Hi wonderful people!
It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Life has been truly beautiful lately and I have so much to share! I’ve been working on some things 👀
But for now, I’m popping in to share some remarks I gave at the Van Alen Institute's Design Sprints Launch event yesterday evening. In a serendipitous turn of events, their program team invited me to be their keynote speaker. Still buzzing from the love I shared and received last night!!! Full speech is below.
Hi everyone,
I’m so happy to be here! Thank you to the entire Van Alen team for having me. And thank you to each of you — the attendees! the community partners, designers, leaders, and my friends who came to support me. I don’t take anything, including this opportunity or each of you, for granted.
Today I want to talk about joy, family, design and community. I’m a community designer, researcher, educator, writer, culture worker and joy practitioner. I see myself as belonging to the philosophical lineage of Toni Cade-Bambara, who once wrote, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” In today’s political and socio-cultural landscape, we tend to view joy as unserious, whimsical work. It’s easy to do so, to fall into that ever-present trap of seeing the issues of our time as all-consuming, soul-crushing work. And, to be clear, it is looking fairly ugly out there, I won’t lie to y’all. We are living through state-sanctioned violence, genocide, ethnic cleansing and displacement, mass, targeted disinformation, and a reckless, evil sanitizing and retelling of this nation’s history. I don’t believe in sugarcoating. But, I do believe in critical joy, in acknowledging that which seeks to harm us and standing steadfast, in building new ways of being together. I don’t see joy as weak or mindless but as a necessary tool for facing oppression with righteous truth, strength, confidence, and hope.
My life’s work is to make individual transformation and collective, systemic change more readily available, more joyful, and more healing. And I finally figured this out, like literally last week, via a very intriguing, roundabout process: by first earning two degrees, reading an incredible number of books, several career pivots, learning how to overwork and overproduce; then unlearning most of that, surviving a pandemic, trucking through a few years of therapy; and finally, at last returning to my biggest sources of inspiration, my forever role models, my grandmothers. My grandmothers dreamed of my life, my talents, and my good health long before my parents resolved to bring me into the world. I am a primary benefactor of their love.
Both were born in the ‘40s, one in Kentucky, one in Ohio. My dad’s mom, my Noni, was born and raised in that part of Kentucky that’s reaaaal Southern. She was out there on the farm, walking miles to get a carton of milk, trudging through blizzards to get to school and all that good stuff that elders say. She married my grandfather and had her first child when she was 17. She then had three more kids, the youngest of whom is my dad, who’s her only son. She later earned her GED and went on to have a beautiful career teaching and loving babies, toddlers, and their families. Wherever I go in Dayton, OH, people know and love Miss Minnie Coleman.
My mom’s mom, my Grandmother, was born and raised in Dayton, OH. Both sides of her family migrated North from Carrollton, GA during the Great Migration. She has five brothers and sisters, my beloved aunts and uncles who, in that way that siblings do, feel like fun little alternate versions of her. All kind, hilarious, and loving in their own way. She graduated from high school and she had two daughters, the youngest of whom is my mom. Wherever I go in Dayton, OH, Louisville, KY, and Jeffersonville, IN, people know and love Sharon Louise.
I say all of that because so much of my work is a direct result of being in deep relationship with them, of wanting to be like them. All I’ve ever really done—personally, socially, professionally—is try to emulate them, try to recreate the way they made people feel.
My Noni loves the Lord, her family—blood, chosen, and church—, and her garden. I learned so much about beauty and resolve from her. She has the greenest thumb of anyone I've ever met in my life. Whatever she touches, grows. As a little girl, I remember climbing the trees in her front yard and playing in the flowerbeds. I never cared too much for gardening—I hated having stuff on my hands—but I loved being around while she planted seeds. I'd sit in the big oak tree and observe how she cultivated the earth, molded it into something capable of growing beauty. She was meticulous and careful, tending the soil as if cradling a newborn. She prayed to God for growth and acted on that prayer with tenderness and precision.
Gardening and design have a lot in common. Gardens are lovely, interconnected homes for plants and flowers and species of all kinds. They promote balance. Any little interruption or adjustment can throw off the entire ecosystem of a garden. Like gardeners, designers don’t “grow” their work in a vacuum. Good design is community-centered and systems-minded; it accounts for all the choices, the leverage points, the people, the institutions that interact with the solution it's offering. Designs “grow” best when they’re intentional and deeply rooted, or when they have collective buy-in and support.
Good design also promotes beauty. My Noni and I share a favorite flower — the peony! Pictured here on my wrist. We all deserve beauty, to see that which is most special to us reflected in our worlds. And what we call beautiful, or our favorite, is so intrinsic to who we are, to how we were raised, what we watched and listened to, who we watched and listened to, when we were young. Good design is beautiful, referential, and responsive.
And now to my mom’s mom, my Grandmother, with a capital G. In some ways, she was my best friend. She was hilarious and thoughtful and kind and so incredibly fun. She loved taking me, my brother, and my cousin—her grandkids, her pride and joy—to the movies and aiding us in sneaking in candy from the dollar store. She taught me how to theater hop and how to laugh at myself and how to play cards and how to say I told you so whenever I was right.
One of the most important things I ever learned from her is how to honor and call forth the dignity and worthiness of everyone I meet. Whenever I'd run errands with her to So and So's or to Pastor's, we'd always have to stop and grab fresh flowers and fresh, hot JJ’s chicken to bring to our host. You did not come to people's homes empty handed; you were generous with what you had. You shared what you loved with who you loved. I’d sit in the passenger seat of her minivan—a pulpit of sorts—and listen to her listening to other people. She had a way of making you feel like your words were the most precious in the whole world. She was fiercely invested in community; she loved hard and was loved hard in return.
Good design, like Grandmother’s care packages and affirmations, is relational and reciprocal. If we are truly designing with communities—which is to say, our neighbors, our kids, our coworkers, with each other—then those we invite into the process should be treated as equal stakeholders and partners. Just as we are trying to figure out whether the people we’re speaking to are the people we need to speak to, they’re trying to figure out if what we’re asking of them is worth their time. Community-led design seeks to foster mutuality, to build partners and colleagues, not “people we serve.” We are not the saviors of this story. True, successful community-led design, like the kind you all are about to embark upon, looks like freer and healthier communities, strangers turned friends and neighbors, and a deep, collective capacity for empathy, understanding, and joy.
And that’s where we started, right? By talking about joy, my most treasured value and practice. Something I’m interrogating in my work is how to go beyond identity and struggle, to not just build connections on the backs of our shared suffering, but on the wings of our shared joys. What would it look like to anchor in possibility, not past harm?
You all have a wonderful opportunity to answer that question, and to connect with each other, to learn new practices, to establish habits that go beyond performativity, to build something beautiful, with your community, that wasn’t there before you all worked together to make it so. Good designers—and if I may say so, good people—don’t just “do no harm.” They add value. They practice care. They leave people, places, and spaces better than they found them.
And so, as far as I’m concerned, my grandmothers are expert community-led design practitioners. They didn’t call things “equitable” or “inclusive” … but they knew how to make stuff feel that way. They knew how to embody what so many of us can only intellectualize: the deep listening, the forging of new partnerships, the merging of lived and learned expertise. And that is the work. That’s what should be celebrated. Those little acts of loving responsibility and rigorous attention. Not the credentials, not the literature, not the shiny, flashy things, but commitment, earnestness, and accountability.
This year, on June 5th, my sweet, sweet Noni, Minnie Coleman, will welcome her 87th trip around the sun. On June 6th, my loving, firecracker of a Grandmother, Sharon Louise Johnigan Pinkston, will celebrate her sixth heavenly birthday. Returning to and honoring their expertise, bringing it into spaces they’d only dreamed of and prayed their grandchildren would thrive in, has been the biggest blessing, the most supreme joy.
Big love to all of you — thank you again to the Van Alen Institute for having me and to all of you for listening. Cheers!
As always, it’d mean so much to me if you shared this with a loved one. And feel free to send me a note with your thoughts, too.
Looking forward to writing, storytelling, and spreading more joy in 2024!