Uncharted Territory

This is Uncharted's second podcast in our series on our journey to become an antiracist organization. We believe that our ability to become an antiracist organization is directly tied to our ability internally to have hard, courageous conversations, so Nicole Dill, our Director of People and Partnerships, dug around, interviewed our team, and explored what holds us back from having hard conversations, and what we can do about it in this article.

In this podcast, Erin Yoshimura from Empowerful Changes, Uncharted's diversity, equity, and inclusion coach and consultant, joins us to explore how to create the conditions where a team can have courageous conversations about race, oppression, privilege, and power. 

Uncharted is taking steps to become a more antiracist organization. We are determined to rise to the responsibility we have to fight systems of oppression, but we are also struggling...this work is complex, nuanced, and slow, and there have been times when we haven't known what to do.

In conjunction with each post, we're releasing a podcast with the post's authors to further explore the ideas, challenges, and questions from the post.

This is the first podcast connected to our first deep-dive post on inclusion where co-authors Adrienne Russman, Uncharted's Director of Government and Community Relations, and Nicole Dill, Uncharted's Director of People and Partnerships explore the topic of inclusion and why it's important to start our antiracist journey with inclusion.

• We referenced this article on White supremacy cultural values in the podcast, and so we're linking it here.

On this episode of Uncharted Territory, we interview Theo Wilson, a Black man, who went undercover online as a white supremacist. We discuss his experience exploring the online communities of the alt-right and white supremacy, and he shares perspective about our moment of divisiveness, racial tension, Black Lives Matter, and identities rooted in politics and fear.

• Watch his TED Talk here.

On this episode of Uncharted Territory, we interview Sara Rodriguez, Uncharted's outgoing Chief Strategy Officer, on what it took to build Uncharted into what it is today. Sara talks about how to hire, how to select social ventures, how to implement company policy, and how to trust your gut. Plus she gives advice for future Uncharted employees about how to make Uncharted their own.

Sara joined Uncharted in 2014 and served as the Director of Venture Funding, COO, and then Uncharted's CSO. Prior to Uncharted, Sara was the Associate Director at Rockies Venture Club, one of the largest and most active angel groups in the Rocky Mountain Region. She holds B.A.s in Law and Business from the University of Salamanca, Spain, and a master’s degree in International Business and Entrepreneurship from Maastricht University, The Netherlands.

On this episode of Uncharted Territory, we interview Paula Stone Williams. As a transgender woman, Paula has lived both as a man and a woman and she's led companies both as a man and a woman. On this episode, she talks about the practical steps both men and women can take to advance gender equity in the workplace, the challenges and nuances of patriarchal workplace dynamics, and how men and women can be allies and champions for each other.

You can watch Paula's numerous speeches and Ted talks below:

• I've lived as a man & a woman - Here's what I learned

The Reverend Dr. Paula Stone Williams knows the truth will set you free, but only after it upends your carefully constructed narrative. Her devotion to authenticity caused her to leave her comfort zone as a nationally known religious leader and follow her heart to transition from Paul to Paula. She lost all of her jobs and most of her friends. Williams also discovered the massive differences between life as a male and as a female in America.

Williams is the pastor of preaching and worship at Left Hand Church in Longmont, Colorado, a pastoral counselor with RLT Pathways and a sought-after speaker to corporations, government agencies, universities and religious institutions on issues of gender equity and LGBTQ advocacy. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Denver Post, New Scientist, Radio New Zealand, Colorado Public Radio and The Huffington Post. Her TEDxMileHigh talk on gender equity has had more than one million views.

On this episode of Uncharted Territory, we interview Edgar Villanueva, author of Decolonizing Wealth, on how funders and social impact leaders can apply indigenous wisdom and a racial justice lens to their work and use money as medicine to heal broken systems.

Edgar outlines how philanthropic funders and impact investors can use their capital, people, rules, and narratives to advance racial justice through their work.

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Edgar Villanueva is a globally-recognized expert on social justice philanthropy. Edgar serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of Native Americans in Philanthropy, NDN Collective, and is a Board Member of the Andrus Family Fund, a national foundation that works to improve outcomes for vulnerable youth.

Edgar currently serves as Senior Vice President at the Schott Foundation for Public Education where he oversees grant investment and capacity building supports for education justice campaigns across the United States.

Edgar is the award-winning author of Decolonizing Wealth, a bestselling book offering hopeful and compelling alternatives to the dynamics of colonization in the philanthropic and social finance sectors.

On this episode of Uncharted Territory, we interview Ricardo Rocha, Founder of Bondadosa, on how to lead and manage a team that grew 870% during COVID-19.

Ricardo talks about how everything broke, his approach to management, his approach to hiring, and how leaders need to practice self-forgiveness while everything changes around them.

Bondadosa's mission is to advance food justice and create an equitable, sustainable food system. Ricardo is Bondadosa's Founder and CEO. He has steered the company from its beginning when they were delivering food on tricycles to a state-wide food distribution company. 

Bondadosa participated in Uncharted's Food Access Accelerator in 2017.

On this episode of Uncharted Territory, we interview Ruby Bolaria Shifrin, Director of Housing Affordability at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Ruby outlines how COVID-19 is an opportunity for philanthropists to change their risk-appetite and pursue bigger upstream impact. Ruby also shares practical steps for ways foundations can get serious about gender equality and staff diversity.

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a pioneering 21st-century foundation, and Ruby reveals how they're being the risk-embracing capital that can test new ideas and why most of the people at CZI do not have a background in philanthropy

In this episode, the following articles are cited:

• As women take over male-dominated fields, pay drops

On this episode of Uncharted Territory, we interview Erin Ulric of the Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger. In only five days in late March, they received 384 applications, enlisted a review committee to evaluate those applications, and selected and made grants to 47 organizations working on the front-lines of hunger relief.

Erin outlines the behind-the-scenes steps they took to rapidly mobilize people, review applications, and deploy capital. She and her team knew they would make mistakes (as they had never done this before), so they optimized everything around two design principles: speed and simplicity, and let everything else fall into place.