“Following my transition out of Time's Up, I was having this crisis of identity. I've always been this storyteller who people really trust, and I felt that if I wasn’t doing this type of work, I would be completely destabilized. It was my sister, who’s a communicator as well, and other professional women around me who said, ‘Girl, you’ve always been the baddest at this. Remember who you are and build something for yourself because that’s what you deserve and it’s what our people need.’

“My sister had been thinking about building a firm and when she saw I was ready, we took the leap and started Black Alder, a communications and narrative strategy firm that primarily services organizations committed to social justice, racial justice, and gender justice. We launched two and a half years ago with six active clients, and it’s been upward ever since.”

“I had to move through those feelings that I think a lot of women in their professional lives have to grapple with—feelings like, ‘I’m good at my job and I get a lot of fulfillment from it, but I’m not my job. I am my own person. My humanity, my dignity, my self-worth are not connected to this thing that I do.’ I had to say to myself, ‘Whether you ever do this again, you are worthy. You are powerful. You have made contributions to the world that are important, and if you never do anything else again, that's enough.’ When I was able to sift through those feelings, I was like, ‘Okay, let’s do it. Let’s go.’” 

“A lot more needs to happen. But when I think about the past 10 years, I have so much respect and reverence for the people of Ferguson because they really did set off what has become a decade of reckoning around racialized violence and gender-based violence. Ferguson changed the world because we started having conversations about the value of Black lives in a system that strips people of their humanity, whether you’re Black, poor, queer, trans, or a woman. And it allowed for other things to take root—for example, we would not have had #MeToo without Ferguson. 

“All the issues are interconnected, so if you care about justice for survivors of sexual violence, you also care about race. If you care about racialized violence, you also care about what's happening to trans people and to queer people around the country, and therefore you also care about reproductive justice. So I think the biggest ‘win’ is that it cracked the ground open in a way that allowed other things to rise to the surface, and it provided fertile ground to activate on and to really build movement around. And I'm proud to have been a part of that.

“Culture has changed, too: When you think back to 2014, we were still in the Obama era, and people were so rattled by Ferguson because they had convinced themselves that we were in a post-racial society since we had a Black president. We saw the way people started to think about racialized violence and that began to change culture quickly. We saw an increase in the creation of culturally relevant apparel with movement logos and quotes, for example. We saw the creation of shows that addressed racial justice and social justice issues. We saw media conglomerates creating whole divisions to cover race and policing. I think that has continued, which has been a good thing…but on the other hand, I think people have grown accustomed to it in a way that the message has become a little bit diluted. We need to not only continue to tell the stories, but to remind people that we wouldn’t have all these things that now feel normal had we not lost what we lost—had we not been forced to mobilize and organize around the deaths of Black people.” 

“By telling the stories of the everyday people in communities around the country who have never stopped working on these issues. Just because the news cameras left Baltimore after Freddie Gray was murdered doesn't mean that those organizers stopped organizing. When George Floyd was murdered, the call at the time was to divest money from the Minneapolis Police Department and to reinvest in community safety and community alternatives to policing. And if folks didn’t see that change overnight, they’re like, ‘Oh well, it didn’t work.’’ But those organizers in Minneapolis organized for years before George Floyd was murdered, and they've been organizing ever since. 

“In my capacity as a communicator, it's my job to tell those stories around the country and to remind people that it's not just in these inflection points of mass tragedy or uprising that things change. Things change in those moments because of the work people were doing before and the work that they'll continue to do after. There are people in these communities all across the country who are still fighting and electing new leaders and trying to change policy and doing all the things. And that's important.”