Hello listeners! We are taking a short summer break... just a little bit earlier than originally planned. Sarah is here to bring you up to speed on her unexpected hiatus, set the stage for our upcoming special Episode 100, and share a few thoughts that have been on her mind in the meantime. Stay tuned for updates, and we'll be back with more soon!

Thank you as always for being a part of our conversation!

Join Sarah Noll Wilson and guest Courageous Fire as they delve into the challenges faced by Black women in predominantly white spaces. Courageous shares insights into her journey of embracing authenticity and self worth, highlighting the power of vulnerability, trust, and empathy in building inclusive spaces.

Courageous Fire is a Black woman and diligent part of the workforce who learned it was important to have a safe space to do safety planning, what it looked like to get help outside the workplace during the crisis of domestic violence, how far reaching the cost of DV is to health, how disruptive it is to work performance, how expensive it can be for years into the future, and how uniquely this health, economic, social justice issue specifically impacts Black women.

Once Courageous executed her plan to free herself and her daughters, she began to furiously RESEARCH. She wanted to find and/or create the best solutions. She wanted to know if she could find employer partners to create spaces within the work environment for safety planning if she provided the training and materials. She wanted to know if they realized how much money she could save them in employee absenteeism and healthcare costs if she provided them with cultural resources for their Black women employees. And she wanted to teach them how to utilize their position in Black women DV victim-survivor’s lives to be disruptors of the oftentime end result of DV - homicide.

She began Courageous Fire, LLC nearly 5 years ago to educate with a concentration on two distinct groups - Centers of Trust and Centers of Must - to increase the spaces where Black women can be treated with dignity, compassion, and stop being refused services or having services terminated for showing up fully as a Black woman during crisis. Courageous has always known her work would need to broaden to mitigate the harm of systems holding Black women accountable for the perpetrator’s violence against them and their children. That’s why she is moving toward those state-operated systems in her collaborative work with organizations such as Iowa Department of Health and Human Services, Children and Families of Iowa, and Safe and Together Institute to make that happen.

Nearly 5 years later, Courageous has successfully charted relationships with over 30 organizations to increase safe spaces for Black women. These places in Iowa include many cities: Waterloo, Dubuque, Davenport, Iowa City, Decorah, Cedar Rapids, Ankeny, and Des Moines, as well as Illinois and New York. In this time she has 1 organization that has set up a place for safety planning, but she knows there are many more needed.

Courageous is a consultant, trainer, and women’s empowerment speaker who comes with 12+ years of curriculum development and delivery experience, 6+ years as a motivational speaker, and 5+ years of independent studies in historical and systemic racial impact on Black women in DV. She often says her approach is never “shame on you!” which closes people down, but instead it is one of “did you know?” to give people a safe place for consideration. Courageous is aware that there is a temptation to assume how a Black woman will “teach”, but experience has shown her that knowledge, authenticity, and comfort with who she is creates a safe for her audience to be comfortable with themselves while they learn, question, seek, discard, relearn, and grow. She comes ready to invite everyone that attends that level of #permission.

Website: www.cfirellc.com/home

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cfire

Instagram: www.instagram.com/cfire_llc

Shared Sisterhood: How to Take Collective Action for Racial and Gender Equity at Work by Tina Opie and Beth A. Livingston : https://a.co/d/dzMZaMD

Join Sarah Noll Wilson and guest Stephanie Chin for a wide-ranging conversation with insights on leadership, personal growth and experimentation, and the complex challenges of creating diverse and inclusive workplaces.

Stephanie Chin has spent the past two decades as a nonprofit leader, including working for the United Way network both globally and locally and at SRI International, Inc. She believes that we all do better when we all do better and her life’s mission is to help everyone operate near their potential while expanding it, by their own definition. She led day-to-day operations of MyFreeTaxes at United Way Worldwide, expanding the number of free tax filers from 50,000 to over 200,000 in two years, and promulgated an inclusive approach to project management at SRI International, Inc., leading a cross-division project management leadership team on the implementation of the new financial planning system. She approaches poverty fighting with a race conscious lens and advocates for equitable practices and systems change and contributed to United Way Worldwide’s Equity Framework. Chin’s new venture, Spicy Conversations, will help clients improve inclusive leadership practices and focus on behavior and systems change that makes a difference.

Chin has a Bachelor of Arts from University of California, Berkeley, a JD/MBA from Emory University, has a Green Belt in Lean Six Sigma, and coaching training from Co-Active Training Institute.

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniemchin

LinkedIn (company): www.linkedin.com/company/spicy-conversations

Schedule a conversation with Stephanie: https://calendly.com/spicyconversation

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer: www.erinmeyer.com/book

Becoming Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic (HBR article): www.hbr.org/2015/04/becoming-powerful-makes-you-less-empathetic

Asch Conformity Experiments (Wikipedia): www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

The Push and Pull: Declining Interest in Nonprofit Leadership: www.buildingmovement.org/reports/push-and-pull-report