Burnout is not a personal failing among today's changemakers. It is a systemic cost, one that philanthropy, movements, and communities can no longer afford to ignore.

In this episode, we travel to New Orleans for a live conversation on the importance of rest, co-produced with Beloved Community. Gabrielle Wyatt, Founder and CEO at The Highland Project; Rhonda Broussard, Founder and CEO at Beloved Community; and Charmel Gaulden, CEO and President at Foundation for Louisiana, come together to explore rest as a personal practice, a source of spiritual grounding, and an essential part of the infrastructure that sustains movement work.

The conversation moves from individual habits: walking, writing, dance, prayer, to the systems that either protect or erode rest for the people doing the most demanding work. Together, they consider what it would mean to build rest into philanthropy, leadership, and community life, not as an afterthought, but as a strategy for sustaining people and movements.

Jump straight into:

00:00 Darren opens with a poem framing rest as the still point between waves.

04:47 Gabrielle recalls a personal episode and a warning that her body needed rest.

10:30 Rhonda reframes a solitary walk to the bathroom as her most luxurious rest practice.

15:22 Gabrielle's daily ritual: one sentence of gratitude, written morning and night.

17:20 The panel turns to rest as spiritual practice, tied to prayer, silence, and faith.

23:04 For Rhonda, dance becomes both prayer and stillness.

24:39 Rest as personal practice to rest as infrastructure.

33:00 Rhonda on protecting rest for frontline and operational staff, not only senior leaders.

35:13 Post-Katrina, Charmel built Communities of Care to sustain overworked nonprofit teams.

Resources

Organizations Referenced:

The Highland Project: founded by Gabrielle Wyatt to build and sustain a coalition of Black women leaders closing the racial wealth gap.

https://www.thehighlandproject.org/

Beloved Community: founded by Rhonda Broussard, a New Orleans-based nonprofit building sustainable change toward racial and economic equity.

https://www.wearebeloved.org/

Foundation for Louisiana: led by Charmel Gaulden, funding climate, racial, gender, and economic justice work across the state.

https://www.foundationforlouisiana.org/

Other Resources:

“Trough” by Judy Sorum Brown – the poem Darren opens the episode with, published in “Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems.”

https://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2013/08/judy-brown-trough.html

Octavia Raheem: rest coach and author referenced by Gabrielle Wyatt as a mentor in her rest practice; author of “Rest Is Sacred.”

https://www.octaviaraheem.com/

#DreamingInColor #DEI #LeadersOfColor

Darren Isom:

Welcome back to Dreaming Color Live, a special series within the Dreaming Color universe. The series is rooted in our belief that the equitable future we seek requires celebrating the genius of today's leaders of color and creating space for their brilliance, lived experience, and imagination to shape how we think about our impact. Dreaming in Color Live is a live conversation and convening series, small rooms and shared tables where bold questions, creative spirits, and community energy meet. Each gathering brings artists, funders, thinkers, and community builders together to explore the ideas shaping a more just and more beautiful world. I'm your host, Darren Isom. Welcome to Dreaming Color Live. This episode comes to you from my home, New Orleans, where we gathered at Maroon Workspace for a conversation about something our sector talks about often, but still struggles to truly practice, rest. And not simply rest as respite.

We wanted to think more expansively about rest as a personal and spiritual practice, as organizational infrastructure, and even as philanthropic strategy. What changes when we understand the ability to pause, restore, and imagine as essential to sustaining the people who sustain our communities? And what does it cost us when we don't? Joining me are three extraordinary Black women who are thinking about these questions from very different vantage points. Gabrielle Wyatt is the founder and CEO of the Highland Project, where she works alongside Black women leaders, building generational wealth and changing their communities, and has been helping us think more deeply about the idea of rest as infrastructure.

My dear friend, Rhonda Broussard, our Dreaming in Color season one alum, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and founder of Beloved Community, whose work asked us to imagine marketable ways of living, leading and building together. And Charmel Gaulden is president and CEO of the Foundation for Louisiana, where she's advancing a vision of philanthropy rooted in justice, community and care. Before our conversation, we actually rested together, no cameras, no microphones, just a room full of Black women leaders and a few of us lucky enough to be invited alongside them, practicing what we were there to discuss. Then we gathered around the question at the heart of this episode, what becomes possible when rest is not what we do after the work, but part of how we do the work?

As you guys know, I've listened to the podcast and in good Jesuit tradition, I like to start with a bit of an invocation, which is a gift to the audience as well as to the panelists. And so this one is The Trough by Judy Brown, a poem. So there's a trough in waves, a low spot where horizon disappears and only sky and water are our company. And there we lose our way unless we rest, knowing the wave will bring us to its crest again. There we may drown if we let fear hold us in its grasp and shake us side to side and leave us flailing, torn, disoriented. But if we rest there, in the trough, in silence, being in the low part of the wave, keeping our energy and noticing the shape of things, the flow, then time alone will bring us to another place where we can see horizon, see land again, regain our sense of where we are and where we need to swim together.

And so I just thought that was a great way to think about our time from a rest perspective. And I'll share with you guys as well. I told Rhonda, I was like, "I don't know how I feel about this session. Everybody resting. The world's on fire, we can just rest." But I mean, clearly this is the time for us to be thinking about how we're sustaining ourselves, how we're bringing ourselves energy. I'm reminded of a session that we did many, many moons ago. I was early consulting. I was working with a client in the Mississippi Delta and we're talking about the urgency of the moment and she raised her hand, "Black grandma." And she said, "We're running out of time. We have to slow down."

And the world that we're in where we're constantly navigating these urgencies, recognizing the importance of slowing down our steps and really being intentional about how we're carrying out the work, slowing down our steps and really thinking about what we're trying to build together and thinking past the moment. And I think rest is such an important part of that. So with that, I'm going to start with an opening question. I'm going to throw it to you first, Gaby, and we can come down the line, come back to me. And so the question really is thinking about, want to give you space to introduce yourself, but a non-traditional introduction, not with your title, but with, can you introduce yourself through a moment, a moment when your body, your spirit or your life made clear that you needed rest? What did that moment feel like?

Gabrielle Wyatt:

I'm Gabrielle Wyatt and the moment that I keep coming back to that I was so afraid to say out loud, and I shared out loud earlier today and I watched Rhonda's face, was in my current role, in my current organization that centers sustained Black women leadership. And I named, as we finished our first cohort, that I was driving a 3 1/2 hour drive back to my home and found myself dozing off and having to pull over multiple times to take a nap to then continue my journey back home. And what it felt like in my body was that combination of anxiety, terror, and I'm letting someone down and it's not just the women around me, I'm letting down me. When we started Highland, one of my worst fears was how do I keep myself well enough to hold space for other women to trust showing up? And that day I remember naming, it's time to prioritize you in this. It's time to ask you, what does it look like to go beyond well enough?

Darren Isom:

Rhonda.

Rhonda Broussard:

Yes. I'm Rhonda Broussard and the hardest part in this question for me is that I realize over and over and over again that I need rest, but do I take action? So I'll tell three quick stories. In the first part of my career, I was a teacher, I was a high school teacher and went straight from running all year in the academic calendar, running all the summer programs, going to the new school, teaching five different classes. And the last day of the first semester, I just collapsed on my desk and I was like, "I don't have a lesson plan to leave for a substitute. I can't leave yet." But like 23, this moment of I have to figure something else out. I didn't make real changes. In my early 30s, I told this story earlier this week, I was in the middle of a big season for work. I was running a network of schools. My children went to our schools and this is still when I wore skirt suits a lot, skirt suits and pumps.

Darren Isom:

Throwback.

Rhonda Broussard:

Look, it was a long time ago. It was a different Rhonda. But my probably eight year old got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and peeks their head into my bedroom and sees me laying on top of the covers in the skirt suit and pumps, laptop on my lap, hands on the keys asleep. And they're like, "Mama, You need to go to sleep. What are you doing?" And I felt embarrassed. I felt guilty. My kids are seeing me work like this and they're thinking this is normal. And it still took me another 10 years before I got to actually resting. But these reminders of our bodies are going to stop, our bodies are going to slow us down. Those have been my biggest reminders.

Charmel Gaulden:

So Charmel Gaulden, the one that stands out for me the most right now is a memory of being with my father. I'm a daddy's girl and my father was navigating dementia. And for folks who have loved someone who has navigated that, it's like a time traveling disease. So they're living in all these other moments that are not the present. A lot of the past. Sometimes they're asking about things that I don't even... He was asking about things I didn't know yet would happen. And I was trying to be present for him and trying to be really present for work and trying to be present for my family and I couldn't be present for any of them and I just couldn't focus. I couldn't allow myself to focus. And I thought, "Oh, you're going to crash out. This is not..." And as someone who has had actual physical car crashes when I am doing too much-

Rhonda Broussard:

Oh, no.

Charmel Gaulden:

Oh yeah, I don't make left turns to this day.

Darren Isom:

I know that's right.

Charmel Gaulden:

I can't trust it. But just not being able to be with him and everyone around me, he loved this old country buffet because we're real Southern. The cashier would say, "Oh, you need to hold on to this time." And the waitress would say, "This is such important time." I could not bring myself to be fully present in the time and it hurt me as a daddy's girl.

Darren Isom:

Yeah. No. I mean, we'll come back to this a little bit later as well as you think about those moments and how did you process those moments. But I'm also reminded, my mom tells us all the time when it's like, "I love you mom." She's like, "If you love me, take care of yourself. I'd love you to take care of yourself, be an act of love." And so how we're thinking about passing on to others as well and normalizing that. I mean, the next question came up in conversation, Gabby. And so towards the end of our session, you gave us permission to think about the practice differently.

I would love to talk about rest as a practice. What does it actually look like in your life? Is it something that's daily? Is it seasonal? Is it hourly? How do you think about what that looks like and what you had to learn to make that happen? Rhonda, I'm going to start with you, given that you talked about these moments where you had these reckonings, if you will. How did you respond to that and how did you incorporate it in a way that was realistic and possible?

Rhonda Broussard:

Yes. One of the first things that I did, and we actually worked with a holistic wellness coach. Shout out Jackie O, wherever you are. I hope you're listening today. Similar to what Gabby was saying, she's the rest doesn't have to be this big thing. How do we reframe and think about micro practices throughout your day? If you shorten your calendar, you have that 10 minutes, that 15 minutes of five minutes, what do you do with it? She had us practice. And in that moment, I realized in my house, I'm working from home. I am CEO of my life, my family and this work. I'm running in my house to go to the bathroom in between meetings.

Darren Isom:

What sense does that make?

Rhonda Broussard:

I didn't think I had a minute to walk to the bathroom in my own house. And so that has been the thing that has become the most luxurious constant rest practice for me.

Darren Isom:

Can we blame COVID for that as well? I think we've normalized these work days that from any half an hour block becomes schedulable. We go to back to back meetings and we've also normalized this idea of professionalism and punctuality, meaning you're literally, if the meeting starts at 8:00, you're there by 8:02. And we've had work meetings where the meeting would be 8:05, you sit in an office. I know he's here somewhere. Let start the meeting. We've normalized that as professional and that's not healthy. It's not sustainable.

Rhonda Broussard:

And we missed it. We missed even the we're going to walk into the meeting three minutes late together because we are the meeting. We are already here. This is the work that we're doing. It's this relationship. It's okay. And the screen takes that arriving time away. And so the most luxurious thing I do throughout my day is just walk. Walk, notice myself, looking on the plants, come back and sit down. And I stopped asking for permission to do that in my own house, in my own life, in my own practice.

Darren Isom:

Chime out.

Charmel Gaulden:

So I'm still struggling with this. I'm a lawyer by training and it is highly about my personality. So we're always practicing something, the practice of law. I can think very clearly about what the practice looks like at work and what we've built in the work context. We have this, I'm a big Slack fan, a Slack channel called walk breaks because everybody needs to go for a walk, but I'm not walking. I don't go for walk breaks. Nobody's said anything yet. I'm looking at somebody in my staff who's like, "Don't call me out." So part of it is trying to figure out how to do it. And in this moment, I've had such a huge life change.

So adding a person that I am responsible for is just a brand new thing for me. So I'm struggling with it and thinking about the practice, watching my team put things on the walk break helps me make sure I go on the walk break. And what we've challenged ourselves to do now is to lean into a much more community care framework because I struggle with what it means for me to take the time for myself, but when we are doing it together, it feels very easy. It feels like, oh, we're catching up, gardening, we're doing these things. And so I'm wondering as a part of our practice, is it more that we surround ourselves with women who we love and respect and want to be in deeper relationship with? And can that be the way to really lean into the practice?

Darren Isom:

And we'll talk a little more about this as well. We talk about what does it mean from a community perspective, but I'm also reminded as we were doing the exercises of growing up in New Orleans, my grandmother uptown in Carrollton and Pigeon Town, all the uncles would come through my grandmother's house and, back in the hole, for Pigeon Town folks in the room. And sometimes they would come into the kitchen and talk, but sometimes they would stop in the living room and they would fall asleep. And my grandmother would be like, "Let him get his rest." But that also speaks to there were only so many places where they felt comfortable to sleep in. So how do you put yourself in spaces where you actually feel comfortable resting? Because your body will do that. It'll make it happen for sure.

Rhonda Broussard:

People will attest to this and Dion will say, "Well, if Rhonda falls asleep at your house, that means you're really family." I will on the sofa, in the chair, take my shoes off, at the pool.

Darren Isom:

Gabrielle Wyatt:

My uncle calls it Gabby's power now. He'll just be like, she goes upstairs before Thanksgiving dinner, exhausted and comes down, bubbling around. But no, I think for me, Rhonda, you mentioned just the slow and steady and Octavia Raheem, who has been my rest coach, our chief daydreaming officer at Highland for the last six years, she always says, "What's the 1% thing you can do?" And how that has integrated over the years looks like in the morning, I write one simple sentence down, seemingly simple sentence. I just write, "I'm grateful for my breath." And then some other gratitude might pour out or a doodle or not, but I think it's not trite. It feels almost like a blessing. It feels like a acknowledgement if no one else is going to tell me that day that I'm a living, breathing thing and I woke up the next day.

And when I go to bed at night, I begin with that same sentence and I write down what I'm grateful for. And it might, again, sound trite, but I think that rest is a practice of honoring who you are and the folks who see you and have witnessed you and hold that mirror back. Rhonda knows this. I'm a walker without my headphones and my phone. I love my morning walks. I love listening to bird song. I'm so curious about it. And when I'm in peak moments or travel moments like this week, I ask myself, what do I need to come home to myself when I'm in a space that isn't mine? And that looks like I pull my favorite teas and I grab my tea traveling mug, or I make sure I get downstairs to bring my berries to have breakfast here with Rhonda before so I can have a little bit of that normalcy of slowness that I might be used to when I'm in that trough. I ask myself, what's that piece from home that's going to bring me back to myself?

Darren Isom:

And this next question is widening things a little bit, but I'm really thinking a lot around this idea of rest, faith, and silence. And so for many of us, rest is not just physical, it's spiritual. It's tied to faith, to prayer, to silence, to being held. And I joke all the time, we've all had this job. I had the job when I was in my 20s. It was a rough one. It was a tough one. And there was a cathedral on the street in New York. I won't say the neighborhood because I'm going to give myself away job wise. And I would go to St. Joseph's altar and that twice a day, I was praying before I started my day. I pray at lunch. Sometimes I pray at the end of the day as well.

And it was a prayer, but it was also just a reflection point. It's a way of thinking about silence as a way of meditating. The Quakers have the silence tradition. In Islam, prayer is so central to centering yourself. If anyone can pick this one up, how do you think about your relationship to rest taught you about your faith? How does rest taught you about your faith, particularly about trust, about what it means to sit in silence, not as absence, but as presence, as a way of looking towards hopefulness as well.

Gabrielle Wyatt:

So my Sunday ritual now is I go to church, I go to mass, but I go 15 minutes early and I sit with my journal from the week and I just read through whatever came out onto the page and I just take note of it of what did this week reveal to me? What did it teach me? And then I sit in mass. I'm a recovering Catholic. I'm realizing I didn't have a choice of religion. And so my charge to myself over the last five years has been, at least just go and explore on your own. I love me some Pope Leo.

Darren Isom:

Shout out to Pope Leo.

Gabrielle Wyatt:

And then I have deep questions about our-

Darren Isom:

New Orleans connections as well. Yeah, yeah.

Gabrielle Wyatt:

As I listened to the different memorials to her, I continue to hear the same things that I heard about my father about a decade before when he transitioned, which was they were people of deep faith who called you every day to read or say a prayer or intention with you. And I think that's inextricably linked with how you opened us here today, how we opened and closed our rest practice was no matter if you believe you have a faith or if you believe that you're spiritual, that there are these spoken words that have been passed down to us that anchor and remind us who we are. And that's how I think about your question.

Darren Isom:

Thank you. Thank you. Charmel, you have any thoughts?

Charmel Gaulden:

I do. I grew up in the church and we used to have the elders of the church do that hour before service where you would engage in song and you could hear, it would be no instruments but the wood floor. And now in the mornings, particularly on Sundays, because I get to spend time with my great nephews and my family, which is really important to me. I listen to music that calls me back to that place. And I hum and I sing. I'm a bad singer, very bad, but that is my-

Darren Isom:

Jesus knows your heart.

Charmel Gaulden:

And having that song and us singing together a little bit centers me. It's as close as I can get in this moment to a prayer. I'm a person of faith. I struggle with prayer. I struggle with what it means in all aspects of my life probably to ask for help. And the way I was taught prayer in some ways it's a cry for help, but that's not the only framing. And so the music is inviting me to frame this differently. And so I've been engaging in that practice for a couple of years and now I get to do this daily hum because the great thing about a baby does not know that you cannot sing. And she is delighted to hear me just-

Darren Isom:

That baby knows your heart as well.

Charmel Gaulden:

She does. And to cover her and create in some ways a connection and a faith tradition for her now before she's even immersed in the church in the same way.

Darren Isom:

There's been so much writing about how we forget that 30% of African slaves who came over were Muslim in faith and how that hour before the cadence of the song is like a call to prayer. So we held onto that because we've always used these religions as just our language to speak with God. And so something really beautiful about that connection there. But also I'm thinking a lot about now, particularly as we're in a moment where there's so much changing to say the least, and the world feels so chaotic.

It sounds ignorant to say, but now I understand more the role of faith within the Black community and faith was not giving up. Faith was, I'm going to do the best that I can and trust that someone's going to bridge it. Faith was this, it was a call for hope to some degree. It wasn't necessarily giving you permission to stop. It was actually encouraging you to keep going forward, you couldn't see changes. And so when you think about prayer that way, it's a reminder what you're doing, what you're getting into. It becomes a really helpful way to think about it. Rhonda, do you want to add something?

Rhonda Broussard:

I do. I mean, I think my relationship to religion and faith has been fraught, but the place where I find the most solace and the most possibility is in dance. And I always say that for me, my dance practice is the prayer. My dance practice is the stillness. There is a part where it is the opening. I mean, I'm sitting tall saying it, opening my heart to the sky and what is it that I'm able to receive in those moments? What is it that I'm able to release in those moments? In my 20s, I got a chance to spend time dancing with my favorite choreographer, Ron Brown in Evidence. And if you've ever seen them perform, I say to people all the time, "This is my heart on stage. Everything you want to understand about who I am, you will receive in a Ron Brown Evidence performance." And I stunk it up.

I was in these classes in Brooklyn and couldn't get the steps. My brain understood what to do and I couldn't get my body to do it. And Ron would just come over with this most beautiful warm smile and come and dance with me. And it felt like we were in the ask together and in the releasing together. And 20 years later, I can physically do it, physically do the dance, but it was this eternal faith and hope. We're going to keep practicing. And how does someone come to you when you are at your worst and show up with grace, show up with honor, show up with heart and help you get to this next place? And I think the stillness of rest is that practice for me.

Darren Isom:

Beautiful. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about rest as infrastructure. So we talked about rest as practice. This conversation is also about rest as infrastructure and what does it actually look like to build rest in the systems we lead? And so I would love for each of you to share on that point. I have a little prompt for each of you. So Gabby, I want you to start. So when did you realize rest wasn't just personal, but structural? And what does that mean? What does that look like? Charmel, what would it mean for philanthropy to take rest seriously as strategy? So just to have on the side, but actually critical to success and impact. Rhonda, what does collective rest actually look like in community? And I can just come back to those, but those are your prompts. Gab, you want to kick us off?

Gabrielle Wyatt:

Sure.

Darren Isom:

Are you with us? Yeah, I can come... Okay.

Gabrielle Wyatt:

And so we rest with Octavia once a quarter, two hours a quarter. We will have rest breaks from the start. And that was really modeled after learning from Rhonda. And I said, if we're going to do this, we got to start it right away. So we take a now five-week winter rest break. We take a five-week summer break. And the beauty of watching that with our funders is we said, "So now you're on our clock and we know you're resting in the summer too. We're going to rest too." And that really means you're not going to hear from us, not just come July 1, but you're going to start not to hear from us the two weeks before. And I share that now entering our sixth year of this practice, but it really took us scaffolding to get there and putting the line in the sand from the start of if we're saying we value Rhonda's rest, we actually have to value our own rest journey and we're going to put in the rules and boundaries for the folks that were interacting around what that's going to look like.

I think in it, it took building a team that had that understanding and not that they were fluent in it or were these exceptional rest practitioners. I don't think anyone is, we're all in relationship with it, but we all were going to truly be care and accountability partners to one another that we were going to say, "Gabby, you said that on Wednesday mornings you're walking and you're writing, but you're holding a meeting with us or we're noticing that you said in your care plan that you're not going to travel more than three times this quarter and you're constantly on the road." And I think it took a deep focus on building our relationships with one another, building our relationship with our funders, building our relationships with our leaders, that we were starting from a place of just shared understanding about our humanity before saying, "You can't talk to me right now." But it was really there are those times when I break my rules of things.

I'm human, we're living in this culture, but it has helped me to be checked by my assistant, Rita, who says, "So if you're traveling four times this quarter then, what's coming off? Or how are you giving up something? How are you saying no to something because you can't hold it all?" And so I think rest as infrastructure first looks like a practice in humanity. Rules are just a set of what someone one day made up. So I made up rest break. And so you just started to try. And it was definitely scary as an early founder to say to a funder, "I'm not going to do this with you right now." But then I learned nothing really broke or didn't get funded. The call, they said, "Fine, I'll talk to you in a month." It just ended up moving. And so it took time to build that.

And then the last thing I'll share is infrastructure obviously means resources, obviously means resources. And when we started Highland, we said, "You're in it with us for five years. I get that might look like five one-year grants, but we can't move through this if you're not going to work with us for at least half a decade." And I think that was a critical decision for us to make and a declaration for us to make to folks that we're not talking about rest as that five minute meditation that you do at 6:00 AM at a conference that then has you running wild for the next 12 hours or that you can only do rest if it looks like waking up at 5:00 to do yoga. That's not what this is. And I think it was important that we're laughing because we've all experienced it. We might have done it too and it's no shame.

Darren Isom:

We're probably doing it tomorrow.

Gabrielle Wyatt:

We might do it tomorrow. But I think it's so critical that we speak up more and more and more since this has become so mainstream talking about rest, that it doesn't look like jamming it in as an afterthought or a one time thing or this thing that you do it and you're cured. It is an ongoing experience and we need the resources that honor and value that.

Rhonda Broussard:

And I'll pull from what you're saying, because this question about rest and community, so much of what we created at Beloved is this mutual accountability. How do we understand and be able to name first for ourselves, then for the people in our trusted circle, what we think rest is going to look like, what we think the barriers to our rest are going to be and raise your hand if you're your own barrier, because I do make my schedule. I'm the problem. I am the drama, but being able to name that and normalize it with folks so that the people who you spend most of your time with know, "Oh, here she goes, this is the avoidant behavior that's keeping her from resting."

And then I can come to you in love and say, "Actually sis, didn't you say you were going to blank, blank and blank?" Let's shift this so you can do the thing that's going to resource you in this moment and making space for folks to know that that's actually our expectation here. You're not resting in spite of, you're not hiding the rest. You don't have to put some code words on your calendar to mask the fact that-

Gabrielle Wyatt:

“Dentist”

Rhonda Broussard:

... this is your rest time.

Darren Isom:

That it's five times a month.

Rhonda Broussard:

I'm like, well.

Darren Isom:

Can I push there a little bit and get myself in trouble?

Rhonda Broussard:

Okay.

Darren Isom:

I'm going to introduce a generational element. And so I think that I'll speak for myself. As a Gen Xer, as Gen Xers, we grew up professionally in problematic baby boomer culture.

Rhonda Broussard:

And did.

Darren Isom:

And we created peace. I mean, that job that I'm talking about, I was praying... You know my manager would.

Rhonda Broussard:

I know the job. Oh, yeah.

Darren Isom:

And then we found ourselves as managers of the next generation, millennials and whatnot. And they have a very different sense of what proper work culture should look like. And we make space for that. But that means that we don't have time for ourselves. And so if I tell you as a partner, I don't want you working on that this weekend, give it to me Friday at 5:00, wherever you are on Friday at 5:00, that's what I have to work on all weekend to get us to where we need to be Monday at 9:00. And so I think that in some ways in protecting the next generation and normalizing practices that we know make sense for them, we're still responding to baby boomer funders and senior leaders sometimes who have different expectations. So we're in between there. How do you navigate that?

Rhonda Broussard:

Yes. I mean, that's the real crux of leadership. For the longest time, we would start off with how do we educate everybody in our community that we're actually going to step away? And for me, we have this month long sabbatical practice for the team. The folks on our team who I was most worried about for rest are actually the folks on the operational side of the house because you still have to run payroll. You still have to make sure everybody's benefits are working. You still have to make sure that people can take their kids to the doctor. Whoever runs payroll at your organization, hug them, give them extra vacation time. Because if you're on the program side, you're like, "Okay, I can tell the funders we're taking a break, but I still have to make sure people get paid this month. No one's going to rest if we're worried about payroll hitting."

And so really thinking about how we protect as much time for folks who are in those kinds of roles that actually don't get the same breadth of break has been the biggest thing that I wanted to protect in the space. Less so for senior leaders and to some degree less so for myself. If I can give the director of operations a real break, that's going to feel like success for me. And even thinking about where you host your retreats and how you structure retreat time when usually it means it's your, at least in our case is the chief of staff and director of operations who are putting retreat on. So they're not getting a break while everyone else is enjoying the meal and the excursion, the activity.

I'm more and more drawn to these places that have some all inclusive rest things built in. So then your operations people also get the break. So we've been thinking about it in that way. What is it that can provide as much support for in any individual role? It could be CEO, leader, it could be that director of operations, it could be your frontline team members, but recognizing that the cycles of when we all do our work are different. And so what looks like the rest for me, your rest actually might happen at a different time and that's okay.

Darren Isom:

And so really think about rest from a community perspective, what's it look like and how it's achieved? Charmel, philanthropy.

Charmel Gaulden:

Philanthropy.

Darren Isom:

Well, that's a big open. Philanthropy as it relates to rest is a strategy because we can talk philanthropy.

Rhonda Broussard:

All of philanthropy.

Charmel Gaulden:

So I'll tell you what we are testing, what we're trying. And this comes out of my lived experience post Katrina. So lived experience, I just watched so many people, so many leaders die two, three, four, five years later. They were dying on the job. People were having heart attacks, they were having strokes. Post Katrina, I ran a fair housing center. The way I came to that job was the ED, a few years after Katrina had a heart attack. Then the next ED had a mental break and people were not able to sustain themselves in the pace of the work as they were trying to create space for others. And so I came to philanthropy with that framing. And when Hurricane Ida hit, I was watching what was happening with my team. Everybody was on all the time. We were able to build in some practices for them and I started to talk to the field and realize, oh, y'all don't know how to do this.

And so we launched a program called Communities of Care. And Communities of Care does a couple of things. One, just providing people with resources because it's really hard to figure out how you want to engage in this type of rest practice. It's also really hard to resource it when so much of your funding is flowing in a programmatic pot rather than a general operating pot. Communities of Care also then pairs folks with practitioners. We are very fortunate to be in relationship with a lot of healing practitioners who have introduced lots of different modalities into our community. But my folks who were doing housing advocacy weren't always in relationship with my healing practitioners. And so we had to figure out how do we make those folks be in relationship? And that is something that shows up for us definitely in all of our disaster grant making, but we're exploring what it means for it to exist in all of our portfolios. Thankfully in our racial justice portfolio, we have a strong focus on healing justice, which requires us to also be intentional about our rest.

Now to the larger point of philanthropy, this is our set of experiments and we found that it is sustaining leadership. People are able to stay in the field longer. People are able to show up in a much stronger and perceptive way. There's some parts of philanthropy that really do engage in rest as a strategy. They don't call it rest. They call it fellowships. Some of them will say retreats, but some of them will say, "Oh, we're going to do a strategic planning exercise and it will last a year or so." And I think there is a value in explicitly naming it. And I do want to touch on the boomer, Gen X, millennial-

Darren Isom:

Go for it, please.

Charmel Gaulden:

... elder millennial in leadership. The tension is real. I watched my senior team who multiple generations sit in that senior team, folks are able to make room for other people, but less likely to make room for themselves. And I'm watching also the field because we are in such a moment of rapid change, resistance to the idea that we do have to slow down in order to be really strategic about how we move. And we've just gnashed our teeth and done it.

Sometimes it makes it very uncomfortable for me, both internally and externally, but that post-Katrina experience, and I don't want to die doing this job and I don't want to see anybody else do it. I think about all of our partners, how many of us who have navigated cancer? How many of us who are existing with hypertension? How many of us have diabetes? And that tells us that we are not well, but it's been normalized that this is how we're supposed to be. And I reject that. We don't have an answer for it yet. We're testing out some things, but I think even recognizing and saying this is not normal helps us navigate some of the generational divides.

Darren Isom:

And I'm reminded of, I mean, going back to my mom giving me advice when I left my private sector job and was working in youth development out in East New York. I had a job working with young kids in housing projects and I was tenacious as hell, staying up all night and came home to New Orleans. My mother saw that I was exhausted and she was like, "Are you okay?" I was like, "I'm just working so hard. I got to fix this. I got to make this happen. I got to save this organization, save the kids, all the things." My mother was like, "You better get some sleep because you have no use to anybody did all this lack of sleep. Who are you helping if you're not here?" And so I think that normalizing this, I used to say, if nothing else, we have to outlive Dick Cheney.

Dick Cheney's gone now, so I have to pick somebody else. There's a lot of people we need to outlive. But I think that thinking about how we think about sustainability in the work, and I want to come back just from a philanthropic perspective as well, because you talk about within philanthropy. I'm also thinking about philanthropy and normalizing this for the folks that they fund. And so in some work we had with a big donor, was giving out big gifts, worked with quite a few, we're lucky. We saw, interestingly enough, a lot of organizations that had been around for a long time doing great work, really respected leaders. They received their big gift and the head of the organization stepped down.

And you can imagine in the philanthropy world, that's seen as not a good thing, but we were seeing that basically it was the first time that leader felt comfortable enough handing that organization to someone. There was enough money in the bank, there was strategic clarity. They didn't want to hand them a mess. And so how do folks in the funding space create that space for leaders to lead, but also to step down, to develop a whole bench of folks doing the work? Is that through funding size, that's through funding sabbaticals, that's through normalizing these practices that we all know are key to success. So any thoughts there?

Charmel Gaulden:

I think the funding of sabbaticals matters. The funding of rest matters. As someone who has just returned back from parental leave, being able to fund interims matters. I also think it matters being in relationship with your grantees enough for them to be able to tell you the why, the why and what they need. For so many folks, they're holding onto the work so hard, so tightly because they have not been resourced well enough to have a competent deputy, someone who can step in the development of leadership within the organization that will allow them to then phase out. We also have this thing in philanthropy where it is really important. I love the focus on Black women and making sure Black women leaders are well, not seeing all the folks who are sitting in leadership in the organization. So solely focusing on the one leader in the org when often we are building organizations that hold onto distributed leadership and we're trying to intentionally do that.

So how do we sit and encourage that more? I would say philanthropy also should be more creative about how we frame capacity building. So the ability to rest and walk away is actually capacity. That means your organization will continue without you being there. In the business world, you don't have a business if you can't go on vacation. So why would we say that it's different in the nonprofit world when it's a nonprofit corporation? Philanthropy has a responsibility to help us get there and really being flexible with the dollars, but also being flexible with the human capital. One of the things I remember about the post-Katrina landscape was people sent people down to come work in organizations, staff institutions, and really show up that human capital and that allowed other people to rest. We don't talk about that a lot, but that's necessary in this moment. And especially in this moment of what I would say, chaos, confusion and some opportunity for us to rethink systems and structures, sending people in as human capital could be the ultimate form of rest.

Darren Isom:

And I think that's paired with also giving people the space to be outside of the chaos, to imagine the world that we're trying to create. I joke all the time about how my biggest asset as a Black professional is being able to look at a broken system and figure out how to navigate around it. We're good at that. They're doing what? Okay, that doesn't quite make sense, but here's what we're going to do in response. When in fact we're living in a world now as things fall apart, we have to be able to not just enable those broken systems by working around them, but think about what we're creating in this place. But you have to have the space to think about that.

Charmel Gaulden:

You do.

Darren Isom:

So we're closing time. Gab, I'm going to throw a closing to you. I was just thinking about how as we jumped in the conversation or in the rest practice earlier, you started with how we're arriving. And I think mine was overwhelmed, I think. And you gave us permission to write down how we're arriving again as we were ending. And I'd written in rhythm and then I crossed it out and put in cadence. I don't know what the difference is between the two. It sounded right intuitively, but I didn't have my phone to check because our phones are off. So I'll look that up later and hopefully there is some difference there.

But I think it speaks to just understanding our place and our space in all of these things. And so I want to close it out or have you close this out by giving us a sense of how much better a world we are when we get this right, how much better we are, how much better world we are, how much better sector we are, what's the benefits to all of us if we're able to incorporate rest in a more thoughtful way?

Gabrielle Wyatt:

It's funny because I thought you were going to be like, how are you arriving now, Gabrielle?

Darren Isom:

You can start there. Yeah.

Gabrielle Wyatt:

Because I am just arriving. I feel like that this experience, I believe that rest is time bending and I love bending time. And so I share that because my morning wake up is 5:00 AM, so I actually can be up in darkness as the sun's rising before my partner wakes up that I can just be with me. And I think when we lay down and we do yoga nidra together, you wake up and you're like, I don't know where I am right now. I don't know what time it is. But as I think about, I feel a bit one foot in one world, this world of dreamy space of having these questions of like, man, if we did this whole week together, what might we dream up? And then I have my foot in the door in this conversation of listening to this back and forth around the role of philanthropy, around what do investments look like? What about those Gen Zers? And so as the mid-career millennial, I will say-

Darren Isom:

Gen Z. At this point, millennials are my friends.

Gabrielle Wyatt:

I think that I want to widen this conversation to be one of health is our wealth. It is our wealth. And what we know when we fully fund folks to have preventative healthcare, what we know when we fund folks to have the spaciousness, not just to go on sabbatical, but to have that coach that comes into their organization to helps them make these shifts of maybe you do have a four-day work week. When we actually engage in that work, what neuroscience has now caught up to say is the following. And our ancestors, Harriet Tubman knew this because she was doing it and she was creating the underground railroad.

When we pause and access our breath consistently with the research, don't quote me on this piece, but we'll fact check it, but it's about five minutes a day. When you pause five minutes a day consistently, your brain begins to access its most generative, original, and creative thoughts. That blows my mind every time I hear that fact because we've all created great shit. Now I'm like, "If you all did this five minutes a day, every single day, We would literally be living in freedom." And that is what I come back to every day. And I think that sometimes in these conversations when my mom hears rest and Gabby's in her rest phase or she's like, "Why is my daughter off work for a month?" I'm like, "No, mom, it's actually about what I'm doing every day before that month." And I think it's important that we push that in. I think we have a responsibility to push it in that, yes, I think we should be funding organizations to do sabbaticals. Yes, I think we should be funding, making sure there's these different layers of leadership.

But I think one of the top bets that we can make is how do we actually support embodied consistent practice across this field? And I think it begins with ourselves. I think that in all of the conversations with my team, which is a team predominantly of Black women, we had to first just begin believing and trusting it for ourselves. And so I think we began today with this question of, do we really want to be well? And I watched you all come up from that slumber, maybe from that meditation, and your eyes look so much more rested. And I just believe a rested eyes see a rested world. And I think our charge is what does it look like to do that 1% every day consistently? And when we fall off and don't do it, because that's inevitable, the rest practice is just to ask why.

Darren Isom:

And thank you for that closing. And I think it's just a powerful way to end. I'm also reminded of the piece, do you want to be well? We have to give ourselves permission as well. I'm reminded my first yoga sessions back in New York many years ago. I remember sitting in the session, this very, very upbeat Filipino woman with locks. It was Brooklyn. She started the session by saying, "You have no place to be but here." I started crying. No one ever tells you that. This is the release of knowing that you're doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing and this is where you're supposed to be and what you're doing and giving yourself permission. And so with that, I want to give us all permission to live and to rest, normalize rest as a practice, as a way of living, as a way of being successful. And thank you all for your time.

Rhonda Broussard:

Thank you.

Darren Isom:

And thank you all for allowing us to continue dreaming in color.

Charmel Gaulden:

Thank you.

Rhonda Broussard:

Thank you for joining us and listening to this episode of Dreaming in Color Live. My name is Rhonda Broussard and I am the founder and CEO of Beloved Community, a nonprofit organization committed to racial and economic equity for our most marginalized communities. We had the honor of co-producing a sustaining change and Dreaming in Color Live crossover collaboration with Darren Isom and his incredible team. And what better place to host it than in our home city of New Orleans. We gathered in Maroon and just before this conversation, we encouraged our guests to lay their burdens and bodies down, to invite rest and the dreaming that comes with it.

At a time when work-like ours is under attack, where there is continued divestment in the social sector, there are historic layoffs of Black women, our Black-led philanthropies carry even more responsibility for our care. And those leaders who are moving resources to enable care for everyone else, how are they and what of their bodies? The vessels that are holding them, literally making their work possible, how are they being tended to? We invite you to consider rest as restoration, rest as infrastructure, rest as capacity for our future selves to fight, rest as legacy. For whichever leg of the race you are running, I wish rest for you.

Darren Isom:

And that's a wrap for today's Dreaming in Color Live conversation. These are the kinds of rooms where new ideas take shape, where truth gets spoken and where community grows. And I'm grateful you chose to be here with us. Dreaming in Color Live is a Bridgespan supported production created in partnership with content allies. A special thank you to our show producer, Denise Savas, our associate producer, Sakina Khan, and our onboarding producer, Claudine Fleury, our videographer, Lowell Thomas, and audio mixer Randy Sinclair. And as always, a special thank you to my Bridgespan Production partner, the ever brilliant Cora Daniels, my partner in good trouble and in all the dreaming that happens behind the scenes. Thank you for listening.