017: Tiffany & Nicole
In this episode, we’re joined by Nicole Cardoza, founder of Yoga Foster and Reclamation Ventures, to discuss leadership amid racism, controversy, and COVID-19.
We discussed:
Nicole’s journey into her own wellness practice
How there is space for all of us in the wellness practice, even if we don’t see it in the wellness industry
How a Yoga Journal cover shoot led to the creation of Reclamation Ventures
Yoga Journal’s performative allyship
How Nicole pivoted Yoga Foster and Reclamation Ventures during COVID-19
Using the practice of wellness to create a practice of anti-racism
Show notes:
Summit Fellows: https://summit.co/fellows/Nicole-Cardoza%20-3zKX0igqN7zP4NteMweKSH
Nike Yoga profile: https://www.instagram.com/p/CCBqS4OpefZ/
“Which cover do you prefer?” https://www.instagram.com/p/BzGHa-dFOGO/
Introducing Reclamation Ventures: https://medium.com/@nicolecardoza/from-magazine-controversy-to-1m-raise-9e57927762da
Reclamation Ventures: https://www.reclamationventures.co/
2020 update on Yoga Journal: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBiZr0TFw-Y/
Exhale: Yoga Foster newsletter: https://medium.com/@nicolecardoza/exhale-chapter-1-yoga-foster-and-covid-19-40f20364f7a
RV Relief Fund: https://relief.reclamationventures.co/
Anti-Racism Daily: https://www.antiracismdaily.com/
About Nicole Cardoza
Nicole Cardoza is an entrepreneur, investor, writer and public speaker. Her work focuses on increasing access to health and equity through representation, redistributing capital, and building innovative solutions for commitment and accountability. She is the founder of Yoga Foster, Reclamation Ventures, and the co-founder of the Mental Health League, and organizes the Anti-Racism Daily, a daily newsletter to dismantle white supremacy. Learn more about her work at nicoleacardoza.com and @nicoleacardoza on Instagram.
Follow Nicole Cardoza
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicoleacardoza/
Website: https://www.nicoleacardoza.com/
Transcript
Tiffany Yu: You’re listening to Tiffany & Yu, the podcast. This is Tiffany Yu. On this episode, I’m joined by Nicole Cardoza, who is an entrepreneur focused on making wellness accessible for all. She is the founder of Yoga Foster, Reclamation Ventures, and organizes the Anti-Racism Daily, a daily newsletter to dismantle white supremacy with 60,000 subscribers. Nicole is someone I have come to admire as a leader, and I spoke with her about how a cover shoot with Yoga Journal magazine forced her to confront with racism in the wellness industry and take action to create Reclamation Ventures and the Anti-Racism Daily newsletter. Hope you enjoy our conversation.
Tiffany Yu: Hi, everyone. You're listening to this episode of Tiffany & Yu. This is your host, Tiffany Yu. Today, I'm joined by Nicole Cardoza. She's the founder of Yoga Foster, Reclamation Ventures, and also a daily email newsletter called the Anti-Racism Daily. Hi Nicole!
Nicole Cardoza: Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Tiffany Yu: Of course. Nicole and I met through the Summit Fellows program. We were both fellows in 2018, was it?
Nicole Cardoza: I think that's when we started, end of 2018.
Tiffany Yu: 2018. Summit had started this program to try and encourage more people working in the social impact space to connect with their incredible community. And since then, Nicole and I have been able to hang out in Los Angeles at Summit LA and then in Utah as well.
Nicole Cardoza: Yup. Yup. And then we reconnected at Summit last year in LA.
Tiffany Yu: Yeah. I remember you came in late
Nicole Cardoza: I feel like I'm always late.
Tiffany Yu: And then we caught up in February of this year, you were passing through San Francisco very briefly. Now here we are. I'm in San Francisco. Where are you right now?
Nicole Cardoza: Wow. That's right. I'm in Alaska now. Gosh, that feels like so long ago.
Tiffany Yu: Feels like long ago, you mentioned you were ready for 2020 to be over. We're recording this at the beginning of July. So we've still got half a year to go, but I love starting these conversations by going into origin stories. And so I know you're working on a couple of different things these days, but I would love to hear about wanting to make wellness accessible for all. What does that journey look like for you?
Nicole Cardoza: Sure. I got into my own wellness practice when I was in college and went to a yoga class. Not really sure what I would get out of it. And it was one of the first times that I really felt at home in my body. It was just a wonderful affirming and grounding practice for me. I'm very lucky that I had a great first experience. And shortly thereafter, I had been volunteering at a school. At the time, they wanted to start a yoga program so I helped them organize that and bring in volunteers and whatnot. And saw the impact that the practice can have with students. And the yoga studio that I went to wasn't far from the school that I was working on at the time, but the practice looked entirely different and I started to pay attention to like, what is yoga look like in New York City? And why does it look so different than what it feels like in this classroom, where it's just kids coming together and volunteers coming together and exploring breath and body and movement, whereas it feels like this is exclusive little club outside. And that question, it just is what I do. I just keep asking myself that question all the time. What does it look like if wellness was something that was actually built for all of us? Because they do feel like, now with the experience I've had building organizations in the wellness industry that the wellness industry is more likely to make us sick than it is to make us well.
Tiffany Yu: You talked about feeling really grounded and at home in your body. I just loved that idea that if you come back to just knowing that it's within you, it's within your body, I think that's really beautiful. And then, there are so many things that inspire me about you and your leadership, but you really got me thinking about what wellness looks like by being exposed to your work over the past couple of years and learning more about the accessible yoga movement. It made me start to really think about what does disability and wellness look like? And the fact that we can all access that space.
Nicole Cardoza: Right. And everybody should deserve to be seen and celebrated in that space as well. It was just such a negative. I think so much of this industry has been built around the idea of what a well body looks like, what a healthy body looks like. Not just the wellness industry, but health overall, and gosh, that framework of what a healthy body looks like has left out so many people from the conversation. That alone . And it's really shaped what touch points, what access points people have to this practice. And I want to name too that it's easy to mixed up in this, but there's a wellness industry and then there's a wellness practice. And we've been taught that they're the same, right? Because that's how you are encouraged to buy things and take subscriptions and follow people. We feel like we have to contribute to the industry in order to receive the benefits of the practice. So I just need to name that too, as we talk about it, there is a space for all of us in the practice, even if we don't see it in the industry.
Tiffany Yu: So would you say that you are playing both in the industry and the practice?
Nicole Cardoza: I am. I am. Most of my work is around redistributing capital or redistributing assets in the industry. So I started a nonprofit, which has a philanthropic model that takes a lot of funding from corporate partners and redistributes that to make wellness more accessible in schools. And I just started a venture fund that does the same thing. It takes in money from investors, from LPs and redistributes it to people that are truly changing the industry through more diverse practices.
Tiffany Yu: I do want to get into that. The story of how this venture fund came about is really important. So I wanted to chat about what happened in 2019, only a year ago. You had this really incredible opportunity to be featured on the cover of Yoga Journal, which is the top yoga magazine in the country. I'd love for our listeners to hear about what happened, which then led you to start Reclamation Ventures.
Nicole Cardoza: Sure. Yes. I knew I wanted to start the fund for a while before this happened and I'd been thinking about it and planning for it, but I was really wrapped up full time with my nonprofit. And through my nonprofit, I got the opportunity to be featured in Yoga Journal magazine, and then got asked to be on the cover of the magazine, which I was super flattered by because it's a great way for my work to be seen and celebrated and the whole magazine issue was around the idea of transformation and that's what I stand for in this work. So I flew to Denver, I shot the cover, did a whole bunch of different shoots. We shot like three variations of what the cover could be just so. Because you never know what you want at the end, right, or what's going to look good. And then a couple of weeks later, the company had posted a survey on their social media and emailed it out to people, asking their community to vote, whether I should be on the cover or somebody else. And they had a picture of me side by side with an incredible teacher named Kathryn Budig who happens to be white and blonde and had our pictures up side by side.
Tiffany Yu: There was no name, right.
Nicole Cardoza: Right. That's correct. Yes. There was no by-lines on the covers and no words on the cover. It wasn't like, do you want to read about Kathryn's really amazing work or my amazing work? It was literally just a picture of us and we were both seated and we were both looking at the camera and we were both smiling and we both looked relatively casual and it was very, very similar. And they'd never done a cover test like this before with two different people. They've asked their community to vote, whether you'd want one picture or another, but they would be of the same person. Right? So I shot three covers. It could have easily had two pictures of me from two different parts of the shoot, but they chose not to. And they sent me an email and told me that they did that because they were afraid that my cover wouldn't sell, which is very indicative of how they felt. So they've also created a lot of harm against people of color on their covers in the past. This is not new for them. And so, they made it really clear. And I told them my response. Right. Not just how harmful that is and how disrespectful that is to me but how indicative that is in this industry, that major media companies or major brands have so much power to decide what wellness looks like and use that power in a way that is violent against people of color and perpetuates the same stereotypes that all of us that are in this work are looking to change. So the irony is, it was supposed to be a transformation issue and they were actually doing the opposite . So I sent them a note and they didn't respond, which really angered me. And so I shared it. I shared it publicly on social media because I know there's so many people that have had something like this happen to them, including myself. It might not be as blatant as the survey or the story or how disrespectful Yoga Journal was. But there's been so many instances where we've been told that we don't belong and that we're not good enough to be here.
Tiffany Yu: And I want to read something from your original post. You wrote, "What are they asking the community to choose between? I don't have the answers, but I know how this made me feel. I know how this comparison has made me feel for my entire life."
Nicole Cardoza: Yeah. Yeah.
Tiffany Yu: So all of a sudden so you shared this on social media. People are sharing this. I remember you came into our Summit Fellows WhatsApp group, and you said, Hey, I'm noticing that my social media is really growing exponentially. What do I do?
Nicole Cardoza: Right.
Tiffany Yu: So the reason why I want to ask you about this is because I think it's easy for many of us who hold multiple oppressed identities to just go into victim mode or to just move into inaction because it's just like, Oh, this is happening again. And you took action. So swiftly.
Nicole Cardoza: I just remember, I'm thinking about how hard that was. I remember posting it and then putting my phone down and making pancakes because I was really stressed and I needed to do something. And then I picked my phone back up and I saw how quickly it was growing. So I like opened wine and it was like morning, I had to have a glass of wine. It wasn't easy. It really wasn't easy, but really what inspired me was how many people shared it. The people that shared it for other people that have been marginalized. A lot of black women shared it really early on that are in my community. And so I was like, this is not just my story. This is all of our stories. Right. Like any of us that have been marginalized. And it felt like it was my responsibility to make sure it wasn't just a flash in the pan and it wasn't just me calling out something and walking away. So yeah, I reached out to the WhatsApp group. I reached out to as many people as possible and actually Natalie in the group connected me to somebody, who helped me organize and was like if you want to have this fund and you want to pay this forward, you should raise money and you should talk about it and get people excited and get people engaged and let them know that there's so many people willing to do this work longterm, even if Yoga Journal isn't. So that's what I did. I decided to raise money. I would give away grants of $5,000 to awesome entrepreneurs and put together the branding for RV and ultimately got Yoga Journal in addition to apologizing and committing to a bunch of shit that they never did. But the one thing they did do was give me all of the proceeds of that magazine. They put me on the cover and then gave me all of the profits of that magazine to reinvest back into the community.
Tiffany Yu: I will say I am the proud owner of a copy of one of those magazines. But I want to read something that Yoga Journal included in their letter in that issue. And then wanted to get an update from you 2020 as to what your relationship is with them now. So they wrote, "We have played a large role in making people feel that yoga and wellness are not for them." And then the editor closed letter by saying, "Nicole, we need you. "
Nicole Cardoza: That is so funny.
Tiffany Yu: Fast forward me to 2020. You had some interactions with Yoga Journal recently.
Nicole Cardoza: Yes. When everything ended publicly with the conversation around this and people stopped liking and commenting on the Instagram post or whatever, Yoga Journal committed to giving me the profits of the magazine. But they also committed to doing DEI work, so hiring consultants to come in and analyze how their hiring practices and their editorial practices contributed to this harm. They also promised to create an advisory board where they would have people that would be on the board to be able to help guide this that were representative of the yoga community. And I had agreed at that time to be a part of the advisory board, and told people both externally and internally with them that I'm in this work until it's done. Right. I'm not walking away. And so I didn't receive all of the money from them until March of 2020 so very recently. And they also promised to some other smaller things online, not smaller, but to me, less transformational to have this work be rectified. So I just want to name that before I go on. But I received the bulk of the funding and I didn't receive it until March, 2020. I actually paid for one of the grants out of pocket based off of the money that they had promised because I didn't receive it from them. And then, they consistently were very coy on whether or not they were doing this work when I would follow up with them over the course of the year. There's many times I sent them an email where they just simply didn't respond. And then in June, so just a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from their new brand manager or something like that, who prefaced the email, acknowledging that they still hadn't done the work. This is a year later. But then asking if they could use my image in an email that they were going to share for some type of solidarity with black lives and they needed my response by end of business day. And again, another year has gone by and the same type of harm is perpetuating. Like you once again, want to use my image in a way that is highly disrespectful for me and not representative of this community. And in this case, so just to serve you and to save face for you in the wake of a revolutionary time. So I was really mad about it and I sat on it for maybe a week just thinking about how I would show up. But what started happening is I realized they were asking other black women the same thing and probably people from other backgrounds for things like this throughout the course of the year. But it was very apparent to me in this -- the month of performative allyship, like seeing other black women calling them out on their own social media and feeling like once again, I need to step into this conversation. Right. Because I did say I'd be accountable for this. And so called them out again two weeks ago.
Tiffany Yu: Yeah. And, is any response still to be determined?
Nicole Cardoza: They have not responded to me since I've both emailed them and posted what I posted on social media. They posted something on their Instagram saying that they would be doing a diversity report, but that feels like very too little too late. They also said they're going to be donating a few grand to the community, which to me is very clear that they're not willing to put the money where the work needs to happen unless they can physically show it. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like, you should've invested that money a long time ago into bringing some DEI consultants in internally and it doesn't have to cost you that much money to build an advisory board. But it's a bigger conversation now of like, who are we willing to support? And I know that people that carry that magazine are not interested in supporting people like that. And people that sponsor that magazine aren't interested in supporting that. And so what I hope comes out of this is not just a larger conversation of them being accountable for the space that they take up in this industry, but the brands that support them and the people that support them to hold them accountable too.
Tiffany Yu: Yeah. I want to come back to this conversation on performative allyship, all amidst a recession and a pandemic, and probably a lot of other things to come. So let's take a quick break here. And then when we come back, we will continue chatting with Nicole.
[break]
Tiffany Yu: And we're back from the break. This is Tiffany here, and you're listening to this episode of Tiffany & Yu with Nicole Cardoza. Hi Nicole.
Nicole Cardoza: Hi.
Tiffany Yu: Before the break, we were chatting about Nicole's wellness journey, both into the industry and into her own practice and controversy over being on the cover of Yoga Journal and some of the things they have, or haven't done since then. So as we're recording this, we are a little over three months into the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the other things that has really impressed me about Nicole's leadership has been how she has pivoted all of the different ventures to adapt to the pandemic. So Nicole, want to bring you back in. As a leader of Yoga Foster, you were really transparent around what was happening with the organization.
Nicole Cardoza: Yeah, I felt like I had to because , especially in wellness that we have a health pandemic happening and I run wellness companies. And I think it's important to be clear on how the impact of this impacts the health disparities and exacerbates the health disparities that are already existing. Yoga Foster is a nonprofit. I mentioned that we redistribute resources from the wellness community. We make most of our funding off of working with yoga studios and yoga brands that host fundraisers for us. Most of those fundraisers are in person. And so knowing that business model had been completely disrupted first and foremost, it was important to name. And then two, we work in schools. And as we know, kids stopped going to school and they started to learn remote at home. And there's so much stress and anxiety generally with what's happening right now, compounded with the fact that a lot of kids don't have parents at home that are available to help them learn remote learning. A lot of our students don't have access to the internet or extra devices to be learning on all day or both. This health pandemic really reshaped what it meant to be working in this space. And so I just wanted to turn things inside out, and we just started for the first few weeks to start sharing week by week, what was happening with us, and how we were pivoting, and what we were looking at. We lost about 90% of our revenue forecasted for the year. We had to lay somebody off. We had to apply for everything under the sun. And I think those things are compounded for being -- We're only a few years old. I'm a black female founder, and it's already difficult to be able to navigate those spaces. There's so few nonprofits run by black women. All of that I think is important to name because that's a part of this work.
Tiffany Yu: The transparency is really important too, because I feel like people only see the accolades, like Forbes 30 Under 30, Summit Impact Fellow, 60,000 subscribers on this Anti-Racism Daily. But there is a work, there is a work that happens behind the scenes. But you all transitioned Reclamation Ventures to create an emergency fund. Tell me a little bit more about the RV emergency fund.
Nicole Cardoza: Yeah. So similar thing, initially RV was giving away grants that helped people grow and scale their businesses in wellness, which is critically important. But as soon as we started seeing the impact of COVID, I realized that our community, which is underestimated entrepreneurs, which is a term that I got from Arlan Hamilton who runs Backstage Capital. That underestimated, it means anybody who's seen as undervalued and how their potential is as an entrepreneur. So it's black and Brown founders, people with visible or invisible disabilities, people across the LGBTQIA spectrum, people impacted by the criminal justice system. We know that those communities are the most likely to be impacted by COVID right. A lot of our brick and mortar yoga studios that are run by people of color don't have as much runway as other ones that are funded by private equity firms, for example. So we shifted to say, instead of us trying to do more grants and strategic investments, which we are going to start this year, why don't we just give money to these people? Just direct cash to help at-- The first round we did, we raised about $150,000 to give away grants up to $2,500 per person just to cover a month of lost revenue. And then we just launched a second round that we're doing. Because that's what the community needs right now. And again, it's like how we do this work and why we do this work is just as important, if not more important, than what we do. And so if what it means to be well has fundamentally shifted in America in 2020, so does the work.
Tiffany Yu: One of the things you said, you said, because what the community needs, right. And again, looking at the portfolio of really incredible things that you do . I'm just so impressed by the way that you see something that's needed, and then you say, I need to be the one to do this. I want to dig into a little bit of like, how that fire comes about? Because the RV emergency fund is great. And the fact that you are bringing it back is amazing. Right. How as a leader, are you thinking through these decisions of what needs to get done?
Nicole Cardoza: Really good question. Thank you for the inquiry on that. There's so many things that I see that I think need to get done and 99.9% I know that I can't. You know what I mean? Like there's so many things I don't know how to fix. I think about climate change, global warming all the time on this, like, Oh my gosh. There's probably so many better ways to be thinking about harnessing energy or creating recycling programs. But like, I know I don't know. I don't know anything else than identifying the problem. But when I see things that are close to my experience that I've had as an entrepreneur, I try to spend more time with it because I'm intimately familiar with the problem. I know what it's like to have lack of access to capital. I know what it's like to feel ostracized when I've walked into a yoga studio before. And in the cases of capital, that's something that I feel more and more that I have the capacity to solve. I'm incredibly privileged based on the connections I've created and the people I've met along my journey as an entrepreneur. I'm also incredibly privileged that I'm a light skinned, able bodied, cisgendered, black woman, you know what I mean? I can leverage my privilege to be able to help people that might not have the same opportunities. So that's what I see is there are a few very small sliver of problems in the world that I think I can give a shot at. And I'm very willing to fail because I've failed so many times in my life. I don't know about you, but the fact that I can do anything still surprises me to this day because there's been so many things that I've tried to do that like have completely backfired or just like not work. I just try to do what I can, where I can . And see how it goes.
Tiffany Yu: That's beautiful. And I think what I'm hearing is, you know where your sphere of influence is, right? You know what your locust of control is of the things that you have either subject matter expertise or lived experience expertise on. Right. And that's where you tackle them. Right. And there's so many other issues. Again, it's almost like we see the highlight reel, which is all the Reclamation Ventures and Yoga Foster and Anti-Racism Daily, but there are all these other issues that other people who have more expertise are working on.
Nicole Cardoza: Oh totally, and also too, like you see the highlight reel and don't realize the pain that came before it. A lot of people recognized me because of the Yoga Journal article and thought-- I remember, I was just talking to somebody who thought I had just started Yoga Foster and it's like, I was doing Yoga Foster for six years. I didn't really get a salary until 2019. I know what it is like to start a startup and not have access to capital, for example, you know? And so I really want to reiterate what you said is like, it's so easy to feel like you don't belong based off of somebody else's highlight reel because we rarely get an opportunity to talk about those experiences. Once we do get to a place right where we have more influence to.
Tiffany Yu: Yeah. Yeah. So we chatted about this COVID-19 pandemic, there's also a mental health crisis, there's also a civil rights revolution. And before the break we were chatting about your relationship with Yoga Journal. They came back in wanting to feature you, your picture in something, but acknowledging that they hadn't held themselves accountable to some of the things that you had laid out, worked with them on, agreed to from a year ago. So now with police brutality, unfortunately, not a new thing, but it has opened up so many non-black people's eyes to the need for anti-racist work. And again, you moved so swiftly into action, creating a daily email newsletter called the Anti-Racism Daily. Tell me a little bit more about it.
Nicole Cardoza: Yeah. And it wasn't something I knew I was starting at the time. I think like many other black people, had a lot of people just like calling or texting, asking if I was okay or checking in. People I haven't talked to in years, people who were like, I still don't know who they are cause they have my number, but I didn't save theirs. Also because of the work that I do, I navigate a lot of white-dominated spaces. I have a lot of people that identify as white that follow me. And I was even getting shared on social media as an anti-racism activist, which I don't consider myself or an educator, which I didn't consider myself simply because of what the Yoga Journal story has done. Right. Although I've talked about this stuff for years, it was like the very public display of racism in wellness. Right. So I was getting really frustrated with all of this and feeling very overwhelmed because I was also just trying to grapple with how I show up during this time as a black woman in my own body, regardless of what everybody else thinks or everybody else's awakening. And so I posted something on social media. I'm like, I'll just send a daily email to people every single day with things that you can do, because I know there's a million and I'm not going to answer everybody in my inbox. Right. I'm not gonna hold space for people one at a time. I can just send you a link to something you do every day. And I posted it just thinking whatever. And then , I think in 24 hours, 8,000 people had signed up. And then it just became a thing. I'm still very surprised by how quickly that grew.
Tiffany Yu: And today I think you said it has over 60,000 subscribers.
Nicole Cardoza: Yeah, so it's grown pretty quickly and now I'm putting energy into it. Before it was an email that I was sending for that reason of like, I just want people to get into action for a couple of reasons. One, I know that people in wellness know how to practice. But people in wellness tend to-- white people in wellness tend to get really angry or upset or agitated about these kinds of things and then disappear. Right. Because that's what happened with Yoga Journal. I posted. Everybody was sharing it for like a week or so, and then I never heard from these people again. But we know how to practice. We literally talk about, you practice yoga. A foundation of the philosophy of yoga is practicing consistently over time with enthusiasm, right? It is not something that was designed to just do once and walk away from. So people know how to practice, and I think that creating a practice around anti-racism is the only thing that's going to solve it in America because we can't just allow ourselves to get activated and walk away.
Tiffany Yu: Yeah, we had Corey Ponder on the podcast and he talked a lot about how we need to make anti-racism work a habit. So you created this email newsletter. Again, so many things that I appreciate you about you as a leader is that you have made it accessible. So if people do have the means, they can contribute one time through PayPal or Venmo, or they can subscribe on Patreon. Or if they don't have the means, they can just subscribe. Right. You never wanted to be behind a paywall.
Nicole Cardoza: Yep. Yeah. And I intend to keep it that way as well. And people that are supporting have made it sustainable for us to hire an editor, and because I've been writing them quickly and there's been typos and things like that. But I'm bringing on another writer onto the team and paying guest editors and paying scholars , actual anti-racism scholars who are contributing to this work. And so, I'm inspired by what it can turn into. I didn't think that when I said I would send out a daily email, it would turn into something with its own URL and its own staff. And so I'm grateful that so many people are committed to doing this work because it's the only way that it changes. We need everybody to be doing this work and I don't care if you sign up for my newsletter or not, but commit to doing this work every day. Usually, what we do is we take what's happening in the news and we provide the historical context. Context that in America was often stripped of our history books. So we weren't even provided informal education. But if you're not paying attention, you might not learn either. And so I want people to be paying attention to the news. I want people to understand the depth of the harm that's happening in commute to communities of color, to black people in particular, because that's where we are right now. And take action every day, whether it's showing up at the polls or signing petitions or being more mindful of the language that they use. And a million other things too.
Tiffany Yu: One of the things I've been reflecting on and you alluded to this is how much content are we consuming that has a non-black gaze? How much content are we consuming that also comes from a male gaze, right, or a white male dominated gaze? And that's something to keep in mind as well. And at least for me, having Anti-Racism Daily newsletter coming in my inbox every day is a reminder, Oh, have you taken an action today or, Oh, is there something within this space or something you want to read or a conversation you want to have that you haven't had yet?
Nicole Cardoza: Yep. Absolutely. And there's an able bodied gaze too. And what I've learned so much about your work is how consistently you push that and all of the work that you're doing in SF too. And I also think that we're missing the intersectionality of all of this as well. Right? Like there's just so many layers to how systemic oppression is perpetuated.
Tiffany Yu: This is what is complex about intersectionality. I want to close with two questions. I want to start with now that the newsletter has been out for about a month, are you finding that there are specific themes or content that are really resonating with your readers?
Nicole Cardoza: Yes, there's definitely a lot of energy around the conversations around politics, from voter suppression. Voter supression was a big one in talking about what happened at the Kentucky primaries, but more importantly, how voter suppression has been historically used to mute people, all different types of marginalized people. And we looked at it from a lens of black people and then calling out Trump. I called out Trump and the racist things that he says and named him as a racist and emphasized how important it is for us to be watching the violence and the terror that he incites and how necessary it is for us to remember that when we go to the polls and simply don't vote for him. So I think that's something that is resonating and I think that's something that's rising in society. We are seeing more than ever over the past couple of months, how critical leadership is during turbulent times, and I think many people would agree that Trump hasn't been handling it well to put it lightly. So that's something that's really resonating. And then interpersonal racism, so how can we show up better to supporting our neighbors and our friends , from asking people if they're okay to apologizing to having conversations with the racist people in our families. That has resonated too.
Tiffany Yu: Yeah. Racism is a whole system, right? That has these different levers from interpersonal to institutional at the top. I work in the disability space. How can we tackle racism within our own community? Right. So, I think all of us have something that we can do.
Nicole Cardoza: Yes. And what people have been emailing me is that they've realized that they can do stuff that they didn't even realize was possible. Like somebody wrote me that they had written a letter to their local officials to remove a Confederate statue and they did. Realizing that, like, how often are we walking through life feeling like we don't have the power to change what we see? And this is the time more than any other time. I mean, the best time to have done this as yesterday. The second best time to do it is now, to take the opportunity to change and fix what is broken in your sphere of influence or what has been designed to work from a place of inequity that needs to be redone.
Tiffany Yu: Beautiful. So I know you have done a lot of things that we have all benefited from, whether it's from Yoga Foster, Reclamation Ventures, and the Anti-Racism Daily, what are you learning through all of this?
Nicole Cardoza: I feel more and more empowered to create change. It's taken me a long time to find my voice and I've done so much unlearning around whether or not I belong as an entrepreneur and just in spaces and as a black woman. And so I am grateful for all of the work I've done over the past few years has helped me find my voice and practice it and use it both literally and figuratively. And I'm also learning from the Anti-Racism Daily in particular, I'm also learning a lot that I didn't learn. So there's a lot of factual things that I'm learning. I don't think I would have spent a few hours researching the deep history of voter suppression in the way that I am to consolidate it concisely in an email. So , those are the two things, some tactical facts, but also I'm very excited about who I am becoming.
Tiffany Yu: If people want to follow you or support your work, what's the best way to do that?
Nicole Cardoza: I live digitally on Instagram. You can follow me there at @nicoleacardoza or go to my website at nicoleacardoza.com to find more about the projects I have.
Tiffany Yu: Awesome. And what are you doing for your mental health?
Nicole Cardoza: Taking walks in nature. I am currently in a little cabin in Alaska and just overwhelmed by the beauty of nature here. So being outside,
Tiffany Yu: Yeah. I loved having you on the show, Nicole. I have been reflecting on this podcast and one of the many things that I love about being able to do it is to reconnect with you in this way, but then for other people to get to learn more about your work.
Nicole Cardoza: Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me here and also thank you for holding this space.