Melissa Bird, PhD, MSW is a passionate feminist whose education in social work has led to a career advocating for children, women, and their families. She is a fierce believer in social justice advocacy and preparing women for leadership roles in politics. As a writer, professor and fiery public speaker, Dr. Bird creates the genesis for a new brand of leadership. Her words awaken revolutionaries, trailblazers and powerful innovators in the quest for justice. When she’s not building her public speaking Empire, she can be found reading trashy novels, drinking fine whiskey, playing mom to three delicious humans, and loving her punk rock scientist James Thomas Kelly.

She’s a fierce believer in social justice advocacy and preparing women for leadership roles in politics. For women who want to be heard. Women who want their families to be respected. Women who believe they can make a difference in their communities and create lasting change, Dr. Bird is creating the genesis for a new brand of leadership she calls The Graceful Revolution.

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Melissa:

Well, I used to say that I was like a political badass. I'm more of a hellraiser than a trailblazer, and I help people tap into their passion to engage in advocacy in their communities. And so, for years, I was teaching at a college level and I worked as a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood in Utah and I was really involved in politics in Utah.

I've kind of taken all of those years of working on the ground and in the Capitol, both at the state level and at the national level, and I decided that it's time to build the Bird girl Army, and really bring people to the place where they are super tapped-in to their passion and their jam and what lights them on fire so that they can go out and do the thing that lights them up.

That's become so apparently critical to me right now in 2018 because we are getting inundated constantly with SHIT, and it's coming down on us all the time. And so, every morning you wake up and you have 500 things on your phone talking about how the nation is exploding and people are freaking out. And they don't know what to do.

So what I do is, I give them the tools to go out and do the thing so they can get past the paralysis and into intentional action. Because it's going to take intentional action at a COMMUNITY level, not at a national level, at a community level, to build this back up. So that we can feel like we're not stuck not making a difference in our communities.

And so I've taken all these years of being a lobbyist, like, on the front lines and making changes in policy and politics and taking it to this really passionate, lit up, on fire... I had someone say that I was an igniter and I just light everyone on fire, which could be really dangerous.

That's a huge responsibility and really taking it to the next level so that people can have the tools to engage in action in their communities and engage in dialogue with people who are holding elected office at a local level, so at city county and state level.

Because, I tell this to my students all the time when I'm teaching in a classroom, but basically, the federal government is a wash at this point. You're not going to make a huge gigantic difference at a federal level, and I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's where we're at.

But now we have this huge opportunity to directly impact our local leaders, no matter what their party affiliation is.

We have stories to tell and we have... There are ways that these policies directly impact our lives and it is OUR time to be telling those stories to people. There's no bigger time to be doing that, so I teach people how to have the tools to scream their passionate dreams from the mountaintop and go out and do that thing.

Slade:

Wow.

You know what? Let's get into a big topic here.

I'm going to ask you a big old loaded controversial question. I believe in synchronicity and timing, and there is definitely a big beautiful Divine timing for me personally with you being here in this moment talking to me today. It's very significant because we've been talking about spirituality and politics in the Automatic Intuition community, the group of people that I mentor privately.

We've been talking about it this week for the first time, very civilly, I must say, so I'm very proud, but I think one of the reasons why we haven't touched it in so long is because it's such a hot potato kind of situation. But somebody went there in a really good way, in a kind of adjacent issue, and so... there is a big dissension among spiritual practitioners, right?

Some of us believe that it's really important to disconnect from the news in order to preserve your psychic hygiene and to protect your energy and your vibration, and that you just need to tune it all out.

And then some of us believe that part of being conscious for us is being plugged in and observant of all that stuff, and aware of the bad and the good.

So what are your thoughts about being spiritually conscious and politically conscious?

Dr. Bird:

So the first thing I want to say is, I have been wanting to email you for like, months and months about coming on the show to talk about this, and it was only in the last couple of weeks that I was like, You HAVE to do this right now.

So I was like, What?

And I was nervous! I was like, What am I going to say to Slade?? What if he thinks I'm this whackadoodle noodle, like, We're gonna talk about how to use your intuition to engage in politics!

And I was like, That's exactly what you're gonna say. You're gonna type it out. It's gonna be fine. He's not going to reject you and everything's going to be magic.

And so...

Slade:

Which it was.

Dr. Bird:

Which it was.

So the fact that you just barely had this conversation while I was like, I really need to talk to Slade, was really... You know, Divine intervention and all the magic.

So, I have to say that because I'm really excited to be having this conversation about using your intuition to engage in social justice work and politics. I call it 'social justice work' because no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, it doesn't matter where you're at because everything that is happening has to do with how our society is going to thrive or just survive, moving forward, because of all of the policies that are being enacted at a federal level that are going to trickle down to the local level.

I can honestly say that, I feel that need to be completely disconnected from the toxicity of the media. And I also feel the need to be completely inundated with what's happening currently in our nation and in our world.

The way that I have sort of pulled that apart and teased that apart is that, I choose, and I'm really active on social media, I LOVE Twitter, I LOVE Facebook, I love Instagram. I love being online and connecting with other people in that way.

But I have figured out how to use my intuition to lead me into places where I am going to be connecting with people who aren't just like me, but who appreciate my differences of opinion.

And this is, I think, where people are getting stuck and later on today, for example, I do Facebook live on Mondays and Fridays, I have Monday Mayhem and Fuck Shit Up Friday. And at noon my time, Pacific time, and I have been having conversations with my darling friend Amy Wolf, who I consider a dear friend who's completely the polar opposite of me politically. She's a conservative, Christian Methodist in a really small conservative town in Oregon.

But she and I have connected on this level that is just unbelievable. And we have people from my friends and her friends and people in the community who keep sending us messages thanking us for having honest conversations about politics, about fundamentalism, about abortion, about really tough conversations about justice and social justice and what that means to each of us.

And we do it in a way that is so respectful that you can't not get something out of that.

You know, and I come from a conservative place - I was born and raised in Utah. And what I learned when I was walking the hills of that Capitol is, elected officials just put their pants on one leg at a time. We're all people. We all get up in the morning and think, How am I going to make a difference in my world today? What do I want to do to really make a difference in my world today?

And it may be the difference is, My god, I'm going to vacuum my house, and that's an accomplishment. It may be that you're going to write a bill and pass it into law like I did. Oh god, it's been 15 years since I wrote that bill. I'll talk about that in a second.

This idea that we have to be divisive about politics is a new idea. That is something that was created out of, I would say, 1980s during the Reagan administration. That was when the divisiveness of politics came along. Were there separation of parties? Totally. Were there Democrats and Republicans fighting against each other for power? Absolutely. For years and years and years.

But there was a discourse and a nuance to politics that has been lost as, I would say, really starting in the 80s and it got worse during the Clinton administration and now it's just all gone to shit.

And I believe that we have so much power to make a difference.

And I know it because I've done it. And I'm not saying - I don't do any of my work because I'm like, up on some high horse pedestal. I'm probably on a soapbox, let's be fucking real here. I love my soapbox. My husband, he even bought me a soapbox that says 'Fairy Soap' on it from the 1920s.

Slade:

I love that.

Dr. Bird:

So that I can have an... I love my fairy soapbox. And it says 'Fairy' so clearly. That makes me even happier. And so...

I can get on my soapbox all day but when I was getting my Masters degree in social work in 2003, I did the very first research in Utah about homeless LGBTQ youth so NOBODY had been, this was, you know, 2002, 2003.

Nobody was talking about homeless kids. Nobody was talking about homeless queer kids, and here I am, in Utah, trying to figure out how many of our youth identifies LGBTQ and I did this research for my Masters research class and Utah was no different so at the time, 35% of youth identified as LGBTQ, and I was like, We have to do something.

Our shelter law was so bad it said that you couldn't shelter a youth for longer than eight hours without parental consent or emancipation. And I knew that our kids, we didn't have an emancipation bill because I worked in child welfare, and I knew we didn't have an emancipation bill and I was like, Ohmygod, I've got to write one!

I sat at my dining room table listening to Ani DiFranco and Metallica and I took the 26 lines from 26 other states and wrote them out line by line and hashed out a lot... I picked the lines that I thought would work in Utah because Utah is a more conservative state and I knew that the parents' rights' folks were going to lose their minds about it.

And so, I wrote this law, and I threw everything in it and I called the woman who was an elected official and I said, Hey Roz, I think I just wrote a bill and I'm wondering if you'd sponsor it.

And she said, What's it about?

I said, Homeless youth.

And she was like, Great!

And I emailed it to her and she called me back like five minutes later. She goes, Missy Bird, you just wrote a law! People don't do that!

And I was like, Oh, they don't?

She's like, No, they come to you with an idea. We take it to leg. research, and then they figure it all out.

Oh! I wrote a law!

It's the only thing, Slade, I've given birth to for real. That bill is my baby.

I learned how to lobby. I taught myself how to lobby. I taught myself how to advocate, and I got it passed into law two years later, and that bill has helped hundreds of homeless youth get emancipated.

I learned how to stay away from talking about LGBTQ kids with certain people but I knew that that was part of the story for other people who were in power. I learned how to talk about polygamist kids that were being kicked out of their homes, as a way to sort of leverage this conversation up to a different space.

And I just listened to my gut the whole entire time.

So every single thing I do when I'm talking, whether it's a person in the community or an elected official is, I use my gut instinct to have conversations about what's happening in our communities. I have followed my intuition throughout my entire career as an advocate.

And so, I think as you're having this broader political conversation in your group, it's not just about politics the way we see it on Fox news and MSNBC. It's about, How do the things that are happening in our neighbourhoods and in our cities and in our counties and in our states directly impact what's happening, our ability to access safe and clean water, our ability to access safe and clean food, our ability to stay in the homes that we're building for ourselves and for the people around us and our families and our friends.

That's what policy is. That's what politics is.

Politics isn't this bullshit Mitch McConnell flipping Paul Ryan ridiculousness, Dianne Feinstein and all this national distraction. The national distraction keeps us from looking in our own backyards and seeing what we can do to help the little old lady who lives next door who might be having a hard time getting her newspaper every damn day.

That's politics!

Slade:

Yeah, what do you sa