Today we’re chatting with Mia Birdsong, a woman whose TED talk has been viewed over 2 million times, and who can best be described as a bright light. She’s also one of those people who shows you how to believe in true change, and what role you can play in doing that within your own spheres.

Listen on to hear us talk about white supremacy, capitalism, trust circles, the role of community (hint: it’s pretty much everything), and so much more. We can’t wait to hear what part most resonates with you.

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When you work on Kanye’s first album, then for Calvin Klein, and then in ethical kids’ fashion, what’s your natural next step?

If you said designing your own (amazing) dresses, you’d be talking about the owner and creator of mrs. jones, Nichole Moss. This powerhouse woman thinks about EVERY detail of the clothes that she’s designing, from who manufactures them, to the quality of the fabrics that she uses, to the fact that she has POCKETS IN HER DRESSES, people.

But more importantly, she’s changing the viewpoint that Black designers have to either be creating super high fashion or “urban” street style and dropping pearls of wisdom along the way.

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Here on the podcast, we’ve been focusing on the intentionality of this sustainable lifestyle shift. It can’t be just reading an anti-racism book once to your child and - suddenly - your child is an anti-racist forever. It has to be more than that, and it has to last longer than a month.

That’s where Barbershop Books comes in.

For those of you who may be wondering why this organization exists, it came out of an idea that its founder, Alvin Irby, had while he was getting his hair cut at his local barbershop in New York, and noticed one of his young students there. What Alvin has done is nothing short of amazing in terms of changing the trajectory of Black boys and their relationship with reading - all stemming from the barbershop, which is a Black cultural center in American neighborhoods.

We hope you enjoy this interview as much as we did - and we hope you get involved with this amazing organization.

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What sort of impact can one person (or two people) have on an existing health crisis that’s largely been ignored for years - and that crisis is happening in the United States, to its citizens?

If you’re Ali Rose VanOverbeke or Brytanie Killebrew, the answer is: you create a product that builds a circular economy - it’s a needed product that employes returning citizens to make it, and resources for the community of Flint, Michigan to get better access to fundamental resources - like WATER - that they should be receiving anyway as a basic right of just being human.

We had so much fun in this conversation because these women are so intentional in their commitment to giving back to their community. You don’t want to miss this one.

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When you think about luxury shoe designers, who comes to mind? We’re fairly sure you’re not thinking about Natasha Standard from Norie Shoes - but you should be.

This military veteran not only makes amazing shoes that are stylish but walkable, but she also travels to Italy regularly to design and manufacture her shoes.

She met the challenge of COVID by pivoting her shoe design to make military-grade combat boots for women (because, shockingly, those haven’t been made to fit women’s bodies to date - and Natasha’s an expert on that).

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If every person in the U.S. spent just $20 at a woman-owned business, it would drive more than five billion dollars towards female-led companies each month.

You’ve heard us talking on the show about how strongly we believe in the power of voting - both voting voting, which we’ll talk about on a later episode, and with your wallet. And we REALLY believe in women supporting women, all around.

This is where Dough comes in.

Motivated by the tremendous wallet power of female shoppers, and the fact that women influence 80% of consumer spending, Anna Palmer and Vanessa Bruce founded Dough, an online curated marketplace, to make it easy for women-led brands to connect with like-minded shoppers, and for wallet feminists to easily find and support women-owned businesses. And these women-led brands include a whole range of women, all shades, and identities.

Talk about powerful. AND where we should all be planning to do our holiday shopping.

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Parents, we are right there with you with the stress, uncertainty, and fear about how this next school year is going to look. Teachers and administrators, we know you are doing your best. But what should we be thinking about when we look at the fall with regard to our own families, as well as our communities as a whole?

Today we riff.

And we bring you, at the end, a special bonus - a meditation by Lisa Guyman to bring you peace, calm, a sense of healing and insight. Because what we’re all going through right now, and are about to jump into with online schooling, is an absolute cluster. Take this gift and run with it.

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As we think about the kids of this country going back to school (or not) in the fall, we can’t help think about how the educational inequality that was already in place is being further exacerbated by the effects of COVID-19.

However, if you take it back before internet connectivity problems and the lack of computer devices to learn from home on, there has always been a problem with equal and easy access to quality education.

We bring you a conversation with Colin Seale, whose biggest mission centers around providing equal access to critical thinking skills by working with teachers, administrators, and parents alike. Hear how every single one of us can make a difference, and how educational opportunities are so intricately linked to racial justice.

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Just because one person manages to make it out of a really tough neighborhood does NOT mean that if everybody applies the same level of grit, they should be able to make it out too. We need to use their story as what it is - an exception - and learn from what worked to help them make it out and change the environment and reality of all the other kids who are having to fight to just exist, let alone thrive every day.

Today we bring to you a conversation with an exceptional young man, Caylin Moore, who went from growing up in Compton, CA to being a Rhodes scholar on his way to earning a Ph.D. from Stanford so he can be a college professor and continue to focus on educating himself and others.

We learned SO MUCH from his experiences moving from a predominantly White area to one where going to and coming from school was an issue of physical safety, and how he made it back out. Listen in.

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Since the influx of new listenership and followers ever since that awful weekend when Amy Cooper was exposed and George Floyd was murdered, we wanted to take this opportunity to re-introduce ourselves.

We are Sara & Misasha, co-hosts of the podcast Dear White Women - where we aim to make it easy to enter uncomfortable conversations about racial and social justice.

We’re both daughters of a Japanese immigrant and White American, and we met over 20 years ago walking out of a racial identity meeting when we were undergraduates at Harvard. We’ve been great friends ever since, though we’ve only lived in the same city for one year since college.

Where we differ is here: Misasha is married to a Black man from the South, and has two very mixed-race sons; Sara is married to a White Canadian man and has two White-presenting daughters. Misasha is a lawyer, fitness instructor, and amateur historian; Sara is a life coach, author, and facilitator who loves positive psychology.

All of these come together in our conversations that aim to expose the humanity and history of our country so that Misasha doesn’t have to worry that one day, her family might walk out the door and never come back, based purely on the color of their skin.

Huge thank you to humorist Debbie Scheer for taking the time to ask us all the questions on this episode!

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When we think about abortion, we tend to imagine Planned Parenthood and/or providers who offer women’s healthcare in their doctor’s offices. We don’t really think about people who are choosing to self-manage the termination of their pregnancy.

(Side note: what comes to mind when you hear the term “self-managed abortion?” Our jaws dropped when we heard it because we hadn’t considered it outside of coat hangers and back alleys.)

Unfortunately, people who manage their own abortions fall into a legal grey zone, and often, because of the way systemic racism works in this country, they are BIPOC who have a higher chance of being criminally prosecuted for doing something that is, while legal according to Roe v. Wade, sometimes challenged outside of the expected medical setting.

Reproductive justice is racial justice. Listen in to learn more.

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We’ve been hearing a LOT about #DefundThePolice, which doesn’t mean exactly what it sounds like; we’re not here at this point to argue the pros or cons of defunding the police, but what we love to do is to unpack the why behind things, the history of things, so we can better understand what is really happening right NOW.

Today we’re looking at a big historical question that’s central to this whole argument about the police. Why were police formed in the United States? For some of us, we may assume that policing in the United States is as old as this country itself. And that’s not really the truth.

So what is the truth? Glad you asked…

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