Radical Daily Action with GirlTrek
Description
What if lacing up your sneakers weren’t just an exercise habit, but a radical political act? That’s the premise of GirlTrek—the movement to help Black women and girls reclaim their health and their communities through a daily habit of walking.
We sit down with Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison, the co-founders of GirlTrek—the largest public health nonprofit for Black women and girls—to talk about reclaiming space for rest and health, what it means to take daily walks in the steps of a Civil Rights legacy, and why Black women making s’mores in the mountains of Colorado is actually a tiny act of rebellion.
The most radical thing any woman can do, and particularly a black woman, is to slow her ass down. Slow down, stop running for other people’s praise. Stop running for other people’s approval. Slow down.
—Morgan Dixon, cofounder, GirlTrek
On the agenda:
- Why GirlTrek’s annual Stress Protest is a life-changing experience. “We are having a genuine spiritual experience on the top of a mountain that is fueled by the truth-telling of Black women who come there and vocalize that they are hurting, and then commit to claim space for themselves and their family.”
- How GirlTrek is creating a workplace that’s not built on hustle. “We have an offseason every year. That’s an annual sabbatical, essentially, that our entire team takes.”
- Why Black women particularly need self-care. “Two-thirds of black women engage in little to no leisure time physical activity…because we don’t have any leisure time. That’s why we don’t exercise on our leisure time, because we don’t have any leisure time.”
- How Harriet Tubman’s legacy inspires GirlTrek today. “She literally walked herself to freedom and saved her own life… And then she went back over and over again to get friends and family, which is what GirlTrek does.”
Plus: We’re in love with the idea of a company offseason. Fellesferie, 2020 y’all.
Links
Sponsor
This episode of Strong Feelings is brought to you by:
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Transcript
Sara Wachter-Boettcher: 00:00 Do you want to keep projects running smoothly, get invoices paid, and make sure your team is on track? Then you need Harvest, the tool for time-tracking project planning, and workload forecasting. Ninety-eight percent of customers say they’d recommend Harvest, and I’m one of them. Check them out at getharvest.com/strongfeelings for your free trial. And when you sign up for a paid account, you’re going to get 50% off your first month. That’s getharvest.com/strongfeelings. [Theme music plays for 11 seconds and then fades out.]
SWB: 00:38 Hey everyone, I’m Sara.
Katel LeDû: 00:39 And I’m Katel.
SWB: 00:40 And this is Strong Feelings, a podcast about work, friendship, and feminism—and what happens when you bring them all together.
KL: 00:46 Today we are talking to Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison. They’re the co-founders of GirlTrek, the largest public health nonprofit for Black women and girls. And we heard about them from our friend Malaika who went to their annual event called the GirlTrek Stress Protest, which definitely made our ears perk up.
SWB: 01:03 Oh my God. Stress Protest! We’re going to let you hear all about it from them, but before we get to that interview, I do want to talk about, Oh, one thing that they bring up in the interview. They mentioned that at GirlTrek they have a company offseason. And my heart just stopped when I heard them say this word. It’s like, yeah, offseason.
KL: 01:22 Yeah.
SWB: 01:22 It’s an annual sabbatical that everyone in the company takes at the same time. And it was like a light bulb went off in my head when I heard it. I was like, that is such a brilliant idea. An offseason!
KL: 01:30 It is an amazing idea. Like the concept of collective rest.
SWB: 01:36 Yes, yes, yes. And I feel like, you know, in other places like my German family, they have more of that concept built into their culture. Right. Like the idea of fucking off to Italy for an entire month in the middle of the summer to, you know, hang out in the mountains or at the beach or at a lake or whatever is so normalized.
KL: 01:55 Yeah.
SWB: 01:55 It’s very typical. Like most of your office is gone. Basically everybody is gone for an entire month at some point between June and August, but I feel like in the U S that is just not true. People do not have that kind of vacation time and when people talk about taking a sabbatical here, it’s a huge deal and it’s definitely not something people tend to do annually and it’s definitely not considered business as usual in most companies.
KL: 02:21 Yeah, no. I have a few friends who have taken sabbatical at some point in their life, but it wasn’t because it was offered to them. They made plans with their employers to take paid leave, or if they couldn’t do that, they figured out how to take unpaid time off from work and it’s like they just made it sort of cobbled together.
SWB: 02:38 And I think that’s the difference, right? It’s almost always this very individual process of figuring out how you’re going to cobble together the different things that you need. Like I’ll take my two weeks of paid vacation, take a week of unpaid leave, and then I can add this personal day and they do it over that three day weekend. Then I can get, you know, and then it’s also really hard then to be able to do it. Like for a lot of people I know they don’t really take a sabbatical until they’re super fucking burned out and feel like they can’t go on.
KL: 03:07 Uh huh.
SWB: 03:07 Where it’s like almost, like, necessary. And they often end up having to do something like quit a job and have enough money saved up to be able to do it.
SWB: 03:16 Which of course means it’s only open to a tiny fraction of people who are able to have that kind of privilege to do it. And it’s not something that’s just like typical normal and supported, culturally or at a company level.
KL: 03:28 Yeah, no, I mean I’ve never been in an environment where that was available and I never even considered it until recently.
SWB: 03:37 Uh huh.
KL: 03:37 Sara, I feel like I should announce it. I still kind of can’t believe I get to say the words, but I am taking a sabbatical during the entire month of December.
SWB: 03:46 I love it so much. So excited for your sabbatical. A little jealous, mostly excited.
KL: 03:52 [Laughs] Well and you were really instrumental in this happening because maybe a month ago we were co-working and we started talking about it. We were doing some planning and I think I said, “what if I take December off from A Book Apart?” But it turned into, “maybe I need to take time off from everything.” And you were like, “okay, if you want to make this happen, you got to start putting it into motion now.” And that was so helpful because one, it made it feel much more real than a “what if?” Kind of thought. And two, you were saying, “look, I support you now. How can we make this happen?”
SWB: 04:26 Yeah. I just knew when you were talking about it that if you waited, it would just seem less and less possible, because it would feel like there were too many reasons not to, too many barriers. Too many like open threads, right? Like you wouldn’t be able to feel like you could just shut the door and everything all of a sudden. And so it’s like, okay, let’s make it happen by making it happen now.
KL: 04:47 Yeah, no, that’s so true. So I started planning and I’m still preparing a little, but I’m really excited and actually my first gut feeling was excitement when I decided to really do it, and then immediately that turned into guilt.
SWB: 05:01 Oh yeah. Like all of those feelings of like, “Oh, do I really even deserve this?” An
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