 All right. Welcome. I dedicated years of my life to causes that really mattered to me. And when I transitioned into working for an agency as a project manager, I thought that I was starting from scratch. Like none of that work was going to help me at all. And I was wrong. Because having difficult conversations with people door to door as a political organizer taught me how to have difficult conversations with colleagues and with clients. And all of the skills that I adapted being a consensus based decision making co-leader of a nonprofit helped me a lot in facilitating agency meetings. And all of the skills that I learned building deep and authentic connections quickly as an activist translated really well when I needed to build those same connections in this new life. The title of this presentation is my check so I thought we would start with a mic check. And because of technology and this being a virtual conference, you can't hear past me and currently at the same well at the current at the same time so I figured this audio was more important and all you'll hear here is me my checking back this speech. And I'll be introducing a nonprofit that I helped to run for two years. You'll hear more about a little later, but here is a make check type style speech and if you've never encountered one before this was something used by the Occupy movement and other activist groups to when you don't have a megaphone to amplify your sound. You can use the crowd as your megaphone. So the speaker speaks and then the audience echoes back what they're saying which feels really powerful if you ever get a chance to do it. The nation's first coast to coast. Roadside litter pickup. We have cleaned from Maryland to Colorado. 145,000 pounds of litter. Removed from the ground by a few people in our 20s. So we'll be rejoining that me, the environmental activist, but first we'll take a step back in time to the beginning and me, the political activist. So how do we navigate difference and move to Cincinnati, which is a big divide politically divided city in a important politically divided state to work on the 2008 election. And I had never done anything like that before, but I really caught the bug and felt what it felt like to really know that my work and my time was making a difference. So I chose to stay and I lived in Cincinnati for two years. And I did what's called canvassing, which is knocking on doors for various issues and train people how to be canvas errors and things like that. I remember knocking on someone's door for that for working America, which is the activist arm of the AFL CIO. And that's a big labor union. This guy who answered the door shouted me off of his property because he was mad about the change in his pension benefits. And I also remember knocking on a woman's door and having her cry in front of me because she was at that moment without health insurance choosing between taking her child to the emergency room or putting food on the table. And I know you might be thinking this is not really interesting, but what does it have to do with project management. It's really important to realize and to internalize that it's not personal. And I had to do that when I was canvassing because whether you're knocking on someone's door for a political party that they are not affiliated with or union they're angry at or anything like that. It's really easy to see them angry at you and think that it's about you. And it's not right. It's about the political organization or the labor union. And so in the same way, I remember that in my work as a project manager that if the team or the clients or whoever isn't happy about what's going on. It's not a test. It's not a statement about me or my worth as an individual. When I was knocking on doors, I'd have really difficult doors like that labor union guy. And I'd have to just keep knocking and go to the next door in the next door. And so I created this internal exercise where I would say let it be, I would sing that Beatles song to myself. And I would learn to reset myself so I could go fresh to the next door. And as a project manager, it's the same thing, especially now going from meeting to meeting to meeting standing in my office like I am right now. Having a little ritual that I can do to reset and to start fresh is so invaluable now. And I often find especially in difficult or contentious conversations that I just want to have the perfect thing to say the perfectly drafted email or the words that are going to make everything great and everyone aligned on the same team again. And I find that those words are whenever they really work like that it's whatever I'm feeling when I give voice to what's going on in my head like I'm really sorry that we have to be having this conversation or I wish this isn't how this went or something like that rather than being being polished or perfect, facilitating meetings. So, as I hinted at previously, I ran this nonprofit organization for two years. We lived in that school bus on the top left, which was sometimes that messy, but not always. Thank goodness. And we held a lot of different roles at the same time. We were picking up litter. We were giving big speeches. We ended in on Ocean Beach in San Francisco at the bottom there, which you Bay Area people may be familiar with, likely. And we let us a group. So we didn't have one leader. We had a group of leaders, and we would lead and organize and manage the nonprofit together. And when Occupy became this real force of a movement, we were walking across Kansas. And so, you know, really rural Kansas towns, there wasn't an Occupy presence there that we found. So we were really lucky when we were able to encounter it in Denver. So what is consensus based decision making activism, teach us about leading meetings as a project manager, be explicit about your group norms. The norm is it's sort of that voice in your head about the way things should go. That isn't an explicit rule, but does feel like a bit of a violation when it's not met. So some organizations say meetings start five minutes after the original, the stated start of the meeting and people can small talking come in later. They say meeting starts the second, the clock strikes noon, and whatever it is that you want to set as your group norm around meetings, be explicit about it and get agreement about it. And that way everyone will know what's expected of them instead of having this kind of quiet rules that are being broken in the background. Have a distinct facilitator and note taker. This is something that's really common. I found in activist organizations that, you know, someone is facilitating another person is taking notes. And those roles move around the community. So it's not always the same person facilitating the note taking. I find as a project manager, it's often the project manager facilitating and note taking. And there's a couple important things lost when that's happening. First, you can't do a great job of both of those things at the same time. Something is going to get missed. And you're really robbing your team of the opportunity to step up and to participate and be more engaged. So that's my invitation is to assign those roles or see who's willing to participate and pass them around the team. Keep a stack. You haven't encountered a stack before this is going to rock your world, especially around those really contentious meetings where a lot of people have a lot to say. So I'm sure you've been there. There's someone talking someone else is about to interrupt no one is listening. And I argue that it's because there's no stack. So the way a stack works is if I'm talking like I am right now, and Kristen wants to talk, she'll raise her hand, and I the facilitator will write Kristen on a piece of paper. Now Andrew wants to talk, it was his hand he wants to talk Andrews on the piece of paper. And what that does is it allows everyone to know that they will have a time to speak and in what order they will speak is this equitable order of whoever raised their hand first. Once I'm done talking Kristen talks next Andrew talks next etc. And especially in this world of zoom meetings and things like that it's really easy to keep a stack in the comment section of the of those meetings. So people can really listen and be present instead of wondering when they'll get to talk. I also recommend borrowing occupies hand signals. So it's really nice, especially now I mean it's nice when we're in person and we can just see, but we have this technology to put everyone on gallery view and see your whole team. So when someone's talking people can say, I agree by twinkling up like this, or I disagree by twinkling down like this. And one of the things about that is you can get an initial gut check of everyone with so much more efficiently without having to go person to person to person, and it allows people to participate and give their feedback, even if they don't necessarily want to speak in front of the whole team. So building relationships. Building relationships are strong relationships are at the core of everything, because you can't have really strong powerful connected conversation. When people disagree, it's not as easy when you're not connected. And it's also not as easy to have really well managed low great facility great facilitated meetings with people that we don't know. So building strong, strong, strong, strong relationships is really crucial. I'm going to tell you about the story of self us and now, which was created by Marshall Gantz who was an activist and then became a professor of public policy at Harvard. And beyond, it's been his work has been used in lots of places and was really famously used in the first Obama campaigns. And so the story of their Arthur in the red shirt was in Marshall Gantz's class at Harvard, and they had to do a story of self us and now as part of their class. She told a story about how she wanted to bike all the way across the country and perform random acts of kindness. And the woman on the right there, Boop in the white shirt. She was her TA in that class and was so inspired that she came on the bike ride with her. We're driving across central Illinois and ran into them and when we were walking across America and they joined us for a week or so and you can find them in the picture on the right if you want to play where as well though. And we were able to get coaching from Boop at Harvard between the years. I gave a bit of a more thorough introduction to this and a Drupal concession which I'm happy to link you to but I want to be a little more high level at this point, and just talk about the framework and the beginning of it which I think is the most profound personally, which is bringing people into your experience. Instead of saying, go vote. It's important to vote. I could instead say, these are pivotal moments in my life that led me to talk to you about voting today and to care a lot about whether or not you vote. And this is what we are doing around voting right so the story of us. This is what voting does this year. This is why it's important. And then the story of now has that tangible and direct action. So, have you made a voting plan. Do you have your ballot yet, things like that. And I, like I mentioned, I think the most profound part is that you start with bringing people into your experience because I find more than more often than not when I'm authentic about who I am. It creates that opportunity for connection because people feel open to share who they are. And so an extension of that framework which isn't part of it is to make sure that you're listening really wholeheartedly and paying attention and being thoughtful about how you follow up and keep in mind what people share with you about their lives. Especially when you have this ongoing and kind of higher stakes relationship with them like your client team and your internal team as well. This is a campaign that we put together when I guess that when we were walking across California, we calculated the amount of money that it took for us to walk a single mile. And we invited people to sponsor those miles. So they would sponsor a mile. We would collect data about that mile like this big one. We picked up 46 pounds of trash and seven pounds of recycling. And the most interesting thing we found was this weird couch. And we have created the social media campaign around both connecting people to what we were doing and also expressing our gratitude. This is a really profound lesson in the life of an activist, someone who works in nonprofits. There's a lot of asking involved. You are, I found I was constantly asking people for money for donations of silent auction items for their time for their attention, all sorts of things. And when I transitioned into project management and agency life, I found that I didn't the desperation of the asking and the constant the having it be so constant, the asking decreased quite a bit. But it's still just as important. And I think the important part is to powerfully and and succinctly and often ask for what you need because we can't do this alone, especially in project management. You know, we're not creating designs or writing codes or code or anything like that. We need things from our team and we need things from our clients and it's okay to ask and to ask powerfully. It's also important to reciprocate that with authentic generosity and gratitude. I find that I often live in a world where I get what I ask for, especially when I'm authentically grateful and generous of the things that I have to give. So in the same way that that campaign was all about thank you and gratitude. I often I remind myself now, just the way that you know you send thank you notes when people donate to your organization or come and volunteer at your event. It's just as valuable and important when my team writes really great code and my clients give me the feedback that I need on time. I don't work as a full time activist anymore. Like I mentioned at the top. I'm actually not a full time project manager anymore, but the most profound thing I felt was this initial transition into agency life, which I did make in project management. Right now I'm lucky enough to work for an agency called Calamuna. We serve a lot of amazing mission driven organizations across education, nonprofit government, all sorts of areas and we get to be at the service of people doing great work for the community and for our world. And we do have a few minutes left. So I'm happy to take questions and I'll also be hopping over to the Calamuna booth. If you'd like to discuss further, I'll share my slides so you can hear my, my mic check from however many years ago that was and happy to connect on LinkedIn or by email. Thank you.