In 2014, Heather Fleming, Jessica Stago, and Natasha Hale launched a one-day event on the Navajo reservation to help the community learn about entrepreneurship. With the hope that at least five people would show up, the team was shocked to see more than 80 people attend their first event. Of course, they knew they were on to something. One of their funders encouraged them to transition from a one-day event to a full-scale organization that would help create a space for Native entrepreneurs and community members to access the infrastructure, expertise, and support they need to build small businesses, and thus, Change Labs was born. On this episode, Fleming walks us through how she moved from a one-day event to a full organization, how she's navigated feeling like an outsider, and why business is so critical to sparking social change.&nbsp;

Ep. 36: Heather Fleming of Change Labs

Did you know that one in every four girls fails to earn her high school diploma in four years, and that those numbers are even worse for girls of color? When girls do not complete high school, they experience higher rates of unemployment, earn significantly lower wages, and are more likely to need to rely on public support programs to provide for their families. Research has confirmed that single-sex schools benefit students that are the most educationally at-risk, including girls and minority students. After learning about this, Liz Wolfson had a vision for an all-girls school that would foster academic excellence and personal development for young women. Fast forward many years, and she is now the co-founder of GALS and BOYS, which are tuition-free charter schools and are the only public, single-gender, college-preparatory schools in Colorado, which are now expanding into other states. We sat down with Wolfson to talk education, how she built a school with no history of doing so, and how she has overcome the challenges along the way.

Ep. 37: Liz Wolfson of Girls Athletic Leadership School (GALS)

There is collective collusion to ignore uncertainty and to pretend that we live in a world we can control, in which we can tell the future, we can mitigate risks.  Now, we have been awakened to the inevitability, impermanence, and unpredictability.  We have discovered we may not have sufficient tools to deal with reality.  We have not discussed this sufficiently. We’re seeing that the things we’ve been trained to do are not sufficient for what reality requires. In the context of conscious business and leadership, the reality requires our ability to look at it, accept it, and embrace it wholeheartedly.   We’re seeing for the first time in unvarnished light that none of our modernity, technology, medicine can fend off the inevitable. At the collective level, we are being pressed in an era of opportunities to raise consciousness in a way that has not been prevalent even in the 60s. There is hope that we, as a community, can ground this, not lose it.

Q&A with Eric Kaufmann | Thought Leader, Executive Coach, and Author

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