Analiza: Welcome to the Women of Color Rise podcast. I'm Analiza Quiroz Wolf, proud Filipino-American executive leadership coach and former CEO of a nonprofit and Captain in the U.S. Air Force. I'm also the author of The Myth of Success: A Woman of Color's Guide to Leadership. It's based on the lessons learned by many women of color leaders, including those on this podcast. We talk with successful CEOs and C-suite women leaders of color and learn about their leadership journeys. I'm on a mission to support having more diverse leaders at the table. If you're a woman or a woman of color who wants to sit at that table, you're in the right place. Now let's get into today's show.

I am so happy to be here with Dr Gail Christopher. She's an award winning social change agent and author known for her pioneering work to infuse holistic health and diversity concepts into public sector programs and policy discourse. She retired from her role as senior advisor and vice president at the W K Kellogg Foundation, where she was the driving force behind the America healing Initiative and the truth racial healing and transformation effort. She's a ton of experience, including the Board of Trustees for America's health from 2012 to 2022 and she's also a senior scholar with George Mason University Center for the Advancement of well being. Dr. Christopher, there are so many beautiful awards and impact that you've had in your career. I'm so grateful to you for being here. Thank you so much.

Dr. Christopher: Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you.

Analiza: I want to talk about your work and think about the driving force behind it, and I'm curious, how does that interplay with your identity?

Dr. Christopher: I grew up during the Civil Rights era, and I think those of us that came of age listening to Dr King and seeing the marches children of many parents who were part of the great migration. I think this notion of the continuing Journey for Justice, I think it was kind of embedded in our DNA. My own personal life experience was dramatically altered when I became one of those statistics. So to speak, my first born child died as an infant, and then I learned about infant mortality. So I believe that this commitment to fairness and justice, I think it just became part of my way of being in the world.

Analiza: Dr Christopher, the true racial healing and transformation effort that you have pioneered, was there a story or a catalyst for that work?

Dr. Christopher: Do you know it connects to my role at the WK Kellogg Foundation. I was honored to have been invited to become a senior member of the team there as a vice president, right after the Katrina disaster. And I'm a spiritual person, and I do pray fervently in critical times. And I recall when I saw my people standing on rooftops begging for help, I viewed their sense of being forlorn and not responding to that crisis as another manifestation of racism in our country, and I remember praying for being able to be more effective at ending racism. And within that orb of about three days, I received a phone call inviting me to apply for this role at the WK Kellogg Foundation. So fast forward, I go to Kellogg, and I'm asked to lead the racial equity there, as well as the health work. And we created a huge national initiative called America healing, and that was a lot of investment in a lot of racial justice organizations and communities. And after about five to seven years of that work, it was time to think about what was next. It was also time for me to think about maybe not continuing to be with the Kellogg Foundation. I've been there about 10 years, almost at that point, and again, I prayed for guidance, and the guidance that I received in answer to that prayer was truth, racial healing and transformation. It clearly was to be a truth and reconcile. Asian effort that America had never undertaken, and that was the moment of inspiration. I called the then president of the foundation and shared it. She called the board, and the rest is history.

Analiza: Dr Christopher, for those who are not familiar with TRHT. Can you please give a primer? It's been, it's both intricate, complex and also simplistic in its understandability. To me. But if we, if you wouldn't mind, can you please explain?

Dr. Christopher: Happy to do that, and I'll talk about it in two contexts. First, it's the framework, and the framework has five pillars. One of the things we've learned from the truth and reconciliation efforts around the globe, and there have been over 40 of them, is that they tend to focus on the catharsis and the truth telling part, without addressing the long term structural societal changes. And so the TRHT framework tries to do both. The first pillar is narrative change, and that honors the fact that our perceptions of our lived experience comes from the stories that we share, the stories that we hold, the stories that we hear and honor, and so to to the degree that we can create a narrative that includes all of us and is not afraid of our past, then we're laying the foundation for meaningful change. The second pillar is what we call racial healing and relationship building. It has to do with doing the hard work of developing the capacities for compassion and empathy and understanding across diverse communities, diverse racial communities, gender identities, religious communities. We use a circle methodology. There are many ways of doing this, but the primary requirement is that they be experiences that connect us at a deep level to our shared humanity. And so as we change the narrative and we build what I like to call the connective tissue and build a sense of authentic authentic relationships, then we have the critical mass to address the structural manifestations of this long held belief in a False hierarchy of human value. We asked ourselves, we meant me and others. We said, well, how has this lie of a false hierarchy of humanity been maintained for all these centuries? How have we structured these systems of inequity? And we came up with three, I like to use a very scientific term, three buckets, right? And one of them is through separation. There's so many ways that we separate diverse groups in this society, and that helps to feed the fallacy of hierarchy and difference. The other is, of course, through our laws and structures that we put in place, immigration policies, voting access to the franchise, voting opportunity, and then the criminal justice system, and then all of our policies and practices within our institutions, those fall under the pillar of the law. And then finally, of course, our economy, our economic system was really built on the spoils of this society, based on a fallacy of a hierarchy of human value. So you have five core pillars, narrative change, racial healing and relationship building, separation, law and the economy. That's the broader framework. But then, when people engage in this work at the community level, at the institutional level, at the national level, we recommend a five step process, and the most important part of this process is creating a vision for success, imagining together what the lived experience will be like when this notion of a false hierarchy of human value has truly been replaced with an understanding of Our equal awe inspiring value as a human family. The second step, then, once you make that concrete vision for success, is to use data and other concrete measures to determine where you are now in relation to that vision after that second. Step, you ask yourself, well, who needs to be part of achieving the goals that are elucidated in the vision? Who needs to be part of your effort? That's not there. And so you broaden your circles. And then after you've done those three steps, then you can establish some very specific, short and long term goals that you want to hold yourself accountable for. And then the final step in these five steps is to determine, how are you going to sustain the effort, how are you going to fund it? How are you going to draw in volunteers? How are you going to communicate your progress? So that's the essence of TRHT. It's both a framework and a suggested methodology, and it's being implemented all over the country.

Analiza: It's robust. Dr Christopher, when I hear about the framework, the five pillars and then the steps that go along with it. And yet, it's not just a concept. It's actually been played out across the globe. So can you share one? Let's use the American context, where you've seen here's never perfect the letter of the rule here. But how have people implemented these concepts to get real change?

Dr. Christopher: Well, I'll tell one story that I think is very exciting, and your viewers can visit the Association of American Colleges and Universities website to there are about three books now that have been written about the work, but we currently have over 70 college campuses in the United States that have established truth, racial healing and transformation campus centers. And I'm excited about that, because if you look back at history, our major progress at least during the 20th century in terms of the civil rights movement, was largely instigated and fought for by the next generation, by the student populations. And so when we were launching TRHT, we knew we needed to get the next generation, to get students engaged, and they are doing amazing, transformational work on the campuses. We also have local communities that are implementing this framework. And Buffalo, New York is a beautiful example. It's being supported by the Community Foundation of Greater buffalo. We also have exciting work going on in Texas, in Dallas, Texas, in Chicago. I think there are more than 16 local communities, Alabama, Mississippi, and we also know that this work is helping to fuel public health jurisdictions across the country that have declared racism to be a public health crisis. So those are just some examples. You can visit the NCAE website. We have an interactive map. We've also put forth resolutions repeatedly in the US Congress, Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Senator Cory Booker were the main sponsors, but we've gotten up to, I believe, about 200 co-sponsors. So the work continues, but one of the lessons that I've learned over the decades is that sometimes it takes longer than we hope for change to happen.

Analiza: The expansiveness of how many communities have worked to implement TRHT concepts is inspiring, and yet, it's also interesting that it's the next generation you mentioned earlier on the college campuses, and that the young people are saying, let's, let's take it upon our hands to envision something different. And can you pull us in closer if we were to take a more, if we were in the room with the students, and they're talking about their vision. What would you highlight for us, about what we would be hearing, what we would be seeing, so that we can actually get a flavor of what is different here.

Dr. Christopher: I'm going to go to the University of Hawaii Campus Center, and one of our leaders, Poni Hey directs that work, and she's been at it now for, I think, maybe six or seven years. And whereas it started on one in one school on that university system, it's now being expanded to all the schools within that university system, and when they were creating their vision for success, and I was this is so touching for me, they realized that their indigenous culture that had been exploited when the island was taken over, that the values of their indigenous. Culture is certainly the values that undergird truth, racial healing and transformation. So they were able to accomplish two things at once, moving forward, but doing so by being informed by the values of the indigenous culture. And so they do healing work, and they do transformational work in terms of the content of what's being taught in ways that honors the past and reframes the past in a very positive way. And that's one of the more moving examples.

Analiza: I mean, I have to go here, Dr Christopher, to reframe the past, a very painful past, very, very painful past in a positive way. Can you actually help to bring light? What does that mean here in this context, or just generally speaking, how to do that with such painful memories?

Dr. Christopher: Well, there is pain, but the fact that we are where we are today would suggest and would be a testament to the fact that there is so much more than pain, and I always recommend the book the slave's cause, which chronicles The 100 year journey of communities working to end slavery, the cross racial partnerships, the cross religious partnerships, the central role that the woman's suffrage movement and the women's equality movement played in getting the amendments passed in Congress, I just want people to understand that getting stuck in the woundedness and in the pain, it creates despair and debilitation. We have to recognize that there has been progress, and that's how we got out of it. And what I love about the Hawaii example is that they honor the wisdom of their ancestors, and they honor the language and the culture, and we have to learn to do that more. I've heard people use the frame to humanize, and I push back on that because we never really we as those who receive the oppression and the enslavement, we never lost our humanity. Folks may have tried to take it from us and to impose their perceptions of our lack of humanity, but in truth, our humanity was resilient and continued to thrive. And so I think it's very important for us to take a more holistic understanding of the past and not get stuck in the pain. The pain is real. We have to honor that too, but we wouldn't be here today if there were not so much more than pain.

Analiza: Hear, hear. I am connected to that very much. So Dr, fix Christopher, as someone through the fellowship that you have generously led, the Coley fellowship, I'm one of the 40 who got selected. Very grateful for the opportunity. And mine has been about racial healing in my specific area. And because of this fellowship and the generosity of the funders, I was able to be inspired and actually act on that inspiration to go back to the Philippines, which is my homeland, and actually see that we had such strength and examples from pre colonial impact that there were community ways, indigenous ways of caring about each other, the land spirit, and this thing that we're seeking, we've already had. So for me, it's about remembering and knowing that, yes, there were, there's impacts. So we don't want to say, Oh, the pain is not pain, it has been pain, and yet we can come back to our roots and find such strength, and the narrative therefore changes. It's not start with the horror, but instead, let's start with the fact that we had it already, and we continue to have it. And also, Dr Christopher, I'm excited to share with you that because of the fellowship, because of your leadership, I was able to connect with scholars who have been studying, particularly one Dr grace, no, no, who is a Filipino scholar who has relationships with these indigenous healers called the Babaylan, and I'm bringing them back. And so we're planning a trip for 2026 to come, invite the Filipino diaspora to come and explore and actually meet the people who have lived this way still believe in talking with each other about how to protect Mother Earth, how to resolve issues through coming. The action and not necessarily follow all of these like systems of law that have been we think that have been imposed, but actually there are different ways of being. So I'm so grateful for that opportunity, and it really wouldn't have happened without you, your leadership, the COHLI Fellowship.

Dr. Christopher: That is such good news, and I'm so looking forward to you sharing your learnings and your insights and your experience with the broader COHLI community. It is such a beautiful, tangible transformation and outcome and just thank you for sharing that makes me very happy to hear.

Analiza: Dr Christopher, before we go to lightning round questions, I want to go to this. I've heard it a couple times in our interview that you talked about spirit prayer, and it's important to uplift as someone who has now realized how much God has a presence in my life, and I hear it in the work that you do. Can you share? What does it mean to pray? How do you mean, I'm very tactical. What does that mean to ask for help, to be inspired? If you can give any ways and practices that you use now to do the work that it is actually to integrate it, not the separate thing you do on Sundays, but actually part of the work.

Dr. Christopher: Thank you so much for that question. I was trained in a holistic approach to well being, and for me, those components are physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Right fast forward to the 21st century, and some would call that psychological as opposed, I mean, they would call it biological, psychological, social and spiritual, but but in terms of spirituality, it's this recognition that there is something greater than ourselves, that there are dimensions to the lived experience that are not necessarily visible or tangible. And if you pull that thread, almost all cultures have some way of acknowledging that the right religion is one way of doing it, but indigenous cultures do it through other ways. They associate their healing rituals with the multiple dimensions in African culture. It's the concept often of the ancestral connections in the Hawaiian cultures, it's our connection to nature, recognizing that there is life all around us, and certainly the world of quantum physics and science in western science is beginning to help validate that from a scientific lens. My particular practice has a lot to do with meditation. I love Buddhist meditation, loving kindness meditation, I highly recommend that particular practice, and it can be done at any time during the day. And the beauty of any sort of meditative practice is its immediate effect on physiology. Right? The body in its natural state is in a state of healing, rest, digestion and restoration. The unnatural state is the stress state, and so when we do loving kindness meditation, when we affirm that we are safe and secure and loved and cherished and valued, when we acknowledge that all of ourselves are truly loved and that they are loved, and when we invite those to express as love in alignment with our sense of purpose, when we repeat that sort of mantra, it it has a calming effect on us, and I believe it helps to open our hearts so that we receive the intuitive insights that we need in order to move forward in accomplishing our purpose. I think everyone has a purpose, and when we can engage in ways to commune, if you will, with that higher purpose, it just makes life easier.

Analiza: So beautiful. Doctor Christopher, let's go lightning round.

Dr. Christopher: Okay.

Analiza: Chocolate or vanilla?

Dr. Christopher: Vanilla.

Analiza: Cooking or takeout ?

Dr. Christopher: Cooking.

Analiza: Climb a mountain or jump from a plane?

Dr. Christopher: Well, in my youth, it would have been jumping from a plane.

Analiza: Have you ever worn socks with sandals?

Dr. Christopher: I have, yeah.

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

Dr. Christopher: Three.

Analiza: What's a recent book you read?

Dr. Christopher: I am currently reading a wonderful new book. It is the biography of John Lewis, Congressman, John Lewis, written by, I believe his name is David Greenberg. It is fantastic. I highly recommend it for everyone.

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

Dr. Christopher: Ah, that's good. I think I love Pilates. I do resistance training on Pilates, and I walk in the woods at least once a week.

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

Dr. Christopher: Well throughout my career, I've always tried to go to workshops and classes that give me the latest developments in my field. And so when I was in the clinic, when I was practicing as a naturopath and nutritionist, I was always taking workshops on clinical nutrition, and because that was so practical, not only for my clientele, my patients, was also helpful to me personally. So I advise people in any field to try and annually engage in workshops that keep you abreast of the developments, because things change so rapidly.

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

Dr. Christopher: I used to be a divorced, single parent, I used to always tell my kids that our home was not a democracy, that I was always right, and they believed me up until a certain age. And I remember the time when my son recognized that I was wrong, and he said, Mom, you were not right. I said, aha, the gig is up now. No, that mothers make mistakes too, but I think a Boss Mom is loving, but strong and firm and to the degree that she can be present when her children need her.

Analiza: And then what advice would you give your younger self?

Dr. Christopher: To love myself, to not believe any of the hype, to recognize that this fallacy of male hierarchy is just that it is a fallacy, and to recognize my equal value and importance and to love myself.

Analiza: Where can we find you like LinkedIn? Anywhere else?

Dr. Christopher: Yes, I am on LinkedIn. And of course, I have a website. You can google Dr Gail C. Christopher, and of course, through the National Collaborative for Health Equity website.

Analiza: And then last question, do you have a final ask recommendation or any parting thoughts to share?

Dr. Christopher: I would say in these times, these turbulent times, it is very important to work at focusing on the positive. To work at staying centered in terms of our nervous system, to be in that rest and relaxation and digest station and restorative state that is fostered by the parasympathetic nervous system and to give ourselves deliberate time to be nurtured and to be loved in spite of the animosity and the vitriolic dynamics that are happening externally.

Analiza: Beautiful. Dr, Christopher, I'm so grateful to you. Thank you so much for being here and sharing such wisdom.

Dr. Christopher: I am honored to have been invited, and kudos to you. Congratulations and we're so happy you're part of our broader, expanding community, and I do want you to keep us informed about your work going forward,

Analiza: Absolutely.

Analiza: Thank you so much for carving out time to hear today's podcast. 3 things before you go. First, if you found it helpful, please leave a five star review. Second, you can get a free chapter of my book, The Myth of Success: A Woman of Color's Guide to Leadership at analizawolf.com/freechapter. And lastly, if you're interested in executive coaching, please reach out to me at analiza@analizawolf.com. Thank you so very much.