Politics/Community Involvement

So that was the basis for The Good Citizenship Project, which is now morphed into something entirely different, except for that it's based on the idea that, everybody, everybody, doesn't matter who you are, what your diagnosis is, what culture, ethnicity, anything, we all need meaning and purpose. Every single one of us needs a reason to get up in the morning, and for The Good Citizenship that means going and helping other people by helping out in farms and barns. So, parents with people that have autism will contact me. I will go pick them up at their house and we'll bring them to local farms and barns, and I teach them how to do all the chores. Through that, they get to interact with all the animals that are there. Sometimes it’s horses, sometimes it's llamas and peacocks, sometimes it's cows and we do all the chores and I mean all the chores, cleaning up the manure, moving the hay, fixing fences, learning how to trim the goats' hooves. And everything that goes in between that. So, they get these marketable skills that they need to be able to go out into the world and be positive contributing members of the community. And the barn owners get much needed help...So, everybody wins and I am there to make sure that if there's someone confused, they don't know what to do or maybe there's a better way to do that chore, I teach them. I teach them how to do it and I base that on my own autism and obvious signs of autism throughout the family and all the years working in the field.....I'll never be rich doing this financially, but I will always be rich in spirit. Always. Because I know that what I'm doing helps other people and I'm teaching others to be helpful and kind and involved in community. At the very basis of it just giving back and doing good where you can, and that's enough for me.

I was a civil rights lawyer for a really long time and our client communities were you know, majority of the global majority, right? And, and yet our staff was not representative of the communities that we served. And I do a lot of work in my organization to help management and the attorneys think about how to build better relationships with the clients that we served and did work to try to have the staff better reflect the communities that we were working with. So, I did that work informally for a long time. And then five years ago, I decided that’s what I should actually be doing. And so, I started Promoting Good on a leap of faith [laughs] thinking there was a need for organizations that want to be inclusive…or maybe don’t always want to do it. A bit of both. And so, I started a company that just does that. So, it started out with just me, and now there’s five of us. All women of color, and we are trying to help organizations do their work differently.

I think I ended up writing about that because it was a way to help me - it was like my therapy and then taking what would be possibly a messy journal entry and taming it and shaping it into a poem that would have some meaning to someone else. It's like when you're really focused on some task, then all this swirl of anxiety all around you kind of goes away because you're just focused on this one thing and then with poetry you get a poem out of it in the end. So, when I had enough of those, I realized oh I have enough for a book, and I made my first collection.

I would honestly say…be patient and be kind to yourself. You are figuring things out as a teenage girl…You are processing things…and maybe going through a difficult moment…I take in interns now and constantly am reminding them…you are not an island. You, as a human, you need connections, and that’s really what helps you grow…It definitely takes time to get there, to build the confidence to just own who you are. But I think all of my experiences and seeing inequities for myself, for my family, for other immigrants, that’s always just driven a passion.

I was griping one time at home to my husband. “I don't know why am I doing this? This is so frustrating.” And he's looking at me. He said, “Aren’t you thinking about your dad?” And it wasn't until that moment that I realized what effect that had actually on me. And yes, you are completely right. I think that was a big part of my desire to work with people who need assistance like that, that nobody's really looking after or helping.