Jenny Tarwarter, BIPOC Partnership

Kyanna:            Let's talk about it. Talk, talk, talk. Let's go deep. We all have something to share. KnolShare with Dr. Dave.

Dr. Dave:          So hello and welcome to the KnolShare with Dr. Dave podcast. I'm Dr. Dave Cornelius, your host. My conversation is with Jenny Tarwater, an international speaker, agile coach and trainer. My first conversation with Jenny about diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, was in San Diego, California, 2018 at the Agile 2018 conference. We were in an international group discussing DEI. So I want to say welcome Jenny. And I would just like to just say thank you for being a partner for BIPOC individuals in this social injustice struggle. And I'm really grateful that we're working on a conference together. So tell me, Jenny, what's been going on lately?

Jenny:              What's been going on lately? Staying at home, wearing a mask. It feels like I live a lot in this little space right here in front of my computer. We were lucky enough, my husband and I are both a hundred percent work from home and my daughter was a hundred percent school from home for a while. So we've been doing that. Doing a lot of coaching with clients, agile coaching. Trying to do some upscaling with... Or coach training and Kanban flow metrics, the normal kind of agile stuff.

Dr. Dave:          Yeah. That's interesting. So let's talk about some of the social justice challenges that affected many people globally. How is it affecting you and your family?

Jenny:              Well, I have to say my family checks all the privileged boxes. So it impacted me less directly than others. But it has certainly changed a lot of my perspective and where I want to spend time and energy. And thinking about how I might contribute to a positive change. It's interesting too when I think about when I said we check a lot of privilege boxes. I thought about this the other day and I couldn't believe it. My husband went to the same high school as two sitting senators.

Dr. Dave:          Wow.

Jenny:              Right. I mean, that's right. Tim Kaine and Josh Hawley. And I'm like this... That's saying a lot. After the horrible events of this year, which we know those events were not unique to this year. I'm just really glad that the conversations have really come to the spotlight to the forefront and I'm having a lot more of those conversations.

I had already been quite surprised in 2016 with some of the biases that I didn't know my friends and family had. So I had already gone through a little bit of shock then and thought that I was being more proactive and trying to educate myself more. But 2020 was even a much bigger leap. And so I think the biggest, biggest impact for me is that I have a much different dividing line of tolerance now. I can have zero tolerance for folks that don't want to learn and improve. And willful ignorance is not acceptable to me anymore. Right? So I don't want to share space and energy with folks that can denounce someone else's lived experience and is not willing to jump into the game of making the world a better place.

Dr. Dave:          Well said. So what awareness are being discovered based on some of the recent experience, especially with the upheaval at the US Capitol. It has just blown my mind and just going like, wow, what other awareness's that you, I, are really going through at this moment? But how about you? What has come to mind for you?

Jenny:              Well, the US Capitol, that was, again, another horrific day. Today's the day they acquitted Trump, which, again, was not that shocking, but still disappointing.