the Useful & Kind Podcast Transcript: Young Leaders
David Simas CEO the Obama Foundation, Alex Smith an Obama Fellow and CEO The Cares Family and Duncan Fraser Director, Useful and Kind Unlimited.
The Obama Connection
Useful and Kind Unlimited is based on the advice that President Barack Obama gives to his daughters, interns and young leaders, namely to be Useful and Kind.
Here is a transcript of a conversation about Useful and Kind Leadership between Duncan Fraser, Director Useful and Kind Unlimited, David Simas, CEO The Obama Foundation and Alex Smith, CEO The Cares Family.
Duncan
When did you first realise that you could make such a big difference? What was the early trigger for you?
David
My parents, consistently emphasised a sense of respect and dignity. My dad would explain, "When you act and speak it not only has an effect on you, but the way people think about you, the way people think about me and your mother, the way people think about our family and the way people think about our Portuguese immigrant community”.
The first taste I had of people coming together to affect change was at seven or eight, when I volunteered on my first political campaign. OK you're a child but the buzz around just stuffing the envelope and seeing people coming together around a person or an idea or cause was one of the most exhilarating things that I can remember and vividly thinking if you want to change the world you can start by making your community a little bit better. It’s both a personal and a communitarian view.
Alex
For me, it was a journey. I was born and raised in Camden Town in London, which is a dynamic, vibrant, inner-city, diverse place which had a genuine sense of community with people knowing one another. Even though people came from all over the world, it felt to me like people knew one another and were doing things to make change, whether that was a local community or school fair. I have the memory of people on our street planting trees one summer’s evening, people going around, front doors open, just having a drink and talking.
My mum comes from a tiny village, in very rural Lincolnshire and that had a very different and clear sense of civic agency where people came together and would organise their own Post Office because there wasn't one in the local community or organise their own church services. She would always say, "you must think of others, you must be considerate of others".
Duncan
What do you think has been your personal greatest achievement? It could be something that you didn't think you could actually achieve or it could be something that's had a huge impact.
Alex
Well, obviously my two new baby twins! I don't think anyone who is a parent would say that anything else comes near. They’re beautiful and wonderful.
The founding story of the Cares Family, the organisation that I set up comes from encountering an 84-year-old man when canvassing and I developed a relationship with him which taught me about my own sense of isolation.
The moment I would choose as an achievement would be almost 10 years ago on August 8 2011 when we launched the first part of The Cares Family in North London. We spontaneously responded to the fires, looting, rioting, discontent, violence that had been going on for days in Camden. We mobilised young people from those communities to stand up and say, ‘this is not what young London is all about, we can be a civic place, we can be a positive place where we bring value, we can build, we don't need to destroy, in spite of the obvious injustices in the world, we can do something positive and add value’. We signed up 100 people to go out onto the streets with broomsticks. And to build relationships by taking cups of tea to people and tidying up their communities.
David
There are many moments I am less proud of where ‘ego, vanity and pride superseded, which are the constant enemies of leadership', but the moment that I am most proud of was when I was working for Deval Patrick, the Governor of Massachusetts, only the second African American Governor in 2007. In order to persuade enough members of the legislature, I observed him calling in member after member of the House of Representatives in the Senate, who were against marriage equality - the subject of the campaign. He engaged in the most powerful and empathetic discussions, where he would share his story about being a young African American growing up on the south side of Chicago and what he faced. He would say this to an Irish American legislator and would elicit from them stories about “Irish need not apply” and the stories that their families would tell them. He would do the same thing with the Italian American, Polish American and with Hispanic American legislators because everyone had a story of being the ‘other'. At that moment where they were sharing those stories of empathy, he would then ask how are our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters were any different. So for me being one small part of that and seeing it culminating looking out of the window onto Boston Common, where there were a couple of thousand people with American flags and rainbow flags, talking about how the process of democracy had validated something as powerful as two people who love each other being able to to be married.
Duncan
A fantastic example of the Others part of our SOW Model (bring useful and kind to Self, Others and the World’.
Alex
I think there's something really important in the power of story. I learned as an Obama Fellow, the concept of the 200-year present. If you think of the oldest and youngest people you have a relationship with and think about how two lifespans overlap, then you can think about the acceleration and the possibility of change during the course of what feels like a huge span of time, but in reality, is only two lifespans. So just to think about the change that's gone on in this world, during the last 200 years, and the change that we are all capable of in the next 200.
David
The 200-year story is so vivid and beautiful. These acts of the transmission of values and heritage and story passed from parent to child, in the family unit, are so important.
Shared stories are so important. In a Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall, walks a very skinny African American named Barack Hussein Obama. There are 70 and 80-year-old men playing cards, looking at this guy. He was running out of State Senate and he always looks for the friendliest face. He walked up to him and says “My name is Barack Obama, thank you for your service, Sir”. All of a sudden, the man’s facial expression changed. And he said, “Well, thank you”. Obama, then in a very genuine way, said, “I remember my grandfather, who was a veteran in Patton's Third Army, talking about the Battle of the Bulge and the sacrifices that his brothers in arms made in defence of freedom and democracy. And so I am just grateful to you and anyone who does this”
This shared story created an opening that allowed him to begin the act of maybe not persuasion, but developing the connection that can then allow those men to put down the defence mechanisms for a little bit and to engage in an actual genuine conversation.
So the underlying ethos or the philosophy that goes to the heart of what you're trying to create, especially with people who hate you, is an opportunity to enter into a conversation with at least an assumption or a generosity of spirit, that does not presume that you actually know their heart, or their intentions.
How do we create an entire system, societal and cultural series of norms, when there's so much around us, in our politics, in our business, in our religion, that works against that very kind of basic empathy to compassion where, you know, empathy is the heart of “I feel you” compassion is well, I want to do something about it?
Duncan
At Useful and Kind, we use a very similar approach which is the idea of the Iroquois Indians that if you're making a decision, ask yourself what will the impact be seven generations hence. For the young leaders that we are all working with, given climate change, they have a foreshortened sense of what a future might be so I’m just wondering what you think and feel about that and how it informs our work supporting and developing them. I wonder too what your experience has been of “The Greta Effect”.
Alex
Greta Thunberg is an extraordinary leader but I think we put a lot of pressure on young people, if we say everybody can be Greta Thunberg. She I think never would have anticipated what has happened by virtue of taking a stand. Greta’s story shows the power of somebody inspiring other people to use their agency, somebody without qualification, without the type of “experience” that most power structures would value. She was a child when she first stepped up. And I think that really shows the power in individuals recognising that we cannot wait for big government, or big business, or big charities to solve the problems that are right in front of our eyes. We can all do something about them. If that is Greta’s legacy, I think that's a wonderful thing.
There's a new piece of research in the UK which shows that 18 to 24 year olds are the most socially conscious generation in recent history. There is a huge opportunity because of digital media. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” and I think people are starting to recognise that. But while they are the most socially conscious generation in recent history, they are the least socially active in their own neighbourhoods. That tells me that there is a huge disconnect between the desire that people have like Greta, to do good in the world, and their sense of capability within power structures that don't allow people to use that agency. We need obviously to find more inclusive, open, relatable 21st Century institutions, we need small, tiny platoons of community-led organisations. Young people feel that they cannot solve climate injustice, and racial or social injustice, until and unless they feel a sense of relational injustice, People need to know their neighbours who are not like them who have different attitudes, who have different life experiences, ages, ethnicities, different religions.
Duncan
Given this compression of time the imminence of catastrophe, the fact that the 18 to 24 year olds, have had a really really tough time in the pandemic, what do you think are the responsibilities for those of us working to develop young leaders?
David
Not everyone is Greta but everyone has the capacity to act in some way. Everyone has to have a sense of the basics of not just activism but organising. It is insufficient to tweet or to post an event or to attend a march or a protest: these are all necessary and insufficient components on the path to collective change
The best description I heard of this activity was an energy distribution system where the activists or the protestors in the march are the generation of the energy but then what happens once the energy is generated, how is it directed via the existing systems and institutions towards the change or series of changes that you want, is where you transition from activist to organiser.
The organiser can be trained to understand, and this is where we hopefully can fit in. ‘Once you finish the protest or the march, now what? Who makes the decisions in your community? It’s not the president of the United States, it’s not the United States Senate, it’s the local District Attorney. How is she or he elected? How do they think about their power? What can you do then to bring pressure to bear on them? This is essentially the work of civic training towards civic engagement in a way that is about creating a broader sense of agency and social cohesion, it’s both simple and immensely complicated at the same time.
It begins with the basics of community organising: you have to begin with individual agencies first. You have a voice, you have worth, you have power, how do you choose to exercise it around that thing that you care deeply about. But if you stop at individual agency and you don’t move to collective agency then you have limited yourself and you can tilt at windmills all day and post all the things you want on social media but you’re not engaged in a generative new society or even an effective way of making a change so, in fact, this then comes back to the necessity of institutions.
Duncan
Given that our organisation is based on Barack Obama’s advice given to his children, interns and young leaders to be “useful and kind”, I’m wondering, what advice you give to your children?
David
The advice I give to my children flows from the advice my father and mother gave me. Every single choice that I make, hundreds of times per day, every time I see another human being, or have a conversation with them, every time I write something to another human being, every time I’m making a decision about what to do and how to act or what to say, that is a choice that I have to make. I can only control my choices. I can’t control yours or anybody else’s and so if I handle those with the default to: ‘am I being helpful to myself and to others rather than harmful to myself and others? Those moment by moment choices become habit, habit becomes discipline and that turns into character.
Alex
Well, I like the advice to be useful and be kind. Simple, clear and in no way patronising or condescending and it connects us to what it is that makes us human. We are differentiated from most other species by virtue of our empathy for one another. So I think it’s a useful motto. What I would just say though I would kind of flip your invitation and say that we need to have more children giving advice to adults. Children don’t have an inbuilt, hard-wired desire to discriminate or to hate or to be cynical. Children see wonder and exploration and adventure and learning and I think the type of leadership that is imbued in the Obama Foundation, at The Cares Family, and at U&K is to try our best.
With huge thanks to David and to Alex for sharing their inspiration and wisdom with us.