Analiza: Sharhonda is CEO of education, leaders of color, we call it EdLoc. And she's been such a committed advocate for black and brown children for such a long time. It's all about how we support students making sure that they have an adequate educational opportunity before being CEO. She was Edloc’s Deputy Director, and the background about EdLoc is that it supports talented leaders of color, including myself in education, she also brings legislative and electoral campaign experience. So tons and tons of experience, and has worked across states and across the country in so many different ways. So I'm so so thrilled to have you, Sharhonda, here. Thank you. Let's start with the story of just your upbringing, and how you had your education and then even to where you are today.

Sharhonda: Yeah. So thanks for having me again. So I'm Sharhonda Bossier. And the last name actually comes from my maternal grandfather, who raised me so I was born in Los Angeles, in 1984. And that is important because it helps I think people understand a little bit about the cultural moment in which I kind of came of age, right. So I was born to two parents who struggled with addiction at the height of what people often talked about as like the crack era, right. And as a result of that was raised by my grandparents, both of whom had migrated to California as part of the great migration, they left southern Louisiana. So hence the funny last name. And my grandparents really sort of instilled in me the importance of community. My grandmother was a devout Catholic woman. So I spent a lot of time in church, and she would nail or hammered into me the importance of service from a really early age. But I think my grandparents also wanted to ensure that I had a strong sense of self, a strong sense of blackness, a strong sense of community, and that and a strong sense of responsibility to my family and to other people around me. And so I think my grandparents really focused on always telling me the truth, even when things were hard, right. So when we talk about particular cultural flashpoint in this moment, you know, I was here and a young kid when the 92, riots erupted, right, and so to have grandparents who were able to kind of step back and help me make sense of that was really important to my understanding of not just what it meant to resist, but what it meant to try and understand my place in the world as a black child, and went to public schools for most of my life. In middle school, I went to Catholic school because middle schools in LAUSD did not provide the kinds of educational experiences my grandparents wanted for me, but by the time I made it to high school, they couldn't afford the tuition anymore. So I went on to a public high school. And my grandmother died two weeks before I started high school. And that's a really important thing for me, because I was 13 trying to navigate you know, being a teenager moving from a tiny Catholic school to a large, comprehensive public high school, trying to find my way in the world. Without the woman who had been my mother for much of my life, for all intensive purposes. I had some teachers who really saw in me a ton of potential, despite the fact that I was a really angry child and was lashing out at everything that represented or smacked of authority at that point in my life. And when I went away to college at the University of California at Santa Cruz, right, so I'm a proud banana slug. I also sort of found a way to channel some of that anger, and some of that frustration into activism, right, and also into trying to change the diversity of the student population at UC Santa Cruz. And so it was really involved in early academic outreach programs, and you know, recruitment programs, etc. Trying to convince other black kids to go to school in the middle of the woods is what we used to joke about, right. But in my second year of undergrad, I got a job as a writing tutor. And really, I took that job because one of my writing instructors suggested that I do it, and it paid well. And I didn't have to scrape plates in the food hall. So that worked. And I realized really quickly that all of the kids who were coming into the Writing Center were my friends, right? They were all the kids of color who had gone to high schools like mine who have come from homes and families and communities like mine, and we're struggling to make it through the university. And that is sort of my first real understanding of, like, the systemic and deeply entrenched problems in education, right? Because we were the good kids. We had done all of the right things, so to speak, we had played by the rules, we had made it to the UC. And so the fact that we were all struggling in some way, was not our fault. And that is the moment it hit me. And that actually is what pushed me to go into education. I had originally gone away thinking I was going to be a lawyer. I started teaching and stayed in the classroom for five years. I taught in California, Texas, and in New York, which is where you and I met, and I left the classroom ultimately, because I felt like even the best schools right? We're not often meeting the needs of the young people. They were serving. And I had not yet thought about my role in helping change systems. So I spent, as you know, right, four years trying to build an organization that was designed to support parents in demanding more from public schools. And so I've spent the past, you know, now, oh, my goodness, nine ish years, thinking more about systems change, right, and thinking more about what it would mean to not have to create organizations like the one I helped found and launch, because systems should just be inherently responsive, responsive to the people they serve, particularly when those people are children.

Analiza: Sharhonda, there's so much there in terms of grandmother's influence, and just how you even channeled your strong belief in being black, which is, I think, a beautiful thing for me, personally, I didn't really get that embedded. You know, being Filipino was something to be proud of. I was trying to assimilate into whiteness, and have now just come back to saying, You know what, all of that was beautiful. And I'm really proud to be Filipino. So I, it's so special that your grandparents really drove that home with you at such a young age. So can you just talk more about that?

Sharhonda: Yeah, music and food were two of the big, big things. So my grandfather loves blues, loved, you know, Sam Cooke and James Brown, and you know, so like, music was always a thing in our house. And what's interesting is that black music always explores themes around blackness, right and Black Beauty, etc. And then I had older cousins, right, who played Public Enemy, that sort of stuff, right? So even just in like, the entertainment that was happening, it was like, James Brown was singing on black and I'm proud, right? If Public Enemy was singing, you know, fight the power. And so even though those were things that were not of my generation, they were like musical influences and messages that I was exposed to pretty early, just like hanging out in the house, right? Or just like being at a family gathering. For my grandmother. My grandmother is originally from New Orleans, right? And so food was like a big thing, right? So Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, right? Like we ate all sorts of cultural foods like gumbo and like the, the entire block ate it if my grandmother cooked, right? So everybody was like, Is your grandmother make it? I know, it's New Year's, you know, was she making it? So that was like a big part of it too. And because people were coming over to eat it to spend time with us, it felt like oh, my grandmother's a good cook. And this is a way of her sharing home with us. My grandparents also gardened, right, so they grew most of our vegetables when we were kids. And part of that was also a thing about back home. So I think that for me, it wasn't just blackness, it was this sense that my grandparents had come from this other place, right? And that they were bringing with them these things that were of this other place, but that were so cool that other people wanted to enjoy them with us. We were also part of a church community, where lots of other people were the children or grandchildren of folks who had settled in California, from Texas and from Louisiana, right. So even all of our church events, right, were deeply rooted in like, things and customs and like, you know, stuff that our grandparents or parents did back home. And so I just think there was this constant reinforcement that like, we were doing cool stuff, right. And other people wanted to be part of it. And then to have that sort of reinforced through some of the music, etc. But my grandparents were also people of that generation. Were like, you bought the encyclopedias, you know, you you, you bought the black history anthology. And I think it also helped that people thought we were cute kids, right? I think we can't underestimate that either. Right? So if my grandmother would braid our hair and put beads on it, etc. People are like, Oh, I really like your hair. So we just got tons of affirmation, not just from our family, but from our community, even people who were not black, which I think made us feel like oh, this we're doing cool stuff over here.

Analiza: What a celebration not just internally in the home, but with your village, your neighbors and then even people I mean, white people, it's I love that so young to have it. So I want to pivot and talk about just your dreams as a young girl. I mean, you're now CEO, and I'm wondering if you had mentioned earlier I was angry that I channeled that into activism, I got my black and brown friends to, you know, start to rally. And so I'm curious back then, were you fed some myths about what the world would be like? You know, what possibilities were there for you and your career, and we're going to focus on your career. There's much to believe in. But for you, Sharhonda myths, what did you listen to?

Sharhonda: To be clear, I didn't really know what life I wanted to live. I knew what life I didn't want to live, right. So all around me there were examples of the kinds of life I didn't want to live. And I thought I either had to be a lawyer or a doctor, right? Like that felt like the two tracks. And it wasn't because my grandparents had said that to me, it was just that I didn't know what else you did if you went to college, you know, and I didn't want to be a teacher initially, right? And so I took a bio in ninth grade and was like, Ooh, no, science is not for me. So I guess being a doctor's out. And that meant, like I could I could become a lawyer, I was a strong writer, you know, etc. And I think a couple of things that I learned pretty early. One was the expectations around marriage and partnership, right? And how those expectations would impact what career is available to me. So I was supposed to be career driven until I met somebody, right? And then I was supposed to get married. And then my career was supposed to become less important to me, right. And I don't think we think about all of the ways that we reinforce that even in professional or higher ed settings, right. The second was, that as a black woman, particularly if I were to become a high earning black woman, it was highly likely that I was going to be the breadwinner, and whatever a romantic or a partnership dynamic, I was going to find myself in right that there wouldn't that I wouldn't have many peers and that I especially wouldn't have many black men peers, right. And that in order to be myself, I or excuse me, in order to be successful, I would have to be a watered down version of myself. So you know me well enough to know, I always have one bright nail color polish. I have one big bamboo pair of earrings right now. There's like nail art happening over here, right? And I think even early in my career, right? I'd show up sometimes with bright nail polish, because it's the summer and you're supposed to wear bright nail polish. And this summer, people were like, What are you doing right? Or that I couldn't have facial piercings. I have my nose pierced, right? Or I couldn't have visible tattoos. Basically, my whole left arm is tattooed at this point, right? All of these things around my physical appearance, particularly as a black woman that people told me would be roadblocks or hurdles to my success, right. And I think this idea that I would always have to report to or work with white people, right? If I wanted to do work that was meaningful, or if I wanted to earn a certain income, right, and I think what's been beautiful about Edloc is that it has really been an organization for us, right? That we've been able to sort of create and cast a vision for what a collective can and and does look like, if we are all focused on each other, we've been able to get support and resources to do that work, right. And so this is coming to a Edloc was the first time I didn't have a white boss, right? It was the first time I didn't have white board members, right, it was the first time that the only people around the table making decisions about our collective work aside from some of our funding partners, right where people of color, and it's been a significant shift. And so I think the two you know, it's like the, if you were too successful as a woman, right, this is going to have an impact on the other parts of your life. If you want to be really successful, or you know, live a certain standard of life you're going to have to work with or for white people. And in order to be successful, you cannot be who you are, represent where you come from, I think are all things that just my experiences have taught me doesn't necessarily need to or have to be true.

Analiza: So I want to go deeper into that, because those myths are quite powerful. And you went to UC Santa Cruz, really great school in the UC system. So I'm curious, those messages that you described. Can you nail down like I really heard that from this one person, this one place?

Sharhonda: I think Santa Cruz was the place that particularly the stuff around gender was disrupted, right? I think. I think about like my intro to feminism's right poor off class as a, as a first year student, right being one of the first places where it was like, Oh, those things don't have to be true. But I think I learned the stuff around gender truthfully from my grandmother, right? So I credit her with so much. But she got married for the first time at 16. Right? And she didn't necessarily want me to rush into marriage, but she definitely thought marriage should be a priority for me. And it's for instance, one of the reasons she taught me to cook. She's like, You have a little bit of an attitude. You're not that great of a dancer, you need some skills. We're gonna make you a good cook. Right? Like that was her investment in making me marketable on the marriage market, so to speak, right. And I think in hindsight, right, I'm like, she died when I was 13. So we were having those conversations really early, you know, the stuff around how I look, I happened a lot in high school, right. So truthfully, I told you I was a little bit of a rebel. I got my first tattoo when I was 12. Right. And I got my first piercing when I was like 14 and then in my junior year of high school and junior to senior year of high school, we participated in a student documentary. And my tongue was pierced, right? And the documentary team was like, you have to take it out. Right? So like me and I was like, I mean, I'm 16 17 years old, I have a tongue piercing, like, everybody has Tongue piercings, you know. And so just like small things like that, where I'm like, I'm the star student, I'm the person running the student club that you all want to profile, but you're making me change how I look in order to do it. And then the stuff around, you know, working with and for white people, I think is something that I'm constantly battling, right. And, even when we think about who funds and supports our work, right, like just given the way that our society is structured, given sort of who has resources and access and who doesn't. The idea that you can create a successful organization and have it be all people of color, I think, is something that I'm fighting to prove day in and day out.

Analiza: I mean, Sharhonda, the Edloc community is such a special one, I get questions about where can people deliberately thrive, and I honestly don't have a very long list or much of a list at all, and AdBlock is one of them. And so it's such a special thing that you're creating. And yet, it's, it is difficult in the system that we're in to even operate one that you're trying to operate. So before we talk more about that, I'd love to talk about just your experiences. And before being CEO at lock, what, when you look back, when you look back at your career, and you're trying to have the impact you're looking you have you've left the classroom, what experience do you find the hardest, and growing and having the impact you wanted, as a person of color.

Sharhonda: I'll talk about my first job out of the classroom. So I had a ton of organizing experience, you know, I'd started doing organizing work in high school and college, I've volunteered for campaigns, you know, managed a couple have been on a couple of independent expenditures, etc. And when I was looking to leave the classroom I reached out to some folks that I had known from the campaign world who had been deeply involved with Bloomberg. Right, and he's running for mayor. And it was an interesting time in New York City, because it really was this marriage between sort of the ed reform world, and the Democratic kind of political establishment, right. And so I'm looking for my next gig and in that context, and I get, you know, sort of put in contact with some folks who are trying to build this parent advocacy organization, right. And what was great about it was I got to try a bunch of stuff at 26. At that point in my career, I think what was hardest about it was I had always worked in schools, where there were people who had deeper experience, professionally in life than I had, right. But it was the first time that I was working with people who were my peers or younger, right? And I was like, Oh, we are the adults in the film. Hold on a second, right. So there's a lot of us trying to figure it all out together, I find myself sitting across the table from people who are hedge funders, right? Who makes hundreds of millions of dollars, right, who, for whatever reason, are interested in what's happening in some remote corner of a city that they've never been to, never been in, etc. And it was the first time that I had to confront what racism looks like, in interactions with people who voted the same way I did, right? So because my family had deep roots in the south, and we'd go visit my grandparents or we'd go back home. Often, I knew what kind of more overt racism looked like and felt like, right? I didn't know what it meant to sit across from someone and have something, have them say something that's like, racist, and you're like, was that racist? I don't know. They voted for Obama. Can they also be right? So you're constantly doing this thing. And then you realize that like, even if your interests overlap in this one place, they probably don't, and so many others. And so you're confronting this constant thing of trying to be in community in solidarity and coalition with someone who probably doesn't actually share your worldview. The other thing is that I learned a lot of lessons there about how people will leverage your skills, experience and proximity for their own credibility. I hadn't thought about the ways in which my presence as a black woman who grew up poor, who had also had to navigate a really shitty public education system, lend credibility to other people who would not have otherwise been able to organize or mobilize those same people, right. And then I hadn't thought about, you know, what it meant to come to the realization that what you were doing, wasn't what you thought you were doing, right? So I got into the work because I wanted to think about how we could push back against a system and we slowly got co-opted by a different system, right? And to have to confront that and to think about what it meant to walk away from something that you had built from The Ground Up. And so I left that experience pretty wounded, you know, and pretty unsure if even in even in the seat of relative power that I thought I sat in all of those things happen to me and happen to other people who were there because of me, right, sort of what was what was possible and thinking not just about changing systems, but even just thinking about changing the dynamics on like, a 10 person team, you know, so, but I learned a lot of lessons. After that, and I'm not gonna lie, it's been three years really like talking through processing, working through what, what that meant for me, not just as a professional, but as a black woman who cared deeply about the families we were working with.

Analiza: So I want to talk about this idea of working in a solidarity community with people who you want to be on the same team with, but there is racism happening. And that there are times when you need to pick your battles. These people often have power, often your bosses often are on the board. How do you navigate that? How does that also play a role in your career?

Sharhonda: Yeah, I'm not proud of this answer. And part of that is because of just the realities of nonprofit fundraising, right. And, and the reality, again, the reality of like, who has wealth in this country, right. So for as long as I'm on the fundraising circuit, year over year, right, it is likely that I'm asking people for money, who do not think of me as their equal, you know, who see me and the work I do as charity, who were fine to do it, because it assuages some, you know, sense of guilt they have right. And, and that is hard, I think there are places where you have, you know, where there's very clear misalignment where you're like, actually, we don't share a worldview at all, and so right, but I increasingly am finding myself looking for the places of overlap. And looking for the places where, you know, we can work together on something, even if I think we might not, we not, we might not fully align on all of our values, I'll say to you, I think it's harder for us to name when it's happening between and among communities of color, right. And so as the network has grown increasingly diverse, you know, we've had to confront what it means to invite Asian and Pacific Islander Americans into our community, right, because we have started as a black and Latin X network, we've had to talk about what it means to support other leaders of color in naming and confronting the anti blackness that exist in their cultures, right? And like how that might show up in their engagements and interactions with us. We've had to talk about why some of our black Latino members don't go to the Latinx stuff we do, right? Because they're like, oh, when y'all say, Latino, I don't think you mean me. Right? And you were like, but you're Panamanian? Right? Like, you're actually flipped. So that would include you. And they're like, Yeah, but in other cultures Lee has, you know, Latino spaces, I'm not invited, or I'm not welcomed, or I'm not included. And so we are in trying to build this multiracial coalition, having to have some really hard conversations about how we, even as people of color, who want to stand in solidarity with each other, have to confront and unpack our own stuff around race and racism, how, you know, whiteness and white supremacy are not only represented by the presence of white people, right? How our desire in many ways to be proximate to whiteness, real or perceived, right, has also tainted our ability to build community even among each other, right? And those are some of the hardest conversations to have. Because again, I don't think we are as practiced at looking in the mirror and talking about those parts of ourselves. And, and because the invisible hand of whiteness is still very much shaping how we are engaging with each other, right? And it's easy to put all of the onus on those systems and on those people, rather than to say like, actually, I've internalized some stuff that I gotta, you know, I gotta purge. And so that is actually where I'm spending most of my time right now is thinking about what it means to build and sustain and maintain this multiracial coalition that I think is critical to any of the work that we want to do.

Analiza: Agreed. Let me just take my own example and hear what's happening to others. And eventually it happens to you. And so we're all connected, there is internalized racism. There's also anti-blackness within our own community, and we need to name it so that we can start to address it. So it's interesting to even have this conversation because when we talk about getting to the top, we're talking about it White supremacist system, right? We're not talking about like, let's pull all down and start our own thing. We're talking about how do we continue to have an impact within the sectors that are white dominated? And so it is this tension that, you know, I want to make sure I name that we're talking about the system, and how do we work to get to the top and hopefully, you know, be the change, although it's very hard when we talk about you growing in your career, and we're going to stay with that it is a white supremacist you don't live in, although we acknowledge that our white people are doing anti racist work. And we appreciate that. What did you learn along the way in growing in your career, and now being CEO? Was there a moment, a couple of moments that you learned really what it would take to get to the top?

Sharhonda: I underestimated how important it was for people to like you? And that might sound right. I was definitely like, my work will speak for itself, but I think I was like, ah, people actually have to know me. Right? They have to feel like they like me. One of the things that I learned was that for funders, and for mentors in particular, right? I needed to cultivate relationships across lines of difference, right? So by that I meant, I mean, I couldn't only seek out mentors who were black women, right? First of all, there were too few of them in positions of leadership. Secondly, they couldn't move for all of the reasons we know. And all of the reasons, we've talked about the same level of resources in support of me and my work that maybe a white man or even a white woman could write. So I started to try and figure out who were the folks who could, even if they couldn't see themselves in me, because I learned that part of the reason that some of my white male peers in particular, were successful was because people would sit down with him at lunch and say, Oh, I see myself in you, right? Or you remind me of a friend of mine, or you remind me of my own kid sometimes, right. And it was unlikely they were going to have a similar experience with me. But I could figure out where there was that point of connection. And just be very clear about what my needs were. Right. So as an example, my current executive coach is a white woman, right? And I was like, Look, girl, there are some experiences you've had in your career as a woman that like are going to be helpful and are going to be instructive to me, as long as you and I can both name that there are some experiences you have not had, because I'm a black woman, or you are a white woman, that's cool. Are you willing to help identify other folks who might be able to lean in as additional sources of advice and counsel on these particular, you know, questions? So I'd learned to name the thing, right. And I learned to be explicit about where I thought someone could be of value to me, because sometimes we've all had this experience, right? You're sitting down with a funder or a potential mentor or potential coach. And then at the end of the conversation, they asked you, so why me? Right. And I learned that I just needed to get clear on why they're right and to say it, and just I hear the places I think you can be helpful, I want to name what you are probably sensing to hear the places and ways in which we are different. And I'm cool with that, as long as you're cool with that, right. And it has really helped me build relationships with people who might not be at first glance anyway, right? Folks who you would think could be supportive of me, my career, my work and my aims. But I had to get clear on that first. So I would say the trick, right is to say like, if I want to build a relationship with this person, where do we overlap? How can they be helpful? What do I want to just name as a potential awkward sticking point, so that we can just get that out the way.

Analiza: I love that you did a self reflection as well, for yourself, like, what do I need? And who has what I need? And then when I'm with them to name it, because that is often missed, right? We're just like, let's get a mentor, let's get a sponsor. Let's keep moving. And then we talked with people, and we're like, what is the goal here? Because it's a mutual relationship? And how can they support and give when you're not even clear on what you need? So

Sharhonda: I don't care to be a superintendent, right? So like, having a bunch of black woman superintendents as mentors is great because they they know the sector, they know what it's like to be a black woman trying to, you know, advance to educate to, you know, a leadership position within education, but they don't necessarily know what it's like to want to be a nonprofit executive versus a superintendent, right? And I'm using that as a kind of, you know, an example. But yeah, I was like, I need different mentors.

Analiza: So now that you've been in the seat as CEO for over a year, I'm curious about any surprises. Oh, so many. Yeah, you know, it's so funny because you think wow, when I get that seat, it's gonna be so much easier. Well, at least for me, I thought like, I'm gonna be able to be this change. I can model out what it is that I wanted? As I'm curious for you, what's been surprising?

Sharhonda: Well, I think it's important also to set the context under which I became CEO, right. So I want to name it. Because, you know, I assume this role after our founding CEO passed away unexpectedly in fall of 2020. And so I never wanted to be CEO, I was actually very happy being number two, because it was like, I can do the work that I want to do. I told you, I'm gonna, like my work speaks for itself person, and like, the number two seat is, like, perfect for that. But number one lesson is people have to like you, when you're CEO, they have to know you, you know, so the amount of like, of work that it is to just spend time with people in a different way. Like I, it took me a while to change how I thought about relationship building, and fundraising and friend raising, right, all of the stuff around just like people need to feel in touch and see you in the CEO role in a different way. To your point about the constraints of the role, though, they are also very real, right? And I think my board would say, and my leadership committee, you know, they're our advisory board would say, you know, like Toronto, you can do whatever you want, like you've been here from the beginning, this is so great, it's gonna be perfect. And I would say to them, I don't feel that way. Right? There are so many forces that make you feel like your role, your job is just to keep the trains on track. And to keep everything running on time it's hard sometimes to carve out that space for the visioning work, right? For the dreaming up of what you really want to do, and the laying out are mapping out the steps to get there. I'll also say that I didn't anticipate the ways in which Sharhonda and EdLoc become synonymous once I became CEO, right. So I have tried to do it to the extent that I've been able to do it, you might have a different perspective from your seat, right? Like to have Sharhonda, the person be separate from Sharhonda, the nonprofit leader, and in the number one seat that is so much harder to do, right? So I say something and all of a sudden, it's the organization's position. I'm like, no, no, no, y'all I haven't I haven't checked with the team. I haven't checked the board. So having been much more mindful, even about what I say, um, and then I think, lastly, I have this reflection. Actually, I shared it with my coach last year, you know, we announced that we were going to grow the team pretty significantly. Last fall, we held a town hall. We had 175 people come to the town hall to listen to me talk about my vision, and I was like, people want to work for me, people want to work here, you know. And it was just this moment of realization that, you know, when you are in the number one seat there, obviously, there's a ton of responsibility, but there's a ton of opportunity to shape not just the work you do collectively, but the experiences that people have at work, right, and how people feel when they are working within for you. And so I have had to take a step back and ask myself a different set of questions about the kind of leader I want to be about the kind of team I want to build about the kind of culture I think is best suited to support leaders of color and doing their own work, right? Like, I want this to be a place where my network team and my ops team get to dream about what their work feels like looks like and the impact it has. And that requires me also to unlearn some of what I have learned about what makes us successful CEO, right? Because I can't be the CEO that you probably read about in your Harvard Business Review article. If I want the work here to feel different, right? I can't add any you layer on top of that gender, you layer on top of that race, right? You may know this. But you know, last week, I didn't know two weeks ago, maybe time means nothing. In the pandemic, we sent out a letter to the network about why we're convening in Texas, right? Because so many folks were like, Why are we going to this place that is openly hostile to, you know, communities we claim to care about? And I was like, let me name my positionality in this conversation for you before I tell you why we made this choice. And one of my new team members said, you know, I never worked at a place where my CEO would have even acknowledged that that was a conversation that was happening, you know. And so I think it's really important for me to say that I have a ton of permission in this seat to do things differently. And to be a model not just for the team that works for me directly, but for other folks across the sector. And to think about what those opportunities afforded me.

Analiza: I read that letter, Sharhonda and I, it really struck me when you stated where you are, in terms of being open and queer. Like, I love that it just made me feel safe. And yeah, and seen, and that we could be ourselves.

Sharhonda: I didn't know that people didn't know that, you know, like, I was like, I was in a relationship with a woman for 11 years like you and I forgot that our network has grown right, and that we've been in a pandemic for two years. And people don't just like might not even know that part of me. And also because I put up a wall, right? Not because I'm like, I'm ashamed, or I'm hiding who I am. But because I was like, Oh, that's my personal life, you know, I don't really want to talk about my relationship. It's ending. It's kind of rough. It's kind of ugly over here. I don't know, you know. And it meant then that people created this whole story about who we were as an organization and as a team. And so, to my point of, like, people have to know you. I was like, Ah, those are also parts of me that people have to know. You know?

Analiza: Yeah. So powerful. So I'm going to pivot us and get us to the personal aspect about the sacrifices because it's real. Yeah. So I'm curious, as you think about your leadership journey, and now CEO, was there a time when you learned what it would really take to be so senior, and that it could be possible to also still have your personal priorities?

Sharhonda: Yeah, that's hard. I'll talk about Layla’s passing. Right. So, you know, Layla passed in the fall of 2020. And we were at the time, a three person team, right. And there was a moment where I wasn't sure I could keep Ed lock afloat and have anything that remotely resembled a life, right. And that meant that I stopped running and working out, right. I saw my family less frequently, you know. And we were, you know, in the middle of a pandemic pre vaccine, right. So I had a pod. And there were just lots of things that I just felt like I was closing in on myself, right? Because it felt like an order to have the emotional bandwidth to do the work I needed to do with this team that I wanted to grow. And what this network of leaders I was supporting, I didn't have the emotional bandwidth to attend to relationships beyond my work relationships, right? And that even my own relationship with myself, right, like I put that on the back burner. And I think the spring rolled around, and I was like, Okay, this is actually first of all, not what Layla would want me to be doing, right. And I'm coming a little bit out of the initial shock and the initial kind of fog of grief it, you know, sort of always lingers. But in like, back to this question of the kind of leader I wanted to be, I didn't want to build a team, or a culture where my team felt like they had to be accessible all the time, where they felt like the expectation was that they respond to emails over dinner, right, where they couldn't coach their kids soccer team, like, I didn't want to build that kind of team either. And so it really required being honest with myself about the fact that what we call work life balance is impossible for so many of us, and saying to myself, sometimes on the daily as I was closing my laptop, the work will always be there, the work will always be there, to remind myself that the people won't always be, you know, and that that was that was a really hard period for me. Yeah.

Analiza: I want to quote you on that. That's so good. The work will always be there. The people will always be real. It honors, I think Layla. Yeah. So beautiful. All right. So any advice Sharhonda, you give a woman in their career trying to make it to the top?

Sharhonda: I say to a woman trying to make it to the top, your calling is your calling, right. And your values should guide the decisions that you make. Every move that I have made in my career, even as it has felt like a move up has been because I have answered a call to serve in a way that has been aligned with my values. And that has meant that I've gotten incredible opportunities I never would have dreamed of. And it has meant that I've taken some bumps and bruises along the way, right? But it does mean that it's 32. Right? I'm 38 now. Well, I am. I got to help launch an organization that does incredible work for leaders of color, you know, across the sector, and that is because I answered a call to service that was aligned with my values. And that that would be my advice, right is like, Don't chase the dollars. Right? I know that that's like a really easy thing to say. And as a person who was a first generation college graduate, it took 15 years to pay off our student loan debt like I get it. But your calling is your calling.

Analiza: Alright, let's line it up later on. with some lightning round questions chocolate or vanilla?

Sharhonda: Vanilla.

Analiza: Cooking or takeout?

Sharhonda: Cooking.

Analiza: Climb a mountain or jump from a plane?

Sharhonda: Climb a mountain.

Analiza: Have you ever worn socks with sandals?

Sharhonda: Oh, I'm a Birkenstocks and socks girl all the time.

Analiza: How would you rate your karaoke skills on a scale of one to 10,10 being Mariah Carey?

Sharhonda: Ooh, see now I know all the lyrics, but I can't hold the two and I'm gonna go with five.

Analiza: What's a recent book you read?

Sharhonda: I'm reading the Yellow House by Sarah broom.

Analiza: And what's your favorite way to practice self care?

Sharhonda: Take a midday nap on the weekend.

Analiza: What's a really good professional development you've done?

Sharhonda: The estate planning workshop we put on for our members earlier last year, to ensure that the wealth I'm building is here for the next generation of my family.

Analiza: What's your definition of a Boss Mama?

Sharhonda: I'm gonna go with my grandmother. Truly she was you know, she was a hairdresser for much of her career. She raised her own kids, she raised her grandkids. And I think if you ask anybody in our family who shaped their worldview, they would say her.

Analiza: What advice would you give your younger self?

Sharhonda: The work will be there.

Analiza: And where can we find you?

Sharhonda: You can find EdLoc. That's what you should find. On Twitter we are at luck on Instagram we are at luck. But if you want to find me on Twitter, I tweet mostly about Black culture and random pop culture moments at bossier on Twitter.

Analiza: And do you have a final ask recommendation or any parting thoughts for the audience?

Sharhonda: Yeah, find out what you can do to stand in solidarity with other people who are fighting for liberation. We only get free together.

Analiza: Thank you so much. This has been so great.

Sharhonda: Thanks for having me.