This transcript of the Stand Together Podcast was originally published by Stand Together Foundation.
Obi Okolo
Hey, listeners. My name is Obiekwe Okolo, one of the executive producers of the Stand Together Podcast, and I lied to you.
If you’ve been with us from the beginning, you’ll recall me mentioning that that would be the last time you hear my voice. Well, I’m back. Again, joined by my friends and hosts of this here show, our brief historian of Good and Paradigm Shifter, Evan Feinberg, the Principals, Ski Ahmad and Jeff Proctor, and the Bringer of Perspectives herself, Ty Spells. Hey, everyone. How we doing?
Evan Feinberg
Hey.
Ski Ahmad
Hey.
Ty Spells
Hey. How you doing?
Obi Okolo
I love it. Doing well. We took on a challenge this season, to present our audience with a section cut of the most inspiring, disruptive, and innovative work by the most influential social entrepreneurs across our nation.
With four episode types, A Brief History of Good, Shifting Paradigms, Principles, and Perspectives, we wanted our audience, you, to understand how we got to where we are today, to hear a vision for a better social sector tomorrow, meet the nonprofit leaders in communities across the nation empowering people to create lasting social change, and to amplify the voices of some incredible souls who were able to change their lives because someone simply believed they could.
So, Evan, remind our listeners a little bit about what we were hoping to accomplish with both the episode types that you anchored on the show.
Evan Feinberg
Well, yeah. Starting with the Brief History of Good, it’ll be… I mean, history matters and the context that we work in matters. And we’ve got to understand, how did we get where we are and what does that mean for where we need to go from here? And so, it was a real joy to talk with my good friend Becky Endicott from the podcast We Are For Good, to just talk about a history of philanthropy and nonprofits and sort of, how did we get where we are in America today? And so it was a really insightful and interesting journey to go through that history and context. I really enjoyed the episode type of Shifting Paradigms because when we were talking about paradigms, we were talking about the most important stuff that I think we could be talking about together.
Which is the reason why a podcast is so interesting for Stand Together and for the work we do at Stand Together Foundation. A podcast is interesting because we care about ideas, we care about principles, we care about the way people think about solving problems, because paradigms are so much more scalable than methods and practices and specific solutions to problems. If we can really dig deep and understand how and why we think the way we do and how we should think in order to better solve problems and improve lives, I feel like we can make a ton of progress. And so, in Shifting Paradigms, we really went deep with some really incredible thought leaders and folks who had perspectives that would enable us to really understand the insights behind the work. And it was a pretty exciting journey to go down.
Obi Okolo
I love it. I love it.
Ski Ahmad
Oh yeah.
Obi Okolo
Jeff, Ski?
Jeff Proctor
Well, for us, there was a lot wrapped up into it. I think the biggest thing by far, was just trying to be better and more popular than Evan’s episodes. [Laughs]
Ski Ahmad
Fail.
Jeff Proctor
No, we set out with a couple goals. One, maybe at the highest level, was to figure out how to talk about being principle-based as a person, as a decision maker, as an employee, as somebody who just looks at what’s going on in society and hopes things can be better. And contrasting that with maybe being a little bit more formulaic or rule-based. And then as a bonus, we got to use a few of the core principles that drive the Stand Together community, specifically as examples and bring guests in around that. So I think kind of the one-two punch of, “Let’s talk about being a principle-based community,” and then “Let’s get some richness around the specific principles that we care about here.”
Ski Ahmad
And I think, to that point, also with a number of the guests, I mean being able to show, at the pavement level, these principles in action with the number of the guests. So it was amazing to see that come to fruition with these principles and practice.
Obi Okolo
And our Bringer of Perspectives, Ty.
Ty Spells
I believe with Perspectives, I was really shooting for… A lot of times we are talking about ideas, we’re talking about theories, we’re talking about institutions, but we forget that these are not just barriers or problems we’re trying to solve, but they are people. And so, in Perspectives, I wanted an opportunity for you to listen to these individuals who have overcome and come out better. Although they experienced a barrier, they are not just that barrier problem. So in Perspectives, I wanted the listener to be able to understand the person.
Obi Okolo
I love getting to talk to this team now, and thinking about the way that we set out to put this all together, of four shows that have four very different personalities and four different voices. It’s crazy having you all in the room and seeing all of that in real time. It’s really cool.
Even looking at our vibes, everyone’s got different style. Evan’s like business casual, but his sleeves are rolled up. It’s like, “It’s business, but we’re going to get our hands dirty.” Ski’s got the business casual, but he’s got the sneaker dress shoes, ’cause he is going to move fast. Jeff’s got the shiny… You can’t see Jeff’s shoes right now. This whole bit is just so I can talk about Jeff’s shiny cowboy boots. [Laughs]
Ty Spells
Their moment. Their moment.
Obi Okolo
The principle flair. I love it.
Jeff Proctor
I feel an Instagram post coming on.
Obi Okolo
And then Ty’s just cozy in her little tracksuit. Just super comfortable and sitting in the pocket with people, getting real and having these human conversations. So, again, I just want to thank y’all for taking on this season the way that we did and so well.
Evan Feinberg
Obi, I’ll tell you one of my favorite parts of the season was not listening or even just getting to host my episodes, but getting to listen to Ty’s episodes and Jeff and Ski’s episodes.
Obi Okolo
Yeah.
Evan Feinberg
I mean, these are mostly folks that I already know, and I know their stories, I know all about their organizations. And man, was I blown away by what these other hosts were able to draw out of these friends of ours and just really bring the listener into the work that we get to do every day. It was pretty awesome. So I’m pretty thrilled to get to sit with this illustrious group today.
Ski Ahmad
I think it was spot on Evan, and not because you mentioned the ones that I wasn’t hosting, but your point is… [Laughs]
Evan Feinberg
Yeah. You really carried Jeff though, so thanks for doing that.
Ski Ahmad
Hey, I was called in to carry Jeff.
Evan Feinberg
Yeah.
Ski Ahmad
And so I was able to deliver, no doubt. But it felt like you could tell that these were friends of ours. That was one of the most amazing thing, was to sit every week to listen to friends of ours.
Ty Spells
It made me think about the importance of listening. So all of our individuals that we work with, they talk about the first time someone actually sat down and heard them or listened, and it shifts how they went about their next steps in life, how they looked at the outcome. And I believe that’s the power of this podcast, and the power of getting to spend these moments with you guys, is that I got to take a moment and breathe and just listen. Listen to your story as well as the people you were interviewing, and that shifted my perspective, which therefore, shifted how I act in this world.
Jeff Proctor
Another interesting overlap I saw was just, we did have the four distinct episodes, but you see elements of each other episode type. So if we’re talking about principles, we’re getting paradigms, we’re getting perspective. Everybody’s commenting on what’s going on in their space through a broader understanding of philanthropy and how we got to where we got in that space. And it was just really cool to see that, even though we sort of designed this as four tracks and it was that… There is a meta-narrative that goes across all of those in a really cool way.
Obi Okolo
So if you’re a listener who’s only focused on one track, what Jeff is saying is, go back and do the full album. Album listen.
Jeff Proctor
Oh, this is definitely one of those albums you go from track one to track 12, for sure.
Ski Ahmad
You all are talking about albums. Do we still do albums these days?
Jeff Proctor
Is this vinyl? Can we do this on vinyl?
Obi Okolo
We’ll be releasing a limited edition vinyl of the Stand Together podcast. [Laughs]
Let’s get into some of the details of those standout moments with our friends. Can you all think of any sort of conversation, element of a conversation, surprising element of a conversation that comes to mind when you think about the last, I don’t know, three months of production on this thing?
Evan Feinberg
Well, I’ll start. The very first episode that we did in the Shifting Paradigms episode type, was with my good friend Lauren McCann, who was one of the very first staff members with us here at Stand Together Foundation. And we took a walk down memory lane and it was really, I don’t know, there’s something very nostalgic about it for me, but I thought there was a lot of insight that we were able to draw out of the journey that we had been on at Stand Together Foundation, to sort of discover the unique paradigm that we were approaching this work with, relative to how other philanthropists and nonprofit organizations were operating. But what was really interesting was that Lauren brought it home by where she is today, which is to say that through her work with Stand Together Foundation, she, herself, overcame significant barriers in her life.
She was, of course, quite successful already, but she, herself, is now in recovery from substance use. And she’s not only in recovery but thriving and sitting on the board of the Phoenix, one of the organizations that we talked to, obviously to Scott Strode and to Kayley Jones in two other episode types. And it really just brought it all together for me. The work we’ve been doing from day one at Stand Together Foundation… But even in the midst of that paradigm episode, we got super personal and got a perspective, just as Jeff was saying earlier, we kind of brought everything into every episode. That moment with my good friend and colleague, Lauren McCann, was really special.
Jeff Proctor
For me, there was a type of experience that happened a lot, which was something I did not expect where I was really an audience member, not a host. And with folks that I’ve talked with on multiple occasions, going back in some cases half a decade. And the one that really comes to mind for me, was talking to Khali about him seeing himself not as a fighter, but as a kid who couldn’t read.
Khali Sweeney
I started a program roughly 15, 16 years ago as a result of me not seeing it in our community, It wasn’t there. It was nothing there for the kids. And I seen kids going through the same struggles that I, myself, went through as a product of Detroit public school. Not to bash them, but I came out of that school not being able to read or write.
In the 12th grade, I couldn’t read. I noticed that in the third grade I would just have these behaviors and I would just be labeled and people would say, “You’re going to be dead in jail, you’re not going to even be a garbage man.” But they gave me no other alternative, other than being dead or in jail. And they would tell me, “You can’t be a garbage man.” So now, what am I going to do with my life?
And I didn’t have the tools to tell them that I couldn’t read. I didn’t have the vocabulary, I didn’t have the words to say that. So I went through life like that and I noticed a lot of my friends go through that. And so, we lost a lot of guys young, lost a lot of guys to prison. And so, as an adult, somebody put it there. Somebody told me, they said, “You know, the rest of the world don’t live like this.” And they said, “What do you want to do with your life?” And I was being honest with myself. I said, “I have to take a deep look at myself.” And I said, “I want to learn how to read.”
And so I went back to school to learn how to read and I started working hard. But then, I looked in the community, it was still kids doing the same things that I was doing and being told the same things that I was being told my whole life. And I made a choice right then, I said, “Man, let me start something. Get these kids something to do besides go to jail or die young.” And so I came up with the youth program idea. I started working with the kids in the community and it’s been a joyous ride ever since.
Jeff Proctor
Him having that personal narrative that maps so well onto why they do what they do. I was a hundred percent in audience member mode sitting here in the studio, just hearing him go.
Ski Ahmad
Oh, yeah. I heard this throughout many of the episodes, it was the power of the tongue and what happens when someone can really just breathe life into another person by the words that they share with that individual, whether it be something negative. So, in Khali’s example, Jeff, as you just mentioned, Antong had made mention of the judge telling him, “Hey, you’re going to be a menace to society,” Or something like that. But the one that stuck out to me, was with Kaley Jones. She said she something about riding in the car with the cartel. And they’re saying to her like, “Hey, what are you doing?”
Kaley Jones
So, I was doing a deal. And the way that works is, a vehicle pulls up, you drive in behind them, someone hops out, gets in that drug dealer’s vehicle, and then they drive for a minute so it’s inconspicuous. And during that time that I was in the vehicle, it was this beat up Toyota Corolla that smelled, I don’t know, it smelled like sickness. Do you know what I mean?
And there were two people in the front and two people in the back. And they put me in the middle seat in-between the two gentlemen in the back. And I remember they looked at me and they said, “Guera, why are you doing this to yourself?” And I thought, “Why do you care? I’m making you money.” But in the back of my mind, there was this, “When the drug dealers are asking you why you’re doing this to yourself…”
Ty Spells
We might have a problem.
Kaley Jones
“We might have a problem.”
Ty Spells
Like if the cartel is asking you clarifying questions…
Kaley Jones
Right.
Ski Ahmad
You had members of the cartel that was helping guide her right, helping her see that you have so much more to give to the world, for you to do, so anyway… Even with Antong, and he made mention of the person that was in prison with him and said, “Hey, you’re a leader.” So the power that folks can share with another human being, can set them on a new trajectory in their life to allow them to go help positively impact the lives of others. So those are some of the standout moments for me.
Ty Spells
For me, I would say for Perspectives, out of all of my guests, they have every excuse to either be angry, see themselves as a victim or give up. But they all made a choice to say, “I choose purpose, and I choose service.” That fascinated me. Every time, as I was listening to their story, I was asking myself, “Why are you not angry?” Or, “Why have you not just stopped?” But they all said, “We choose purpose, we choose hope, and we choose service.” And that just really moved my heart.
So when I’m having moments in my day to day where I get frustrated or I want to sit down and say, “The world’s not fair,” I think back to my guests and I realize their perspective and say, “Nope, let’s choose purpose, let’s choose hope and let’s choose service.” When I got the opportunity to sit down and speak with JJ Velazquez, who was incarcerated for 23 years, he has a moment where he says, “I want to invite anyone to become closer and learn more about those who are incarcerated.”
JJ Velazquez
We’re willing to invite anyone to learn for themselves, what exists behind those bars. And that’s the starting point. Once you realize that there are human beings being mistreated inside, then we can start to have a conversation about how we can change this. But until you understand what you’re attempting to change, you are not really doing anything. So I think it starts with proximity and then from there, it’s really about going back to the listening piece and listening to an individual and realizing, “How does this person fit in this puzzle? Where is this person’s strength? Where is their superpower? And how do we harp on that to help change something”? There is no absolutes again. Everything is individual and we have to be willing. I know I am. I’m willing, not only to be a part of this movement, but to lead it.
Ty Spells
That is fascinating. It just moves my heart completely, because you could get angry and you could give up on the whole society that didn’t believe in you, but he chooses to believe in society and community and not only say, “I want to lead towards goodness and grace.” That was something that really spoke to my spirit and it’s something I’m cautious about. And it goes back to Ski, what you were talking about, listening. He even mentions this part where he says, “You can start to help someone to believe in themselves when you sit down and slow down long enough to listen to them. People have not felt listened to.” And that really shifted… When I’m in interactions with individuals and we have so much happening in life. You’re either on your phone, you’re thinking about where I got to go to make this appointment on time. But when you sit down and say, “I’m going to be positive, I’m going to be present and I’m going to listen to this human that is in front of me,” It’s amazing what we can do and shift, in our spirit, as well as the world.
Obi Okolo
Yeah, I love all of those. I’m just going to give my favorite moment because I have a mic in my face. And I just thought I had one that was incredible while I was recording with Evan and Dr. Soaries and Antong. And I think for me, one thing I’ve come to understand about myself, something I’m very passionate about, something that kind of brings me to life, are multi-generational spaces.
And I think it’s realizing that, as a 30-something year-old millennial, there are so few truly multi-generational spaces in our common square. And to sit and listen to this episode where we’ve got a real OG in Buster, someone who’s a good number of years younger than him and Antong, and then knowing that Antong is affecting the lives of someone or people who are 20 years younger than him, understanding that these conversations aren’t happening in generational silos.
Antong Lucky
Our interventions come from the people. Cause I think oftentimes, people who study the problem, who write about the problem, they don’t actually go to the people, the actual people in neighborhoods who have answers themselves. So anytime you try to parachute an answer in without including the people that you are studying, the people that it affects the most, it’s a combination for a bad result.
It happens all over the country. People who do that, who bring in ideas that don’t include the… Cause it’s this misnomer. You think that people in communities, they not smart or that they don’t know the answer to what they dealing with. And they do, they just never been asked. So what our way of looking at it, we always include, in creating solutions, the people who it affect the most.
Buster Soaries
You know what I’ve learned about that point? Because it’s absolutely correct. When the people on the ground, in the community, are asked, what they’re asked is about the ‘what’ but not the ‘how’.
Antong Lucky
Exactly.
Buster Soaries
So they’ll do what’s called needs assessments. We did that and people say, “We need jobs, we need youth programs.” Everybody knows what they need. And then they’ll go off and go to the PhDs and the scholars to come up with the how. But the people, not only have the what, but they have the ‘how’. And that ‘how’ that you describe Antung…
Antong Lucky
Right.
Buster Soaries
Is an example of letting the people describe the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.
Antong Lucky
Right. I agree.
Obi Okolo
I hate, in some capacity, generational studies because it’s like, it’s always, “The next generation’s going to save us. And the last generation was boring and lame and we need to forget everything.” And I was just like sitting there watching Dr. Soaries speak wisdom while watching Antong speak energy… That was such a, quite frankly, catalytic change environment when wisdom meets energy. I think that’s a place where we can just begin to rebuild and redefine entire things, entire communities. So that was super fun for me to watch.
Ty Spells
I also think that’s important because the reverence of understanding and the wisdom that you have to appreciate both perspectives. I think that’s where we sometimes miss the ball is like, “Oh, that generation matters, but I’m not going to listen to a younger generation.” Actually, both have something to bring to the table and it’s worth listening. And once you do that, that’s when we can really start making an impact.
Evan Feinberg
When I think about that episode in particular, it brings me back to something that both Ski and I think Ty were alluding to, when you were talking about the power of language, you talked about Antong and these two moments in his life. The first where a judge sentences him to prison and says, “You’re a menace to society.” And he then realizes, he has this moment that he realizes that he’s been causing harm. He had not thought of himself that way. He was just surviving. And then in prison, an older gentleman in the prison coming to him and saying, “Young brother, you’re a leader. If you can lead these men to do wrong, you can lead them to do right,” being this transformative moment in his life. And this gets to, I think, something even more profound than just the language, that Antong Lucky’s experience—having been in it, having experienced the challenges himself—gave him a unique set of experiences and characteristics and capabilities that gave him an advantage in actually solving the problems.
And even when we sat here for this episode with Antong and Buster, you heard Antong go first in so many of the answers, to speak to the truth on the ground. Buster, as Obi called him an OG, right? He’s a pastor of a very large church. He’d been doing this work for a long, long time. It was Antong’s very real time, personal experience, that he was leading the way with. And then Buster would share with us wisdom and he would extrapolate lessons and insights. And so they both… As you were saying that both generations had value and wisdom to bring to that. But I just can’t get past this insight that kind of cut across the episodes, that if I want to understand addiction issues in this country, man, do I want to be talking to Scott Strode and Kaley Jones, who’ve experienced addiction themselves, who’ve overcome it, and now are applying what they’ve learned to help others.
I can’t imagine better experts on the subjects than they are. But our culture, all too often, trusts experts far away from the problem, who’ve been studying it, have got some white papers or academic studies on it. And I think we’ve, for too long, been overlooking some of these incredible experts because of their lived experience, their own personal transformation. I thought we were able to bring out a lot of that through this podcast.
Obi Okolo
I’d never heard the term ‘proximate solutions’ until Lauren said it on the episode you released with her, and maybe I don’t play in the space enough, I should. But that phrase, proximate solutions, I’ve repeated a thousand times cause that makes so much sense. The people who are in proximity are going to understand the reality.
Lauren McCann
I think their approach to the work has to be grounded in that different mindset around the problems they’re trying to solve. We were looking for organizations that were trying to solve these intractable problems that were innovating and that were agile and that were entrepreneurial, and that had some insight into the populations they were trying to serve. And what was interesting was, many of the groups that we selected, the leaders were not only proximate to the problem, but had suffered the problem themselves. That lived experience gave them that unique insight into how to engage.
So, if you’re trying to solve the addiction crisis in America, you’re going to want to go to somebody who is in recovery and that’s successful in that recovery, and build upon their learnings and their experience. If you are going to try to help people coming out of incarceration, you should go to individuals who have been incarcerated and understand the barriers they faced when they got out. And so, some of the most amazing organizations that we saw, had that insight because they had lived through that barrier and had overcome that barrier successfully, and were trying to take that knowledge gain through that experience and disperse it to as many people as possible.
Evan Feinberg
We don’t get to proximate solutions because, and this is what we got at the entire episode, one of my… I really geeked out on Todd Rose’s episode. Todd’s a real hero of mine. I really loved it. And we got this, if you’re looking for big, average solutions across the entire society, you don’t even look for proximate solutions because you’re just looking for big, one-size-fits-all, standardized approaches.
Proximate solutions, by their nature, are going to be very complex and dynamic. And things that are working in one place aren’t going to be what you do in another place because they’ve got to be up close, they’ve got to be proximate and dynamic. And so, I just don’t think many people are looking for proximate solutions because they’re saying, “Well, geez, those local solutions could never be the answer for everyone so I’m not even going to pay attention to them.”
Ski Ahmad
Well, Evan, I think to that point that, what the proximate solutions also takes into account, the folks looking to help solve or leverage these solutions in that proximity, they also understand the context for their locale. And I think that’s probably one of the difficulties of trying to just go and scale and get these large, average solutions is, they become void of the context that’s so critical and necessary in a particular community. And so, I think these proximate solutions definitely take into consideration context, and that matters a ton.
Jeff Proctor
I think a lot of times too, maybe the industry as a whole, either misunderstands, or doesn’t fully appreciate, the idea of scale. So, scale doesn’t just mean, or needn’t just mean, that we find one thing that works and we do it everywhere. I think a bigger part of what we’re hoping to do here is scale the opportunity for people with lived experience to make the kind of transformation that they’re making in their community. So we don’t need the same solution in every community. What we do need, is people with the right experience and the right distance from the problem in every community, to be able to be well positioned to be successful. And I think it’s an edit on what we mean when we say scale. That can be confusing if we don’t acknowledge it.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah, that’s good point.
Evan Feinberg
This is one of my favorite moments from the season, and you can tell I’m sort of, like the philosophy geek of the group here. Well, I mean, some…
Jeff Proctor
Just general geek. Let’s not limit ourselves. [Laughs]
Evan Feinberg
When Todd shared this idea of active versus inactive ingredients in our episode, and he was saying… So when he was talking about this, he was trying to articulate what scales and doesn’t scale, and he got it into the cooking metaphor. It’s like, well, everyone’s trying to scale up this sort of whole recipe for the thing that’s going to get scaled all over the country. But as it turns out, it’s not all of the particulars. There were some active and inactive ingredients. Some things that really mattered, and then some things that didn’t matter at all to recreating the recipe. And I think all too often in nonprofits, we treat it just like a cookbook and we just try to follow the recipe to a tee and that’s not how things scale. But there are scalable elements of what’s working. And the cool thing about the guests we had on the season, was that they were able to think about what the… I think about Scott Strode in particular.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah.
Evan Feinberg
Scott knows the active and inactive ingredients in the Phoenix, to the point where, even though everyone thinks of it as a peer-to-peer physical fitness approach to addiction recovery, he’s like, “The physical fitness is an ingredient, but it’s not necessarily the active ingredient. The active ingredient is the community, the support for one another, that each person’s recovery is an asset to the community and so, they get mutual benefit from offering that.”
And so, the safe and supportive culture that they build at the Phoenix, is the thing. And they could replace physical fitness with book clubs or going to concerts together or any number of things. And they’ve scaled the active and not inactive. I thought Todd’s language around that was awesome, and then I thought we heard that through our other guests.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah. Now I did see that the Phoenix does have some cooking classes too. [Laughs]
Evan Feinberg
Yeah, there you go.
Ty Spells
I think something that stand out for me was, with all of our guests was, they invited society, community and every listener to be a part of it. So I think that really makes a difference as well. Evan just mentioned sometimes we’re looking and then you’re like, “Oh, well this might be the easiest or this might be the one-size-fits-all.” But it also speaks to those who are doing it through proximity, that they are inviting others to take part in it. Even when things aren’t necessarily one-size-fits-all. I think whenever you’re working with these individuals who have realized what is their active ingredient and they know that it’s working. They’re not saying, “Do exactly what we’re doing.” They’re saying, “Take the time to get active in your community, understand what could be the active ingredient to make a difference in your community.” And they’re inviting you to take part of the journey and the process with them. And I believe that’s what all of our guests do that makes them stand out in this space as well as really speaks to why they are partners in our community.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah, no doubt.
Obi Okolo
All beautiful moments, all incredible moments. I’m sure we could sit here for another hour and a half, three hours and talk about some moments through this podcast. As we’ve sort of gone into these conversations with our guests, and we’ve gotten our legs under us and we’ve gotten more comfortable in front of these giant microphones, talking to friends. It’s just been this peeling back of this layered present of hope and of excitement and not ignoring the real reasons to despair or ignoring the challenges that are in front of us, but really building that foundation of hope from the reality and from the proximity.
So my, I guess, final question, and I’m just going to direct this directly to Evan, Fearless Leader, Evan Feinberg, what comes next for the Stand Together Podcast? Where do you see this? If you had all your druthers about you, where do we go from here? How do we build on this?
Evan Feinberg
Well, I’ve got one last favorite moment from the season that we didn’t talk about elsewhere. And it was when Dr. Soaries and Antong had this incredible conversation about what they had learned from Viktor Frankl. And in his famous writings, he talks about how, “He who has a why, can bear with almost any how.” And they were describing that concept, but they actually were backing up to talk about how, if you’re trying to drive historic changes and true social change, people always set out to change the big system, to change society, to make this massive change. But Dr. Soaries really told us that people create systems.
Buster Soaries
When you look at historic changes that have been positive for the general good, it always starts with individuals. It starts with a transformative value system. Systems are simply the amplification of people. Systems don’t exist separate from people, people create systems, and people change systems. My problem is, I read Viktor Frankl as a young man. Viktor Frankl was in a Jewish concentration camp, a German concentration camp, where Jews were just treated like nothing.
Viktor Frankl said, “I am in a concentration camp, but the concentration camp is not in me.” And it was transformative to see someone in a concentration camp say that I can rise above my circumstances. And once I read that, I couldn’t unlearn it. It just changed my life.
Antong Lucky
Viktor Frankl was one of my favorite authors, and I’ve read him in prison. That’s how I got through prison. Finding your why, find your why to live.
Evan Feinberg
And so, where’s the podcast going from here? We want people to hear these ideas and act on them. To be empowered themselves, to empower others, to realize their full potential, to come up with new and better ways to serve their neighbors, their communities, whatever it is that each person can do to contribute to this, we want them to go from here thinking and tackling problems differently.
And if we’re going to have such a big audacious goal of doing that, we’re going to have to come out with some more content. We’re going to need to produce more. So we hope that our wonderful friends and listeners that have been on this journey with us, continue on it. So we’re hard at work on another season of The Stand Together Podcast, so folks should be on the lookout. It’s probably going to be in 2023, that we really begin to publish the next season of The Stand Together Podcast.
And we’re going to keep diving deep, in not only these problems and these helpers that are helping, but really draw out the insights and the stories that hopefully, can lead to that broader culture change around empowerment and around believing in people, that we’ve been talking about. So, we look forward to being with everyone again, soon. And in the meantime, we hope that folks will drop us a podcast review, that they’ll let us know what they thought about this season. We want to know what you want to hear more of, what you especially liked, what you hated, and we shouldn’t do anymore of. And with that, we just really are so grateful. And thank each and every person that’s listening to this podcast for being a part of it.
Obi Okolo
And with that, who wants to start us off for our final sign off of the season?
Ski Ahmad
The Stand Together Podcast is a product of the Stand Together Foundation.
Obi Okolo
It’s produced by Stand Together and Bittersweet Creative with executive producers, Obiekwe Okolo and Robert Winship. Editing, engineering and sound design by Robert Winship.
Jeff Proctor
As always, special thanks to producers Molly Ringel and Elgin Cato, for herding cats and filling in the gaps that made this all possible.
Ty Spells
And a huge thank you to all the friends we had on the show, who shared their stories, insights, and made this season so special.
Evan Feinberg
And to you, our listener, thank you for joining us for this pilot season of The Stand Together Podcast. We now know that this is only the beginning, so keep listening and keep sharing. Let us know what you loved and what you’d love to hear more of, as we work on what comes next. I’m Evan Feinberg.
Ski Ahmad
I’m Ski Ahmad.
Evan Feinberg
I’m Jeff Proctor.
Ty Spells
I’m Ty Spells.
Evan Feinberg
From all of us here at the Stand Together Podcast, thank you, and we’ll see you soon.
