My personal mission and my role is about providing young people with access to a hidden career path. I self-identify as an environmental educator and an experiential educator, a life sciences educator, all of those things smushed together. I’ve come to some realizations over time, and I’ve also been able to infect my coworkers over time. We are bringing young people into an inherently flawed white supremacist system of intellectual endeavor. So we had to sit with that and go “okay, what can we do in our own spaces to change that?” And that is where we really are trying to hold ourselves accountable – always asking “who is helped and who is harmed” anytime we make a decision, centering the people most impacted. And making a commitment that includes budget items and timelines for making change, and then telling other people that we're doing it. I've done a lot of under the radar work around diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, all of that for my whole career. And now it's like they want to use us as a model for that because we've been doing it all along. Okay, great. Well then, we're really going to do it.

Since this past summer, how do you feel about the most recent surge in social justice and activism?

People are starting to learn to sit with discomfort in a different way, or even just know that they're going to experience it. A lot of people go through life experiencing no discomfort. And those people are now realizing that things are uncomfortable. So if you wanted to push and pull on diversity-equity-inclusion, they shouldn't be surprised. I mean, I have colleagues and they're like “I spent a week at a workshop where they kept talking about being JEDI warriors,” you know, ‘cause now it's justice-equity-diversity-inclusion. So the JEDI warrior thing – it's great, but where were they? We're not going to shame people for jumping on the bandwagon now, but there is something to be said. There is a leadership video where they show this one guy at this music festival dancing by himself. It looks like a goofball dancing by himself. As soon as one person joins him, he's no longer a goofball dancing by himself. And then everybody else gets up to join in the dancing. So even if you were that one person dancing by yourself and now someone joins you, that's fine. That's going to move it forward.

At times, did you ever feel like that goofball dancing by yourself?

Absolutely, all the time.