How does the media shape our view of the world?

- Hello everyone, I am Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed. Welcome to the next episode of Here to Help. My pronouns are he and him, and for accessibility, I'll offer a quick visual description. I am a middle-aged man. I'm wearing dark rimmed glasses and a gray t-shirt and a black pullover. And behind me is the North Austin skyline. At Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs. This is what gets us out of bed in the morning and what keeps us going all day and what powers that mission is people. Here to Help is a look at how experience, strength, and hope inspires people to want to help others and helping others also is about looking at the world with a new lens and with every guest, we aim to challenge old assumptions with new ideas. My guest today is Shuronda Robinson. Shuronda is the CEO of Austin Women Magazine and a fourth generation entrepreneur who also serves as the president and CEO of Adisa Communications, a boutique PR firm based here in Austin, Texas that she founded. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Shuronda over the past year through a variety of community organizations, and it feels like everywhere I show up, Shuronda is somehow the co-founder or board director. I'm not sure where she finds the time, but she has clearly dedicated her life to helping others. For nearly 30 years, Shuronda has helped policymakers improve decision-making processes, social services and public affairs programs throughout Texas. She's currently working with city, county, and community leaders to address homelessness with a view to creating a more equitable housing system. And last year, Shuronda was named the 2022 Dewitty/Overton Honoree by the Austin NAACP, their top honor. Today we'll be talking about how the intersection of media policy and the dominant narrative shapes how we view ourselves and the people around us. And we'll be diving into who gets to tell their own stories and who has their stories told on their behalf and why that all matters. Shuronda, thank you so much for joining me today.

- Thank you, Chris, I'm so grateful to be here with you.

- Let's start where we always start these conversations. How are you doing right now?

- I'm good. I'm usually behind the camera, so we'll make it through, but I'm doing really well. Grateful to be here this morning.

- Great, well, let's start with that. So you've been a professional communicator for over 30 years. Tell us a little bit about the work that Adisa Communications does.

- Sure. So I like to say we work on projects that move a lot of dirt or upset a lot of people. And so we are really engaged in, I use a different word when I'm not in mixed company, we engage with communities across the state of Texas, making sure that the experts and people in how they live their lives, that that gets translated to the decision makers, the bureaucrats, the policy makers, so we can really make good decisions together as a community.

- So can you talk a little about the name Adisa and where that comes from and what that means to the mission of the organization?

- Adisa is actually a person, it's my oldest son, and his name means, "One who makes himself clear". And I don't recommend this for anyone who is not thoughtful about their parenting. I have one business named after one son, but I have three boys. So growing up, the younger two are like, where's my business? I'm like, mommy's tired. But Adisa means, "One who makes himself clear". So when I started the company, he was about a year old and I thought about naming it The Robinson Group, and then I thought, well, clarity is what communication is all about. You don't have real communication unless there's clarity. So I named it after him.

- So you are an entrepreneur, you're not the first in your family, so you're a fourth generation entrepreneur. Can you talk a little bit about your family? So I, at the NAACP Awards, I had the pleasure of being seated next to your incredible mother, and it sounds like she's not the only one in the family. So can you talk a little bit about your mother, about the family and also a little bit about the weekly African American newspaper that your family runs in Houston?

- Sure, well, I got my start in business with my mom and dad. They founded a weekly newspaper called the Houston Sun and it's still publishing today when I was in middle school. And, I did not appreciate as a teenager, a pre-teen and teenager working for the family business, they would produce a publication every week write the content, take the pictures, lay it out, and then distribute it. And of course all the marketing that goes behind it. I didn't know I was learning from them how to do a lot of what I get to do today. In my family, entrepreneurship is one of the paths you can take. And so it was always evident to me that I could go work for someone, I could start my own business, or in my family, there are a lot of teachers or people who are in education, so, going in the education route. But yeah, it is powerful to be able to tell stories of communities that don't typically get told in the daily narrative. And I got to witness that and experience that growing up and it's a large part of what I get to do today.

- So when we were talking last week, one of the things that you talked about is that you said, you know what it's like to be unloved and unwanted. Can you talk about what this means and how it influences your view of work and the workplace?

- Right, yes. It's very personal, I think, to us all, this idea of belonging and where we show up in the world and who welcomes us. And I was born in Illinois, we moved to Texas when I was in the sixth grade. And so there was a real significant culture shift for me. Even though I had spent many summers with my grandmother in Mississippi, where I belonged in the south was very different, at least in my mind in terms of where I belonged in the north. And so dealing with as a black woman, racism and seeing like racial injustice sends a strong message that you don't belong here or living in a community that's not integrated, that is just one type group of people. And going to other parts, other communities in Houston and seeing it very different, very white communities or very Hispanic communities, they send I think subliminal messages. I didn't even know I was getting a message honestly of where I belonged or where I was wanted or where I was loved. And so over my adult years, I've had to unpack a lot of that and really begin to understand that I am a child of the Most High and we are all created and this is my belief system. And so wherever I am is where I belong and to really stand in that truth for myself, yeah.

- So I'd love to talk a little bit then about where that inspiration comes to keep at the work. So you've been doing this work for a long time and as you said earlier in the conversation that what you're doing is not easy. You're trying to change the narrative, you're trying to do things and talk about things that are going to make people feel uncomfortable. That work is hard, is exhausting. And as I said in the intro, you do a lot of it. You're kind of all over the community in terms of where you're putting your time and your energy. So where does that energy come from? What is the inspiration that keeps you going?

- That's a great question, I wish I knew, like I wish I could pinpoint exactly, because I think some days I would turn it off, I'd be like, no, not doing that today. But I feel like it's a calling, right? And it's indescribable. However, the feeling is so powerful. There have been moments in my life when I'm like, yeah, I'm just going to be a regular person, right? And I'm just going to show up and go to work and do what's required to go to work but not do anything else and that's hard for me. So the only way that I can describe it is that there's something in my heart, I've learned to follow my heart, that compels me to want to give, to want to serve, to want to lift other people. And honestly I think it's in all of us, I think it's just love, right? And I feel better when I express it. I feel better when I show up and I'm able to support and lift because honestly, it's quite selfish. I feel better, right? So it can be, I think it's exhausting when you're not living in your purpose, right? I think all of life is exhausting. When we're not doing what we know in our hearts and our minds we are here to do and the way that we are here to do it, then I think that's a message back to us that we probably need to examine or re-examine our direction in life.

- Hmm, yeah, I think you hit on, I mean, it is pretty much a universal truth, that most people can get stuck in spending a lot of time thinking about themselves. And the only tried and true formula for getting out of that is by thinking about other people and helping other people. And when you turn your thoughts to others, it tends to feed into everything and help, I think, help people get through really tough times. So I'd love to talk a little bit about your new role. So you've been doing all this work, but primarily as you said, more of a behind the scenes communicator. You just stepped in this role as the CEO of Austin Women Magazine. You're the first black woman to ever hold this position. You're only in the role for a couple months now, I think, but what are you hoping to bring in terms of a different lens and a different perspective to what the readers of Austin Women have come to know and what can they expect?

- Thank you. So the magazine has been around for 20 years, and so it is an institution in Austin and the only place where intentionally women in business, their stories are lifted. And what I hope to do is just really further that work, but then also bring in the lens of research and thought leadership because what I'm finding is that as Austin has grown, Austin has become one of the hottest markets in the country. And thanks to South by Southwest and ACL and our whole music culture, there's nowhere that I go where if I say I'm from Austin, people don't know where that is. And they go, "Oh, I've heard about that." Or, "Oh, I've been there." And I've been here over 30 years living here. The population has increased, the types of businesses that we have in our community have quadrupled. And so, telling all those stories is really what excites me. Researching the issues that women care about is also very exciting to me. And then being able to add that lens of diversity and inclusion to the way we tell our stories at Austin Women.

- So can you talk a little bit about what maybe some of the problems with the dominant narrative is today? When in particular, how women and people of color and other marginalized communities are represented in media and how you hope to bring a different lens to that.

- Yeah, so when I look at the media landscape, what I see is women are usually objectified. We're overly sexualized. We're seen as an object of someone else's desire without any agency of our own or we're characterized as victims. Like something has happened to us, we have to be saved. And those are the two like predominant narratives that we still see today. Even though there's been a lot of progress made even since I was a child. When I think about people of color, the narrative seems to be the aggressor, right? Or the problem or the exception, right? That somehow, this one is different. And so and again, it's something that we've all been socialized in and we've all learned it, we've all taken it in. And I think what we hope to do with the narratives that we tell is really show the nuance and the diversity of women in our community, that we live these really complete lives and that we do have a way of looking at the world that I honestly believe the world needs to see and hear, a way of looking at the world that is more collaborative, that is more nurturing, that we are powerful in our strength. And that power doesn't have to look like masculine power. It can look like feminine power and really describe and define that for our community. So just talking about it, Chris, I get excited, I'm going to take some notes about ideas that are popping in my head right now, but I think that representation is about identifying individuals and letting them tell their own story without the filters, without the narratives that we assign to them. And so those are the kinds of things, the way that we hope to approach the work at Austin Women.

- Yeah and that last part is really key. Clearly it's that difference that I hinted at the beginning about who has their story told and who gets to tell their own story. And I know for me, in my own experience, we spoke about this a little last week and I've shared this here before, but about five years ago, I looked at the stack of books on my bedside table and realized that they were all written by white men. And so five years ago I set out to start just reading black and brown authors and not only, but primarily women of color as well. And I've been at this for five years and it is extraordinarily different as a white man, the stories and the narratives that I've been exposed to that I had to go out of my way to be able to expose myself to a different narrative. And so I would love to hear your thoughts about how you think about changing that narrative and in the position that you're in, being able to put people into a position to tell their own stories and to expose people like me to a narrative that's different than what we would normally see.

- Right. That's such a powerful question because I think it's about staying uncomfortable, right? Staying in a space where, of humility, like where even though I'm in charge, even though I'm responsible, even though I'm leading, I don't know everything. And so staying open to, and being uncomfortable with, "Oh, there's something I don't know, and therefore there's something I need to learn." 'Cause there's such pressure when you're in the role of CEO to have all the answers and to know every answer to every question that you're asked. And I think that trickles down into how we tell stories and whose stories we tell. As human beings, I think that we are very, once we find a spot where we feel safe and comfortable, we like to hang out there. Like, we like to stay there because it feels good to us. And so what I've learned and what I am encouraging our team to do is really be uncomfortable. Let's find stories of women that we haven't told before. We can look at the data in terms of who's on our cover and who do they represent, and then see that there are gaps in representation. So we're doing that kind of work. And I think where I am at this point in my life is anything that makes me uncomfortable, I'm leaning into and I'm going, okay, let's embrace this. Let's figure this out. Let's find a way to bring that forward. Because if I'm feeling uncomfortable because I don't know, I can only imagine how those other parties feel without even being, having a spotlight shown on them.

- Yeah, I love that. Last year I had Jacqueline Woodson, the author on Here to Help, and she said that discomfort is a muscle and that basically it needs to be exercised and the more that it's exercised, the stronger that it gets and we can get more comfortable with being uncomfortable. I also read in another book, this line that really just hit me, which was, "Be skeptical of anything that makes you feel comfortable." So what you're saying is, you lean into it and you want more of it, but I think the opposite is actually really powerful. Like, if something is making you feel comfortable, it's maybe numbing you to something that you should be paying attention to.

- Well, life exists in what we don't know, right? And so that is, I think that's one of my core beliefs is that I'm going to be perpetually uncomfortable and perpetually incomplete because there's always more. And that's the nature of life. And so then how do I direct my focus and my attention in what's happening in front of me instead of resting on what's happened in the past?

- Yeah, oh, I love that. You've said before in communication, that mistakes are made predominantly by confusion and mistrust. And so I'd love to hear you sort of talk a little bit about that especially when it comes to misrepresentation in the media and these stories that are told about people of color.

- So I'll start with a long answer, Chris. My dad was a coach and he coached poor kids. He coached football and baseball. And so I grew up on the sidelines, going to games and also to practices. And I didn't know I was learning like human behavior and psychology as part of that at 4, 5, 6, 10 years old. And, as I look back on that experience, what I've come to understand is that people who don't trust each other are more likely, in a team environment, to make mistakes. I don't know, it's almost like they're static in the air, the space when communication happens between people who don't trust each other, which literally means you can't hear what the other person is saying and you can't connect teamwork. And that's what business is about, is about people connecting with one another. And so that's why I say that mistrust breeds mistakes and it can happen unintentionally as well. I'm a big sports fan, and so I watch basketball, I watch soccer, I watch football, baseball, all the sports, and there's a significant difference in the beginning of a season in terms of how the players interact with each other, particularly when you get new teammates versus in the middle of the season and the end of the season. At the beginning of the season, they don't know or trust each other because they haven't worked together. And they haven't figured out how to work together. But by mid-season, they're running at a pretty good smooth clip because they've worked through that mistrust. And so that's like, I think the broad, generic answer, I will say specifically as it relates to like, dynamics of identity, gender, race, that we have been taught to mistrust each other. We have learned the narratives around, particularly between, I'll speak for myself as a black woman, black people, and white people. There is built into the narrative of this country, there is built in mistrust based on the experience of slavery. And so it's difficult to work through that on an individual level, right? But it's so necessary because those connections have to be made in order for all of us to be able to move forward together. Does that get to?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- Absolutely. I'm curious where we are right now, just today is February 27th, while we're recording this, we are literally at the intersection of Black History month and women's history month. And we're talking about this in the context of the world, but also in business. And so given all of this, what is the responsibility of corporations to address these issues, to challenge the existing power structures, and you as someone who's working with companies to help them with their narratives, how do you think about bringing this into their conversation?

- I think the first thing to do is to acknowledge that those narratives exist, right? That the way that we're socialized, what we learn in school, what we learn in community, that those are all stories that have been repeated over time. And so the work around equity is about naming it. So what is the story that we're all living? What is the story? And the work we do around branding, it's all about how do you tell the story of your company, how do you tell the story of your organization? So we're all made up of stories. We're just human beings walking, talking, storytelling, making machines, right? So I think the first step that corporations should take is to name the stories that they're living by. And a lot of them are unnamed, a lot of them are informal, if you will. They're like the formal rules and then the informal rules. So I think that's the first step. And then once you name the stories, look at who's not included in those stories, who's experience is pushed to the wayside or not a part of the storytelling, and then being intentional about how you include those narratives. And honestly, I think business has a real incentive because we're here to make money, we're here to make a difference in the world. We're here to lift and change others' lives with our products or with our services. And the more control we have over the story that we're telling, instead of the story running us from the background, we are in charge of it, the more successful we are because we're bringing people together and we're moving forward together. So I think it really is critical not only to just another person's humanity, like the people that you have working with you, but also critical to your bottom line to be able to take hold of those narratives from an equitable standpoint.

- Along those lines, in the summer of 2020, there was this massive sort of crack in the narrative for a whole lot of people with the murder of George Floyd. And suddenly a bunch of organizations that had not been part of this conversation before became open for whatever reasons, whether they felt like they had to, or they felt compelled because it was the right thing to do. And it seemed for a brief period of time, like the narrative really was going to maybe shift. And over the last few years, a lot of what opened up feels like it's closed back down, both in terms of the money, the mind share, and especially right now in potentially, challenging economic times, people are pulling back on some of the areas that they might have been investing in. And so I wanted to talk about that, but when we started talking about it last week, I want to get it to that through your story of how the Black Leadership Collective here in Austin got started. When we started this conversation, you shared with me something that I didn't know about your connection to George Floyd and I'd love to hear you talk about this a little.

- Oh, this is a goosebump moment for me. So, George Floyd went to my high school. I am a mighty, mighty lion, Jack Yates Senior High School in Houston, Texas. And when George Floyd was murdered, the day that we all found out, my Facebook timeline lit up because I knew people who knew him. And if I did my math correctly, I was a senior in high school when he was a freshman, and I don't remember him, but we were both athletes. He played football, I played volleyball, and which means that we were probably in the same spaces in the building, the athletic wing of the high school at the same time. But again, I don't have a personal memory of him. So when he was murdered, my community was grieving. If you went to Jack Yates High School, you were always a lion. And there was a very close knit community there. And so I was grieving with my friends and people that I love. And as an owner of a company, I was watching other corporations write their statements, people were writing Black Lives Matter statements. And my team came to me and they said, Shuronda, you have to write this statement for Adisa Communications. And my first thought was, well, I'm black, of course black lives matter to me. But then I thought, well, yeah, this makes sense that we should make sure that we put a line in the sand on this issue. And so I started to write, and I think I looked AT&T's, I looked at a couple of different organizations and they had written a couple of paragraphs and I was like, okay, I can do that. I can write a couple paragraphs. And I actually wrote a playbook and it just poured out of me, the idea for me was how do I ensure, how do I equip people with some things that maybe they don't know, things that they can do, so that once the protests are done, it's what you were talking about, Chris, like, once this moment of revelation and uproar is over, how do we make progress together as a community? Maybe there's some things that I can share that will support that. And I wrote a playbook and one of my, now I'm an adopted mom, she adopted me, a brilliant, successful, two brilliant, successful women who adopted me as their mother. Being a mom of three boys, it means a lot. And one of my daughters called me and said, "Hey, I saw the playbook. I'm bringing together a group of leaders in the community. I want you to tell them what to do." And I kind of laughed. I was like, yeah, no, I'm not going to do that, I won't tell 'em what to do, but I will facilitate one meeting and ask them what they'd like, what they want to have happen as a result of them coming together. Three years later, we're still meeting and we formed what is now called the Black Leaders Collective. And so it's about taking the power, the genius of black leaders who are leading amazing organizations throughout our community and lifting them and supporting them and making sure that we can support the vision that they have because we know that if we impact the leadership of the people who are in the front and the vision of the people that are in the front, then our communities will be better off.

- Yeah and it's okay, we can name check Terry here.

- Okay, all right. Terry Mitchell, Terry P. Mitchell, brilliant, brilliant woman.

- Who will be a future guest on Here to Help. I've already asked her to join us. So I guess as we're starting to draw to the end of our time here, I would ask, in that sort of world of having thought about this, this playbook, what would your message to other business owners and leaders be who are thinking about the tough decisions facing them? And how do people need to show up today when maybe the energy behind some of this is starting to wane, how do people stay the course?

- That is such an individual answer. I think the best I have, Chris, is that I think we all as leaders have to love ourselves more deeply. Love has to be the foundation of everything that we do. And I'm convinced, I'm absolutely convinced that when we love ourselves more deeply, we can't help but love other people. Even the ones that we've been taught to be afraid of, the ones we don't understand, the ones we may have fought with in the past, right? And so, I just think that as we develop the muscle of leadership that is based in love, then whatever decisions and choices we make that come from that will have the ripple effects for generations to come. I don't think there's a cookie cutter answer and I think we're all in different places in our walk in life, in our journey in life, and it's perfect wherever we are. What I have found for myself is that I can't love myself enough, right? And that I've got to continue to learn how to love myself more and more and more and more. And the more that I do that, the more capable I am of loving other people. And I think that's what leadership is.

- That's fantastic. Well, we'll close with the same question that I ask everyone at the end. And this podcast we started in April of 2020, so just a couple weeks into the pandemic and throughout this time, the world has been through a lot. And so the question is, with all of the extraordinary challenge and suffering and awakening and everything that we've all been through, what in that experience has left you with some hope for the future?

- I went to see my nephews yesterday, and they were telling stories of Spider-Man and all these characters that I don't know anything about anymore, but the stories are still alive in us, and they're constantly being reshaped by the next generation. And I think what gives me hope, quite honestly, are the generations, the younger people who have a very different idea about what life is supposed to be and how it should look. And the babies who just have this innocence and joy and excitement and fun in their lives, they're the ones who give me hope.

- Well, great place to end. Shuronda, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for taking the time to share your experience and thank you for everything that you do for Austin, for Texas, and for the world.

- Thank you, Chris.