She Been Ready! The Podcast

Wanda Swan, is the Founder and Director of the The Swan Center for Advocacy & Research, Inc., Founder and CEO of Start By Talking, an anti-oppressive education and multimedia company that helps White folx, leaders, and organizations map their Oppressive Muscle Memory to dismantle White Supremacy and anti-Blackness, and podcast host of Come Get Your White People; where she hosts conversations and engages in the theory-making and analysis that undergirds her work to unpack the taken-for-granted, automatic attitudes and behaviors that maintain racist practices and processes among people in relationships and organization.

Our conversation is riveting and insightful, provoking the type of deep reflection I imagine happens for her clients in 1:1 leadership coaching, their online learning center, and organizational training and assessment.

Follow Wanda on Instagram @startbytalking

We are in for quite a treat. Malesha (Mali) Taylor-Browning joins us to talk about the art of leadership. Malesha is an accomplished vocal artist, TEDx Speaker, strategist and the creator of The E.L.E.V.A*T.E. Framework: 8 Guiding Principles for BIPOC leaders and organizations. This framework has emerged from her lived-experience as a trained opera singer, Black woman, Mother, professor, arts administrator and consultant working across arts disciplines and multiple sectors for the past 25 years.  

Often, Black women’s leadership praxis involves bringing together multiple complex aspects of ourselves and Malesha’s story and articulation of her work is no exception. I hope you all enjoy this conversation and walk away from it as full as I did.  

Learn more about Malesha and her work at musesalon.org/ and follow Muse Salon on Instagram @muse_salon_collaborative

To learn more about what Dr. Wendi is doing and thinking about, follow her at ⁠@drwendiwilliams⁠ on Instagram and Twitter and stay up with the latest on She Been Ready! The Podcast on Facebook ⁠https://www.facebook.com/She_Been_Ready-The-Podcast-105193828770865 ⁠

The final installation.

As a reminder, I invited @yolie_sealeyruiz and @mindfield_drj to a conversation of remembrance and reflection. We began this conversation Fall 2023 delighted that #ClaudineGay was named president of Harvard University all the while #JoanneAEpps and #OrinthiaMontague were both reported dead within weeks of one another at the start of the term. We were not a week into the 2024 new year when we learned that #BonnieCandia-Bailey completed suicide beneath a deluge of bullying and harassment at Lincoln University by her superior. What is it about the higher education context that makes it so fatal for Black women? While, Black people and Black women in particular have found access to respectable professional lives within a narrow range of roles, education has always been an access point. We’ve been lauded as excellent educators, and now we have must figure out how to survive in academia. Join me for this special 3-part SBR series with my dear colleagues, as we explore what is happening in academia for BIPOC folx, why it is happening (utilizing a framework of intersectional racial and gender trauma), and how we can enact acts of refusal to enable our own recovery. #SheBeenReady!ThePodcast was created for moments like these. Moments where we want to get voice and perspective from Black women thought- leaders about the experiences of us by us. What I know, what we all know is that Black women are not a monolith, nor are the negative experiences we face unique to us. What I also know is we offer a unique perspective that might, just might, lead us to a path of liberation. Somehow, like my grandmother, my mother, my aunties, and my sister “-friends, we survive these spaces and sometimes even thrive. Tune in. LINK IN BIO. #RefusalRecovery #SheBeenReady #RacialTraumaIsrael #DyingInAcademia #BlackWomenAtWork #YouWon’tBreakOurSoul #We’reTellingEverybody

Dr. Wendi is in conversation with Dr. Jennifer Mullan, a clinical psychologist who is lovingly called the “Rage Doctor”. 

Dr. Mullan is the creator and founder of Decolonizing Therapy and has merged her training as a psychologist with her lived experience to question the ways in which the practice of psychology works and doesn’t work, for whom, and why. 

Her work is powerful and is outlined in her recent book, Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma and Politicizing your Practice. Dr. Mullan has cultivated her practice through her work as a professor preparing social workers, therapists, and psychologists in academic programs as well as direct clinical work with clients, specifically young people identifying as BIPOC in complex communities and environments. 

Her latest work amplifies the importance of getting acquainted with rage such that its expression can be liberatory, releasing her clients (individuals and organizations) from the captivity of unexpressed emotion to the lightness available when one listens to what their rage is attempting to tell them about their boundaries and need for care and protection.  This, she says, distinguishes “rage for rage sake” from sacred rage. 

Follow Dr. Jenn Mullan on Instagram @decolonizingtherapy or on her website at https://www.decolonizingtherapy.com

To learn more about what Dr. Wendi is doing and thinking about, follow her at ⁠⁠⁠@drwendiwilliams⁠⁠⁠ on Instagram and Twitter and stay up with the latest on She Been Ready! The Podcast on Facebook ⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/She_Been_Ready-The-Podcast-105193828770865 ⁠⁠⁠

Music Credit: She Been Ready - Arranged, produced, and mixed by Shawn Nealy-Oparah

Instagram: @drwendiwilliams
Website: ⁠⁠⁠www.drwendiwilliams.com⁠⁠

Dr. Carole Dorham-Kelly, or as she is also known, DC, is the Chief Executive Officer of Rubicon Programs. At Rubicon, they do exceptional work to address the scourge of poverty by equipping participants in their programs to develop the economic mobility to move out of poverty through developing assets, income, wellness, and connections.

I asked DC to join me in conversation during our first meeting. We were invited to participate in a conference about workforce issues.  I learned she was a counseling psychologist and in that moment I knew we had to meet. 

I am a counseling psychologist, too. And as a scholar and practitioner in the leadership development space, I was curious about DC’s experience as a counseling psychologist, a Black woman, and a CEO.  Sis, is a whole BAWSE and I wanted to talk with her about how who she is and her background, professionally as well as her identity, shape her leadership. 

To learn more about what Dr. Wendi is doing and thinking about, follow her at ⁠@drwendiwilliams⁠ on Instagram and Twitter and stay up with the latest on She Been Ready! The Podcast on Facebook ⁠https://www.facebook.com/She_Been_Ready-The-Podcast-105193828770865 ⁠

Music Credit: She Been Ready - Arranged, produced, and mixed by Shawn Nealy-Oparah

Instagram: @drwendiwilliams

Website: ⁠www.drwendiwilliams.com⁠

Activist, Community Organizer, Change Maker. Nsé Ufot is nothing short of a transformative presence in our political landscape. Former CEO of the New Georgia Project, an organization founded by Stacey Abrams, Ufot's coalition building and organizing efforts turned the "Peach State Purple". In this incredible interview, I had the pleasure of being in conversation with a thought-leader and "doer" whose political labor in Georgia got voters' and the country's attention focused on the oasis of the southeast during the 2020 Presidential Election and the 2021 run-off election. We know, now, the impact of both of these elections on the political landscape of the nation at such a tumultuous time.

Nsé's story is one of a woman that has #BeenReady! and we need to learn from her! Specifically, what is the leadership praxis of the woman who was at the heart of it all? Who is she and how do her identities shape her leadership? But perhaps, more importantly, how do we find the courage to big things in the face of big power?

Nsé's story and journey are filled with gems and in this interview she dropped a few of them.

Follow Nsé Ufot's work and conversation on line on her website at https://nseufot.com/ and on Instagram @thenseufot (linktree.com/thenseufot).

To learn more about what Dr. Wendi is doing and thinking about, follow her at ⁠⁠@drwendiwilliams⁠⁠ on Instagram and Twitter and stay up with the latest on She Been Ready! The Podcast on Facebook ⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/She_Been_Ready-The-Podcast-105193828770865 ⁠⁠

Music Credit: She Been Ready - Arranged, produced, and mixed by Shawn Nealy-Oparah

Instagram: @drwendiwilliams

Website: ⁠⁠www.drwendiwilliams.com⁠⁠

The marriage of heart and intellect is a beautiful thing, made so for its rarity. And yet, in my conversation with Dr. Yolanda (Yolie) Sealy-Ruiz, we get just that as she shares her work bridging the arts and academia to make layers of ourselves available for our own life practice and for our work and relationship with others. One such example is her program, Archaeology of Self, where she encourages new and seemingly seasoned teachers to do the inner work (in the trenches), socio-emotional work, to understand what motivates and informs their practice in the classroom.

Dr. Sealy-Ruiz is an accomplished scholar in the areas of racial literacy, culturally responsive pedagogies, Black Girl literacies, and work with Black and Latinx high school boys. Her work is featured in her books and articles and made accessible in public forums, such as her TedX Penn Talk on Truth, Love, & Racial Literacy. Dr. Sealy-Ruiz is also the author of two volumes of poetry, The Love Vortex and The Peace Chronicles, in which she does the excavation work for herself that she coaches educators through.

And she also hails from the South Bronx, USA! A lover of words and poetry, she is currently writing her forthcoming poetic memoir about coming of age in the 80's Regan Era economics, the war on drugs and Black and Brown communities, and the birth of hip hop which she will align with the 2023 50th anniversary of hip hop and the opening of the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx!

Follow Yolie's work in a few places.

Her website: https://www.yolandasealeyruiz.com/

Instagram: yolie_sealeyruiz

X (formally Twitter): @RuizSealey

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

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yolandasealeyruiz-714a24126/

To learn more about what Dr. Wendi is doing and thinking about, follow her at ⁠⁠@drwendiwilliams⁠⁠ on Instagram and Twitter and stay up with the latest on She Been Ready! The Podcast on Facebook ⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/She_Been_Ready-The-Podcast-105193828770865 ⁠⁠

Music Credit: She Been Ready - Arranged, produced, and mixed by Shawn Nealy-Oparah

Instagram: @drwendiwilliams

Website: ⁠⁠www.drwendiwilliams.com⁠⁠

Black women are moving in and through in academia while cultivating movement within academic spaces. I see it up close in my own work and also in the work I witness and support others through as they navigate these complex and often intersectionally toxic contexts. And one woman whom I watch with bated breath and intrigue is Dr. Maryam Jernigan-Noesi. I simply want to see what she will do next!

Author of academic texts and children's' literature, consultant and truth-teller, Dr. Jernigan - Noesi has rightly been called the "Olivia Pope of racism" as she utilizes her expertise in racial trauma and background as a counseling psychologist. CEO of Jernigan and Associates Psychology and Educational Consulting, she and her colleagues offer a myriad of comprehensive consultation services and professional development experiences to educators, mental health providers, health care settings, and corporations.

In this conversation, I talk with Dr. Jernigan- Noesi about her experiences in academia, and how she created a "way out of her own way" to be an entrepreneurial psychologist within her private practice and consulting, while continuing to provide students with transformative professional development experiences while making her psychological expertise accessible to many more, including children and families in myriad ways, like her co-authored children's book, I Miss My Friend, a story of two Black girls grappling with the complex feelings of loss, change, and hope during the pandemic.

Learn more about Dr. Jernigan - Noesi's work on her website and following her feed on Instagram (@mindfield_drj).

To learn more about what Dr. Wendi is doing and thinking about, follow her at ⁠⁠@drwendiwilliams⁠⁠ on Instagram and Twitter and stay up with the latest on She Been Ready! The Podcast on Facebook ⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/She_Been_Ready-The-Podcast-105193828770865 ⁠⁠