The show’s guest in this episode is Nisha Anand. A true boundary-buster, common ground creator, and non-violent culture-creator. Nisha’s journey has taken her from being a grassroots activist arrested for pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma to becoming a national leader for social and racial justice.

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Listen to the podcast here

Unconventional Partnerships for Change with Nisha Anand

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the experimental leader Podcast. I’m Melanie Parish and I’m super excited to be here with you. And I’m super excited to get to introduce Mel Rutherford. Hello. Yeah, hi, Ma. Do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you, Mel is going to be joining me to be a co host on the podcast. And I’m super excited to have you here.

My name is Mel Rutherford, I’m in a leadership position. I am McMaster University’s first transgender department chair. And I’m new to leadership, two years into this position and learning a lot and have a lot of thoughts and reflections that I’m ready to share. As I experiment with my leadership.

Yeah, and then you know, just secret, big secret Mel’s also my husband. So we sit around talking about leadership all the time. And we have such fun conversations, I thought it would be fun to include him in my podcast, because I love the thoughts he’s having in an active leadership role. I get to coach people all the time, but I just thought he could bring so much to the podcast. And I thought I might start by just talking about what I’m thinking about in my leadership right now. And you know, for obvious reasons, I’m thinking about making space in my company, for others. So one is, you know, if Mel comes into the podcast, what needs to change in order to include someone else, I have another project I’m working on, where I’m collaborating with someone, and I’m just trying to figure out like, what does that mean, for me? How do I collaborate better? How do I change in the way that I think about expectations? I know sometimes, I get really caught up in how I want it to be, you know, I’m a CEO. So I’m used to sort of, and I’ve been a solopreneur a long time. So sometimes I get caught up in thinking about, you know, my ways the best way, but I’m really pondering how I can just make space and calm calm down a little bit and just allow that my brand, my offerings can be better if I allow people to expand them a little. What are you thinking about now?

Well, this week, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the feedback meeting, when you’ve got an employee that you think might benefit from hearing some feedback, and maybe even making some some corrections in there and their processes. And I’ve actually had the experience in the last several weeks of of witnessing several of these meetings, and I’ve had some thoughts. So one of the thoughts that I have is that this should not be a gotcha meeting, the employee ought to have an agenda ahead of time and know what they’re going to be talking about at the meeting because you always want your your employee your direct report to have the opportunity to put their best foot forward. And if you give them some information ahead of time, give them some time to reflect and collect their thoughts. They’re going to have a better performance at the meeting. Another thought that I’ve had is, don’t give them the kitchen sink, they don’t list. Don’t put things on this list that might be a year old things that got resolved a year ago and and if you’re adding things to that list, you’re probably adding things to that list because of your own ego or your own emotional response. If it’s not constructive, don’t add it to the list things on the list should be things that have solutions or that you can come up with solutions during the meeting. And we’ll and probably you want to limit your You’re caught your concerns to about three things. If you’ve got 20 things go into this meeting. This is the wrong format for that. You want to list things that you know the three most important things, things that you can come up with solutions with and make sure the employee knows what you’re going to be talking about before the meeting starts. So it’s not a got you meeting.

I love that. I love that three things and not a got you meeting a constructive meeting. Fantastic. Well, I am super excited about our guests today. Are you excited about our guests today?

I’m so joining us today is Nisha Anand, a true boundary-buster, common ground creator, and non-violent culture-creator. Nisha, her journey has taken her from being a grassroots activist arrested for pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma, to becoming a national leader for social justice. She’s dream org CEO. And she guides a team of storytellers, organizers and policy experts working on some of society’s toughest problems to create a better future for us all.

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Welcome to the show, Nisha.

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Hi, Nisha. It’s great to have you here. And well. Wow. I love your intro. It’s super exciting. All the things that you’ve been up to you.

And I know, we’re either it made me excited.

Well, I hope you did all those things. I hope we didn’t make it up.

All true.

Well, I’d love for you to tell us just to start by saying how are you experimenting in your life and work right now?

Yeah, I loved listening to both of you think about what’s in your mind. And so it made me think what’s in mind, and I was thinking about change management. If that we know, you know, one of the only constant is change. Are we good managers of change? Do we do all the things necessary to make sure our teams are set up to understand the change, accept the change lead through the change? I think of everyone that I directly supervise, they’re the leaders. am I setting them up? Well, we have a lot of change. I became CEO in 2019. And, you know, after a long career, I never thought I wanted to be CEO. Because it’s a lot of the hard stuff, you get all the problems get thrown your way and very little of the clamor comes your way. But I accepted doing it because it was really a challenge for me to step out of my comfort zone and go to that next level. And so 2019, I had bambi legs, and I was really figuring out what I needed to do that year, I dug hard into management, that was kind of my mantra of the year let’s make everyone great managers. And then I started 2020. I said, Alright, now it’s time to make everyone great leaders. And you know what happened in 2020. Every plan we made, every single one of us got thrown out the window. So in 2020, we braced for an economic recession, when COVID hit, we thought we have to make some big changes. And then all of a sudden, we had more money that year, nonprofits had the largest amount of money. So then I was leading everyone through years of unprecedented growth. Nothing was what I thought it would be change became the thing that I could count on. And so I’ve been thinking a lot lately. It’s a huge field change management, we can all get better as leaders and experiment with that. What are the messages we tell folks? How do we roll it out? How do we make sure folks feel comfortable in the new normal? That’s what’s on my mind.

That’s really cool. And yeah, what um, can you tell us a little bit about dream dot work and what you do just I bet people are curious right now about how you ended up more money in COVID.

Right, and 2020. So dream.org is a national nonprofit social justice organization. We work on criminal justice reform, climate justice, and we think of technology is one of the most important, future focused solutions oriented sectors that we can be a part of. And so we think about tech enabled solutions and innovation and, and we write a lot of policy paths, a lot of bills and our mission statement says we want to close prison doors and open doors of opportunity. What I find why I stay@dream.org and I’ve been here now for over 10 years. What keeps me going is the how we do our work, how we pass legislation, how we innovate across sectors. We at our core believe that you can make change at scale, big, huge change at scale, without having to further polarize the country. In fact, you can bring people together to solve these tough problems. And so we do a lot of bipartisan legislation. Our biggest win to date would be a federal piece of legislation, the first step Act, which we passed during the Trump administration, we started working on it during the Obama administration. We had to ask ourselves when Trump became president, and there was a Republican controlled House and Congress, can we still get this bill passed? Even should we still work on this bill, because we knew there might be more concessions. And we dug in pretty hard. And we asked our team and said, there’s no buddy inside prison that wants us to wait for four years, or maybe even eight years, until perhaps the path is easier. They want us to do it. Now. They do not care who’s in the White House, they want to come home to their house, right? That was kind of what we kept in mind. And we passed the first step act with a Republican controlled Congress, Trump president, the Senate voted 89 yeses. So it wasn’t a little bit bipartisan. It was major bipartisan. And when that act passed, we’re coming up on our five year anniversary. 20,000 people have come home from that one piece of legislation. And we did not have to. I mean, we did that with a huge level of bipartisan support. And so that model has been what we’ve used for all of our solutions.

How do you start to make those connections? When you’re starting a project like this? How do you build that bipartisan partnership?

Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely harder in this climate than it’s been for most of the time. Certainly, polarization is hard. But for me, the number one thing to start was with is being authentically your self. Why do you come to the table for this issue? What’s your why? And we can all have different why’s for being at the table. It doesn’t make my why wrong or your why wrong. But knowing that and not hiding it is the most important thing. So for criminal justice reform, I’m coming from a long, like long history of activism, like you heard in my introduction I’ve been arrested. Does over a dozen times for different civil disobedience, I was a Hellraiser as a young kid like that’s my background, I come to the table for criminal justice reform. Because I do believe that it is a system that has been carried out in a really unequal way. It is racist, it is unfair, it is unjust. I come at it for these reasons that I think too many people are being locked up for unjust reasons. I come from justice. But the other people at the table that we worked with came from totally different reasons. Republicans and red states, the fiscal conservatives, they were like, so many, so much taxpayer dollars is getting wasted in a system whose only successful if more people get locked up. That’s bizarre. So more and more tax dollars are going into the system. So there Why is about how they can legislate, not raise taxes, but we still have common ground, I don’t need them to care about my why. And they don’t need me to care about their why but we need to understand it. And so through that process, they know I’m going to keep pointing out justice, I’m not going to vote for anything that increases injustice. And I’m probably not going to make them vote for anything that decreases their, you know, like ability around 10 straight like understanding people’s why is important. And that’s how we come up with a solution.

So it sounds like you you have you in the the two sides are envisioning the same outcome, even if they have different ways to when they come to the table. Is that is that a prerequisite you ever actually persuade someone who thought they were looking for a different outcome?

I mean, I’d be lying if I say I’m not there to persuade. Certainly, I think when you’re in partner with the best partnerships mean, you both change by knowing each other. And part of what I feel is wrong with the polarization in our country right now is we refuse to even be touched by anyone that’s a little different, or to allow the different thinking into our hearts at all our hearts and minds, so we can’t change. So that change is important for me too. I now understand and can explain different sides because I’ve allowed myself to be open to that and I actually can have some sympathy for folks that might not want to do one of the changes I want because I can understand where they’re coming from. And vice versa. I think about you know, the mask debate. Every side of the issue you’re on for masks. I mean, this is back I think folks have different opinions now, but in the heart of when we were talking about COVID and wearing masks. It was very much like you’re either for it or against it and not even being open to the fact that both sides are right. In some way. That’s the other thing, be authentically yourself, and then to find the place of agreement. So when someone said to me, Oh, I hate my kids hate it, they get pimples everywhere. I could say, Yeah, mine too, it really sucks their faces full of pimples, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m still going to advocate for a mask, and they’re still not. But I have found the place where we agree, it does suck for kids to get a lot of pimples. If we can admit, any place where we agree, that to me is the second most important thing and having that conversation, find that place and you’ll be moved and you’ll be touched. And you actually are being more honest and more consistent with your perspective, being able to say, Yeah, places have agree and disagree.

I have a question for you. And I, I you know, I actually probably know the answer, but I am curious. Those 20,000 people that came home, at your work your in your words, um, there might be people wondering, like, why did we want them to come home? If they were convicted of a crime, or they were in prison for a reason? Can you? You know, walk? Walk us through that. So that, you know, we’re clear on on on your organization and your perspective on that?

Totally. You know, my perspective is there are way too many people inside who shouldn’t be inside. And I’d say everyone that came to the table felt that too. There’s easy stuff to look at like nonviolent drug offenses, marijuana is now legal in most places. Why are so many people still in prison for small amounts of marijuana? Right, that became an easy thing for everyone to be like, should they really be serving 20 years? For marijuana, right? There’s some easy things like that, that a large part, we need to get people home. There’s also for us, one of the things that it introduced was good time credits, and credits for if you actually have had some rehabilitation, and there’s been some part of redemption. And if you’ve actually done certain courses that show that, well, you should get some time off. If you’re ready to come back. Most people in prison, the majority are coming home one day. And so the question is, do you want them to come home better or worse? Well, let’s incentivize better. Most of our prisons don’t have a lot of services or things that help rehabilitate people. In fact, folks come home worse. And there were surveys, the recidivism rate is quite high. Everyone that came home from the first step act, it’s nearly 50% lower than the national recidivism rate. I can get the exact number, for sure. But it’s major because we made sure that folks coming home met certain criteria. For years, we were never able to do that the 90s and the tough on crime era. And when that we’ve heard over and over again, the 1994 crime bill that ushered in this era of mass incarceration, our population went up a lot more than it needed to without crime going down in the same way. It was a failure. And both parties voted for that crime bill, which had mandatory minimums and, you know, allowed for very little discretion in sentencing. Both parties got a Senate, we need a both parties to get us out. So goodtime credits, definitely nonviolent drug offenses, introducing just house arrest is a new area as well, that can be done for folks. Certainly, folks that were sick and old. And a lot of those things that went into play and part of what was in the first step act. It didn’t go as far as maybe I would like it to and other people on the left. But it was a first step. And a lot of states have followed suit and instituted some of those reforms. It’s what we work on all the time. And now to see what else we can do at the federal level. And right now we’re, I’m sorry, I just keep interrupting me, I’m fine with being interrupted. Right now.

We’re we’re finding what you’re saying. Fascinating. I do have another question, though. I’m, I’m curious. You haven’t mentioned race yet at all? Is that a part of the way that you lead this legislation as to like, like, how do you think about race as you’re leading, discussing and finding common ground around this legislation?

I that is what you can count on dream.org to always bring to the table. Like I said, we don’t hide who we are. For us. I sometimes draw this Venn diagram for folks that you know, we start with our progressive values. That’s who we are. We want criminal justice reform. We also add in this radical inclusivity, which we’ve just talked about, how do you bring as many people to the table with as many different perspectives so you can come up with the best solution possible. That’s, you know, gets. i i I have blind spots that folks can point out just like I can point out their blind spots. But the third part of that Venn diagram is equity. For us, it’s dream.org Is that equity lens, the understanding how this might impact one community more than the other how it might, that is such an important part, it’s part of our Venn diagram, dream.org will only get solutions that are right in the center of those three things. So in climate, that’s an area that our partners know we are going to bring up, this policy that you think will work is going to hit this community worse than all other communities. That’s usually a race or a class. Race reason. And same with criminal justice reform you can count on us to talk about right now the equal Act, the crack and cocaine sentencing disparity, those are the same drugs and they were incurred, they were put in jail at 100 to one rate, cocaine versus powder, cocaine, or powder, cocaine versus crack cocaine 100 to one, and they’re the same drug, the only thing that was different, was pretty much the race of the people using it. And so getting that down, the first step back, got it down to, like 18 to one we’re trying to make it now one to one that will get most people home, folks from cocaine have been home a long time, folks from crack cocaine have been in there forever. So race is absolutely a piece of it. It’s what you can count on my team to bring to the table to talk about we know.

I am hearing you, you are committed to you know, these progressive principles. And also you’re committed to having conversations with, you know, across across the aisle with people who may not share those principles. I just wondering if you have any, if you can share a story or something about a conversation that you had with a Republican that where the where something came out, that was surprising to you. Along those lines?

Yeah, definitely. I have so many the one that came to mind, though, right, as you were talking was on student student loans and student debt. I thought this is a winnable issue. Shouldn’t Everyone agree? Isn’t that bipartisan, low hanging fruit? Don’t we all want student debt gone? I really thought I was right about this. And this was, you know, pretty recent, when I you know, in the last year when I was having this conversation. And so I spoke to, you know, a Republican ally, who we’ve worked with on a lot of other things. I’m like, isn’t this one that we could just do isn’t like, Can we do the same kind of model on criminal justice reform? Couldn’t we do it with student loan? And they were like, No, I was like, I don’t understand why you went to college? Wouldn’t you want your student debt? He’s like, Yeah, I would. But you’ve got to understand that middle America, that is not how they think about it, it is very much an individual rights issue that you as an individual can choose if your kid is going to go to college or not. And so a lot of times, and a lot of these working class area areas, college isn’t the path they took for good reasons. They wanted to keep the family business. And so their kid just, you know, trade school, or worked in the family business, and they are very successful, and are making huge success and never went to college. That was their choice. But now you’re telling them they have to pay because your kid went to college? Because it’s our tax dollars. And that doesn’t feel right. And I wouldn’t have thought about that. Right? I mean, it’s, it’s all of the taxes. Of course, I want them to do that. I think it’s, you know, good, but I’m trampling on the fact that they chose not to go into debt. For the reasons that they did, but I’m saying they have to finance my debt. Now. I’m not backing away. I still think we should be canceling a lot of the student loan debt, but it made me understand why somebody in middle America might not want to, because they chose something very different.

I just saw someone after the Supreme Court case this week, the ruling this week, a Facebook post I have Republicans who are my friends, I have very carefully curated out some that are, you know, anti our family, they don’t get to stay but people who aren’t actively hurting or trying to hurt our family, do you get to stay and I’m very curious about their perspectives and I and someone posted I just dodged paying for someone else’s student loans. And I thought it was such an interesting post because I wouldn’t have thought it either like it but I think that individual rights thing is a really good thing to remember that you can be a choice that you can you know, I think it’s interesting I and, and it’s funny, it’s one of those that’s interesting about where privilege and marginalization sit like where what’s where, in the Student Loan peace. So yeah, I think that’s a really interesting example.

Yeah. And I’m still gonna fight for it because I believe America is better as a whole. If we make sure everyone can go to college who wants to who has that in them, like, I’m still going to argue for it. But now I understand why.

New Mexico is doing a really good job, they’ve got the everyone has a New Mexico resident can get the opportunity and go into a state school can get the Opportunity Scholarship, which is free. Yeah, they’re doing a great job with that, like, so. You know, it’s interesting, that’s interesting. You know, like, where, what can we do that’s different than forgiving student loans? Can we do it a different way better? I think they’re using the lottery to do it, which, you know, I’m not sure who the money comes from in the lottery. But that’s, that’s a different question. Um, let’s, let’s shift just a little bit to leadership, and how you develop leaders in your organization. I’m guessing how many people are in your organization?

We have about 70. Staff?

And how do you think of them? I’m sure that they, some of them come to you young and grow with you. How do you think of developing them as a CEO?

Yeah, I think that I, because I’ve been in every position in the organization of all different types of organization, there definitely is a bit of the bias of when I see myself in them, it’s easy for them, me to see how they can move about in their career that certainly there. But I always do run into people who I just don’t understand, right, and I don’t understand how to help them lead. And that’s kind of the bigger challenge. It’s easy to forget what I needed to cultivate that level of leadership, I came up as a fundraiser. And so in the development team, I forget how scary it is to call and ask for a lot of money. And so sometimes the young staff, I’m like, why aren’t you just calling the donor, I forgot that that’s scary. Because I’m so far past it, I think is really important to remember all of the steps that we took to get there. Trust, I think the number one thing is trust in the folks that you hire the folks right. Below me, that’s been the hardest part there is that one of you said it earlier, the thing of like, oh, I can do this myself, or I know how to do this the best. There’s a lot of trust of saying that My way is not the only way that my head of programs is there for a reason. She’s going to come up with a better strategy than I am i If not, we’re experimenting, we very much are an experimental organization. We have this model where we do want everybody to experiment. And so I have to really embrace that as a leader and let my leaders do that too. And let them fail and evaluate and try again. And we use that model. It comes from Amazon, the one one way door decision two way door. I don’t know if you’ve covered that before.

No, go ahead.

This one door, one way door, you open it shots behind you a two way door, like at a saloon keep going back and forth out of it. And so any decisions that are two way door decisions, let everybody make them let everyone may come from the top all the way down to the like, if you send this email, what’s the worst that can happen, you can just walk it back. If you try one thing, go for it, we can, if it’s easy, it’s your decision. If it’s a one way door decision that if we walked through it, it will be very hard to walk back. That’s when you go up the chain of command, that’s when you have your decision making charts of who needs to be involved. Like, you know, I can’t let my team just decide to switch, you know, web carriers or the database, right? That’s a pretty big decision, all your names here. And if it doesn’t work, how much money it’ll cost and effort and staff time and all that that’s a hard one to walk back. It’s not consequential to our work. But it is a one way door decision, you need to move that up the ladder. So that’s been really helpful for me to let go of decision making is to say it’s a two way door decision that’s yours. However you want to do it, do it. If it doesn’t work. The evaluation piece is the next biggest piece. We walk it back. Trust and evaluation, I guess would be the things on my mind today that are really important.

That’s amazing. Do you have one more question? No, no, no, you’re done. That’s it done. Yeah. I have one more question. Nisha, where can people find you? 

Yeah, it’s easy. It’s in our name dream.org is the organization but also my name, nishaanand.org. is where a lot of my writings and posts and podcasts are as well.

And your nonprofit. What do you need from people?

Absolutely, we are building our membership base in several different states that were passing legislation. So if you’re interested in this way, this bipartisan way of doing things, this unlikely ally way of doing things absolutely become a dream.org member. There are a lot of opportunities, scholarships, fellowships, lobbying days learning how to tell your story, we do a lot of that throughout the country. And of course, members also are given the opportunity to donate. I’m a nonprofit, I can’t lie, we will absolutely need that as well. But join dream.org If any of the like way that we do things sounds interesting to you. I think there are a lot more of us that want to end the era of polarization than there are who want to continue it. So we’re looking for all those people.

Me too. Me too. Thank you. Great. Thank you for the work that you’re doing in the world. It really touches my heart. And it’s great to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, that’s fantastic. Thank you.

Yes, and I’m glad to be on Mel’s first show.

Yeah. I hope that you’re enjoying my show. And if you’d like to take a look at my book, The experimental leader, be a new kind of boss to cultivate an organization of innovators. I have a special deal for my podcast listeners, go to book dot experimental leader.com. And you can get a digital copy of my book for just $4.95 I hope you love it as much as I loved writing it. And I hope it helps you create your first experiments.

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It was so great to be here today with you. I loved having Mel on the show. His questions were so interesting, and hearing about dream.org and the way that they’re bringing people together to listen and hear the differences that they have. And still to find common ground to create change is so powerful. I challenge you to look around in your world and see where you need to be creating common ground and making space. This is Melanie Parish. Go experiment!

Important Links: 

• Nisha Anand – Website
• Nisha Anand – LinkedIn
• Nisha Anand – Facebook

Nisha Anand

Nisha Anand is a boundary-buster, common ground creator, non-violent culture-creator, outside-the-box experimenter, and national leader for social and racial justice.

Once a grassroots activist arrested in Burma for pro-democracy demonstrations, Nisha is known today as a leader in cultivating unlikely and unconventional partnerships to create change.

As Dream.Org’s CEO, Nisha guides a team of storytellers, organizers, and policy experts working on some of society’s toughest problems to create a better future for all.

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