Nov 10, 2020
In this episode, Holy Cross professor Stephanie Yuhl reconnects with friend and former student Meg Griffiths '04. They reminisce about Meg's days on campus, and reflect upon the many ways that the Holy Cross Mission and the pursuit of social justice are evident throughout Meg's life and career.
Interview originally recorded on July 31, 2020. Due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic, all interviews in season 2 are recorded remotely.
---
Meg:
I think people who come to the dialogue table… they come because they’re in touch with something that means a lot to them, and they care enough to show up and listen and try to muddle through with people who they know occupy different positions. And to me, that’s a sign of hope in and of itself: that people are willing to come to the table. And that they have a shared commitment to making some kind of change, making their community better, making space for more voices and rehumanizing the “other.”
Maura:
Welcome to Mission-Driven, where we speak with alumni who are leveraging their Holy Cross education to make a meaningful difference in the world around them.
I’m your host, Maura Sweeney ‘07, Director of Alumni Career Development at Holy Cross. I’m delighted to welcome you to today’s show.
Maura:
In this episode we hear from Meg Griffiths from the class of 2004. Meg can be described as an educator, space maker, practitioner of dialogue, crafter of questions, and human can opener. Ever since graduating from Holy Cross, Meg has pursued mission-focused work. After starting her career with the Jesuit Volunteers Corps in New Orleans, her journey has evolved to include work in the nonprofit sector and higher education.
Today, she works for Essential Partners, an organization who partners with communities and organizations around the globe, equipping them to navigate the values, beliefs and identities that are essential to them. Her work showcases the importance of dialogue and connection in order to build trust and support mutual understanding among diverse groups of people.
Stephanie Yuhl, Professor of History, Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies, reconnects with Meg to speak about her life and career. Their conversation is filled with mutual admiration and respect, stemming from Meg’s time as a student at Holy Cross. The importance of living the Holy Cross Mission is interwoven throughout the conversation. Despite coming to Holy Cross not knowing what a Jesuit was, Meg has lived a life devoted to the Jesuit values of social justice ever since.
Stephanie:
Hi, Megan, it's Stephanie.
Meg:
Hi, Stephanie. It's Meg.
Stephanie:
How are you doing Meg? I'm so excited that we get this chance to spend some time together and to talk about interesting things related to you and Holy Cross. I have to say, whenever I think of students that to me, have really lived out the mission, you see the T-shirts at Holy Cross that say Live the Mission, and I think that certain people actually really do that and you're always at the top of the list of that, so thanks for sharing your time with us today.
Meg:
Thank you, Stephanie. When I think about my Holy Cross experience, you are one of the people that regularly comes to mind. So, this is a pure joy to have some Zoom time with you these days in this weird, strange time we're in.
Stephanie:
It is and hopefully the listeners won't be bored with our mutual admiration society that we're having. Let's get started and let's talk about Holy Cross and you and then, we'll move into your life and career. Tell me why did you choose Holy Cross? What was it about the school that attracted you and how did you move through Holy Cross during your time there?
Meg:
Yeah. So, I was looking at colleges in the late '90s but before I actually stumbled into Holy Cross, this glossy, beautiful materials that came my way in the old school snail mail, my sister was looking at colleges and she's a couple years older than me. We are very different people in all kinds of ways. My parents had taken my sister to do a New England college tour and Julie came home, very uninterested in Holy Cross and my mom said to me, "Megan, I found the perfect college for you, because your sister is not interested." So, it was sort of planted in the back of my head, before I actively started looking at colleges and I just loved it when I stepped on campus.
Meg:
I think a lot of Holy Cross students say this, they have this experience of sort of feeling something when they come to campus. My mom said she could read it all over my face, but it really sort of met a lot of what I was looking for in a school at the time, which is a small liberal arts Catholic school. I didn't know what a Jesuit was yet but I was Catholic educated my whole life and that felt familiar in a good way and in a challenging way. Yeah, I landed here in 2000 as a wee freshman, and took me a little while to find my sort of academic home and you, Stephanie, were a big part of that. I meandered through all of my distribution requirements and learned that I wasn't a disciplinary thinker but a multi-disciplinary thinker.
Meg:
Got a chance to design my own American Studies major before that was a thing on campus, and you Stephanie, were wise enough really, to say yes to being my advisor for that-
Stephanie:
It was wise because then we got to be friends, and you did your senior thesis on Child's Play, which I think is really interesting and I think it reveals a lot about you and the way that your brain works. Can you talk about that a little bit, explain what that thesis was about, if you can recall?
Meg:
Yes, I can recall. I can recall sitting in the library at a giant table every Friday writing it, my senior year. I was really interested in gender. I was also a women's studies concentrator before it was women and gender studies and then, material culture, and so, I studied how doll play and child rearing manuals sort of told a story about gender and the role of women in early America and how girls were socialized to grow up to be mothers and caretakers, through the use of dolls and doll play. So, it's really interesting, kind of nerdy but lovely research. It was sort of the bringing together of all of the disciplines of my American Studies major and my interest in sort of gender, and culture.
Stephanie:
Yeah, and also, I think creativity, right? The idea of looking at something and you see something extensible in that, a doll but then, being able to read and interpret more deeply into it and try to think about what are the influences and impacts that this artifact could have? I think that that is in a lot of ways really connected to some of the work that you do about seeing things one way and then trying to shift one's angle of vision to see it another way to unpack its power. So, it might look like doll play, but I think it was really indicative of future trajectories, perhaps.
Meg:
I love that.
Stephanie:
So you mentioned that you didn't even know what a Jesuit was and then, your biography really kind of spent a lot of time in that Jesuit social justice space. So, can you talk a little bit about ... and that's what we would stay around mission, right, around how you're formation at Holy Cross, what are the sort of the things that you think are part of your Jesuit education at Holy Cross, and then we can talk about how you then put those into action after graduation?
Meg:
Yeah, I love that you brought up the Live the Mission T-shirts, because I was an orientation leader who wore that T-shirt many summer and I'm a little bit of a mission statement nerd, because I just love the way that institutions and communities and even people can take an opportunity to name explicitly what they're about and what they aspire to be. So, I think they're both aspirational and descriptive. The Holy Cross mission, I stepped into it in a variety of ways. I mean, my experience as a student is that you can't go to Holy Cross and not be steeped in mission, but I understand other people have different experiences of that.
Meg:
For me, I saw it everywhere I looked, and I sought it out also. So, I got involved in the chaplains office, pretty early on in retreats, and in singing in liturgical choir, and sort of embracing the social justice mission of Jesuit education and formation through Pax Christi, and going to the School of the Americas protest and participating in the Mexico Immersion Program and SPUD. Really, seeing the ways that a faith doing justice was a huge part of the college's larger mission and I also just ... I think, part of what I loved about specifically, the Holy Cross mission statement was that it was full of questions and when we talk about what I do now, this might become even more clear to people but I'm sort of all about questions.
Meg:
I love the ways in which a question can invite us into, again, aspiration and also possibility, and deep personal reflection at an institutional level, sort of organizational reflection on again, who we want to be and how we want to be in the world. The Holy Cross mission statement asks these super powerful questions like what is the moral character of teaching and learning and what are our obligations to one another? What's our special responsibility to the world's poor and powerless? How do we find meaning in life and history?
Meg:
These are what I have always called the big important questions and I love the way that my academic experience sort of mirrored that more spiritual formation in wading into those big questions and finding the nuance and complexity that comes through sustained engagement with those kinds of questions. There's no simple answers to be found here and I love that. Even though I'm someone who really likes clarity and planning and a clear path, there's a big part of me that also knows, we need to wrestle with the complexity and the gray areas of what it means to be human. So, those are the parts of the mission statement and the way that the mission was lived in my experience that really captivated my imagination.
Stephanie:
That's awesome and that notion of patience and ambiguity, which is also in the mission is a wonderful thing and it's hard for type A organizers, like yourself and myself, sometimes to sit in that space but I think that that's really probably where we're most human, right? Particularly today in our really Balkanized political discourse, it's important to try to find these spaces of more nuanced. So, let's talk about that a little bit, so you come to the college, you find your way, you figure, you learn what a Jesuit might be, you live the mission, wear a T-shirt and then you graduate, right? With this thesis in Child's Play where everyone is banging on your door to hire you to do something with Child's Play because they don't know that Child's Play is not a play, it's very serious.
Meg:
I think that was the subtitle of my thesis.
Stephanie:
It was. This is no joke. I think it's serious-
Meg:
Something about seriousness of ... Yeah, anyways, yes.
Stephanie:
Exactly. So, tell me a little bit about ... I know right after college, you joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, right?
Meg:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Stephanie:
And went to New Orleans.
Meg:
Yeah.
Stephanie:
Tell me a little bit about that decision and how this question driven impulse that you have, played out in that space. The kind of work you did there, and how maybe your sense of your own personal mission started to shift a little bit in that time.
Meg:
Yeah, so I served in New Orleans in 2004 to 2005. I served at a domestic violence shelter. We had a transitional shelter and an emergency shelter. My work there involved being a part of the life of the shelter, of the residential life of our clients and guests. I dropped into a culture that could not have been more different than my suburban New Jersey Catholic upbringing, although New Orleans is very Catholic, but sort of my sheltered, very white suburban, middle class upbringing. For me, that was a transformative year in terms of coming to see the lived realities of some of the things that I had studied at Holy Cross. So, I took great courses, like social ethics with Professor Mary Hobgood, and liberation theology with Jim Nickoloff.
Meg:
I had studied ... and also in my local volunteering over the four years that I was in Worcester, obviously, coming face to face with the realities of injustice and poverty and violence, and sort of had this sort of charity orientation. Definitely, Holy Cross moved me into a conceptualization of justice as a really important aim, more so than charity. They go together but really, that more of my activism sort of bloomed as a Holy Cross student. It was entirely different to move to a city I've never lived in before, worked in a shelter, live in intentional community with six other humans, doing all kinds of work in the city, and tried to live in some shape of solidarity, which is not really possible in some ways, because I was bringing all my privilege and my social network of support with me.
Meg:
I remember feeling like I saw a different side of the world for the first time, that I really was face to face with three dimensional humans, who were experiencing these things that were really sort of more theoretical in my head at the time, oppression and discrimination, and violence, and classism, and sexism, and heterosexism and all the isms. Yet, New Orleans is this amazing, cultural, rich, historic place that is so much an example of finding joy and having resilience in the face of so many difficulties. Of course, I left New Orleans, three weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and never was that clear, that sense of resilience and hope and richness of community than when I returned to New Orleans, about 10 months after Katrina hit to move back.
Stephanie:
Let's talk a little bit about that, because that was a really interesting ... an interesting move for you, I think. They joke that JVC graduates are ruined for life, right? That sort of tagline and I think a lot of our students would find it interesting and helpful, frankly, who also choose this path of service as a postgraduate moment. After that, sometimes they feel a little stuck about what next, right? Because you've just had this really intense experience, an experience in which hopefully, you've made some kind of impact but really, mostly it has an impact on the server, as we know, around that quest around justice and charity models, right?
Stephanie:
You opted to come back to New Orleans, right, to go back to New Orleans and the listeners might not know this, but Megan, Meg Griffiths was a member of the CIA and I think you should explain that, because I think it will surprise people that you are a CIA member. Do you want to explain that Megan and what called you back to New Orleans?
Meg:
Yeah. Yeah. So, I had moved up to Milwaukee. I was serving at Marquette University, an internship in their university ministry office, so that's where I went when I left and that's where I was when Katrina hit. I didn't have a television in my apartment. I was living in a residence hall. I just come off of a year of simple living. I do not bring a lot with me to Milwaukee. As the news of Katrina was sort of coming up to Milwaukee, I was really not as in tune with what was happening as I would have been if I had a television and sort of made a point to be following the news. Simpler times back then. I quickly started checking in with some people who I knew who were in New Orleans, and it became clear that it was being taken increasingly seriously, as Katrina was approaching.
Meg:
So, I think that the fact that I had been a resident of that city three weeks before Katrina hit, I mean, I just ... it felt like home still, as much as a place you've lived for 11 months, can feel like home but-
Stephanie:
Very intense 11 months, so that makes it more home, right?
Meg:
Yes, and I just ... the only way I could explain it is I felt like I was having the experience that my heart was still in New Orleans and was breaking for this beloved city and its beautiful humans. So, I made my way down several times that year when I was serving at Marquette. I brought students, I went down and met up with other JVs and at the end of my internship, I didn't really have a plan as to what was next. My supervisor at the time, at Marquette who is Jocelyn, she was the liturgist there, she decided she was taking a leave of absence and going to move to post Katrina New Orleans because she felt so called to do so.
Meg:
I remember so clearly that she asked me straight out, "If I do this, will you come with me?" Without even thinking, I said yes. That is a moment where I felt so deeply certain about the word yes, that I didn't even have time to think before it came out of my mouth. Then, I was like, "Oh, no, I just said, Yes. I think I have to do this."
Stephanie:
Wait a minute the overthinker didn't overthink this. She just responded. That's great.
Meg:
Yeah.
Stephanie:
That's a pure yes.
Meg:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it felt like a call. I mean, it was a direct invitation-
Stephanie:
It was an invitation, literally. Yeah.
Meg:
So I said yes, not knowing what it meant or how we would pay for anything or what we would do. Another person joined us, a recent alum of Marquette, my dear friend, Stacy now. So, the three of us moved to New Orleans, rented a house started calling ourselves contemplatives in action, i.e. CIA.
Stephanie:
I love it.
Meg:
So, we built this fledgling nonprofit to help people ... to help receive short term volunteers into the city. So, our Jesuit high schools and colleges and parishes, and so many others but in particular, we had a connection to this larger Jesuit family, and people wanted to come to New Orleans and help rebuild and stand with the people of New Orleans and accompany people in their moment of pain, and hear their stories and bear witness. So, we created an opportunity that made it easier for people to find their way to do that work by helping place volunteers and connect them with local nonprofits and local community leaders and with the spiritual and religious and cultural history of the city of New Orleans.
Meg:
It was really hard work. I mean, physically hard labor but also emotionally hard work. I remember, Stacy, my colleague and co-conspirator in the CIA, say, "I came to New Orleans, to lighten other people's burdens and what I didn't realize was that I would wind up carrying them, with them." That's how we help lighten other people's burdens.
Stephanie:
Right, accompany them.
Meg:
Yeah, and that weight of living in what was, for many years after I was there, still a city in distress and in disarray, is emotionally difficult to show up every day and be present to that and to be able to leave was a huge privilege. That wasn't my life. It wasn't my community. It wasn't my home. It wasn't my school, that was destroyed and yet it felt like a part of me. I also knew that there was a limit to how much capacity I had to continue to show up. So, I made a commitment of a year of doing that work in community and then, stepped out of that work and into the next thing.
Stephanie:
Right, and that's, I think, really ... I just want to thank you for sharing that. I think it's really important for people to know that, you can step up and step in and accompany and do your very best and sometimes it feels like failure to step away, but stepping away is also stepping towards something else. It's not always stepping away from. This notion of sharing the suffering and sharing the stress, and sharing the work is something that very few single people can do, right? It's something that many people need to step in and come in and go. So, I think that idea that you were there, you went away and you came back, I mean, that's that kind of push, pull relationship.
Stephanie:
I think it's important for people, particularly younger folks who might be listening, to recognize that one, you make a commitment to something and you follow through on your commitment and then, it's okay to also make a different commitment. That's also part of the development and you're not abandoning people, you're not quitting.
Meg:
I mean, for me, it was about how can I find a different way to support this work. So, I think, also like, especially right now, in our world, when there's so much work needed, and so many people joining in the long struggle for racial justice, for the first time, finding your place in the work can be really hard and I think we sometimes ... I'll speak for myself, I think I sometimes think that there's only one way to show up, to be part of the work and the truth is, there are many ways and we are as different, in terms of our gifts and our assets, and our limitations, as you can get in humans. So, noticing what you can do, what serves the work, what sustains you and the work.
Meg:
Then, being okay with pivoting, when you realize that that's no longer the role that you can play or want to play or is helpful to play. So for me, I moved to Providence, which is where I live now after New Orleans and I took a job in higher ed setting and one of the first things I did was asked if I could start a program to bring students to New Orleans. So, I continued my relationship and my work and in some ways, built a much more sustainable way. My advocacy continues like super-
Stephanie:
Particularly you singularly doing the work.
Meg:
Yeah.
Stephanie:
Something that amplifies and continues. Yeah, the sustainability question.
Meg:
Yeah. So, I mean, not right now because nobody's going anywhere but up until last January, students were still going on the NOLA immersion trip from my previous institution. I built that program in 2009. It ran for 10 years, and it will come back I hope, when travel is a thing again, because the work in New Orleans also continues. The immediate response and rebuilding was ongoing for many, many years and yet, there's still ongoing work that we can do.
Stephanie:
Yeah, and I think that's really interesting, Meg to hear you talk about how you can best serve because sometimes we do have these default notions that it needs to look a certain way. I would connect this with the spiritual exercises, right? That idea of you have to find your way, right? Discern your way, not the way that the culture might tell you is the way or what does service look like, what does a simple life have to look like? We bring a lot of baggage to that and the hard work of reflecting on what is my path and being okay with that even if it looks a little counter-cultural, if it looks like someone's leading something or pivoting.
Stephanie:
I think that has a lot to do with letting go of ego. Did you think that had to do at all with ego, the idea of who you thought you were in that moment and then, recognizing there's another way of using your skills and gifts toward a larger end?
Meg:
Yeah, I don't know that I would put that language around it at the time but certainly looking back ... I mean, I did have a lot of moments of asking myself, like what am I here for? Am I here for the right reasons? Am I the right person to be doing this work? I mean, the answer wound up always being yes or enough of a not no, to stay. I think there are moments where in my own development and sort of self-actualization we might say in the fancy words, where I would look at people that I admired and try to be more like them. I think it was actually another of my Holy Cross mentors, Kristine Goodwin, who at one point, used this frame of sort of holy envy.
Meg:
That when we see people who live out values that we share in a particular way, we can have some jealousy around it almost, that like, we want to be as good, quote, unquote, as they are. I think there have been a lot of people in my life that have served as beacons or sort of examples. The challenge is to always stay rooted and figuring out how I can live out my own values in my own way. One of the things that I care really deeply about and how I show up in the world, is with a sense of integrity. For me, that means living in alignment with my values and who I am and who I've been called to be. So that there's an integrated self in that way of the word integrity, that what I say I'm about, I'm about or at least I'm trying real hard to be about it.
Meg:
The same with the mission statements being both descriptive and aspirational. I think my values are things that I hold dear, and I want to live out and I also have to aspire to because I won't do it perfectly, and I won't always get it right.
Stephanie:
Well, of course and I love that phrase holy envy, I have to say the reason I went to graduate school was because of holy envy. One of my professors at Georgetown, I wanted his life. I thought it was just remarkable what he was able to do and the impact he had on me as a young person. We're very, very different. Went to really different fields and different personalities. We're still friends and that's right, you find your ... you might have the catalyst, the inspiration. Then, as you emerge and you grow, you find your way, hopefully in it. That back and forth between achieved ... hitting the mark on values and aspiring to living that, I think that's really interesting.
Stephanie:
Tell me then about how in your life, if you can ... and you have a really rich professional biography, educational biography, activist biography, and we don't have time to go into all of them. So, I want to give you the opportunity to highlight if you can, either a moment or a choice or a career path, that for you, really puts this values in action, where that integrated self has found firm ground, and what kind of ... and how you manifest that in your work.
Meg:
I'll leave it to you, Stephanie, to ask the big old questions.
Stephanie:
Sorry, but you got to give me a good one example. I'm just wondering, is it your current work now? Is it navigating higher ed? Is it your work, which I'd love to talk about at one point with the LGBTQ alumni network at Holy Cross, which to me has been so important, so we can get to that unless you want to talk about it now. So, it's really up to you. I mean, I think ... like I said, the beginning of our conversation, you are a person, remarkably. I mean, I admire you so much, Meg. When you talk about being catalyzed by people, and you put me in that list, I need to share with you that one of the great things about teaching at Holy Cross is being catalyzed by your students. I mean, I put you in my list. It's true, though. It is true though and you know that and I would throw your wife Heather in there as well.
Stephanie:
I mean, you the two of you really live what ... from the outside and someone on the inside feels very real. A real life where you don't run away from the hard stuff and you try to stay true to your moral compass. We need more of that in the world, frankly and so I'm glad you're in it. So, having said that, what's a way that you think that that's succeeded for you? Obviously, never 100% but what do you think what's been a moment where you've been able to make those choices and live the way you seek to live?
Meg:
Well, thank you for that kind offering. When I think about how I've had to navigate and negotiate what it means to live out my values, I mean, I think what has been the ... one of the pivotal sort of negotiations has been around identity. So, you mentioned my beloved wife, Heather. She's a Holy Cross alum as well.
Stephanie:
And a former student.
Meg:
Yes. Although Stephanie can take no credit for the matchmaking directly but-
Stephanie:
Much to my chagrin. I had each of you in class and yet you didn't even know each other as undergrads, which just breaks my heart. See, fate happens, right?
Meg:
That's right. Yeah, so I mean, I ... So when I was an undergrad, I didn't believe myself to be anything other than straight. When I started to come to know myself, as at first, not straight, and then later claiming various identities over time, but then, partial to queer, because of its sort of umbrellaness of many things. When I was an undergrad, I imagined myself working in Catholic higher ed for the rest of my life, ideally, Jesuit higher ed. I wanted to ... I'm obsessed with mission and mission statements. I wanted to be the person on a Jesuit campus who helped the community live out their mission, of course.
Stephanie:
You pointed at it, you'd be fantastic.
Meg:
I was born and raised Catholic. In many ways, my Catholic faith was nourished in college, which is often, I think, not the case for what happens in terms of spiritual development of many young people but Holy Cross was a place that nourished my spirituality, and gave me an intellectual and theological frame for holding complexity, as I was sort of mentioning earlier. So, I took classes like sexual justice and feminist theology and liberation theology, that helped me make sense of a world in which multiple things can be true at the same time, both in the world and inside of a human. So, when I came to know myself as a queer Catholic, that was a lot to take in.
Meg:
Also, I felt really prepared in some ways to hold those identities at the same time. There is internal tension there, that is never going to be resolved and it's taught me a lot about embracing paradox or seeming paradox. I think that that process of negotiating my identity and trying to live out my values as a faithful person, and my identity as someone who falls outside of the church's teachings about what is right, quote, unquote, I think is what was part of the path of getting me into the work that I do now, which is the work of helping people hold tensions and manage internal conflict, and sit across from someone else who holds a drastically different opinion, idea, ideology, set of identities, and see them as human still, not in spite of but because of what they bring in terms of their humanity.
Stephanie:
We're listening to them and taking seriously in.
Meg:
Yeah, absolutely.
Stephanie:
This seems to me a good segue to talk about the kind of ... what it is that you do? Sometimes people talk about the language of bringing people to the table and having people, and it is sounds wonderful, but it's hard to understand what that actually looks like and I think about my own struggle right now, given our current climate and as an American historian, and the ways in which history is being bandied about and weaponized, frankly, and I feel like I know certain things. I know certain things to be true and you're telling me correctly, that multiple things can be true at the same time. Talking about how does a community respond to what's going on right now and to me, let's just use the example of Black Lives Matter, to me, this seems like it's not an ambiguous at all, right?
Stephanie:
You're either stand with Martin Luther King Jr. or you stand with Bull Connor and his dogs and hoses. To me, it feels like that kind of choice. How in the work you do, which I think is so important, because I feel myself getting more and more entrenched and frustrated, how would you bring someone like that to the table with someone who had a different feeling? What are some of the things ... this is very much mission. I mean, how do you do that and I want to ask you another question, what do you call yourself? I mean, I know your title is associate, but are you a teacher? Are you a mentor? Are you a space maker? What do you go? So, those would be ... I want to know more about how this actually works, largely, because I feel like this is a free consultation.
Stephanie:
I don't need to pay you for your expertise because I feel like I need this. I need this in family conversations, Twitter ... my goodness, the text threads, I need Meg Griffiths and your skillset. So, how do you do that work and what do you call yourself?
Meg:
Well, first of all, we all need a little Meg Griffiths. I mean-
Stephanie:
True and we need Meg Griffin's baked goods. The whole other story of your community making baking space but we do need a lot of Meg Griffiths, not just a little. So, how do you do that when we're in this moment, it's hard enough anyways, particularly, this reactive moment we're in right now.
Meg:
Well, let me start with, who I work with and for and what we do, and then, I'd love to talk about what I call myself and how we're responding to this moment. So, I work with an organization called Essential Partners. We were founded over 30 years ago by family therapists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These were a group of mostly women who looked at the public debates around, say, abortion that were happening in the 90s and could clearly see patterns of dysfunction in these quote, unquote, conversations on public television between the pro life and pro choice sides of the issue. They said to themselves, "You know, these are patterns we see in family therapy sessions. We are familiar with this dysfunction and what these systems produce. These communication systems. These power dynamics, et cetera."
Meg:
So, they went to work and started playing around with an approach to dialogue that would begin to bring their tools to the public conversation. So we were founded as Public Conversations Project, about 30 years ago. We had a name change about five years ago to Essential Partners. So, what we've done over the last 30 years is fine tune, adapt, iterate, and evolve an approach to conversation around polarizing issues. So, what we do is we come into communities, organizations, schools, faith communities, nonprofits, anyone who wants us, and they usually call because they're stuck. They're stuck or they've gotten bad news because they got a climate study back that said, things aren't looking so hot or because they've had some sort of acute conflict come up in their community.
Meg:
They say, we need help. We don't know what to do. We don't know how to get out of these stuck patterns that were in.
Stephanie:
Even where to start, right? That kind of news is just so shattering if it's not your experience of the institution, but you know that some of your colleagues it is their experience.
Meg:
Right, right.
Stephanie:
Even that moment of recognition is huge.
Meg:
Yeah, that cognitive dissonance of, well, I love this place and this place feels like home and community and family to me, what are you telling the other people don't feel that way? Yeah, and other people are like, "Thank you for putting the data in front of people, because we've been telling you this for a really long time or we haven't been able to say it out loud because of fear of consequences, of naming our experience. So, I mean, we do a lot of different things but we usually start by listening and trying to get a sense of what the real ... what hasn't worked in the past. What people's hopes and concerns are. If they can imagine a preferred future, what would it look like for them and their community?
Meg:
Then, we do all kinds of things. So, yes, my title is associate. I talk about my work as being a practitioner of dialogue and of facilitation. I am a trainer, I am an educator, I am in accompanier. This work feels like the Venn diagram of everything I've done. It feels like the middle of ministry, which I have a history in working in ministry, education, I've done teaching of various kinds, and still work for justice because I think this is about helping everyone in the community feel heard, valued, understood and understand that they have dignity, and that their community sees them as having the same dignity as everyone else.
Meg:
So, we work with people to build skills, to try on new ways of speaking and listening and structuring conversation. We build people's capacity to lead and participate in dialogue and we also work with faculty to help them bring dialogue in their classrooms. We bring coaching and consulting support to organizations and leaders. We just try to ... I mean, when it comes down to it, what I think this work is about is helping people see what's possible, because when we're stuck and all we have are bad examples of destructive communication about hard topics, we have lost our sense that anything else is possible. We can't even imagine that I could sit across the table from someone who disagrees with me, and feel heard and understood by that person.
Meg:
Be able to hear and understand what their experience and how they've come to their beliefs has been. That's what we do.
Stephanie:
It's such important work. I mean, it is a real crisis, I have to tell you and I feel like in a differently trained way than you, I tried to do that in my classroom and yet, in personal life, things get more complicated and it's really easy to fight or flight, that you either fight the fight and sometimes it doesn't always have to be a fight. It can be a combination but everything feels like a fight these days or flight, which is just shut down. I'm just not going to deal with you. I'm not going to engage and there's a certain amount of ... there's a lot of disservice and violence in that, of negating someone entirely and yet, engaging when another person doesn't have the same skill set, and where my skill set might be really out of training, because of the world we're living in, can be a really, really hard thing.
Stephanie:
It also seems like it's a hard thing for someone like me, I would say, who's very outcome oriented, right? When I directed Montserrat, one of my colleagues said, "Okay, we need to process these program goals and outcomes all around assessment," right? I said, "Well, we did that, didn't we." She said, "No, we need to have more meetings and more conversation." I'm like, " Ugh, process." So, I discovered, I'm kind of a closet autocrat, that I ... the illusion of democracy but I really just, let's get it done, right? So, I've learned as an adult to slow down and listen and embrace process more. My teenage children might not agree with that but at least in the professionals space, I tried to do that.
Stephanie:
It's been a challenge for me, and I know that you also are a person who's outcome oriented, action oriented, but you're also a process person. So, what advice would you give us today, who are all having these conversations in our lives, professionally or personally, around this idea of process itself being worthwhile and not just thinking about the win or the outcome?
Meg:
Yeah. That is-
Stephanie:
Consultation, free consultation, but it's true and this is mission, right? This is exactly ... when you talk about your Venn diagram, again, I think you're very lucky and I think you've also been really intentional about creating that diagram. Some of it might be luck, but a lot of it is choices and most of us don't necessarily have as integrated of a Venn diagrams as I think you've been able to construct. So, what do you think? How can we do this better? What would you say to folks that want the outcome that weight with the process.
Meg:
So I mean, my thing is ... I often say this to clients who are like, we got to get to the business. We got, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "Y'all, this is the work. The process is the work because if we're stuck in destructive patterns, we got to rebuild a different kind of pattern. We have to examine the processes that are getting us stuck and every process is designed to get exactly what it gets." So, if you're going to try and like, be different together, you have to have a different process. For me, I think about naming that with people up front, because we are so outcomes focused, right? People call us because there's a problem, an acute problems. Sometimes a very public problem, sometimes a lawsuit kind of problem.
Stephanie:
Right.
Meg:
They want to fix things and I think-
Stephanie:
Make it go away. Make it go away. Fix it and move on.
Meg:
Yes and hopefully, people when they call us, they're not trying to just check a box, they're actually trying to change the culture of their organization or their campus and build some new skills so that they don't need to keep bringing us in all the time if they can start to build their capacity to change and shift things themselves.
Stephanie:
I was thinking that it sounds like the kind of work people and organizations should do before the acute crisis. In other words, you should build your skill set before the crisis, because what I talked to you about was this idea of how do you bring people who are so outcome oriented, think of the process is the work because ... And also how do you do it when it's asymmetrical? Let's say you have the skills of process, but the person on the other end doesn't have the skills? How do you leapfrog them?
Meg:
Yeah, and so, one of the things that we do organizationally is we have a couple of certain organizational norms and principles. One is, we say, connect before content. So every time we're doing anything, a client call, a workshop, a dialogue, we build the time in to connect as humans before we get down to business. We do that really simply, we might ask a question like, what are you bringing with you into this conversation that it would be helpful for other people to know about as we prepare to like land in this conversation, or tell me about how your morning has been, right? It doesn't have to be so fancy and what we do in every engagement is we try to model a different kind of process.
Meg:
Bring people into that so that they can see what shifts. So, I'll say, I actually have done some work at Holy Cross, I worked with the chaplains' office with Marybeth Kearns-Barrett, who was trained by us when we were still Public Conversations Project back in the late '90s, as an early adopter of dialogue and we were able to work together to re-imagine the freshmen retreat and I trained a bunch of Holy Cross faculty and students and staff in our facilitation model to prepare to lead that retreat last fall. Marybeth, she took this idea of a connecting question into other work that she was doing on campus, and that she heard from someone who participated in that conversation, that it was the most seen and understood, that community member has ever felt on this campus.
Meg:
Because they were able to show up and tell a different side of who they are in that space. Because in our work lives, we're often put in boxes of ... and we introduce ourselves, name, rank and serial number, how long we've been here where, all these things that can actually serve to disconnect us rather than connect us because it can highlight our differences or different levels of power and status. When we ask a connecting question that actually invites story or experience, a little bit more of our humanity into the room, and we suddenly see each other in a new way, in a more three dimensional way. The same is true in a deeply divisive polarizing dialogue.
Meg:
That what we do is we invite people to share a story about something that would help other people understand how they came to their position on an issue. We don't ask people to state their positions. That's a destructive pattern of communication. We know what that looks like when it plays out when all you do is bring a position to the conversation. When you can bring a story, a piece of who you are and then when you can share the values that are underneath that story, you start to get a more complex picture and then, you ask people actually, where have you experienced internal tension on this issue? That is a completely different conversation.
Meg:
There are infinite, more possibilities for how that conversation can unfold and if we stick to our typical pro and con, or and against position conversations,
Stephanie:
That's really, really helpful to think about, and it makes me ... I don't think I did this in the class I taught with you but I do this political autobiography assignment that actually, Margaret Post back when she was directing the CBL and Donelan Center really helped me shape and she also does a lot of this kind of service work and scholarship. It's the same thing, I asked my first years to write a political autobiography without any guidance, just like who are you? What do you believe? It's very much a position statement, pro, con and then, through a series of interviews with peers and different reflective exercises and the readings and of course, over the course of the semester or year, if I'm teaching at Montserrat, they rewrite various points of it.
Stephanie:
It's so interesting, because slowly as trust is built and confidence, and a sense of community, they feel able to share, exactly what we're saying, when you said a piece of themselves. It makes that position so much more legible, and it makes it legible to the peer and the various peers that are reading those autobiographies or having the interviews. I always try to put people that I've ... have a sense of might be oppositional in the conversation, because it's easy to be oppositional on paper but when you're sitting at Cool Beans with a cup of coffee, and I say go to breakfast, have coffee, sit on the hovel, suddenly, I understand Meg, even if I might disagree with her.
Stephanie:
Suddenly she's going to understand me differently and 201, the students that comment, they love the assignment and again, it's built on the shoulders of other people and their help to me. They comment that, that experience of being with a peer talking about serious value driven questions, and needing to listen because they have to reproduce the conversation, each of them and then reflect on it, as part of the assignment, was the high point, right? That's just like a teeny little bit of what sounds like what you're doing though, that adults need to do that, right? So, these are these young people information and it's underneath this academic umbrella.
Stephanie:
Then, it's like, okay, your credential, if you've got your BS or your BA go out into the world, you're fully formed now and clearly, we still need that. I need that reminder, in my own life. It's funny, I feel like I can facilitate that a little bit with my students because of my position as professor and they have to do what I say, but am I doing it in my own life in the spaces that that needs doing?
Meg:
Well, I love that and that is so beautiful, Stephanie because I mean, when we talk about how to bring this work into the classroom, we have a particular approach. It's highly structured and it's structured because we know that that helps people feel safe enough to contribute. There's a sense of certainty about what to expect. They know that there's a container for the conversation to happen inside of and it can hold a lot. The container can hold a lot of emotion, a lot of disagreement, all of those things but you don't have to bring a 90-minute structured dialogue into your classroom, to create the kind of dialogic spirit that you have clearly demonstrated, right?
Meg:
It can be as simple as helping students, and then also to your point, bringing this out into the world, in our families, in whatever, right? Helping them to ask questions that will invite that deeper experience, that is behind their belief. It's about following our curiosity instead of listening to debate or persuade, right? The intentionality that we bring to our listening and to our asking of questions, we know has a powerful impact on what we hear and how a person responds. So, we come with a genuine curious question. We're going to get a really different response from our interlocutor or conversation partner than if we come with a question that's actually just a suggestion with an inflection point at the end of the sentence, don't you think it would be better if you just did this?
Stephanie:
Do you mean my mom voice? Yes, I know that, I've heard that once or twice. I always say I'm a better professor than I am a parent. I'm so much more generous and open ended with my students than with my own children.
Meg:
My God, please. Heather is like, that doesn't sound like a curious question.
Stephanie:
There's no fun in it. Yeah, I'm not talking ... That is great, I love that she says that. Look, bring your work to home. Usually, it's like your work at the work place and you're like, "Okay, bring it into this conversation." That is too funny. Well, I would like to write my congressional representative, Jim McGovern and suggest that he bring essential partners to Congress, because I think exactly what you're talking about is what we need and we need it frankly on local and state government levels, as well as institutionally what you're talking about, because I really think we are in a crisis and unfortunately, I don't believe that playing to just ... I mean, leadership matters and the tone is set from above in many ways, I believe in a ground up model too.
Stephanie:
I don't think that necessarily just notions of who's in charge is going to magically change how we have trained ourselves over decades frankly, really, it's not over a few years as a country but over decades to not listen and to not understand because people are angry and frustrated and then shut down. So, it sounds like if you were to describe yourself beyond, you need a new title. The associate does not encapsulate it. It's teacher, it's curiosity generator, it's ... you're a human can opener. You're a maker of space for these things to happen. We need a more-
Meg:
Crafter of questions and-
Stephanie:
Crafter of questions, that sounds like Hogwarts. The Crafter of questions and potions. Well, this is such a pleasure and I have to say I'm so glad you do this work, Meg, because we really so desperately need it. It must feel wonderful to do work that you really believe and see, as needed and effective. That's really awesome, so thank you for that. I'm going to shift gears and do you want to say one more thing? Go ahead.
Meg:
I just want to add, I think sometimes dialogue gets a bad rep because there are so many urgent issues that need action and attention. So, I just want to say that dialogue is a tool, and our approach has, at its heart, a purpose of building and supporting mutual understanding, and it is not going to solve all the world's problems but what it is really good at is building trust, building understanding and building social cohesion in communities that have been sort of torn or harmed in terms of their sense of community, and it can lay a really strong foundation for action, for a community coming to know and understand where its shared values and shared hopes are and then, moving toward that.
Stephanie:
Again, this is a ... it's a really helpful precondition. A really necessary precondition but I appreciate you saying that because I think, again, as historian of the ... and I think about Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama, Birmingham and the City Council saying, "Just wait, don't do this now, wait. This isn't the time," and he wrote his piece why we can't wait and the letter from the Birmingham Jail. So, there does come a time when dialogue shuts down, because it's not really dialogue. It's not dialogue of ... sort of you're talking about, which is people on various positions and I'm saying sides because we don't want to be binary, occupying various spaces in the conversation, who are equally equipped to have a true dialogue, as opposed to not equipped.
Stephanie:
If people refuse to be equipped, and they insist on being equipped or failed to be equipped, then, of course, I understand why it breaks down and people have to act, because you're right, action toward justice is what the process is hopefully leading toward.
Meg:
Yeah and people have to ... I think people who come to the dialogue table, they come because they're in touch with something that means a lot to them, and they care enough to show up and listen and try to muddle through with people who they know, occupy different positions and to me, that's a sign of hope in and of itself, if people are willing to come to the table and that they have a shared commitment to making some kind of change, making their community better, making space for more voices and re-humanizing the quote, unquote, other and that ... again, process is an outcome.
Stephanie:
It were, you say, yeah.
Meg:
The outcome of that is increased trust, increase connection, increased resilience of listening and social cohesion that, as you said, can be a precondition for greater change in terms of structural change or organizational change, or societal-
Stephanie:
Yeah, absolutely and even an opportunity for decreasing certain kinds of behaviors, right, is also ... plus its increasing capacity, but not just dismissing a person because you think you know their whole bio or of course, that's how they're going to react and I'm sure that in your work, you come up against certain parties in various institutions, when they hear your plan, say, "Well, I'm not going to do that, right. That's not for me." That must be really frustrating because the idea is to build that trust so that, people who need it, who's all of us, that's the other piece, it's not just certain parties need to hear all, all the parties need to hear.
Stephanie:
I think that that's a really inclusive model. Awesome. That's great work. It's so needed, I want you to come to my house in my next Thanksgiving dinner, Meg and we'll have a consultation. All right, so let's shift gears, because we don't have too much time left, although I could do this all day long. I wish I could. I'm going to do something called speed round for fun.
Meg:
Okay.
Stephanie:
My gosh, what is it? Okay, and I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I just want you to answer in whatever way you want. Okay? They're really, really heavy questions. These are heavy questions that are going to shape the future of the world, ready? Favorite vacation spot?
Meg:
Wellfleet. The Cape.
Stephanie:
Beautiful. Favorite baked good that you make yourself?
Meg:
Homemade no knead bread.
Stephanie:
Favorite dessert that's a dessert, baked good. Of course. It's so funny that I say baked good, I'm immediately thinking chocolate and you say bread. So, favorite dessert, dessert not just bread.
Meg:
It's the Italian in me.
Stephanie:
I know. Right.
Meg:
I don't actually make a lot of desserts but I buy the most delicious brownie from The Vegan. I know, it sounds unbelievable. The Vegan bakery down the street has amazing fudgy chocolatey brownies.
Stephanie:
Delicious. All right, then that sounds perfect. I like that. My mother was a baker like that. She was like, I don't really bake, but I go to Paris Pastry Bakery and I buy the best stuff in pink boxes. What is one of your favorite places in Worcester, because you also lived here for a while after graduation, what's one of your favorite places in Worcester?
Meg:
Can I say your house?
Stephanie:
Yes, you're so sweet. Thank you. More importantly, what's your favorite restaurant in Providence, your current home?
Meg:
We have a weekly standing Friday night dinner at the Vegetarian Place down the street. It's Garden Grill and we miss them terribly while they were shut down and now, we get takeout usually on Friday night.
Stephanie:
Nice. Garden Grill in Providence. Excellent. Do you make New Year's resolutions or is it every day resolutions?
Meg:
I don't usually make a New Year's resolution. I try to reflect on the previous year, around that time of year. I don't really make resolutions.
Stephanie:
That's good. I think you live resolutions every day. Resolutions are outcome oriented. They're not process oriented anyway, right?
Meg:
Yeah. Yeah.
Stephanie:
Maybe what we should make are New Year's process commitments. We need to change that to ... change your title and change that tradition. All right, what about ... real quick back to Holy Cross, what was your favorite dorm that you lived in?
Meg:
I was the first class to move into what was simply called the apartments, my senior year, now Williams Hall. I was the senior resident director. The first ever in the senior apartments.
Stephanie:
Did you get a room with a good view of downtown?
Meg:
I was in the basement, so not the perfect view, but close to the nice balcony-
Stephanie:
They do.
Meg:
Yeah.
Stephanie:
That overlooked Worcester. What about if it's possible back in the early 2000s, your favorite food at Kimball?
Meg:
Gosh.
Stephanie:
It's gotten so good.
Meg:
Probably, froyo with cereal on top.
Stephanie:
Yeah, I think that's probably still, because that constant open machine of the froyo, yeah. What kind of cereal?
Meg:
Cinnamon toast crunch or something with sugar-
Stephanie:
There you go. Excellent and then, what's the best part about being a Holy Cross graduate? What's the best part about being part of this community and I'm going to add, what is something you would like to see more in this community of people?
Meg:
Well, one of the best things about being an alum is that I got to build the LGBTQ alumni network and meet a bunch of really fabulous and I mean fabulous in all the ways, LGBTQ alums and be part of creating a space where some of our alums who had never stepped foot on campus since they graduated, and had felt really disconnected from the college could reconnect. So, we have a network of hundreds of alums from across many decades and more than a handful of people have made it known to us that they have not had a relationship with the college until this group was founded and recognized and the college was so supportive when we approached them a number of years ago.
Meg:
Really, the request and encouragement of students at the time from the Abigail Allies now Pride group who wanted to see alums be recognized and organized so that they could see themselves in the alumni community, and that they could have support from alums. So that work has been really meaningful and my colleague, Phil Dardeno, from the class of 2002, has really held that work and steered the ship for the last few years.
Stephanie:
Wonderfully so and I can attest how important that group is for students. This model of, of being able to move through this place and be true to oneself and have a community that matters, that's wonderful. What would you like to see more from your alum group or from ... what do you what do you hope Holy Cross graduates can bring to the world right now?
Meg:
Gosh.
Stephanie:
It's a diverse group of people, so it's so hard.
Meg:
I know.
Stephanie:
A hard ask.
Meg:
Holy Cross alums are doing amazing things in the world and I love how we have Dr. Anthony Fauci out there representing some of what it means to be a Holy Cross alum right now and I'd love to see more storytelling and more ways to bring alums back together. I think the affinity spaces is the future of alumni development and alumni community because I imagine I'm not alone in this. My relationships and connection as a student spanned all four ... well, more than four, graduating classes because I was involved in so much. The idea of coming back for reunion is like, lovely and also, those are not all my people. I missed the people that I saw and had relationships with, that were years ahead and below me.
Meg:
I would love more opportunities for alumni to gather and now, that must be virtual. Also, for the college to tell the story of more alumni who might be not as famous as Dr. Fauci is and doing really amazing and important work in the world and that's why I love this podcast, but also, I think to amplify and elevate voices of alums who are doing ... who are living their mission and the colleges and then, have opportunities to like hang out together and learn from each other and like rub off on one another a little bit.
Stephanie:
Exactly, and then, that's that sustainability thing, right, that it fires in sustainable and relationships. That's awesome, Meg. I am so grateful for you, taking the time today to share your story with us and also to share your wisdom around process and relational exchange and hope. Whenever I speak with you, I always leave with a great sense of admiration, love but also such a sense of hope. You're a person who makes things possible and I thank you for that because sometimes this world feels like that ... possibilities feel, they're shutting down. They're literally shut down with isolation, right? It's just really revivifying to spend time with you and I appreciate how well you live the mission. Do you still have your T-shirt, we should have had you wear it.
Stephanie:
Maybe you have to find an old picture of you in the T-shirt to send ... to post with the podcast, of moving people into the apartments, right?
Meg:
I'll have to ask Brenda Hounsell-Sullivan, if she has an old orientation photo of me with the Live the Mission.
Stephanie:
I'm sure she does. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much. I will hopefully come down to Providence and grab some Garden Grill with you and Heather, and my husband Tony soon and keep up all the wonderful work you do. Thank you for being part of the Holy Cross story, Meg.
Meg:
Thank you for being one of my beacons along the way, Stephanie.
Maura:
That’s our show! I hope you enjoyed hearing about just one of the many ways that Holy Cross alumni have been inspired by the mission to be people for and with others.
A special thanks to today’s guests, and everyone at Holy Cross who has contributed to making this podcast a reality.
If you, or someone you know, would like to be featured on this podcast, please send us an email at alumnicareers@holycross.edu. If you like what you hear, then please leave us a review.
This podcast is brought to you by the Office of Alumni Relations at The College of the Holy Cross. You can subscribe for future episodes wherever you find your podcasts.
I’m you’re host, Maura Sweeney, and this is Mission-Driven.
In the words of St. Ignatius of Loyola, now go forth, and set the world on fire.
---
Theme music composed by Scott Holmes, courtesy of freemusicarchive.org.