In My Civic Era: Women, Civic Leadership & Local Government

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I ghosted you like a bad Hinge match, and I owe you an explanation. In this episode, I'm telling you what the last six weeks actually held: meetings with legislators across Georgia, a bill that could impact 1.7 million children, an affordability symposium that started as a conversation with the mayor, and a new seat on my county library board. My whole life went civic, so this podcast is going with it.

The show is now In My Civic Era. From here on out, I'm teaching you how to get things done where you live: how to get appointed, who to call when the road floods and nobody is fixing it, and what to say with three minutes at a microphone. I will never tell you how to vote.

Next week: a framework for public comment.

Mentioned in this episode

• She Should Run Local Leader Lab: https://sheshouldrun.org/local-leader-lab/
• Schools Beyond Screens: https://www.schoolsbeyondscreens.com/
• United Way's ALICE data: https://www.unitedforalice.org/

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.

Send us Fan Mail

Most of us have spent our whole lives quietly accepting somebody else's definition of who we are. Mother. Wife. The reliable one. The one who supposedly can't.

This week I'm talking with Molly Kennedy, a disability advocate, speaker, and founder of Molly Kennedy Consulting, who has spent her life refusing to let other people's expectations become her reality. We get into what it actually looks like to adapt instead of shrink, why advocating for yourself is the least selfish thing you can do, and how she built a nonprofit to get more women with disabilities into leadership and at the table.

You'll walk away looking sideways at the labels you've quietly accepted, and rethinking what you're actually capable of building. Give it a listen, share it with a woman who needs it, and come tell me what you think on LinkedIn.

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.

Send us Fan Mail

In 1989, Dr. Fay Niewiadomski had 50 cents in her bank account, four kids, an abusive husband, and a job as a university dean in an active war zone. She looked at all of it and decided to start a business anyway. In this conversation, Fay and Lemon dig into why women are brilliant at living small, how bedtime fairy tales conditioned us to be silent and compliant before we could even read, and why the beliefs you accepted without questioning have become a mental prison you hold the key to. Fay shares the three pillars of real leadership from her new book, Decisions That Matter, and the question-asking technique that lets you disagree in any room without losing it. If you have ever stayed quiet because you wanted to be liked, this one is going to sting a little. Share it with a friend who needs it, leave a review, and tag us on LinkedIn.

Connect with Dr. Fay: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fayniewiadomski/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fayniewiadomski/

Substack: https://substack.com/@fayniewiadomski

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ICTNLLPUK

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ICTNonline

Media Appearances: https://www.ictn.com/news-events/

Blog: https://www.ictn.com/blog/

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.

Send us Fan Mail

Organizations fail when everyone operates in their own lane. But here's what I realized at the Community Development Society conference: we're doing this in our own lives, and we're calling it normal.

When you fragment yourself across different rooms — professional Lemon, civic Lemon, friend Lemon — you miss board seats, unlock opportunities stay invisible, and slowly lose yourself. In this episode, I'm breaking down what silos actually cost you, what whole-human leadership looks like, and three practical steps to integrate your life so you can stop being different versions of yourself everywhere you go.

If you're tired of compartmentalizing, this one's for you. Share it with a woman who's operating as five different people, and tag me on LinkedIn, I want to know who's ready to lead whole.

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.

Send us Fan Mail

Ask a mom who is in her family, and she will list everyone but herself.

That is where this conversation starts. My guest is Coach Whit, a mother of five, avid CrossFitter, and coach who helps overwhelmed women stop disappearing into motherhood, marriage, and work. We talk about what actually goes first when you slip into good mom mode (spoiler: it is your body, your sleep, and your sense of self), why doomscrolling is sedation and not rest, and why the habit advice you keep failing at was never built for moms in the first place.

I also share the guilt spiral I went through going back to graduate school this year, how my kids panicked at first, and how they now check on my grades and tell me they are proud of me. Because they are watching. What you model becomes what they believe is possible.

In this episode:

• How Whit defines mom code switching, and why "I don't have time" usually means "I stopped making the time"
• Why doomscrolling and the nightly glass of wine are sedation, not self-care
• The ten-minute rule: starting so small it feels almost silly
• Mom guilt, quality over quantity, and what your kids actually want from you
• My grad school story, the needlepoint club, and coffee with the birds
• Date night rules: no kids, no work, no community projects
• The ripple effect of not choosing yourself, and how to snap back when you start disappearing again

Connect with Coach Whit:

• Website: apogeewoman.com
• Facebook and Instagram: @CoachWit

If this episode hit home, send it to the friend who has not showered in peace since 2022. And if you have a minute, leave a review. It genuinely helps more women find the show.

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.

Send us Fan Mail

Leadership programs for women fall into two camps: the ones teaching you to lead like a man, and the ones telling you to wait for a full moon before you launch. Both are setting you up to fail.

In this episode, Lemon breaks down why the masculine approach leaves you fractured and exhausted, why the woo-woo approach leaves you ineffective and broke, and what actually works instead: integration.

Listen if you're tired of choosing between power and presence, ambition and devotion, pragmatism and intuition.

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.

Send us Fan Mail

Diversity, equity, and inclusion has become one of the most politically charged phrases in the country, and most people arguing about it can't actually define equity if you asked them to.

Celeste Warren spent decades leading equity and inclusion work inside major corporations and just wrote The Truth About Equity to clear that up. We get into the rocks-and-fence analogy that reframes the whole conversation, what separates real inclusion from performative inclusion, and a story from my own corporate past I have never told publicly before.

This isn't a policy debate, it's about trust, and whether the people you lead actually believe you see them. Listen, then come tell me what your fence is.

Connect with Celeste: 

LinkedIn 

Website

Book

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.

Send us Fan Mail

For five years I lived in a house that didn't reflect me. Not disliked. Hated. And I never talked about what that actually did to me: to my creativity, my ability to host, my relationships, my willingness to show up.

This episode is that conversation.

Your home is not separate from your leadership. It's infrastructure for it. And if it's working against you, you are spending energy you don't have to compensate for an environment that quietly drains you every single day.

In this episode:

• The rental years: what five years in a space that didn't fit actually cost me
• Why I didn't join the Junior League until I was under contract on my current house
• How a space that doesn't reflect you will make you shrink back without realizing it
• What started shifting when I finally made one room feel like mine
• Why you don't need your dream home, you need an intentional one

You don't have to wait for the perfect house to start leading well out of your space. But you do have to stop pretending your environment isn't affecting you.

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.

Send us Fan Mail

Your home is not separate from how you lead. It's either giving you the space, the energy, and the environment to show up fully or it's quietly draining all three.

In this episode, Lemon sits down with Kim Costa, author of Live In Your Wheelhouse and creator of the Wheelhouse Method a framework that helps women align their home environment with who they actually are and where they're actually going. They talk about why Lemon didn't host a single person for five years in a home she hated, what it cost her, and why she was hosting a Georgia game the day after closing on her current house.

You'll walk away with a completely different way of thinking about your home — not as a backdrop to your life, but as an active part of your leadership.

If this episode resonates, share it with a friend who's been tolerating a space that doesn't fit her anymore. And if you're ready to lead from every area of your life, the Well Lived Society founding member rate is still available — but not for long. Find the link in the show notes.

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.

Send us Fan Mail

If you've been giving your time, your brain, and your leadership capacity to organizations in your community, and you're not putting that on your resume and LinkedIn the same way you put your job on there, you are leaving your own qualifications off the table.

In this episode, Lemon Price gets tactical about one of the most underutilized career assets women are sitting on: volunteer experience as professional development.

Learn how to translate nonprofit board leadership, civic roles, and volunteer work into a leadership narrative that opens doors to career changes, board seats, and leadership roles your current job isn't positioning you for. We cover how to rewrite your resume bullets with impact and numbers, how to fix your LinkedIn so recruiters actually find you, and how to volunteer with enough intention that the organizations you serve are actively building the skill set you need. Your civic work can be the bridge, but only if you're strategic about it.

Grab the Future You Journal

In My Civic Era is the civic playbook for women leaving their community better than they found it, hosted by Ashley Price.

Read the deeper dives on Substack: https://civicera.substack.com/
Join the Well Lived Society membership, where I teach you how to set up your life so you have room to lead: Join Here
Know a woman who should be in the room? Send her this episode.
Leave a review. It's the fastest way to help other women find the show.

I will never tell you how to vote. I just want you to walk in prepared.