This fall, I ran for election to my local Board of Education. All four Democratic incumbents on our board were up for election. Our campaign began in August and continued through November 7th. By the numbers, I made 217 calls wrote 150 postcards knocked on 125 doors attended 8 community events wrote 4 Letters to the Editor won by 3 votes That last figure is what blew me away -- I will remain on our Board of Education because four people decided to get their ballots and vote. I know these folks: a friend's mom who's critically ill, wasn't planning to vote, but got fired up about issues and decided to make her (& her husband's) wishes known firefighters whom my friend's husband texted, telling them to vote for me  a guy on my husband's basketball league who said it was hard to vote for a Democrat but he did it While winning by a wide margin would've been nice, winning by a slim margin leaves me with important insights: Every vote matters and counts.  I was...

I wrote an email to my mailing list today and talked about a shift in focus to reach parents directly on social media. Because my updates are kept short (3 updates, 3 asks), I didn't delve into the "why" behind the shift. We like to celebrate the resounding successes rather than dwell on things that didn't work so well. The point of this blog series, however, is to delve into what works and what doesn't.  Asking school clinicians and therapists to share Empowered Together  with their families didn't work in the sense that it didn't result in requests to join Empowered Together.* Maybe those channels can be effective down the line but I couldn't crack the code to it right now. Where I was  seeing requests to join was from a few facebook posts I made. Now that has me exploring the channel of social media and it makes sense when I think back to early customer discovery conversations. When I asked parents where they went to find support and answer kid-rela...

I'm working through some articles related to race* and I came across the term "responsive listening." Contextually, the article was discussing how white people engage with people of color when people of color provide feedback or criticism about methods and practices used by white people. The term struck me in this context. When white people patiently listen and agree, that doesn't go far enough. Feedback and criticism ought to result in action beyond nodding one's head! This is where responsive listening comes in. We listen and respond with changed behavior. This is something I'll employ in the racial context mentioned and also with my husband, kids, and everyone else I come across. *I'm a member of a Facebook group designed as "a space for people of color to lead discussions about racial (re)conciliation and justice." People of color have not always been the privileged and centered voice in the group so the group admins recommended some readin...

Before nap time, we read. Today's book retold the story of a black slave who mailed himself to freedom. While it provided an opportunity to talk about historical and modern day abolition with my daughter, one line stopped me in my tracks. "Henry's [slave] master had been good to Henry and his family." I thought, "this must have been written by a white person. No black person would dream of calling a slaveholder good." Sure enough, the author is white. (The talented artist is black but that's a separate conversation). Why do we, as white people, feel the need to sanitize the past, rendering it patently false? Is it white guilt? Is it our inability to confront how truly devastating historical American slavery was? Moreover, I wonder what this means for our perspective as whites on current racial tensions in America. Do we still try to sanitize what we see rather than confront latent racism for the devastation it continues to be? Perhaps the author w...