Community Coalitions with Chioma Nnaji

Paul Kuttner:

Welcome to Partnership Work, where we explore what it takes to reach across the walls that divide us and get people working together to improve our world. I’m Paul Kuttner.

On today’s episode, we’re taking a dive into the world of community coalitions. When it comes to tackling the big issues, individual community organizations can only do so much. So, like the X-Men or the Avengers, they team up, combine their powers. These days, coalitions are a common feature of the social change landscape. But they are a lot more complicated than they look on paper. They can be fragile things, quick to fall apart over distrust, competition, and power struggles.

My guest today knows all about building and maintaining coalitions. Chioma Nnaji has spent over two decades organizing and supporting community coalitions in public health. In our conversation, Chioma talks about how her childhood helped mold her into a consummate community builder and how she found herself quite unexpectedly working in HIV and AIDS. We discuss her approach to organizing across African diaspora communities rooted in a shared African identity. Chioma shares some of the lessons she’s learned about how to bring coalition members to the table, how to develop shared language, how to help people step into their power, and how to maintain a coalition over the years or even decades it takes to see real change.

Chioma lives in the Boston area, so she was able to join me here in the studio at Urban Media Arts. We had a lot of fun and more than a few laughs, so I hope you enjoy it as well. Let’s get to it.

Paul:

Today, I am joined in the studio by Chioma Nnaji. Chioma is an organizer and community health worker who for over two decades has been working with African diaspora communities on issues around public health, racial justice, and immigrant rights. She is Senior Program Director for the Multicultural AIDS Coalition in Boston, where she founded and directs the Africans for Improved Access Program.

Recently, Chioma helped launch the African Immigrant Health Research Consortium. I had the honor of attending their first summit this past year, Africanizing the Research Paradigm, which was honestly one of the most energizing events I’ve been to in quite a while. Chioma has a background in theater. She sits on a bunch of boards and a whole lot of other things that I don’t have time to list. I will link to her full bio in the show notes. So Chioma, thanks so much for joining me today.

Chioma Nnaji:

Thank you for having me, Paul. I always enjoy intros because I’m like, oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s me. Did I really do that? So I always enjoy how people introduce me. So thank you.

Paul:

No, thank you. So I’m starting out all the episodes with the same question. And since you’ve been involved in so many things, I’m super curious how you’re going to answer it. When you are at a family event or a party and someone asks you, “Hey, what do you do?” What do you say?

Chioma:

Oh, that’s a big, I don’t know. I mean, oh, wow. So, I started off and I still do HIV AIDS work, right? So, I feel like it was easy for me to answer that question because I used to say, depending on who I’m talking to, I’d say sexual health, HIV. And now I find myself saying public health because I’m across so many different things. And then if people want to dig deeper, I might go into particular aspects of my work.

I think what I find interesting is that when I say public health, it’s more understood at this point because of COVID-19, right? Like COVID-19 brought a lot of awareness to the general population about what is public health, right? And so I think now I feel comfortable saying public health. But 15 years ago, definitely the first thing out of my mouth wouldn’t have been public health. It would have been sexual health, HIV. Or, you know, “I work with communities.”

Paul:

Maybe tell me a bit about how you ended up in public health in the HIV field.

Chioma:

Oh, I fell into it. I never expected to be in public health, right? Never expected to be here working in the United States. I finished my bachelor’s degree at Florida A&M University and that was in health care management, right? And my father chose my degree. I was like, “Oh, daddy, I want to do healthcare.” And he was like, “You definitely are not the doctor.”

He was like, “Okay, I have somebody who runs a program around healthcare management. Let’s put you in there.” So, I did healthcare management. I worked for the government of Florida, really focusing on Medicaid, Medicare for two years. And it was a hard two years, right? Because I was sitting there making decisions about people’s lives, looking at budgets and looking at numbers, right? Not really understanding why people are in their certain position or why people couldn’t cover their bills or whatever, right? And I didn’t feel good about it. So, I was like, “This healthcare management thing is not for me.”

Long story short, I had a partner at that time who graduated and was going to New York. And so he was like, “Uh, yeah, you need to figure out — cause you’re not staying here with your daddy in Florida — you need to figure out what you’re going to do.” So I was like, okay, I guess I’ll be going up North.

So I had a cousin who was doing a master’s in public health, and an MD. And so that’s how I ended up in the area of public health and came to BU and did my MPH. And then while I was finishing up my thesis for my public health, I just wanted to do volunteer work. Because in my mind, I was about to move to West Africa somewhere and do work with NGOs. And I found a volunteer opportunity at the Multicultural Studies Coalition, working with the population, the communities I wanted to work with, really doing the organizing work that I wanted to do. And so I’ve been there for 24 years. That’s a long time to be in one organization.

Paul:

That’s true.

Chioma:

I can say I’m one of the longest. Myself and the executive director have been the longest.

Paul:

One thing I know, when I look at what you’ve done through the Multicultural AIDS Coalition and elsewhere is a lot of your work being with coalitions and large collectives. Why are coalitions important for the kind of work you do? And maybe what were some of your first experiences with coalitions?

Chioma:

I actually started off in the public health field as coordinating a coalition, right? It was a coalition focused on HIV, AIDS, and African immigrants. And one thing that I realized when you’re working with coalition, these are community coalitions, right? We can have all different types of coalitions led by different individuals and organizations, but particularly, I’ve been a part of community coalitions.

And so one thing that I’ve realized that’s critically important when you’re working with community coalitions is knowing when to step back, right? Knowing when to be the fly on the wall and let what needs to happen in the room happen, right? Or what needs to happen in community happen.

And sometimes that’s hard, especially if you’re with an organization and organizations come with certain parameters because of funding or maybe because they’re the backbone organization, they have a certain agenda. But if you’re serious about doing equity work, if you’re serious about doing community health work, it’s important that when you’re running coalitions, to be able to step back and say, “The community knows what the community needs.”

And not only do they know what they need, they have the solutions to address whatever challenges they’re dealing with, right? And most times, nine out of ten, the issue isn’t having the solution. The issue is having the resources and the access to power and privilege to be able to implement what needs to happen.

Paul:

Say a bit more what you mean, how you define a community coalition.

Chioma:

So, for me, a community coalition is when the majority of people around the table identify with the issue and represent the individuals who are being mostly impacted. So you could have coalitions like the coalition that I actually started with was a coalition of African immigrants living with HIV, African leaders and community-based organizations.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health was represented on the coalition, we had health care providers on the coalition, researchers on the coalition. The core of the members were individuals who were most impacted, either impacted in terms of their living with HIV or impacted in terms that they had family members and friends who were living with HIV, right? Most of them were African immigrants.

And so, when you have a coalition like that, then you’re very clear and you’re very centered around community needs, right? Sometimes when you have a coalition that is talking about community needs and you have one or two community people who are represented on the coalition, the focus gets lost. The agenda becomes somebody else’s agenda. And oftentimes the voices of communities get dissipated, right? Because there’s only two of them at the table, right? Out of a coalition, maybe of a membership of 20, right? And so it’s critically important when you’re talking about community coalitions that that coalition reflects the community that you’re actually wanting to have a positive impact on.

Paul:

Coming into that as a young public health professional, what were some of the first things that you had to learn about how to do coalition work?

Chioma:

I had to unlearn all the stuff I learned in my master’s program. That was the first thing. All the stuff, all the theories, all the ways in which programs should be developed, I had to unlearn that. And not saying that it’s not important, but walking into community, you have to really let go of whatever you think you know.

And I unlearned that quickly because I was around folks who did not mind telling me. And even my mentor in the work, Rosette Serwanga, you know, she was very clear. She was very grounded in what does it mean to do community organizing work. And she was very clear about creating space for community to define the solutions and the challenges and understanding challenges. And so that was the first thing, unlearn what you learned in your master’s degree. And then, like I said, the second thing is knowing when to step back.

But then also what was important in the work and what I continue to sort of learn and grow in is how are you transparent, right? So you mentioned the collaborative, the African Immigrant Health Collaborative that started. We started about five years ago, right? And one of the things I had to learn as being one of the founding members, but also my organization being the backbone of that collaborative is being transparent with partners around the table, right? Folks are okay if you say, hey, look, because we’re the backbone organization we need 15% of the budget to come to us to support the administrative work. Folks are okay with that when you tell them the reason why.

The problem comes when you’re like “Oh yeah, so the budget, um yeah, oh, so can we talk about that the next meeting, oh, oh no, so I didn’t bring the paper for the budget oh, oh no, oh did I say this meeting I meant next…” You know what I’m saying, right? Yeah, and so transparency is important, right?

Also, it’s about understanding my positionality in the work. And I had to learn that early on when I started in 2000. I had to understand my own positionality. Yes, I have a lot of similarities as it relates to African immigrant communities. And I also have a lot of differences. Similarities. My father’s Nigerian. I was brought up in Nigerian culture as well as African-American, U.S., of black folks born here in the U.S, that history, that rich history and culture.

I also had to realize that, especially today, the political environment the social environment, what does it mean for me to walk around talking about immigrant rights as someone who holds a U.S passport? You know what I’m saying? So even doing the work, recognizing my position in that and recognizing that I have a certain level of privilege and power because English is my first language, because I have a U.S. Passport, I could say I was born here in the U.S., you know, because I don’t have an accent, right? Because I can run my mouth off and nobody’s going to tell me to go back to my country, right? Like I have a certain level of privilege that I can use for good, but I also need to know how what that privilege can create in terms of tension with the communities I work with, and so I have to constantly be intentional about that.

Paul:

So, when you were first learning how to do this work, do you remember any big mistakes that you made, that you learned quickly? Like, were there any big mistakes that you remember learning from in those early days?

Chioma:

Oh, big mistakes. I got one. I was doing something similar to what’s going on now, right? Like, there’s a lot of “know your rights” trainings that are happening, right? So, at this point I had—I was already doing a lot of coalition work. And so I thought I had the people there that would come, that would be a part of it. So it was a know your rights training that I was partnering with a local organization. I’m not going to mention the name, a local organization.

And so we had the date, we had the time, it was happening on a Saturday, not during the week because people were working. I thought I had it all figured out, right? We had food coming, it was going to be rice and chicken, it wasn’t going to be cheese and crackers. I put that on the flyer, I was like,” I’m in it, I know what I’m doing because I’ve been doing this coalition work for a minute.”

Come 10 o’clock, nobody was there. Come 10:05, nobody was there. Come 10:30, I was like, “No problem, Africans are typically late, they’ll come.” Come 11 o’clock, nobody showed up. And so I had to really sit down and say, okay, why isn’t anybody here? I told the coalition, I emailed them. I emailed them. And so that was my aha moment. Maybe that sort of helped me figure out what does it mean in terms of building relationships in this work and the power of relationships.

And I sort of knew that because I’m running a coalition, I had everybody’s phone numbers, up to 50 people in this coalition. I knew everybody’s phone numbers, I was able to call people, but emailing is not enough, right? Dropping off flyers is not enough. What I learned and what I had to understand is making phone calls, having that personal connection, building off of the relationships that you have so that people will know, “Okay, this is something that I can do.”

The other thing that I realized is that concepts are not always transferable across cultures, right? Like, this idea of know your rights was not a fully understood concept. I don’t mean in terms of education and stupidity. I mean, in terms of like cultural concepts around know your rights, right? Like, you won’t see a know your rights training on the continent, right? And so really understanding how, do you take what maybe is a concept happening here in the U.S. and really unpack it so that communities that need the information will know what’s going to happen at those events or whatever.

But yeah, I mean, you know, it’s a core of my understanding in doing this work is the power of relationships. You have to focus on that relationship, right? And that means you might be going to a couple of baby showers. You might be going to a couple of weddings, right? That means maybe you’ll be going to an afterparty, right? Like, like people need to see that you’re committed to them in their community. And it’s not just about, in our case, you know, getting people tested for HIV, right? Folks need to see it’s more than that for you.

Paul:

You clearly are a connector and community builder. Where do you think that comes from? Like, is that something that started off early in your life? Is that something you learned as a child? Like, where does this, the skills and the aptitude or just your tendency to want to bring people together? Where do you feel like that started?

Chioma:

That’s a good question. I mean, I know that in my childhood and growing up, my mother and father were very much community oriented, right? Like to the point that I hated it because they knew all my teachers. My mom was best friends with my principal at my high school, to the point that I was like, okay, this is done. My father knew everybody across campus, you know? So the dean of my program knew my father very well. So, it was like, ugh, right?

And so I always grew up knowing the importance of community and grounding yourself in community and doing community work in a way in which you’re giving what you can give, right? And you’re not looking for anything in return. Of course, growing up, you don’t understand that until you get older and you sort of see. Because you’re like, “We have to go to another event? Like, really, mom?” Or, “Why are we always in Girl Scouts,” right? But being able to understand the meaning of that later on in my life, I think it was critical to me.

Figuring out what I want. Like I told you, I was working at government, doing healthcare, managing programs, Medicare and Medicaid programs. So it was not something that was intuitive, but I figured out like, where was my happy place, along my journey, where I could really lend my skills and my knowledge and my willingness to grow and learn, the best place for that. And I really enjoy, like you said, I love partnership work. I think in this time that we’re in right now, partnerships are going to be the answer. They really are going to be the answer. Multi-sector partnerships centered on community. I would even say led by community. That’s what’s going to be the answer to get us out of where we are right now, to sustain us as a greater community, a global community. That’s where we’re going to have to lean into.

Paul:

Amen. So, you talk about multi-sector partnerships. Do you have an example of some of the work you’ve done there? And I’m particularly interested in talking through how did you bring those people to the table to the point where they’re really able to both collaborate and center community?

Chioma:

Yeah, so I can use an example—it’s not really in the HIV space. It’s more in my work doing collective impact work. And that’s particularly with my business, Ultra Transformations, where I facilitate partnership development—ways in which you leverage partnerships to have greater impact.

One of the partnerships I was working with was focused on economic mobility for a particular sector of the community that was being most impacted: Black mothers who might be the only breadwinners in their family—the head of household.

I was brought in to create the partnership, to focus on a common agenda and figure out solutions to the problem, then collectively decide what’s the next step. What was interesting is that this partnership was actually being led by a foundation. They brought in business owners, Black mothers, employers and trainers, universities in that area, folks who focus on career development.

The one thing I realized quickly was that everybody had a different understanding of economic mobility. That was something I realized in conversations with different partners. I always find that starting a partnership with shared language is critically important. It doesn’t even matter how long y’all have been together—like even in the African partnership that I’m part of, we’re always working to be clear on our language and what we mean.

So with that partnership, we literally had conversations around, “What is economic mobility to you?” Of course, you had the business people and the universities saying, “Oh, we have to do more training,” or “We have to make sure mothers have the skills and knowledge they need.” And the mothers were saying, “No, I just need you to have child care so I can actually come to the job at a time that makes sense,” or “I need you to have flexible time because my child has special needs and I need to pick them up from school.”

“I don’t need you to tell me, as part of my onboarding, to be in a training for three months. That’s not really what I need.”

Being able to have a conversation around what would actually get this population to a point of economic mobility—and having that shared language—I think was the pivotal point. So any partnership, I think you have to start the foundation with: what exactly are we talking about? Let’s all get on the same page about that. Then we can get on the same page about the agenda for the partnership.

Paul:

And how do you prepare people to listen to that, to take one another into account in that way? That’s a rare kind of space that you’re talking about.

Chioma:

I always like having fun. That’s why I talk about facilitation as a power move. I enjoy people being comfortable enough to share with each other and laugh and have fun.

That can look different ways. For me, it could be when I’m working with a group—what does the space look like that we’re working in? Or how am I going to have people introduce themselves to each other? Or how do I walk into the room?

One partnership I was working with, my mom actually got an opportunity to come to. My mom needed something to do, so I flew her down and was like, “Come with me to this partnership meeting. Then we’ll take the weekend off and go somewhere.”

So she was in the room, and I was just like, “Well, my mommy is my mommy, and everybody should know my mommy because she’s fabulous.” I said, “Hey everybody, I have a guest. I’m so excited to introduce you all—this is my mommy.”

And that set a different tone. Everybody was like, “Oh, it’s your mom!” It allowed people to see me in a certain way, and it allowed them to open up—maybe about their relationship with their mom, or how they were excited to see me with mine.

How do you humanize a space so people can connect in ways that might be unexpected, but definitely strip them down from that “I’m here as a professional and I need to represent my organization”?

Paul:

Yeah, I love that. So that sort of gets to the beginning of a partnership. One thing I’m interested in is what partnerships look like and how they change over time.

So I’m curious if you can talk to me about National African Immigrant HIV and Hepatitis Awareness Day, because I know you worked on that for a really long time. It was successful—but it took years.

Tell us a little bit about that effort and maybe one or two things you learned from that long-term effort to start that day.

Chioma:

Yeah, so that started in 2014. And so just to give context, right,— In the HIV space, we have HIV Awareness Days. Those are big things because they bring visibility to whatever issue you’re trying to highlight and also could potentially lead to funding and new opportunities.

Back in 2014, a group of African organizers doing work within the HIV space came together and said, “We should have an HIV Awareness Day for African immigrants.” We also recognized that hepatitis B was increasing in our community, so we just slapped hepatitis B onto the awareness day as well. So, again, it came out of community organizing, activists, and community knowledge about what was needed to bring more visibility to this day.

The question then was, how are we going to get it in front of Congress and the House of Representatives? How are we going to get a champion for this? Because it has to be officially stamped and signed off. It took until 2024 for us to actually get it recognized as a federal HIV awareness day. The twists and turns around that are that the people we started with weren’t the same people we ended with. One thing I’ve learned in organizing work is that’s okay, because people join the movement or the journey when they can.

You have to create space where there’s staying power, but participation might fluctuate along the way. Staying power meant that someone constantly took responsibility to lead. Somebody has to do that in partnerships that are sustainable. That doesn’t mean the lead can’t transfer from one organization or individual to another, but somebody always has to take the lead.

What I learned from that is creating a process where people can get in and fit in at the moment of their lives or where their organization is, is critically important. Often, we have these expectations: “No, you’re going to be here for two years, you’re going to do this and that.” And sometimes that causes partnerships to fail because you create all these rigid parameters and boundaries.

But if you create a flexible process, a flexible relationship with your partners where it’s like, “Okay, I see you’re struggling this month. Take some time off for six months. Whenever you’re ready, come back,” where the partnership operates that way, you will have staying power. It might not look consistent because you don’t have the same people at the same table all the time, but you have people moving the work forward.

If at any point you can pull on this person, that person, or the other person, they’ll be saying the same thing because you’ve created a space where they can come in, be grounded in the work, step back if they need to, and come right back in at the same place and continue the work.

And so that’s what I had to learn, because it was exhausting. It was exhausting to constantly be talking about, “We need this awareness day, right?” Then it’s like, “Okay, but we need this partner.” This partner would come and say, “Okay, yeah, I can do this.”

They might only be here for the next two years, but they’ve done their part and they’ve committed. Then if I call them in the third year and say, “Hey, I just need you to send this out to your network,” they’re like, “Oh yeah, cool.” Because I’m not holding them accountable to where I think they should be, and I understand they have the capacity to do what they can at that moment. And if I need them for something, they’ll be right there because they’re still committed to the work.

Paul:

Oh, that’s perfect. So I do want to talk about one of your recent projects, the African Immigrant Health Research Consortium. I got to go to your first event, which was fabulous by the way. It felt very different from certainly any other research meeting I’ve been to in a long time.

Chioma:

Everybody keeps saying that. Why? What do y’all do?

Paul:

I don’t know. Just the amount of hugging and laughing, taking photos, and the connections happening at the tables. It was really inspiring. So, I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about how that group came together and where the idea came from.

Chioma:

So, if I’m being very transparent, it came through a grant. We were able to receive funding from PCORI, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, to do work around creating a partnership—a research partnership.

We knew we wanted it to be community-led. As part of that project, we said we would do a national meeting. I really didn’t want to make it as big as it was, but the partnership pushed for that. This is again where you have to step back because it’s not about me, it’s about what the partnership says. I was fine with a small meeting and keeping it going, but the partnership said otherwise.

Paul:

Who are your partners?

Chioma:

So we have six partners that make up the African Immigrant Health Research Consortium, or AIHRC. The majority are grassroots or community-based organizations providing services to African immigrants, and some also serve refugees and immigrants more broadly. They cover everything from resettlement services to social services to healthcare services.

Putting together that event, we knew it needed to reflect what we were talking about. How can we challenge colonial understandings of what research is and how it should look? We didn’t want to show up in the very traditional ways research is presented and talked about, or ignore the communities we were talking about—African immigrants.

So it started with the space. I talked about creating the space first. We decided everything would be African—from African fabric to kola nut, because it was important that Africans walking into the room would feel welcomed. Kola nut is found across the continent as a way to start ceremonies, rituals, to welcome people into a home, or as a gift.

We knew the significance of kola nut, and also the significance of African fabric, which shows the various cultures represented there. We were very intentional because Africanizing the research paradigm also meant Africanizing the space in which we hold the conversations.

Paul:

One thing I’m really curious about— you organize in African immigrant communities, which include people from over 50 countries, each with its own histories, cultural backgrounds, and languages. What does it look like to build community, partnership, and solidarity in that context? Where do you start?

Chioma:

Yeah, I mean just in Nigeria, we’re talking about 250 different ethnic groups—that’s just Nigeria! Africa has 54 or 56 countries depending on how you count the smaller islands. Each country has many ethnic groups. So when thinking about building community in that space, it’s about what are some of the similarities across the continent that we can all pull from.

In my work in HIV/AIDS and organizing around research as a tool for advocacy, one thread across African communities, no matter where they’re from, is the concept of “we.” This idea that we are collective—we’re not individuals. What I do impacts you, and what you do impacts me. My issues are your issues, and your issues are mine.

Sometimes that can be a hindrance, but I use it as a way to talk about our issues and how we’re building and addressing them collectively. That was very important in HIV/AIDS work because of the level of stigma. I couldn’t say, “Well, that person’s living with HIV, how do we help them?” It had to be, “We have a challenge in our community. How are we coming together as a community to address it?”

Then there are visual cues you just know are African—whether it’s the material or cultural practices like kola nut. At the event, you saw we did a libation—a very African tradition you see across the continent. How do we pull on those cultural cues to support communities, to help people not just engage, but say, “This is something I can own”?

Paul:

Love it. One of the things you and I connected over when we first met was theater. You have a background in Theater of the Oppressed, and you’ve done theater work connected to some of your HIV work. How do you think about the role of theater and the arts in building coalitions and partnerships?

Chioma:

You know, it’s not so far-fetched from what happens on the continent of Africa. I think here in the U.S. it’s a foreign concept, right? Like, if I was doing HIV-AIDS on the continent, I would be doing it through theater and the arts. If you look at some of the ways in which interventions and development has happened on the continent.

I think that, for me, the reason why I engage in particular Theater of the Oppressed, but other sort of participatory theater methods is because it allows people to get out of their head and really to think about this issue or this challenge in different ways, right? The beauty about theater of the oppressed is like it not… And since you’re a theater head like I am, like, you know that it doesn’t just unpack the issue, right? It personalizes the issue and then it forces you to think about how you can intervene, right?

And so that’s what I love about ways in which we can introduce or bring in theater. But then arts has always been part of the HIV/AIDS movement. It’s because of the arts, right? The arts was like the biggest advocacy movement happening in HIV and AIDS to show the fact that people are dying and we need to do something about it.

You know, we have the AIDS quilt, which was done. Act Up. Act Up was really sort of integrated into the art scene. So arts has always been there as a tool for advocacy, as a tool for visibility, as a tool for people to share what’s going on in their personal lives without having to voice it, right?

And so I think theater is just a way for people to embody what’s happening in their lives and to embody what’s happening in the community and really sort of allow their other senses to guide them on what the solution could look like, right? Because we get caught up in our head, you know, we get so caught up in our head. And that usually is the main barrier to actually collaborating, partnering on whatever issues that we want to deal with.

Paul:

Yeah, that’s beautiful. What is the hardest or most frustrating part of doing this work?

Chioma:

It’s people not understanding their own power. That’s the hardest part. The hardest part is people not understanding their own power. Because the way that we’ve been socialized, particular communities who are racialized and marginalized on a day-to-day basis, about what they can and cannot do, about what they’re allowed, what space they’re allowed to be in, and what space they don’t belong in, about what their limitations are, right? And so you internalize that. And so it’s a harder process to support people in seeing their own power, right?

I don’t use the word empowerment because I think that further notes that someone is marginalized. For me, what the issue is that systemically we’ve been told something and we’ve internalized that. And so it makes it challenging for us to, it makes it challenging for people to step in their power. And so that’s, for me, the hardest part. Because I know for sure, without a question of a doubt, that the answer is going to come from community.

Chioma:

I know for sure, if we’re not grounded in that, then we’re going to continue to go in this circle of “what ifs,” right?

Paul:

So what do you do to help people or support people to step into their power?

Chioma:

Part of that is unpacking the reasons why, right? Unpacking the reasons why folks may feel like they’re in a certain situation or are in a certain situation. So, creating space to have that dialogue and that conversation. Even before that, I would say just acknowledging how shit is real and shit is hard, right?

Just because I can’t speak to what does it mean to migrate from the continent of Africa through the Mexican border doesn’t mean that it’s not hard, right? Like, it wasn’t my experience, but I hear people saying that shit was hard. That shit was hard, period, right? Acknowledgement. And so being able to create — am I allowed to cuss? I guess it’s too late.

Chioma:

I should have asked for the parameters of the discussion.

Paul:

They’re going to put that little explicit sign next to the podcast.

Chioma:

Like, gosh, she cussed a lot. No, I didn’t cuss that much.

But yeah, so that acknowledgement and then creating space for people to unpack that. And then, I’m a strong believer — I mean, of course, since I sit in partnerships and I support partnerships — the power of collaboration. Right? So, someone might be challenged with something. Someone else might be challenged with the same thing. Bringing them together in the room and seeing how they’re acknowledged, how they’re seen, how they’re valued, and how that transfers into them walking into their own power is just an amazing process. It’s just an amazing process.

And then once folks are able to connect at that individual level, what they can do as a — we’re calling it a coalition and a partnership, but what they can do as a collective, it’s the most beautiful thing. It’s really the most beautiful thing. Like the conference. I’m still in awe at people saying that the conference was amazing. I’m still in awe of that, you know, because when you’re doing the work behind, you know, like I told you, I wanted a small meeting. The partnership said, no, Chioma, we’re going big. I was like, okay, we’re just going to do this little thing. They said, “No, Chioma, we’re going big.”

I remember I posted on LinkedIn after the summit. And I said, “When you have a dope partnership, you do dope shit.”

Paul:

Yeah.

Chioma:

You know what I’m saying? Once you have the partnership in place, once you have your process that is transparent, that is authentic, that is full with trust, that’s about building, centered around community, your outcomes are going to be amazing. They’re going to be more than what you could think it could ever be. Right.

So that was just—It’s a testimony to me to be clear about that and stay grounded in that.

Paul:

Well, that seems like a good place to end it. I love that. That’s a bit of a mic drop, but you’re not allowed to drop these mics.

Chioma:

Okay, yeah, they look expensive.

Paul:

These are not my mics. So I just want to thank you for joining me. That was such a fun conversation.

Chioma:

Thank you for having me. I’m excited. I’m excited about how you continue this conversation around partnerships. And the critical point I think we are in and how partnerships can really move us into a better place than where we are right now. So thank you for your commitment to this work.

Paul:

Of course. Thank you. Take care.

Paul:

Thank you all for joining me today. To see the episode transcript and show notes, head over to partnershipwork.podbean.com. I’ve included some links to places where you can learn more about today’s guest and the topics we discussed.

Partnership Work is an independent podcast created with the incredible support of the nonprofit organization Urban Media Arts here in my hometown of Malvin, Massachusetts. Check them out at urbanmediaarts.org. I’ll see you next time. Take care.