S3 Ep 5- Everyday Equity: Everyday Ways to Make a Change with Aparna Rae equity Strategist

In this episode, host Pooja Kothari sits down with strategist and advocate Aparna Rae to explore what everyday equity looks like at the intersection of work, technology, and democracy. 

They discuss why most workplaces operate like authoritarian regimes, the real harm of performative DEI, and why basic needs like fair wages matter more than belonging metrics. Aparna shares her journey from building equitable organizations to taking a radical sabbatical and reveals practical ways you can practice daily disobedience in your own life.

Learn why "safety" in the workplace often means protecting white supremacy, and discover how small acts of kindness and disruption can compound into real change.

Transcript

 Welcome to Everyday Equity, everyday Ways to make a change. The show that brings real conversations about fairness, compassion, and progress into our everyday lives. I'm Pooja Kothari, and each week I sit down with guests from all kinds of industries and backgrounds to talk about what equity looks like, not just in their work, but in their daily choices and personal journeys.

Because building a more equitable world isn't just for academics, activists, or experts. It's for all of us every day in big ways and small. We can choose to be more aware, more kind, and more connected, and this is where we learn how.

Hi everybody. Welcome back to Everyday Equity, everyday Ways to make a change. My guest today is Aparna Rae, I am so happy that you are here with me. I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. I have known you before you knew me. I followed you on LinkedIn. I followed all your posts and I took your de and I data master in.

2023. I learned so much from that class. I still have all the handouts and I refer back to them. And it was certainly a, a new way of looking at the data part of, of DEI. And after that, you know, I got in touch with you. I wanted to know you, and I'm so happy that, you know, after these years have passed and we've built a friendship that you're here on my podcast.

So welcome Aparna. I'm so happy to have you.

Thanks for inviting me.

So everybody, Aparna Rae is a strategist, entrepreneur. Advocate who has spent her career building more equitable workplaces from redirecting $300 million in philanthropy towards bipoc led organizations to co-founding future for us, a platform that helped 20,000 women of color when millions in promotions and pay increases.

Today she joins us to explore what everyday equity looks like at the intersection of work technology. Democracy, Aparna, you have a wealth of experience under your belt. I'd love to pass it over to you to hear more about what you do and how you do it. 

Thank you. What do I do and how do I do it? Well, right now I do very little. I had to take a pause from the DEI work that I was doing. I sold my consulting. Firm. I took a year off and I am, you know, slowly getting back into the swing of things. And through the course of having my practice for five years four and a half, five years, one thing that became really clear to me, and, you know, you talked about coming to my data class and starting to see the fields differently as a result of it. Well, like imagine seeing it. Results from hundreds and hundreds of surveys that were being administered between 2020 and, 23. And one thing that became really clear to me is that , we want work to feel good. We want workplaces to feel less like a punishment. that's very hard to do because every organization, for the most part, right, with few exceptions, are run like authoritarian regimes.

And so we're at a moment now in 2026 where everybody has a vocabulary around democracy, fascism, authoritarianism, you know, we're talking about it really openly and publicly. the place that we find ourselves in, and yet we never think to question when those exact same things are happening in workplaces, right?

The fact that. Two and a half years ago, people were getting fired and blacklisted for talking about Palestine. Right. You didn't even have to say anything negative about Israel. You just had to say, I really care about Palestinian people. I care about their liberation. I care about their safety. Maybe you didn't even have to say that.

Maybe all you had to say was like, gosh, like I, wish these people weren't getting carpet bombed. Right. And having their infrastructure taken away from them and. You got fired or you got picked out of your organization. And, but 10 years ago that was happening to all of us that were talking about racism and white supremacy at work as well.

Right. And so I think coming out of my sabbatical, a lot of what I've been focused on is getting organizations to really think about. The extent to which the way they operate is actually a barrier to being in a state of democracy. Like we cannot have a multicultural, pluralistic democracy out here when inside of our organizations where we spend, you know, upwards of 40 hours a week, we. Are getting surveilled. We are getting punished for speaking the truth. We know that DEI and HR practitioners get fired or managed out of organizations for literally naming the facts, observable facts that are coming to them through their HRIS systems and their surveys. yeah, I mean that's, that's largely what I care about in this moment.

  Yeah, we often say, you know, the, the organizations and companies are, are just a mirror of our society. You know, how, how are you supposed to build an equitable workplace when you live in a a highly inequitable society? And it's a joke. To, to come to hire consultants, to come into your organization to be like, we want more inclusion.

We want more equity. And we're, we don't even realize that we're trying to build this like a mirage in the middle of a very inequitable society. And you can't do it until you realize that you're just a mirror of, of what you live in. You know, the, you said so much, you know, and I was taking some notes of.

You know, 2020 happens and there's suddenly like real performative collective consciousness that kind of arises from the murders of, of what the public finally made high profile, because we wouldn't have learned about Ahma Arbery or breonna Hitler without the public's outrage.

Yeah.

And of course, you know, the filming of, of, the most high profile murder of that year George Floyd. So they're suddenly like, oh my gosh. I just, NI never realized, you know, can we, when this was, you know, before your sabbatical in 2020,

Yeah.

you tell me a little bit about your experience seeing your clients, seeing people react, and you already, and you, me.

Most of us, you know, anti-oppression, you know, facilitators and, and thinkers in this space, we're like, what do you mean? You just found out? You know, we've lived through so much just in our own lifetimes, Rodney King, you know, that we've lived through it. We've seen the racism. So what do you mean you're just like, figuring this out now?

What was your like That was my response. What was your response to it in your internal response? Maybe not your external response. 

Yeah, my, I think that actually both my internal and external response was like, well, welcome to the club. Like glad, glad to have you, like glad that you have this realization. I studied decolonizing pedagogy and you know, was by every measure, a social justice warrior. All through my twenties. I was a labor organizer.

I. Understood it in theory, and I was obviously seeing it play out in practice. First job out of college was at a community, large community based organization here in Seattle, and I never once got promoted even though I, every year I got more responsibility and. You know, at like 26, 27, I was doing the annual like development day for my coworkers in my department, many of whom were much older than me. And at no point anybody thought to say, oh, well Parana, like she is ahead of us. Maybe we should promote her. Maybe we should make her a manager, right? So, but I got. I got a lot of responsibility. I also had like the highest performing program in the organization. You know, I was graduating almost a hundred percent of young people from high school in my program, and I was sending something like 80% of them to college.

And I wasn't doing it on a 40 hour work week. I was doing it because I was at my job all day every day, and on the phone with parents trying to convince them to send their daughters to college instead of marrying them off. And so. 2020 happened, a, a big part of me was like, great, I'm glad there are more people who see who can see the injustice. But that, that was also very short-lived because while organizations were saying, we wanna do this, what they were also saying is, but I don't wanna change anything. I actually don't wanna change anything. And some were saying it. Quietly or using language that wasn't as clear. But I had one client that was a hedge fund and they said, you know, we want you to do trainings.

And I said, look, like my firm, we don't really do trainings like we, if you're interested in having a. Sort of integrated data informed approach to DEI will, we will, we will work with you, but we don't do one-off trainings because we know that that actually causes more harm and it causes more harm to people that are marginalized already.

It's gonna deepen inequities in your organization and we don't wanna do that. And my hedge fund client was like, well, we really need you to do this training. And by the way, we don't want you to use the word racism. 

Yeah. Yeah.

And I just kind of went, well, I'm sorry, what?

Right.

like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we don't want it to be, we want it to be informational.

And I'm like, well, you could then read a Wikipedia page. You can listen to a podcast. You can watch a movie. Like, you don't need me to come in and do, educational content for you. Like it already exists in the world.

Yeah.

like, right, but they used the word racism.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a point where you say, okay, I'll use the word white supremacy, then you don't want racism. I'll, I'll just name it for actually what it is that's white supremacy. I mean, it's so funny, you know, because when you say these one-off programs, especially in places that don't want anything to change, all they do is put marginalized staff on the spot.

Highlight them and then you leave or you know, the consultant leaves and it's like, okay, I did this like really gross check the box kind of work that is really antithetical to like what I believe in. And all you did was actually like deepen the frustrations and highlight like who, who the mainstream staff can point fingers to.

And, and, and continue to marginalize. So, yeah, I mean, I just wanna say that 'cause it's, when we say like, one-off workshops can be really harmful, that's what we mean is like it's without giving context, it's without continuity and it's without the commitment from the hedge fund or company organization to protect the staff.

It's like you're protecting white supremacy and that will always endanger marginalized folks.

Yeah. Yeah. The other trend that I noticed in my practice, right, as somebody who was already known for being like a data person before 2020 I would get these clients that would, you know, they were like, I wanna do a survey. And I'm like, great. Love a survey. and then they would be like, an RDEI committee is gonna design it. And I would just be like, great. So then none of your data is have validity there is a science to designing surveys, but there's a science to like capturing information in a way that. Actually gives you insights that are worth operationalizing. And I would just sit with these DEI committees or in many instance, like they weren't even the worst offenders.

It would be like the chief people officers. And we had, we had one client where the chief people officer. Absolutely lost it with us with our team. And she was like, you guys have the most negative questions on this survey. What is somebody gonna think when they read this question? And the question was like, my manager doesn't care about me.

Right. And you're asking somebody to respond on a Likert scale. And just, I just had this moment where I was like, how do you have this job? Of managing an organization with 5,000 employees. How did you get this job when you don't under, like, understand fundamentally how are constructed.

Yeah. Yeah. 

How, how, how did you get this job? And then of course you also like struggled with the reading bar graphs, which, you know, I mean, I look back on that and I, and we can laugh about it, but I also think that that's. The anti, the anti-intellectualism, I think is also a component of white supremacy that we don't talk about enough, right? 

Being a little bit dumb and using that as an excuse to not do the right thing

Mm-hmm.

or when the data doesn't match your expectation, then you're like, oh, this data can't be correct. I'm like, well, if three years in a row your employees are saying X, then I think the data is correct.

Yeah.

think it's correct.

Yeah.

You know, it's it all goes back to this centuries old construction of. If you call me a racist, that means I'm a bad person.

Yeah.

It all goes down to this like little, like the most bite-sized, chewable piece

Yeah.

of all of this. It's like, don't call me a bad person.

Mm-hmm.

say I'm bad. I can't handle that.

Mm-hmm.

And it is so deep. Whereas you and I, I mean, we can both say like, yeah, I'm racist. I have to be, I live in a racist society. It's like I'm a human being, so I, I, and I live in this society that, that was constructed around me. I was born into it. I breathe the air, I exhale it, I'm racist, I'm misogynist, I'm racist, I'm classist, I'm ableist, I'm all those things because that's, I'm a product of my society.

What's like, why are, why is that so hard for people to say? It has nothing to do if you're bad or good, like, it's such a you know, and Hindi we say like, like, it's,

Yeah.

 Meaningless and you know, I talk to my kids, my kids also, you know, it's easy to say like, okay, this is good, this is bad, and I'm, and I'm really trying to teach them life.

There's, that's just not relevant. You know, there, there's extremes. And then we all live in this gray area. So like, it's rare that we're at the extreme. It's really rare. We're usually right here in this gray area in regular human behavior. But when we're talking about, you know, like these issues, white supremacy, racism why can't we see them relative to our society instead of like.

Okay. I'm, I'm in this binary all of a sudden and I can't tolerate it because I don't wanna be a bad person. I don't wanna be at the extreme.  

So, what is confusing to me is I don't wanna be a bad person, but I wanna do harmful things. I, I want the

Yeah.

to do harmful things. Right? And over the course of.

Oh my goodness.

Running this firm. I think we had like somewhere like around 60, 65 clients, but also we had built this survey platform that was used to run hundreds of surveys and. I ha I feel like I have a lot of data to, to inform my point of view, but I would sitting in these rooms with senior leaders of organizations where, you know, upwards of 50% of their employees were earning not only less than a living wage for the area in which they live in, but in. In many instances, they were earning below a federal poverty wage, which is a number so low that I'm like, oh, I think I spend more on food every year. For my family of two US two adults eat more, we spend more money on food than whatever they're earning, and. executives who are making hundreds of thousand dollars a year, maybe even like seven figure salaries would be like, well, yeah, but how do we move the needle? How do we move this number?

And I'm like, well, I don't think that you can move the needle on belonging if people are like, they're not getting enough food.

Yeah.

they're food insecure, if they are housing insecure, if you are not willing to give them a bus pass and the $5 a day that they have to spend on riding the bus feels really hard for them.

Or anytime they, you know, work overtime, they miss being able to go to the food bank to get food. Or the fact that like your own managers. Are buying cup of noodle at Costco because that might be the only meal an employee is gonna get when they're onsite working for you. Your belonging scores are never gonna go up.

And also why is that a metric that you are interested in? Why are you not interested in raising wages?

Hmm.

Why? Why are you not interested in that? Why are you not interested in managing people's workloads? Why is that not a thing? And you know, so like all of this also is sort of elite rad of people that have class privilege, people that are high income earners that also don't wanna be made to feel bad about doing things that are explicitly harmful. Like the harm is happening and the harm is observable versus where I think people's mind, you know, when they, they think of DEI or they think about DEI practitioners. And I could say a lot about also just like the ways in which DEI practitioners have operated over the last six years that have really harmed the field. Right. I'm not talking about microaggressions. I'm not talking about, oh, you looked at me in a way, you know, or you made fun of my food, right? Like, that's like little h harm. It's a little sting. The interaction feels icky. I'm talking about like observable harm. Like somebody doesn't have enough food because you don't pay them enough,

Yes.

right?

But you don't want. You don't want that said out loud. don't want the hunger and the housing insecurities of your employees getting in the way of them doing their best work.

Right, exactly.

I can't do my best work hungry. Nobody can, right? Like this is, this is why we have school meal programs because we recognize that children's brain needs energy.

Like our, our brains literally need And the way that we get that energy is from food because none of us is an air plant,

Right.

right? Like human beings are not air plants.

You know, it's. It's this siloed way of, you know, looking at like, okay, well inclusion means like this feel good emotional aspect and, you know, this is very hard to quantify. And you're like, how about, how about they come with their bellies full and you know that a good, good night's sleep in a bed in their own home?

It is so much more than that. 

Also belonging and psychological safety isn't about only having positive interactions, right? Like your measure of having a healthy workplace isn't that I only had positive interactions because no relationship that is without friction. is actually good. need friction to innovate. We need friction to show up differently.

We need friction to remind us, right? Like that. We can be different. We can be better. And so we've, I feel like as a field, and this is where like for sh like shame on practitioners that have boiled the ocean of belonging and psychological safety to, I only wanna have feel good interactions. No, you can't even have a feel good only interaction with your dog. Right? And that is a being that's wired to please you. 

Yeah.

Right. Like that's a being that is literally wired to please you, and you're still not gonna have 100% feel good interactions with your puppy.

Yeah. Yeah.

they are gonna do things that annoy you. They are going to eat like your expensive pair of socks. You know, they might pee inside the house right after coming from the outside side,

Right, . It's misunderstanding what the word safe means. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna, I wanna talk about something you mentioned like a while ago, right? In the beginning actually, you talked about your sabbatical and for the, and I wanted, if you don't mind if we, if we kind of get into that.

'cause I remember when you took your year off and I was seeing posts from you and I was like, oh my gosh, he's taking a year, a whole year off. That's like. Really radical, and I wanna just talk about that just just for a second because we are, you know.

Our notion, whole ocean notion of ableism is, is based on your value as a human is directly tied to your productivity, and here you are taking a whole year off from the conventional way of productivity. This capitalistic, traditional, I don't know, like. I shouldn't say traditional or conventional, but those are the words that are coming to my mind.

But the way, the very common way and the ableist way we measure the worth of a human being is by what they produce. Can you talk to me about what it was like to decide to take time off? What it was like any friction that you felt in like, okay, I'm gonna take this year off. Any conflict that you felt there and then, and then how you, how you did it, like how you got through the conflict or if you, if you had any

Yeah. Well, so not only did I take a year off, my husband and I took our year off together,

Wow. 

you know, like he left like a million dollars in Unvested stock at his job to take the the year off. And I walked away from a practice where I was like, I was earning really well. Yeah, look, I think our sabbatical came about for a couple of different reasons. One, I. We had been working for 20 years and we were just tired and we were actually pretty burnt out.

And my husband had already had an episode, I think in maybe 22 where he took a three month sabbatical from his job because he was so burnt out that like the idea of going to work just like it was untenable. And so we knew and we knew that at the end of those three months like that, that didn't feel like enough us. Right. Like he was really like anxious about going back to work. And I was just burnt out on all of the shenanigans from all of my clients. And just was tired and was also had been noticing since 21. Right? And so everybody has like their own sort of moment where they're like, oh, DEI is going out of Vogue.

Or you know, like these kinds of conversations or this way of doing org strategy is gonna go out of Vogue. Me, I started seeing the writing on the wall much sooner and I started seeing it in at towards the end of 2021, where companies were like, Hey, we're gonna do return to office, and you know, employees, were like, actually, no.

I really like not spending $20 on a shitty salad and another $20 for parking and an hour and a half in my commute. I actually really like it Now, I don't wanna glorify, I never wanna glorify the, period of our lives where so many people were dying and we could not leave our homes, and there's no glorification in that, but there. For a lot of people, especially white collar workers, there was some breathing room, right? Like you could go to a doctor's appointment, still get your work done. And the fights around return to office as they were happening and escalating in at the end of 2021 and then into 22, I knew that. That would have an impact on of quote unquote DEI work.

And then the Supreme Court hands down the Title IX decision, right? This is the Harvard case. And in that moment, every like in my body went up and I was like, this is it. Like this is the start of the end 📍 

Mm-hmm.

This is the start of the end for now, because companies are gonna see this decision and they're gonna. You know, retract whatever their commitments were under this banner of like, it's legally unsafe or it's illegal. If it's illegal in education, then it's illegal. Surely it's illegal at, at work, none of which was true then, and none of which, which is true now. Right? Our employment laws have not changed regardless of any of Trump's executive orders and, but companies, I think, you know, they. They felt FOMO in 2020 and 18 months later they were like, screw this. I'm not here for it. So those were some of the reasons why we decided to take a year off. Of course, like, I'm not gonna say, oh, it was a hardship. No, no. We had enough money saved. Like we could, could take the year off. We weren't worrying about paying our mortgage.

We had a chance to travel. Was the first time in my marriage where. my husband and I could spend like many days together doing whatever we wanted and not worrying about being on number of calls and meetings and what have you. And it, it did create a lot of spaciousness in my life. And after probably the first like two months where I, I felt like, oh, are people gonna forget me or am I ever gonna get invited to anything again? I really settled into a, just a really nice pace of. Taking care not only of myself, but I, I did a lot of auntie in my sabbatical year. One of my really dear friends is going through a divorce and was going through a lot of challenges in her own marriage at that time. And I was going and spending, you know, often a week at a time and helping with childcare and cooking and cleaning and all of the things that never go away, regardless of what conflict is happening out in the world or in your marriage. And. I did a lot of organizing. I did a lot of election related organizing that year as well. I took some motorcycle trips. That was really fun for me to like push myself to feel like a lot more comfortable. As a rider, I. The friction that I really felt was coming out of my sabbatical. Right. And I think all of my fears came true last year when I came outta my sabbatical and I started thinking about what I was gonna do next for work. And this whole world of people that for years had said to me, oh partner, you should come work for us. Like we would be so honored if you came to work here. And I tried to cash in those chips and people were like, Hmm. No, not really. You are not a safe person for us to hire. You're not a safe person. You have a very loud, noisy public persona.

You write a lot. You, you know, like you're speaking about what isn't working. We want somebody who's safe, somebody who's not gonna be disruptive and. I in fact like applied for jobs at organizations whose like people and culture strategy. I had written, I myself created the strategy

Right.

even get confused in many instances. I was like, what do you mean? Like, I'm not a qualified candidate, I literally know

Yeah. It's not about that.

everything about your organization.

Mm-hmm.

months working with. Your strategy and I like helped you implement it and this job is to continue to implement it. What do you mean? I couldn't, like, I'm not qualified to do this job. And I think a lot of what, what it boils down to is this, you know, you said this earlier, right? Like our workplaces Mirrors of what's happening societally, and they,

Yeah. 

it's a bidirectional relationship. Work impacts society. Society impacts work. Right. It's always intention and I, I. A friend, you know, halfway through the year, I'm like, so depressed, I'm so upset. she was like, look, the reason they're not hiring you is because you're gonna make them look bad. Nobody wants to hire a person that's gonna make them look bad. Right. And in many instances. What's happening in society is white people feeling a status threat. They're not gonna hire a noisy brown woman who's not just noisy.

Like she's also smart. Like she's also capable. They're not gonna hire you. And that was a friction, I think, in the whole sabbatical process. But look like I would still take it. I would, I would, if I had to make that choice today, I would still leave my seven figure business and I would still take the sabbatical.  

Yeah. You know, and , I love the way you re you, you frame what that year meant to you because you were building community, you're organizing and you're doing, you know, volunteering and election work, which is like so dire right now. And when we talk about like what product productivity means in this very common way that we all define it, you actually were, to the ex, you know, to the other end of extreme on, on your productivity in community building and like contributing to civic society in a way that often in our, in these full-time jobs, these pain jobs that we have we just don't have the time for. And that sabbatical will allowed you to do such.

Deeply meaningful work that I'm sure your community, your friends at that time who got the best of you and all of your presence and attention and like conscious attention to them are deeply, deeply appreciated.

I would even reframe the idea of like, we don't have time. And this is like the, one of the most pernicious aspects of, when I say so much of how organizations are structured are authoritarian is What do you mean you don't have time Legally? A work week is 40 hours a week, but really it's like 37 and a half hours a week because you're supposed to get a half an hour break at at least every single day.

Right? For every. After you work, what, four or five hours? You should get a half an hour break. At a minimum. At a minimum, right? So this idea that we don't have time, we are choosing, we are collectively choosing our employers and our clients, not having boundaries, not resisting the urge to put in an extra 10 hours and. It would require a lot of us to resist. But the reality is like 50 years ago, people were not working 60 hours a week. Most of us are not working in a profession that is emergency management. We don't work for, we are not physicians, we're not firefighters and first responders. White collar workers are consultants, right?

We're strategists, we're marketers. We work in communications and pending like a crisis. There's no aspect of this job that should require more than 40 hours a week. Why are we doing that? Like we are doing it to ourselves? Because I bet like if even 30% of an organization's employees were like, actually no, I am gonna clock out at four o'clock because there's nothing here that can't wait until tomorrow,

Yeah. Yep.

we would have time for civic engagement,

Yeah. Yeah.

Then we would have time to just.

Our neighbors. Yeah. 

Just, but also I think like, well, I'm not a parent and I have, I don't, I have no judgment about anybody's parenting unless it is actually abusive. But look the way in which work happens. Also, depletes parents to the point where they're not great parents, and the data is showing that more and more and more is that children are having more adverse experiences. Almost entirely attributable, attri attributable to workplace stress and the trauma that they're exposed to and or experiencing in their workplaces. So forget civic engagement for a minute. It's like I'm spending my time in a place that causes so much harm to me that I go home and I yell at my kids for no reason at all. 

Yeah.

there, I don't know that there's ever a reason to be yelling at kids as an auntie, right? Like, I'm like, don't yell at them. 

Yeah.

I know I'm definitely the auntie that's like, they can sit in my lap and eat their food. They don't have to be independent yet.

Yeah, yeah,

the parents, you are gonna sit and eat your food by yourself.

Yeah. You know, it's a real, it's really hard, you know, two full-time jobs, you know, I was just telling one of my friends this week, like. You know, I, I wasn't that great of a worker this week, but I know I was a really good parent, and it's like you, it feels like you can really only be good at one of your two full-time jobs.

Then if you're caring for other people, that's another full-time job. Even if you're, you know, when kids are in school, you're still a full-time parent. You know what I mean? Like, you're always thinking about about the kids and how to take care of them and how to teach them and how to make it right and all of that stuff.

So yeah, it's not possible. I wanna move to something that you created and I want, I want our audience to hear about it. And so tell us about India's first online teacher education platform, expanding access to quality professional development for educators in underserved communities. How did it start and who does it serve? 

Well, fury was, you know, 10 years ago. I. I left, my husband and I moved to India three weeks later, and I, I moved to India with a consulting project and I, you know, like found my way to teach for India that was really interested in taking some of their best pedagogical practices and making it accessible to, you know, tens of millions of educators in India that. in many instances have never even been to college. Right. You can teach in a private school in India without a college degree, especially this category of low-cost private schools. And so, yeah, that's how KY came about and, and when I was in it, I felt a lot of pride for taking. What I would say essentially are a lot of Western pedagogical practices, classroom management practices into low income schools. In hindsight, I would say it wasn't entirely culturally responsive. It wasn't really culturally responsive. Right? And so, 

 tell me more.

Yeah, and this is like part of, you know, like as we get older and we like grow into our leadership and we grow into like a different kinds of awareness you, you and your listeners probably know about Teach For Americas.

It's an organization that was started by Wendy Copp that was zip placing, you know, sort of like high caliber individuals, however you define it. But it typically means somebody who is income privileged, who grew up in an upper middle class family to go and teach in low income schools, right? Because the thesis is, even if you go and work at a hedge fund afterwards, which many Teach For America alum work in finance or work in other, like, you know, their. At, you know, the big four consulting agencies. Even if that's the path that you choose afterwards, you are gonna be a more sort of enlightened citizen. Having had this experience of slogging it out for two years in a low income school and then Wendy Copp took this model and you know, took, took it to other countries and India was one of the places and. Yeah. And so, and when I was at Teach for India, launching the CEO of Teach for India, I. Is a woman who comes from immense wealth. Most of the fellows had drivers who were taking them to school, you know, who had a tremendous amount of house help. Now, that wasn't every single teacher, India fellow but. It was largely people who could afford to not have any income. And what were the pedagogical practices? Well, all of these teach for organizations outside the US were largely seated by Teach for America alum, teach for UK alum. And what were they teaching? They were teaching Western pedagogical practices to each other. then we were trying to evangelize a lot of Western pedagogical practices. 

Yeah.

in those countries. And some of them are, some of them are good, right? Like it is good to be student oriented. It is good to not teach front to back, but to have like a more shared power structure in a classroom. of those are really good practices. I was a public school teacher. I, I also taught in a pre-service teacher education program at the University of British Columbia. I believe in a lot of those practices, but I think in hindsight, you know. The idea that you design something without the beneficiary, being a co-design partner is so

Yeah.

problematic,

Yeah.

Any design researcher like worth it will tell you that that's a problematic practice.

And so as, as a part of my career journey, I have a lot of pride. Now at 40, looking back at what I was doing at 30, yeah, I would do it differently.

Yeah.

would do it differently. I would co-design with I would pay those educators, know, to be partners. I. I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't think that like my US and Canadian higher education credentials actually gave me any real street cred in those communities. Like, why did I thank me with my, you know, fluent but limited Hindi comprehension could walk into a school in Bahar and tell the teachers in Bahar how to operate.

Yeah. You know for our listeners, you know, this is so interesting 'cause I didn't know this conversation was gonna go this way, but I think what we just saw from you, and I think it's so instructive, is a way to reflect on how we would do things differently.

Yeah. Right. I think what we just saw was just really instructive of a way to reflect back to take accountability without guilt and without shame. I mean, guilt is great and you might feel it internally, but without when you don't ha have to express that and attach that feeling to accountability.

It is so clear and a clean way to discuss something that is not only like you're accountable, but also is really productive and it's very instructive. And so whoever's listening, I hope you just rewind a little bit and just hear how Aparna just. Talked about that experience. 'cause it's, it's beautiful the way you described it and you know, without giving too many, too much praise to it.

It's just, it's just really helpful. It's just always helpful to see it mirrored how to reflect and, and say what, what could have been done better. I, I, I love that.

Thank you.

Thank you. I wanna talk about a few ways that, that people can get in touch with you and then I wanna kind of like wrap up by getting from you ways that people can get involved.

Like you are so deeply involved. You clearly think. Very deeply about these issues in, in such a comprehensive and holistic way. And I would like to invite you to kind of give a suggestion of how our listeners can get involved in, in what, whatever part of their journey they're in. But first people can connect with you on LinkedIn Aparna Array, A-P-R-N-A-R-A-E on Instagram at app Ray, A-P-P-Y-R-A-E.

And then, of course, your website@partnera.com. You also have a podcast coming up? 

Just it. I just launched a podcast

yeah.

Week. I don't know. I don't know what I thought. I didn't know what to expect, but I have gotten like dozens, maybe like hundreds of dms and texts and emails from people that have listened to our first episode already. And everything from, you know, like, here's a section that made me like burst out into tears because you finally named something that I'd been feeling to, oh my gosh.

Like I don't feel as lonely anymore anyways. But a lot of those made me a little teary I was like, my voice matters.

Course it does. What okay. Tell us the name of your podcast. How can we listen to it?

It's called the Circle Back Club, and you can listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts. You know Spotify, apple, iHeart, all of the places and names that I haven't fully memorized yet. Yeah, and it's, I would say. In a nutshell, it is a conversation about how and why certain things happen in workplaces what we can do about it. we don't have to live in an authoritarian regime. We can make different choices. We can, yeah, the invitation is like, be a troublemaker, be a man in your organization. You know, like do rogue things.

Yeah.

Also, you could just be kinder. You don't even have to be rogue. You could just be kind to somebody who's having a harder time in life by being gentler with them.

Yeah. Sometimes that is going rogue, you know? Yeah. I mean, kindness is the, is the, exception sometimes, unfortunately. Okay. So your podcast is called a Circle Back Club and I'd love to it's available on all platforms and I'd love for you to talk about, well, how can listeners start doing something incrementally?

Oof.

I.

Yeah, I would say, you know. There, are many things that people can do, but I would say do a little audit. Do a little life audit and see, you know, where are there places where you can interrupt harm, you can interrupt unfairness, you know, where labor is distributed. Asymmetrically. I think that's, it's not a very hard thing to do.

Could actually just be as small as being a friend that leans into care labor, right? Like you don't have to go on a sabbatical to offer to watch somebody's kids. You could just offer that to your neighbors. And I, my sense not being a parent is that parents really appreciate when you're like, Hey, Pooja, can I take your two kids off your hands for a couple of hours?

Like you could take a nap. don't even have to go on a date or anything. You could

Oh

do catch up on your laundry, catch up on your email,

yeah.

Watch like a shitty TV show that you can't watch when your kids are at home, right? And those little acts of care can really compound. At a minimum, we can do those little acts of care, but I do think that in this moment specifically, all of us need to have a daily disobedience practice. Little acts of disobedience, like we have to learn to lean into that. We have to learn to lean into that. And can use an LLM to help you, you know, think of 50 ideas. But even in parts of our life where we don't have a lot of power, all of us have agency and it's a choice to exercise or not exercise that agency. So those are the things, right? Like I, I'm. I'll share one example with your listeners. I was working with a foundation in the course of working with them, there was a a week where multiple people got their salary, increase letters, they got the wrong letter. They got the letter for a different person what they realize.

Yeah. So it's like, you know, so like you, Pooja gets Andrews. Letter and you're like, I'm not Andrew. But then you read the letter and you find out that Andrew, who has the same job as you, is making $40,000 more than you.

Oh my God.

happens to multiple people on the same team, right. That we were working with. It's not anything that I did, but in that moment I was like, oh, there's a rogue agent in hr. There's a rogue agent in HR who was sending Pooja Andrew's letter because they are clocking. The Andrew was making way more money for the same job as Pooja, and now Pooja gets to take that letter to her boss and be like. I'm gonna need you to pay me $40,000 more a year. And by the way, the boss can't say no because if they say no, now they're breaking employment laws. Pay equity is the law of the land in every state. It's the, it's federal law. You have to pay people for the same job. And there were so many people on that team, and by the way, they were all women of color who were able to negotiate. Some really substantive pay raises because of some rogue person in HR sending the, the wrong letter,

You soon. Amazing. Yes.

amazing. It's amazing. Go be rogue. Now, we also live in a surveillance state and organizations can surveil all of your actions and platforms are tracking every mouse click and so, you know, like be safe in that. But. There are ways to, to do this, this kind of disobedience in a way that compounds benefit.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Inadvertent, so to speak. Mistake led to yeah. Oh

realize I sent the wrong emails.

Wrong mail merge. Oops.

Mail merge is awful.

Yeah. It's so difficult.

doesn't always work. Yeah. So I, I do think,

Yeah,

everybody at this point needs to have a daily disobedience practice,

yeah, you gotta get used to it.

mena. Like, just go be a menace.

You gotta build that habit.

everybody. can't fire everybody, right? Like human capital is capital for a reason, is because no company, not even the ones that are trying to automate their way using AI agents can run without humans, right? And so. We have the power to be disruptive and we should be disruptive.

Amazing. Aparna, this has been, I could talk to you for hours. There's so much we didn't get into. So maybe we should do a part two of this including our South Asian culture misogyny in our communities, and of course racism in our communities. But maybe that's another podcast for another day.

I'll bookmark that. You can find aparna@aparnaready.com at at finder connect with her on LinkedIn or on Instagram. Aparna, it has been a pleasure. Thank you for this conversation. You're amazing.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Take care everybody, and we'll see you next time. 

 Thanks for joining us on Everyday Equity, everyday Ways to make a change. If today's conversation inspired you, keep the momentum going. Connect with us on LinkedIn at boundlessawareness. Subscribe to our YouTube at Boundlessawareness and explore more free resources to support your anti-oppression journey @boundlessawareness.com.

Remember, progress isn't about perfection. It's about showing up every day with curiosity, compassion, and the courage to do a little better. I'm Pooja Kothari, and I can't wait to keep learning and growing with you right here on everyday equity.