Maria Kim, Impact Spotlight at NationSwell 2024

Maria took the stage to present on lived expertise at the 2024 NationSwell Summit.

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This November, our CEO Maria Kim spoke as part of the Impact Spotlight series at the NationSwell 2024 Summit. In this talk, she shares the story of Raahsaan, whose path helps illustrate how, if we want to truly build a stronger economy, we have to reframe our perception of lived experience as someone’s lived expertise.

A huge note of thanks for the NationSwell team for making space for Maria to share her perspective at the Summit. We’re so grateful for your collaboration in this important work.


Transcript

NationSwell: Please join us in welcoming our first Impact Spotlight, President and CEO of REDF, Maria Kim.

[applause]

Maria Kim: Good morning.

I’ll start with a confession. I’m in recovery.

Now sometimes when people hear that term, they conflate it with being in recovery of an addiction, but when you look it up in the dictionary, it’s actually about being on the other side of a deeply palpable loss.

I am in recovery of not being chosen.

This might be a little TMI for this audience, but just go with me; I promise I’m taking you somewhere. When I was 17 years old, my dad went on a business trip, and he never came home. First, he was gone for a month, then a few months, then a year, then eleven years. And on the other side of that, we became estranged, unsurprisingly, and he has since passed away. But there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t feel my father not choosing me over and over and over again, in my blood. In my DNA. It’s like a suggestion or maybe a reminder that, “Hey, you’re not so lovable, because if your daddy don’t love you, who’s going to?” And that’s been a throughline that I’ve actively worked against, once I knew (and once those who loved me reminded me) the deepest truth of who I am.

I share this with you because that is my lived experience.

And what I’ve learned through my work and my life over the years is that lived experience is not just what you’ve done or what’s been done to you, it’s sometimes this catalyst that makes you most beautifully, gloriously, affirmatively, who you are. You know?

In a weird way, maybe my lived experience is more aptly described as my lived expertise.

This notion of lived experience as lived expertise has permeated my professional life, too. For the last twenty years, I’ve been knee deep in the work of helping people overcoming the trappings of poverty get back to the power of a job. People who you often hear the rhetoric of, “Well, why don’t folks just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?” without recognizing the systemic inequities that deprive people of boots in the first place.

People like Raahsaan, a man I’m super proud to call friend to this day. I’ve known him for many, many moons. We worked together for so long that he has me as “Boss Lady” in his phone to this day. You can think of Raahsaan as “teddy bear” meets “big man on campus” meets “kind of a 50-year-old version of Urkel,” if you remember that guy from TV. He’s lovely, lovely, lovely.

I met Raahsaan a few months on the other side of incarceration. When we met and got to know each other and built trust, I learned that the root of his lived experience was, when he was 13 years old, he lost his mom pretty tragically to cervical cancer. In an instant, he went from being a boy who loved his momma to the man of the household, who desperately wanted to provide for his sister and three little brothers.

Only in the neighborhood where Raahsaan came up, there weren’t many options to figure out a way to put food on the table. There were more pay day loans than banks, more liquor stores than grocery stores, more places where you had to have your wits about you than places where kids could just go about and play.

But there was one place that did show promise for Raahsaan, and it was the guys on the street. And they offered him a side of community, too.

So as you can imagine, Raahsaan lost his way for a time in the underground economy. He eventually got into the prison system, and on the other side of incarceration, he said to himself [that] there had to be a different way. He found his way to an employment social enterprise. Employment social enterprises are businesses that are doing some type of good for the world, but they exist for a greater ethos: to create jobs and mobility for folks who’ve hit a rough go.

He worked with us for many moons, and eventually got scooped up by another portfolio company in the Emerson Collective. And there, he got his bachelor’s in sociology, he is enrolled this fall to get his Masters degree in sociology, because he’s like, “There aren’t enough men who are doing this work who can be the light for young men behind them.” And he’s the site manager of a program where he’s working with 46 young men ages 18 – 30 who want to leave life on the streets in the rearview mirror but who lack a safe passageway to do so.

Raahsaan is their safe passageway. Raahsaan’s lived expertise? Survival, tenacity, leadership, and drive.

You know, sometimes when I share Raahsaan’s story, or anyone’s story that I’ve had the honor to work with over the years, I worry that people might get confused. I worry that you all might get confused. I worry you might think Raahsaan’s story is exceptional which it is – but it is not rare.

There is a whole pool of talent across this country that is itching to get back to work, if only they had the access and opportunity to do so. A whole talent pool who remind us every day that skills are not relegated by words on a resume, but by the string of experiences in our lives that make us creative, resilient, and whole.

So my ask of you to turn hope into action on this fall day? I want you to get curious, I want you to get proximate, and I want you to get intentional.

Get curious about the ways in which your firms may inadvertently be boxing people out for their lived experience and not boxing people in for their lived expertise. I want you to literally Google your job site’s entriest of entry level jobs for your firm and read all the requirements and tell me they’re as lowest barrier to entry as they can go. And if they’re not, I want you to push.

Then, I want you to get proximate. Meet some of the folks I’m talking about in your local employment social enterprise or elsewhere at a community-based organization. And maybe get to know IRL the people that would die to work for you, if only they had the doorway in.

And then, I want you to get intentional. Some of you might be like, “Yeah yeah, Maria, I’m picking up what you’re putting down, but I don’t have the jobs.” OK! But you do have the power of your purse. Look deep into your supply chain and tell me how you can convert it into a value chain. Put that pressure on the vendors with whom you transact to do the right thing. Because I’ll tell you what, people out there? They follow the lead of people in here.

And I know we can do this if we put our back into it.

And if we do it, we end up shifting – yeah, yeah! You can laugh at that – We end up shifting from a generational transfer of poverty to a generational transfer of joy. I know this to be true when I see Raahsaan and his three grandkids – 13, 9, and an itty bitty at two months old. They only know him as the funny, suave, swagger-filled, intelligent papa bear that they’ve known from jump. That is his lived expertise. And I know that their futures are forever brighter, forever possible – and even probable – as a direct result of him.

Now that, my friends, is hope in action. Giddy-up.

[applause]