Diversity

The past few days have been emotional for women all around the world. For me, our civil liberties have been diminished and I wonder about our dystopian world.

As we develop each of our MEA campuses, we brainstorm the adjectives and experiences that might create a set of original spaces.

It is difficult to describe how it felt last month when Ketanji Jackson Brown was sworn in as an Associate Justice to the highest court in the land. As a Black woman living in the U.S. for my entire life (interrupted with consistent forays to other countries).

Women and midlife is often a lot more complicated than engaging a therapist, buying a sports car, and popping out the other side as a new person. There are a myriad of complex issues for women, and often multiple events that seem to have a compounding effect. The whole thing can be quite dramatic and go on for years.

As I write this blog, I have the row to myself on a morning flight to Cabo for MEA Mastery Week with Carl Honoré 18 hours ago I had no idea I’d be here. It had been 3+ years since I’d been in MEA’s second public cohort - Soul Train - to become a Modern Elder.

Chip’s Note: This guest post comes from one of MEA’s Activists in Residence, Evelyn Reynolds, who just spent a couple weeks with us in Baja. We first became aware of Evelyn through ageism activist Ashton Applewhite and Evelyn’s Huffington Post essay, “Aging While Black.”

Juneteenth (June 19) is a holiday celebrating the 1865 emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. Last night, sculptor Dana King’s 350 ancestral sculptures were unveiled as a new work of radically inclusive art in the heart of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park as conceived in concert with MEA alum Ben Davis called Monumental Reckoning.

In 1980, Diana Ross released the song "I’m Coming Out." In 1980, I was 21 years old and just graduated from college. I moved from Illinois to San Francisco. That song became the LGBTQ anthem, about declaring who you were and being proud.

This recently-published study shows that many advocates for diversity and inclusion in the workplace have cognitive dissonance when it comes to age discrimination. The same progressively-minded folks who support more opportunities for women, people of color, LGBTQ employees and those with a disability often feel conflicted when it comes to keeping older people in the workplace longer.

Do women feel included in narratives about soul work when the loudest voices are from men? MEA alum Douglas Tsoi and Wisdom Well subscriber Jennifer Villeneuve are friends and colleagues at Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with Stanford’s Graduate School of Education focused on kids' well-being and lifelong engagement with learning.