, social connection significantly improves the health of individuals, as well as the wellbeing of communities. And, you know, socially connected communities enjoy better health, but they're also more prepared for and able to respond to crises, to disaster situations, they experience greater prosperity and, you know, less incidents of crime. There are all kinds of reasons why social connections benefit individuals and organizations and communities. And we've lost the ability to nourish that to the point where we are getting sick as a nation, as a people. And we've got to do something about that. And we're really kind of compelled by this science. We kind of know it in our heart that it just feels bad to be disconnected. But now we have, you know, this extraordinary Surgeon General sort of saying this to many of us and saying, you know, we need to adjust the way we think about supporting policy and funding and prioritizing ways we can come together and find one another again that our nation's health depends on it. Wow, that is so fascinating to me. You know, I think back to the way our families have evolved. I personally live about 3,000 miles away from my family, you know, my core family, but at one point in our life, right? Like you moved out of your childhood home into your next family's home, right? Like looking at how do you keep this family unit going forward? I also have had the great privilege of playing on a Latina soccer team, whereas the entire sideline Jared was filled with family of all ages, right? We don't see that in American, I didn't see that in my, you know, other American leagues. That sense of family, that sense of belonging, I personally have seen it and witnessed it in my own life. And I'm curious if you can talk to us more about these structures of belonging and what that looks like for us and our communities. Yeah. You know, there's some wonderful kind of thinking about this going back to Robert Ludlam and bowling alone and, you know, understanding that while people were beginning to enjoy the sport of bowling, their bowling leagues were falling apart, you know, block parties and neighborhoods were no longer active and that there's something about social capital, you know, the way in which we thrive as a culture when we really emphasize coming together that was being lost as we sort of retreated into our silos. You know, the activities were changing and it was impacting then Peter Bloch's work on community and ultimately Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General writing this book together that kind of compiles all the science around this and really is a wake-up call to the fact that most of us live lives in which we are that far away from family. But not only are we not having regular opportunities to come together, you know, to have family dinners, but we don't, you know, cities were built around town squares and you don't go to the town square and, you know, kind of celebrate what's happening in the world with your neighbors anymore. And that's a real problem. It's a problem and it's a problem that I think we need to recognize the solution is complex but things like council invite us into a place where we feel we belong. We feel that, you know, our existence on this planet is valued by somebody and it's really simply experiencing the regard of others and having the opportunity to have a voice. This concept of council comes from a Latin word concilium which means a gathering of people. That's all it means. It's not C-O-U-N-S-E-L, which is counseling and people, unfortunately, because it sounds identical people often think that counseling and council are the same thing, they're not. Council is the unit that is created when folks come together and each person has a place and each person has a voice. And as people sit together, take a backward step from the craziness, from the noise, from the fast-paced lives that we live and actually speak authentically about who they are, offering each other just the respect of listening, something extraordinary happens in that setup and it feels good. It feels good. On one level, it's really just about offering regard and feeling that your voice matters. On a deeper level, I think doing this is a chance to find your voice, to share your story, to hear others without judging them or dismissing them or making them the other in every context as much of our social media drives us to do and recognizing how much we have in common. We started out this conversation around, all of us in this sector are working to make the world a better place. Sometimes just hearing that you care about the world you live in in the neighborhood, you may have a different path to that and you may act differently, vote for different people, you may worship differently or have all kinds of different beliefs, but ultimately we want the same thing and sometimes we need to remember that so that we can coexist. We don't have to love each other all the time, we don't have to agree on everything but we need to understand that we're kind of in it together, we're in this life together and there is room for all of us and structures that reinforce that are really important to create in our communities, in our organizations, in our families, in our schools and that's kind of what this organization is all about. You know I'm fascinated by this because I find in my own self and my own sense of judgment, I have become and the nonprofit show has amplified this, a philanthropic snob and I find that because every day we talk with somebody different, different organizations all over the world and I pass judgment on sometimes I'm like, oh my God, this is such a ridiculous nonprofit or why are they doing this? This is not important and it's a really interesting piece of myself that I don't appreciate because I see how polarized even the nonprofit sector is and how that used to be the bastion of love and hope and we could be more tolerant but I don't know if you're seeing this and I ask you both this question, are we becoming more polarized within our own sector thinking that our programming is the only way, our programming is the right way and stripping our own collective approach that we used to share and driving more into those silos as you spoke about. I mean, Jarrett Ransom, do you see that? You know, it's fascinating. I've seen again this huge evolution over time. I believe wholeheartedly in having civil discourse but I do know that a lot of us aren't comfortable in that space and we often listen to respond as opposed to simply listen and it's fascinating to hear so many different organizations. I still take it back to perhaps it's that finite, that belief in a finite amount of financial resources, right? Like we've become perhaps a little more cutthroat because we don't come from a place of prosperity, consciousness and abundance. We come from this place of scarcity, right? And the more we perpetuate scarcity, the more we become hoarders, the more we become outliers to say we're not gonna partner, we're not willing to partner, I'm not willing to consider this conversation. I see that, but I also see other people that have really embraced the other, you know, which is essentially Jarrett, what you're sharing with us today and I so appreciate it, you know, and I even look at how volunteers play a huge role in our community, but I'm curious if you're seeing councils, I don't know, popping up or being performed, right? From our community leaders. Like is that happening more and more? Are you seeing that? I think you're onto something and I think it's a really important conversation to have. Council is an incredibly effective way of combating what we sort of look at from a neuroscientific lens as dysregulation. So from the point of view of our autonomic nervous system, when we are in a scarcity mentality, when we do feel like there's not enough and I need to get mine and you're winning means I'm losing, you know. We are activating this fight, flight freeze, sympathetic tone and when we do that, our prefrontal cortex is shut down. We don't reason, we don't listen, we can't be relational in this sort of stressed out fear state. And so our autonomic nervous system is working against us in that moment. We don't hear each other, we can't really work with each other because we can't be sort of attuned to where the other is coming from and everything looks like you're with me or you're against me. And I think this concept of us and them is a really dangerous one. Our new initiative is called beyond us and them and to me, this is really what we're trying to do. Council is a sort of surprisingly effective way to get folks to step away from that, to understand, okay, I am dysregulated in this moment. I'm not listening, I can't hear, you know, when your mom used to tell you, you know, count to 10. That was like a, that was a neuroscience intervention. She didn't realize it perhaps, but she was telling you to activate your prefrontal cortex because that's where you hold the concept of abstract, you know, fought and numbers. One, two, three, it interrupts this fight-flight-freeze sort of cascade that is moving through your body. And so there are things we can do, there are things we can train so folks can become more self-aware of what's happening in this scarcity mentality and understand that in, sometimes when you're writing a grant and when you're presenting and when there are things that require you to really sell what you do as being the most effective, you know, in that, in that case, it may be helpful to really promote yourself, but in many cases, being relational and understanding we are all in it together, there isn't a need for us to be competitive. You are not a threat to me, can help us activate a part of us that is, you know, attuned to relationship, to collaboration, to cohesion, to trust and together we can create something, whether that's within your family, within your organization, within the sector, you know, within the culture, we've got to be able to move to that and many of us don't have the tools, we're just not resourced in understanding what's happening with our nervous system and how we can intervene. Mindfulness, breathing, you know, walks in nature, centering prayer, there are all kinds of things folks use. Council is a wonderful, you know, practical way to give folks that opportunity to kind of reset and have the conversation where we don't need to be at war with one another and, you know, simply activating that part of ourselves is a great relief. We no longer have to be, you know, fighting those battles 24 seven, we don't need to have the accelerator kind of pressed down moving through, you know, how am I going to get what I need and protect the things that you may be after, you know, all those very basic parts of our anatomy that are as a result of our evolution from folks who, you know, had to battle it out. And I think that's kind of an argument for the critical need for things like council in the world that give us that opportunity to show up and maybe move towards curiosity, maybe move towards understanding and away from judgment, maybe understand that if we walk in nature and we hear a rustling, we don't have to agree or disagree with the rustling of the leaves or, you know, the waves at the beach, if we're walking on the beach, we hear the waves at the sound, we can listen to it. Oh, you know, the tide is coming in. It's not like I can't hear you because I disagree with you, which is what we do with other humans. Making that switch to listen in that way to each other activates this, ah, there's more here, there's more data points, more information than I realized. And when you allow yourself to do that, the opportunity for collaboration, the opportunity for, you know, moving away from that scarcity and allowing that abundance and all the things that you were saying, Jared, that are so critical for us, that make us feel good can happen. But it doesn't just happen naturally in the society. And our, again, our social media and all the media is telling us that we need to be scared and confirming for us that it's just us and all of them are the problem. And we've got to like gird ourselves for this, you know, the fight of our lives. And that's a real problem. Well, it also takes vulnerability. And I am a big Brené Brown fan. I'm sure you know her as well in this space, right? And so I feel like within these councils and the conversations, it requires patience, you know? I believe I'm speaking for myself to sit there and listen without the drive to respond, right? Simply sit and listen. But it also takes vulnerability. And as you're sharing, and I know Brené has shared as well vulnerability leads to trust. Can you talk to us about this and how you see it in the work you do? Something extraordinary happens when we go just a little bit farther than we were going to and say something about ourselves that maybe reveals something of who we are as a human. And I'm not saying, you know, share your deepest dark secrets. I'm saying a part of me that I didn't think would be allowed in this conversation, in this relationship is welcome. And when I take the risk of actually sharing something, when it's my turn and I can tell you a little bit about what's going on with me, something that I'm feeling really great about or something that's heavy on my heart, it is what Daniel Coyle, a wonderful author in this space calls a belonging cue. We create this sort of vulnerability loop where my saying something and sharing a piece of myself feels good. It's an unburdening. It means more of me can show up, but it also cues to you that it's okay for you to bring yourself to this conversation and this relationship. And in doing that, we have created for each other a space in which more of us is welcome. And when more of us is welcome, it feels good. It feels like now we have a community. It needs to be done skillfully, of course, but there's that Swedish proverb that, you know, shared pain is half pain and shared joy is double joy. You know, there's something about how, you know, the act of sharing in that way, it's an act of courage, as Brené Brown says. And it only happens when we are trained in and encouraged to be vulnerable. And that vulnerability is really simply sharing some of ourselves our authentic story. And having permission to do that requires a space in which we norm that that's what we're doing here, that we have a staff meeting and now we're taking half an hour to talk this way. Or we have a class, we've done, you know, we checked in in homeroom, but now we're gonna kind of bring something about our weekend. Or with the police officers we work with, you know, we've done roll call and now we're gonna sit together in our little circle. And it's okay for us to share something about what's on our mind, what's keeping us up at night, just amongst peers. It's so simple a practice to do, but it changes everything about the way folks feel about those they work with, the work they do, their work-life balance and how they serve their stakeholders in their community. Because you have norm that it's okay for me to bring my full self. I don't need to hold it back. I don't need to hide. I don't need to pretend I don't hear what you're saying. We are in it together and together we can resource each other. And I think that's a unbelievable kind of, you know, tool, resource for organizations to be more effective, for teams to work better, as Daniel Coyle talks about in his book, you know, high performing teams know how to do this, whether it's a bot team or it's a successful tech firm or an improv troop. There's a way in which these groups work well together and trust emerges as a result of this practice. People get it backwards and think that you need to be trusting in order to ever be vulnerable. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work out that way. And it is surprising how quickly the environment of cohesion and trust and feeling good about the mission that you're together to accomplish emerges when we create these vulnerability loops. And that's kind of what council does. So Jared, we still in our workplace have a multi-generational makeup, right? Like we have such a generational makeup within our workplace and we still have individuals that say, do not bring your personal life to work. Check it out the door, right? So is this, how do you build vulnerability in a multi-generational workspace? Yeah. This is a good question. And, you know, what's your personal, what's personal? What, I mean, I am a person. So I'm going to be showing that they're basic values that every organization adheres to. And, you know, there's a wonderful scholar of compassion called Joan Halifax who I studied with for a long time. And she says, you know, it is in the helping professions. It is in this work of compassion that we may value things like empathy and respect and beneficence and engagement. But we must be skillful in the way we apply this because the downside, the flip side, the cliff we fall off of when we work with these qualities are empathic distress and moral outrage and pathological altruism and burnout which are all qualities we want to avoid in our organizations but they are not because we are bad people. They are because we are good people who have high values and are not skillful in applying these. And so these conversations help us understand, okay, empathy but when does empathy go so far as we're now down a rabbit hole with somebody we can't help or, you know, doing something but when am I on a hero complex where, you know, I'm not getting any sleep and I'm giving up all my fun, my money, my savings to help somebody and that's become now pathological for me or when have I just given too much and burnt myself out and forgotten about myself and the equation I didn't put the oxygen mask on first before I helped others. These are qualities that are about efficacy and about optimizing our performance as well as taking care of ourselves and it is a nuance that only becomes apparent when we have these real conversations. This is amazing and I'll tell you I hope that what you have brought to the nonprofit show today really gets shared and replayed a lot because I think you touch on so many issues that we kind of sense but we don't know how to articulate it. We don't know how to organize it and I think that's where the Center for Counsel comes in. It's really an amazing organization that you have and we've only scratched the surface. I mean, your international work is really remarkable and you yourself have really led the way for so many. Check out Jared's work, he's the executive director Center for Counsel, centerforcounsel.org really an amazing website that shows you their work and what they're doing in person, things that you can join online. Before we let you go, I really want to make sure that we also highlight your book where compassion begins. I love it that you have a Spanish version and an incarceration component of this as well. We don't have a lot of time but can you briefly talk to us about this because compassion has really been a central theme of our discussion today. It is and it's really a wonderful conversation. Compassion is not sympathy or pity or even empathy. It's a very different quality that has to do with how it is we can really listen to what's going on in the relationships, in ourselves, in the environment and when we feel the need actually take action that's beneficial and that keeps us intact as well. Compassion involves self-compassion. That's why compassion fatigue isn't really a thing because when you're acting with compassion you're thinking about yourself, you're making sure that you have the resources you need and capacity to be able to function well in that relationship. This book came out of the work we've been doing for a great deal of time. There is a version for incarcerated folks we're in 29 prisons in California working with thousands of incarcerated folks who've paid their debt to society or coming back as citizens and really don't have tools to be able to take the next step in their lives. So the book is translated into Spanish as well. It's something that we use not only with folks in prison but we use it with educators, we use it with all kinds of first responders and we use it with law enforcement. We have a partnership with the Department of Justice where we are training local police officers and correctional officers to understand how we can bring these resources to bear in the work we do. These folks are entrusted with protecting the public safety and they're really under resource to deal with folks who are experiencing in some cases the worst day of their lives. These tools that we can use in order to be of service to protect and serve communities but mostly to take care of ourselves and our loved ones and sustain a career so that we can actually enjoy our retirement and not wind up a statistic. Cops tend to experience mortality that is 20 to 22 years less than the general public and the fact that our public safety officers are experiencing this kind of stress and dying from it. They're not dying from line of duty issues, they're dying from the stress that is unmitigated and for which they have no resources. So we've got a lot of work to do in helping people understand what's going on inside us and how to be more attuned, to be more relational and do our work in a way that allows us to thrive and communities to benefit. Amazing. Yes, thank you. Yeah, it's been a magical conversation and we really do need to explore some other topics with you. It's just been wonderful. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I've been joined today by Jarrett Ransom, the non-profit nerd herself, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we have sponsors that allow us to have conversations like this. They bear no part of our editorial content or who we determine we're gonna have on the show and what we're gonna talk about. And that's pretty bold. I mean, a lot of these organizations, you know, out there restrict what's gonna be discussed. Our sponsors do not and they include Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit thought leader, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, non-profit nerd and non-profit tech talk. They join us day in and day out to explore these amazing conversations. Okay, you've really filled my cup today. You've given me a lot to think about. I say, thank you, thank you, thank you. Jared, we have a sign-off every day and sometimes I have to admit it takes on a different sense of what this conversation means, but our sign-off goes like this and that is to stay well so you can do well. Thank you so much. It's really been a pleasure to have you on the non-profit show today. Thank you both.