Casually Creative

This week, we're taking a look back at some of the dopest Black women we've had the privilege of talking to since we started.  These world-changing, boundary-pushing, genre-destroying women have inspired us, challenged our perceptions, and made us believe in, and push towards a better and more beautiful future.

Mercedes Fulbright: @Mercedes.Fulbright on Instagram

Since we have chatted, Mercedes' plate has been FULL. Black Lives Matters, Covid, and an Election have happened.  Mercedes has pushed and pushed over so many hurdles and organized for those that deserve it most.

Michelle Williams:  @Bemichellew on Instagram

After speaking with Michelle, she has pushed on to get that Executive MBA she has worked so hard for and graduates in 3 Weeks!

Christina McSwain: @MissChrisness on Instagram

Christina has also faced all of the new life we all have.  Covid has effected her in this time, and it seems, it's absolutely not going to stop her.  During a Global Pandemic, she was a part of a brand new effort called "North Texas Cares" to act a Covid relief drive raising over a cool $32 Million during a pandemic y'all!  Then turned right around for their yearly effort "North Texas Giving Day" to raise a record $58.8 Million in 1 Day! 

Brittany Barnett: @msbkb on Instagram

Since speaking with Brittany, she has been in full book promoting mode!  Her book is impacting so many of our listeners, so if you haven't purchased it, use this link to get it now! This morning, it became Amazon Books Editors' #1 Best Book of 2020!! Congrats Brittany!!

Friends, we will see you the week after Thanksgiving with a new episode.  Enjoy a nice break with your family & please stay safe.  Wear that mask and Stay Dope.

A dynamic national speaker, community connector, and founder of the Hey Chica! movement, Veronica Torres has consistently been at the forefront of championing for the community of Latinx women who don't have access to the same opportunities that she saw available to so many others. After navigating unimaginable grief at the loss of her newborn son, Veronica's life took an unexpected turn. Confronted with the reality that she wanted to be a part of impacting and changing lives in a greater way, Veronica set out on the path to what would eventually lead to her creating Hey Chica! This summit-turned-movement provides a sisterhood that supports, empowers, encourages, and strengthens opportunities for Latinx women and women of color and provides them with pathways to live out their greater story. Hey Chica! "bridges the gap between generational learning, cultural relevancies, and legacy building" and provides women with a nationwide network of sisters and friends who help them grow. 

Growing up as the daughter of a Mexican gangster (yeah, like in Narcos), Veronica learned early on about resilience and loss, and how the trauma from impactful experiences can have lasting physical effects on the body and mind for years. As a certified Yoga instructor, Veronica has become a passionate health and wellness advocate who, alongside her husband, has built a growing fitness and lifestyle brand that connects with and engages large corporations, celebrities, and nationwide communities in conversations and actions towards a healthy and active lifestyle. As the co-owner of V12 Yoga and Workplace Fit Co, Veronica works every day to create strategies for her clients to engage in a balanced and healthy approach to their lives.

Fair warning: we've all been friends for almost a decade, so the laughter is loud and the ridiculousness abounds. 

Curiously Creative

Instagram: @healthylatinalifestyle

Hey Chica Network

Molly Rasmussen is a bit of a Unicorn. She's one of those rare people who, since high school, has known exactly what she wanted to do and is, you know...actually doing it. Her passion and skill for bringing people together through their most celebrated moments has been a cornerstone of her entire career and what has propelled her to create experiences for her clients that transcend their understanding of the ordinary- and Molly is anything but ordinary. Dedicated to finding the continual balance between the creative and the operational, her focus on expanding her understanding of the tools, techniques, and skills necessary to deliver exceptional moments of whimsy and delight is matched only by her desire to find order in the midst of occasional creative chaos. 

Curiously Creative

Instagram: @pop_parties

Pop Parties

Renée Diresta spends most of her life looking online for conspiracies. 

Within the half-truths and outright lies online, she and her associates at Stanford Internet Observatory are on a mission to investigate and understand "the spread of malign narratives across social networks." In an increasingly polarizing political climate, where no one is sure what's true and what's fabricated pseudofiction, Renée and her team are on the veritable front lines of an information war that is many decades in the making, and whose tools are becoming more nuanced and deadly with each new story "leak." Renée has been a contributor for, well...just about every publication talking about the role that tech platforms can and do play in the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories. Her unique perspective and ability to interpret and understand the various parts of a supposed narrative and its veracity or dubiousness have made her the go-to expert for corporations, networks, and the federal government.

Whether it's understanding the power and appeal of the anti-vaxxer movement, or how easily outside influencers can organize and arrange two opposing sides of an issue, Renée's journey to being one of the nation's foremost experts on misinformation during an era of extreme mistrust and unrest is a storied one. Her fascination with information and creative approach to understanding and dissecting how it is shared allows her and her team the opportunity to assist policymakers in devising responses to the problem and awareness of the appeal of half-truths in the American story.

Curiously Creative

ReneeDiresta.com

Twitter: @NoUpside

“She Warned of ‘Peer-to-Peer Misinformation.’ Congress Listened.” The New York Times

“Renée DiResta: Putting 'Numbers, Systems, And Efficiency' To Work In A Classic Un-Career” Women@Forbes

“Anti-Vaxxers Are Using Twitter to Manipulate a Vaccine Bill” WIRED

“Social Network Algorithms Are Distorting Reality By Boosting Conspiracy Theories” Fast Company Co.Exist

“How Social Network Manipulation Tactics Are Impacting Amazon and Influencing Consumers” lecture at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University (video)

“What We Now Know About Russian Disinformation” The New York Times (op. ed.)

Jessica Burnham is and has been many things in her storied career- college professor, executive director, graphic designer, and above all, full-time advocate of the power of design to impact and change communities. After an unexpected series of encounters with and through design, Jessica realized that design thinking can do more than make things pretty, Design can also provide opportunities for connection and communication and bring people together to solve problems that have challenged people for years. From her time shepherding a business community in a transitioning entertainment district in Dallas to going on to become one of the leaders of Dallas' vibrant and culturally impactful Deep Ellum community, Jessica has always been focused on how to use design to make lives better. Currently serving as the Director of Southern Methodist University's MADI program, Jessica now has the responsibility of training up a generation of leaders to think differently about the problems they face, to apply design and creativity, and to turn those challenges into experiences that impact entire cities.

Curiously Creative

@jburnham4 

Facebook

Reimagine Crowdus

The download at Lyle

Big Design Conference Keynote 

Lyle Now Magazine 

Mike Baughman kept getting fired. Let's be more precise- Rev. Mike Baughman kept getting fired from the churches he was leading. He never quite fit in and never felt like he really got how other people "did church." An ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, he saw past the walls of the chapel and saw a community of people who were marginalized, and often overlooked or pushed past by the church. Mike now serves as the Founding Pastor and Executive Director of Union Coffee, a community-oriented coffee shop/church/community center/performance space/generally dope place to hang out that has the ambitious self-professed mission to "cultivate the divine spark in our neighbors for the good of the city and the world." With a focus on inspiring through outstanding coffee, robust community and engaging causes, Union stands as a shining example of what Mike defines as God's first commandment- to create.

An east coast native with the skilled and artisanal use of strong language that comes along with that- Mike is not what you'd expect when you hear the term "pastor." He believes that offensive actions like homophobia, systemic racism, and inequality are deserving of the strong language he uses to describe them and comes to them with a disdain that's rooted in a hope that it doesn't have to be this way. That there is a more just and verdant world that God has envisioned- it's the world he and Union fight for every day.

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For your viewing and listening pleasure

What We Didn't Expect While Expecting

After over 25 episodes (or as we like to say- "a quarter hundo"), Byron and Damany sat down to reflect on Damany's journey from an awkward Brooklyn Black boy to an awkward Dallas Black man (some things don't change) Damany's journey has led him to more fully celebrate his "awkward" approach to creativity,  embrace his love of random knowledge, and understand more fully the impact of a diverse set of experiences to develop, shape, and foster opportunities for people to be transformed by the engaging moments he's been a part of creating. When confronted with the significant impact to the events industry because of COVID-19, Damany and his team at The Event Nerd leaned hard into their diverse skillset to become some of the preeminent leaders in the virtual broadcast and virtual events space, and in the process have been able to put dozens of people back to work producing the kinds of events they can all be proud of. 

Curiously Creative

Insta: @damanyd @TheEventNerd @CasuallyCrtve

The Event Nerd

Casually Creative

Erica Felicella has always felt called to the acts of creation and discovery. As a child, you'd find her building life-sized "log" cabins out of the sticks she could gather, or cutting down trees with nothing more than a pocketknife just to see if she could. Her fascination with understanding the "why" of a thing led her down a path of artistic discovery that has enabled her to curate, cultivate, and create experiences for artists the world over, while she continues to explore her own story as a performance artist. After early battles with addiction and a medical condition that made it virtually impossible to continue her rapidly growing career as a commercial photographer, Erica set out to discover new ways to make art. She discovered the power found in pushing through her pain and discomfort to connect with her audience in ways that transform them and, most importantly, enable them to confront uncomfortable realities in themselves. When you hear the word "artist," what instantly comes to mind may not be someone who locks themselves in a box, or types 40 years of their life story on a manual typewriter, or allows themselves to stand naked so that they can be sculpted before an audience- but in each of these pieces, Erica opened up her audience to new ways of thinking. 

We think she'll do the same for you.

Curiously Creative

Instagram - @felicella

Brittany Barnett's effortless wisdom comes from years of sitting at fishing holes and on front porches with her granddad and her father. These early and formative moments communicated to her a way to view the world that left her open to its possibilities, while acutely recognizing its challenges. Motivated early on to pursue excellence and not give up on a possibility simply because you can't see your desired outcome, Brittany has navigated through the halls of this country's most prestigious law firms and most hallowed centers of justice until she found her passion and her calling in a chance Google search that set her on a path to free those inequitably imprisoned, and to push for a more just and fair criminal justice system. By the age of 32, she had successfully petitioned for and won clemency for her client- clemency that came at the signature of then-President Barack Obama. 

Motivated and bolstered by a singular vision- to fight for justice amidst the communities, cultures, and causes that the country often overlooks, Brittany has found herself at the forefront of the fight for criminal justice reform. After founding the Buried Alive Project alongside two former clients she had successfully freed from lifetime imprisonment, Brittany set out to free as many people from life imprisonment for non-violent drug offenses as possible. Her persistence led to the litigation of the release of an impressive 17 people in 90 days alongside her co-counsel. This jaw-dropping act has earned her headlines and international attention and acclaim that have catapulted her to the forefront of a much-needed conversation that often impacts and ravishes thriving and healthy communities and leaves their inhabitants fatigued and their children disconnected.

As the author of the recently released book, "A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, & Freedom," Brittany's intensely personal memoir chronicles the stories of three of her clients and has been listed as an Amazon book of the month. In describing the book and its characters, Al Woodworth, of Amazon Book Review says it best as he writes that "their lives—including their crimes, their families, and their jail time—are rendered with such care and compassion that it is impossible to put this book down. It is also impossible not to root for Barnett and her clients as she fights to get them the justice they deserve, and never had. A Knock at Midnight is a profoundly moving memoir that reveals the incredibly racist world of the feds, the courts, and the laws that throw away people’s lives—for life."

Casually Creative

Twitter: @msbkb

A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, & Freedom

Essence Magazine Feature

Sam Lao and Jeremy Biggers are precisely what you think of when you hear the word "creative." Endlessly inquisitive, aggressively competitive (with each other and themselves), and seemingly unwilling or unable to believe that "good enough" is actually enough, their work has been showcased around the world and celebrated during some of the country's biggest cultural moments. This quintessential power couple continues to break completely through boundaries to discover new passions, perfect new mediums, and try new things...sometimes just because they can. As established visual artists, musical performers, and multi-hyphenates (it's ok, Damany had to look it up too), their work has continued to show the power of communal creativity in the pursuit of endless dopeness. 

Curiously Creative

Insta: @stemandthorn

StemandThorn.com & TheSamLao.com