Welcome back to another episode of the Awakened Heart. This week, Carrie Hoops joins Bill de la Cruz, and Guadalupe Guadalajara. Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends.

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Awakened Heart

We have another episode for you around the Awakened Heart. The show was created to give people a voice to be able to talk about their stories and some of these challenging conversations in this divisive planet that we all live on and to be able to share perspectives without fear of dehumanizing or denigration for what people think or for having a different perspective than somebody else has. We have a number of episodes. We started an offshoot of that called The Awakened Heart: Rehumanizing Our Connections. It’s about how we reconnect through our hearts and so much of what I see out in the places and spaces that I work in and support people in is rooted in what we do and not who we are.

What we realized as well is that there are a lot of people who are doing great things in their community. We’ve created this culture among White people that if they share their story about things that they’re doing for other communities they move in and out of that they run the risk of being labeled a good White person or that their story doesn’t matter because they’re doing it for some other reason other than being altruistic and caring.

Guadalupe and I, who’s my co-host, have known each other for a while. We’ve had conversations about why this voice of a White person feels so stifling. They can’t have a space to talk about what they do. It’s mostly because of this socialized realm that we all live in that says that certain people’s voices are not as important as each others. For the Awakened Heart, everyone’s voice is important.

Our guests are going to share their stories and talk about things that they’re doing, not because they’re good people but because they’re caring people. They engage in their community and want to do something that causes some ripple of change in their lives and the community. That’s what the Awakened Heart is all about. I’m going to welcome my co-host, Guadalupe. How are you?

Thank you so much, Bill. It’s great to be together. I am motivated to do this. I’m a Holy Name’s sister. I’m very committed to healing and repairing the world. This dream of this show has been with me for years as I’ve listened to some of my wonderful White friends and allies tell me the good they’re doing in the world. What I notice is that you all don’t share your stories. This show is a way for you. Carrie Hoops is our guest. Carrie, when we got the return of the lights, I was thinking, you are a light in my life because of the way you have shown up. It was Socrates who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

You live so close to yourself. You are transparent and humble. You show up fully with your heart, hurt and everything. I thought I wanted you as a guest because you are such a model. I want other particularly wonderful, good White people and those who are struggling, who don’t have your gifts, intestinal fortitude, your courage to hear a bit of how is it that you put your circuitry together like this to share some of that inner journey with us tonight. You could start at any point that you want. That’s the story that I hope you’ll share.

Thank you for having me. It’s a gift. I’m touched and humbled. I’ve been thinking about this because I wasn’t sure what questions you are going to be asking. I’m thinking about the journey. I started with my childhood and thinking about my upbringing, my family, my journey and my profession. I grew up in Northwest Portland and it was at a time when it was very much artists and professors from PSU. I was exposed to a lot of different beliefs and people and how they’re walking in the world. My parents always had strangers at the dinner table. At the time, that was irritating to the rest of my siblings because we were like, “What about us?”

My mother was notorious, in particular, for bringing home folks that we didn’t know. I have this little story about my neighbors, Eric Marcoux and Eugene Woodworth, who were two gay men. My mom opened our house to them. I didn’t know this at the time but now what I think was going on is they were organizing the early LGBTQ movement in Portland, folks around that and voice around that. At the time, it was like, “There are all these unusual people in my house.” They were singing, laughing, crying and trying to figure out how to create more voices for the gay lesbian community.

I think about my father’s very dear friend, a Black man named Lloyd Gaston, whose family used to tell me these stories that when the jazz musicians would come to Portland, they were not allowed to stay in the hotels locally. His family housed all these famous Dizzy Gillespie, major jazz performers in his house. Why am I babbling and telling you all this? There was a richness that I didn’t quite get until later because I learned so much from you, Guadalupe around DEI.

At the time, I didn’t have a vocabulary for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. I grew up around a lot of different kinds of spirits but I’ve had a lot of reflection from childhood to now and leading a social service agency in this time in Portland when there’s such a massive humanitarian crisis and how communities of color are disproportionately impacted by poverty.

I want to take you back into that childhood story because I find it so fascinating. One of the ideas of the show is that the things that we do as adults or the way that we experience our stereotypes, judgments or experiences are rooted in our early childhood, typically between birth and adolescence. As you’re sharing that story, it leads me to believe that you were raised in this home where your family and parents were accepting and giving both to people who weren’t like them.

It is both interesting and great that you were able to grow up with that and maybe not see the value of it then as much as you do. I’m curious how you see that connection as an adult in the story that you’re going to tell us about what you do in relation to how you were brought up. Do you see that connection? How does that resonate for you in terms of the story that you shared as a young person?

I’ve never had to think about this in this context but I do think that exposure to other people and ways of being informed my interest in nonprofits and working most importantly with teams. In some ways, the content of the missions that I’ve worked for was less important than the people and trying to get at the heart of how you move groups of people forward and create a culture, safety and a place where people can speak openly and freely.

One other tangential story was my sister is lesbian. At that time, people weren’t out. She was coming out of high school in The Oregon Journal. We used to have two competing papers, The Journal and The Oregonian. The Journal did a story on parents of gay children and interviewed my mom and my sister. I remember being little and my mom showing us the paper. Joy was my sister. I didn’t ever think of her as lesbian. My mother had this incredible voice and saw that as important. I took all these little experiences into my being and they informed my work.

It sounds like she had a sense of pride even in being able to create that kind of environment, not only for you and your sister but also for all those folks that came in and took your dinner. You were like, “What about us?”

We didn’t talk about race. I’ve been thinking about that a lot because of my work. As a child, I have these two very good friends or sisters. I didn’t identify them as Native American but they were part of Chickasaw and Potawatomi. My best friend was half-native Hawaiian. We didn’t talk about it. I knew they were different but it was not ever spoken about.

I’ve been thinking so much about that as an adult and how those conversations around racial identity are so much more heightened and rightly so like, “Why weren’t they? Why didn’t I know their tribe name? Why didn’t we talk more about Ann’s grandmother in Hawaii and what she brought forth in our relationship?” I’ve thought about that a lot. I don’t know.

It’s an interesting time that we’re in. I see it from two perspectives. One is we are very racialized in terms of talking about race. Race doesn’t define your ethnic story. It sounds to me, as young girls, you were friends. It didn’t matter what your background was. You were friends. You could see differences by how you saw each other and yet it doesn’t sound like it became a divisive part of your relationship.

Where I hope we go as a society is to develop a consciousness of political education because when I run into people who are pro-labor but anti-gay, they don’t understand the purpose, content and structure of oppression. Some ideologies tie all the oppressions together. One reason is it’s possible that we didn’t talk about race at some point, gayness, queerness or any of that but I’d love it if you would share with us part of your story. How did you begin to connect the dots, “There is something bigger here that I didn’t know I didn’t understand. It’s a container?”

That’s where you come in. I didn’t even have this reflection when you and I were together. I had to get away from that experience and then get into social services. Those things helped me tie them together. It’s the work that you all were such pioneers in this community. It was impossible for me in that experience to see until I was away and working with people struggling that live in deep poverty and has a drug addiction and mental health.

I was able to tie the learnings that I was trying to get while I was there. It was abstract in a way because we were this organizational development consulting firm. We were delivering the services. I became your leader but had no real depth in DEI. It wasn’t until I got to go away and take a lot of those learnings. The learnings were perfectionism. Feeling like I had to have all the answers and a sense of curiosity that you want to keep grounded when you’re leading. It’s the acceptance of ambiguity when you’re working with groups of people. Am I getting at the story or is it disjointed?

What you’re saying is you were so close to it. You were too much in the midst of it to sort it out but once you were able to remove yourself from it, in a new context, you could look back in hindsight and go, “I see the connections.” You’re right. Your job was to be at the helm leading. Your job as native people would say was the eagle view. We were living the mouse view on the ground. It looked theoretical until you could remove yourself or rather put yourself in a new situation where you were continuing your journey, growth and development.

 

I was thinking of an example with this taking what I think you and Cliff, Carol and then Maria Lisa Johnson, who’s been another mentor for me, especially in DEI in my last years was grounding why it’s so important to lead with race in a DEI framework. That was a conceptual framework at tax than NAO. I got to put it into play at this organization I’m leaving. Race is the indicator that consistently determines the greatest disparity. If you don’t lead with that, you miss it.

I did not get that when I was working with you until I was in the context of the social service agency that was seeing more people of color come through the doors, Mandarin-speaking Chinese seniors like, “Why is it that a higher percentage of our guests at William Temple House are people of color?” My board didn’t see that. My job was to get my board to begin to hold these things because they were using antiquated terms like working poor. Not to disparage, we’re all here learning but to ground that as to why is it important that we’re providing these services and what are the systemic issues that are impacting the people that we are serving and holding that as the ground. That was huge.

That was beautifully framed, articulated and said that if you don’t lead with some framework and analysis, what you get at the end is going to be dramatically weaker and different. When you lead with that framework and analysis, then you can make a systemic and structural difference.

What was it like as a White woman in a predominantly white state that’s rooted in racial inequities to lead an organization leading with race? What were some of the challenges that you had and growth areas that you had to explore on your own to be able to do that even to have the conversations like with your board, I can imagine how those might have gone?

I’ll give an anecdotal story related. When I first started, a lot of the folks that came into our food pantry were Chinese seniors. I didn’t know this at the time but we had a lot of complaints from volunteers like, “They are taking too much.” I would go down to the food pantry and observe. We have limits for how much meat and things you can take. Some people were taking more than the stated limit. We had everything translated into different languages so that could be communicated.

What I realized through talking to clients that were able to speak some English and through my staff who’d worked there quite a while is that folks that grew up under mal and in China that are in their 90s, many of them lived through horrific periods and were starved. There was a scarcity mindset. That was why the taking may be of more than the limit was an action. I was like, “It’s not like they’re taking more. It’s their life experience.” That was an epiphany and needed to be communicated to the volunteers who are White like me and did not have that lived experience. How do you know what you don’t know? It’s like, “They are taking too much. Let me give you some context.” That was a powerful moment.

The other part of that is a lot of families are multi-generational. They may be taking food home for their selves and also their children, grandchildren, aunts or uncles who also are part of their household, which is not what we do as Americans. It’s happening more and more with aging parents. It’s not the norm though, as it is with other ethnicities where it’s normal to have your aging parents as part of your multi-generational home. It sounds like you were able to bridge that message in the way that you brought it. What is it about you and the way that you messaged?

It was gentleness. I have tried to be tender and gentle and have more open energy around how I communicate so it doesn’t shut people down because people go into a place of shame immediately if you’re reprimanding. I had one older very affluent volunteer who was upset about it. Let’s call him Sam. I won’t out him but I said, “This is what I learned about where our guests are coming from and their historical background. I’d like you to consider a different perspective than they’re not taking.” He goes, “There are so many other people that have needs and there’s not enough.”

 

I said, “I know. We do have a finite amount of meat in the freezer. It’s still okay that we’re adhering to limits. We need to continue communicating but hold our hearts open to the fact that that’s probably a place of terror for them, that they’re not getting enough food. As somebody who’s never experienced hunger, hold that.” He was thoughtful about it. He was able to step back and soak that in.

I can appreciate that approach because that gentleness and willingness to have a conversation, in the long run, is a much more effective way than just telling somebody they’re wrong or that’s not the right perspective rather than using it as an opportunity. That’s a great message for our readers to understand that you don’t make a change by demeaning somebody. There is a way that you can have a conversation that keeps your folks engaged in the long run as you make these shifts to the diversity of your guests.

Our consultant, Maria Lisa Johnson, whom I cannot say enough good things about, helped so much at our organization. When we built our DEI framework, there was one of the things she suggested that we do. There was 26 staff and I’d never managed a team that large. This was when the pandemic hit. There was all sorts of stuff going on internally, a big culture shift and a lot of tension and fear because of the pandemic. We decided even during all of that to do a climate survey. We wanted to look at what the volunteers, employees and board members think about the workplace and their supervisor-employee relationships, the work climate, job satisfaction and experience with belonging in the workplace.

Belonging is an important thing in a work environment. It’s not something I had thought about until I got away from my experience at tax. That survey helped my leadership because I was able to take the feedback from everybody and quickly see, “People are experiencing tremendous burnout.” There are pay equity issues. There is a division between two different lines of the business. We have a thrift store, social services and mental health counseling. There was a division between these three lines of mission service.

Belonging is an essential thing in a work environment. Share on X

I was quickly able to know where I needed to go. It was super valuable and made a huge impact on people feeling like, “I want to stay here. My voice is heard and management’s taken action.” From there, we did a whole host of things around pay equity setting a minimum wage for people. We weren’t living our values. We were employing people that could shop and qualify to come to our food pantry. I went to the board and was like, “This stinks. You can’t afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Multnomah County on the wage we’re paying. Where are we with our values around this?” They didn’t know that. It was information for them. I never thought I would be excited about a survey in my life.

It’s interesting too because the word belonging has become very politicized and yet for those of you who are reading, belonging is the idea that you can be a part of an organization, community, school, church or whatever it is without having to give up a part of yourself to do so. It’s this idea of, “How do I bring my most authentic self into whatever I’m doing and not have to mask parts of who I am?” The fact that you were able to get that information and realize that people didn’t have a sense of belonging.

When you think about it in your organizational culture and then look at the folks whom you’re serving and their level of marginalization, it’s no wonder that we have a society that feels disconnected. I don’t think we’re working as hard to create that sense of belonging in our communities as we’re having to in our workplaces because culture matters.

One other tangential thing related to this is we also did a client needs assessment. That had never been done in the organization. We had never brought in the voice of the people that we are serving. I did it in three different languages, Russian, Spanish and simple Chinese. That was a huge moment to think about, “What do our clients think about the services we’re providing? Shouldn’t we be asking them?” It has never been done. That had a whole other wave of change and how we deliver what we do.

This has been very informative, lightning and inspiring. How I want to cap this off is you haven’t used the word transformation but it is what you do through your work. My favorite definition of the term transformation is a fundamental shift in assumptions that leads to an expansion of consciousness and your willingness to be curious, open and secure enough, to question and not take it personally. Let’s find out what’s going on.

A friend of mine once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. You went right in there. Let’s measure this so we can improve it.” What caused me to invite you to the Awakened Heart is your awakened heart. Thank you for giving us this time to share your stories which particularly goes a very long way. Bill, is there anything that you’d like to say in closing?

I would like Carrie to share with our readers, what are a few things that helped you in your transformational journey to be able to move and support the communities that you’re talking about here? I’m not sure this is how you identify if you identify as a White woman or have other levels of identity. Part of our approach here is to bring out the voices to what I usually say, “We don’t like labels.” It’s not that we’re perpetuating the label of Whiteness.

We know that there are a lot of White people whose voices are being marginalized. That’s why we use the phrase and are focusing on skin color even though we both know that our life’s work is ridding ourselves of being seen as a label. From that perspective, I’m curious as a White woman, what were some of maybe 2 or 3 things that you did yourself in your journey to be able to outwardly create the transformation that you did in the organizations? I would probably presume even in the communities that you live in so even outside of your work. Maybe 2 or 3 things that you had to do to bring this transformation.

Number one is holding the immense privilege that I have as a White woman that grew up. We weren’t affluent but upper middle class. The consciousness started when I began working with Guadalupe and Cliff. I was holding that as I walked through the world and the doors that opened for me and holding that not everybody gets that. How did I get the cool internship? It’s because I knew somebody who knew somebody and I got in. That was a huge lesson.

The other thing is trying to be present. That’s a word that’s used a lot but I try to pause, take a breath and listen deeply to the moment and not shy away from the conflict. That’s been a skill that has been honed in the last several years, especially living through the pandemic because it was so elevated. I had to take a lot of the practice I’ve learned. I studied with a woman and took a yoga class for ten years and she did all sorts of practices but meditation and kundalini. This is where I get real woo-woo on you. Some of those energetic practices helped ground me for this time.

Acknowledge privilege, be present and keep practicing.

Acknowledge, privilege, be present, and keep practicing. Share on X

It’s never over and done.

We’re all a work in progress. It’ll be something that we do every day until we make that transition.

Thank you so much, Guadalupe and Bill.

Thanks for sharing your story, journey and practice. Guadalupe, it is always a treat to co-host these lovely episodes with you. Just a reminder to everybody that our approach is all about rehumanizing ourselves. The idea of the Awakened Heart is to realize the thing that I learned a long time ago. Everyone has a good heart and deserves to be trusted. If we keep seeing each other that way, move beyond our labels and get to know that person for who they are, it changes how we interact with each other. When we have a connection and we know that person who lives next door to us and some of their story, they’re no longer just our neighbor. They’re a member of our community.

 

We’re not asking everyone to agree with everything that we share or that you read. We’re asking you to find the level of acceptance that says, “We can not agree, yet I can accept your perspective and still hold you in a space of being part of our community.” In the end, we are. The only way we’re going to switch from this divisiveness that we’re all living through is to reconnect. We’ve been divided long enough so it’s time to get connected and stay connected.

Find the level of acceptance that says, 'We cannot agree, and yet I can accept your perspective and still hold you in the space of being part of our community.' because, in the end, we are. Share on X

If this is something that sparks your interest in you, please share it. Subscribe to it so that when we have a new episode, you’ll always get it to your electronic device or whatever that is. Thank you all. Remember something that you’re thankful for every day. However you celebrate the season that we’re in, do it with joy, a good heart and a connection to somebody that you might not be as connected to. Thank you all for reading. Until next time.

 

Important Links

• Sisters Of The Holy Names Of Jesus And Mary
• Carrie Hoops – LinkedIn
• Contact@delaCruzSolutions.com
• @Bill.delaCruz – TikTok
• @BilldelaC – Twitter
• @BilldelaC – Instagram