Intent vs. Impact with Baionne Coleman

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:02] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Grow Kinder Podcast, where thought leaders in education explore how social-emotional learning can help us navigate society's most pressing challenges and create a kinder, more compassionate world. Brought to you by Committee for Children.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:00:23]SM: Hi, Grow Kinder listeners. It’s one of your hosts, Shauna McBride. Today, I am thrilled to be speaking with Baionne Coleman, CEO and Principal of Rainier Valley Leadership Academy. With two master's degrees in teaching and in educational administration from Seattle University, Baionne is known throughout the South Puget Sound region as an anti-racist change agent and an expert in social-emotional learning, K-12 education, school leadership, and restorative behavioral practices.

Well, so great to connect with you today, Baionne. This is actually my first solo podcast. I can't tell you how excited I am to chat with you.

[00:01:08] BM: Thank you. Thank you. Likewise.

[00:01:10] SM: Great. Okay, so before we get into what I'm predicting is going to be a really meaty conversation, I would love for you to tell our listeners, who may not be familiar, a little bit about yourself and the great work that you're doing at Rainier Valley Leadership Academy in Seattle.

[00:01:27] BM: Thank you. Yes. My name is Baionne Coleman. I am currently the CEO and Principal of Rainier Valley Leadership Academy located in Columbia City. 98% of our scholars are global majority. 80% of our leadership team is global majority, specifically black. We are the only black lead or global majority lead charter school in Washington State for that matter, so we are the 2% out of that.

In addition, I am a mother of four beautiful children. I have three beautiful brilliant black males and one amazingly brilliant young black female, as my beautiful children. I have an amazing husband, who is also a black man who continues to work in education. I've worked in education for going on 21 years now. I've been an administrator for 13 of those years. I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington and went to Howard University for two years, which I probably would have never came back if I didn't need to help our family. But I'm thankful that I was able to have the opportunity to come back and support, and then graduated from University of Washington, and went on to go and do two different masters after that.

[00:02:40] SM: You've been doing a lot. Excellent. You have a nice big family. What led you to found a charter school?

[00:02:47] BM: I had been an administrator for nine years before I ever went and got my administrative certificate. I think it's very indicative of inequities in our systems where it's like you can be doing the job for a really long time and not actually be supported in the financial space for actually doing just based off of a piece of that paper. When I went back to go and get my certifications, one of my professors, Dr. Tyson Marsh, who is now at Bothell of University of Washington, he basically had had a conversation with folks in the charter sector, and they were looking for a principal who was like going to be graduating. He basically was like, “No need to worry about till they graduate. I got somebody for you right now who's like ready to go. If y'all can get her, then y'all will be in basically.”

I had no idea that he was having this conversation. I was actually looking for charter schools for my son at the time, just to make sure that he had a better experience. He was having a lot of frustrations in the schools that he was at private and traditional public schools. So I met with some folks, had some conversations, and ended up going in to found an elementary school in Washington in Tukwila, the first elementary charter school organization here. I didn't really recognize that the folks that I was creating the school with were actually very much not aligned with the work around that I wanted to do around anti-racism. So after two years of being with that organization, I actually ended up having to step away because of the verbal, the physical, and the mental abuse that was happening consistently.

I had to make a choice at that time to say, “I'm going to either be complicit in this lie, and be tokenized in this space, and be inviting my community into this harm. Or I'm going to walk away and walk with community and support them in that space.” At this time, I didn't know what I was going to do. I was like, “Okay. I don't know what's next.” But I know my husband being the very supportive man that he is and just a fierce protector, he was like, “You can't continue to stay in this space. I'm going to lose my wife, and my children are going to lose their mother if you continue to stay in this space.” When I made that decision, I kind of just walked away on faith and the community actually reached out, “So happy that you walked away. Can you come over here to Rainier Valley Leadership Academy and support us?”

At the time, I was like, “Nope, not happening. Things are a mess over there. I just need a breath. I don't know if I can do this anymore,” and really had to do a lot of self-reflection and a lot of prayer, honestly, about what I was going to do. A couple of the elders reached out and were like, “Look, young lady. We need you to come over here and do this.” Between like my faith and the elders, I was like, “I can't say no. This is why I'm in education. This is my heart, this is my passion, and this is my community that I grew up with in these spaces.” At that time, I took the position as a principal at Rainier Valley Leadership Academy, supporting the community with their transition to become an independent school and specifically an anti-racist, collaborative community school focused on leadership for middle schoolers and high schoolers.

At that time we began the work, I didn't have an opportunity to necessarily hire any of the teachers that were in the building, and we soon found out that about 50% of the teachers that were currently in the building were not necessarily certificated, and so they didn't necessarily understand like classroom management or how to actually support scholars. So there was just a lot of work that we had to do and a lot of cleanup that we had to do. The board was a majority white board in Columbia City. That’s one of the most diverse areas in our nation, if you will. So we began to change things up.

On June 23rd, I was actually promoted to the CEO position after my first year there as principal. Chastity Catchings was promoted as our COO, who's also another black female, and we began the work of changing things around. So we changed our predominantly white board to almost 90% global majority, again, to support our teachers and our teaching staff with ensuring that we turn that around. So we had about 30% global majority teachers. We now have 78%, with 40% of those being black. I was at the time the only person on our leadership team that was black when I came in and then hired a assistant principal who was also global majority. We have since changed that to be 80% of our leadership team is global majority, and then there was no executive leadership that was global majority. So we've been able to flip that completely on its head to be 100% black female lead executive team and the only one in Washington State for charter schools.

[00:07:17] SM: Wow, wow, wow. I said this was going to be a meaty conversation, and you’ve already [inaudible 00:07:24]. Wow, wow. I mean, there's so much to talk about there. You're right. Change can be – It’s scary and betting on yourself as always. It can be tough, right? I feel like things happen when and the way they're supposed to, more times than not. What do you feel has kept you?

[00:07:45] BM: Community has kept me. My husband being the fierce protector and supporter that he is protects me. I'm a very faith-based woman, so I believe in God and I believe that there are no coincidences also. I believe that we're put exactly where we're supposed to be when we need to be there. I believe that all of the hardships that we go through make us stronger and put us in a position to where we can support other folks to actually do that work. This is not work that I could do alone. This is work that I do because I feel drawn by an ancestral pool. My mother who's passed, like I felt a lot of her in this work. She was also an educator. She was a black panther here in Seattle, Washington, low 4’11” woman, Beverly Minnis-Washington, and she was phenomenal.

I come from a legacy of educators. I believe that this work is really ingrained in my DNA. I believe that community calling and asking to do this work and being with the community to do this work makes the work easier. It makes it more beneficial and it makes it actually stick. I don't think that you can do this work and not be from community and of community.

[00:08:51] SM: Yes, yes, yes. 1,000 times yes. You're right. I love that you referenced your mother and what she ingrained in you and how you carry that on. It sounds very purpose-driven, and I can so identify my mother also who’s passed away. Every day I think about what she would do and how to do right by her. She was so fierce. It sounds like your mother was as well, and she was always thinking about community and the importance of community to lift us all up. It's so amazing that you are carrying on that legacy and building for your community.

[00:09:31] BM: Thank you. It sounds like we're both doing that, so thank you for what you're doing as well.

[00:09:34] SM: Thank you for what you're doing. So let's fast forward a bit and discuss the racial reckoning that occurred last summer. After the murder of George Floyd, there have been a lot of folks trying to prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in their schools, their organizations, and their communities. But sometimes, these efforts can go awry, right? What are some common missteps you see schools and organizations make?

[00:10:04] BM: There are so many. I actually wrote a letter to my white friends and recorded it and put it on my LinkedIn, which I'm not a social media person, so I normally don't do that. But I was like, “I'm exhausted by this.” I think what's really interesting is that the majority of black community members and global majority community members for that fact, they also have been living in a very racist America for forever, since inception really, as far as like what America is. We're not talking about pre-America. But the reality of it is, is that none of this is anything new. There have been lynchings from the start. There have been folks being murdered. Folks have been enslaved, human trafficked. All of these terrible things that we hear about, like this has been happening in our country for forever.

The difference is that social media was not necessarily present, and a pandemic did not actually make it so that folks couldn't escape and go back to the gym, and go on about their happy lives, and go sit down and have hors d'oeuvres with friends, etc., and ignore the fact that this was actually happening in our communities. There were so many murders before George Floyd, and there are still so many more that are after him that folks don't know the name of the people who have actually died and been murdered. The reality of it is, is that racism is murder, and it's the reason why we have disproportionately folks who are lacking indigenous who have all types of health conditions because that trauma and all of those issues actually become internalized. They affect our bodies in different ways, and they cause us to have all types of health conditions that make us lose our parents and our family members well before some of our white peers, to be quite frank. I think that that's one piece of it.

I also think that one of the biggest missteps is calling DEI anti-racist work. There's a huge difference between the two. Diversity, equity, and inclusion does not necessarily have anything to do with being anti-racist, right? DEI work is saying that we want there to be diverse perspectives in spaces. We want for folks to come from different ethnicities and cultures. We want for folks to come from different gender identities, etc. So we want LGBTQ. We want folks who have neurodiversities. We’re thinking about all these different things, and we want everybody to come into this space and like be happy and be included and hear all of those perspectives.

But it still doesn't address racism, and the reality of it is, is that folks who have different neurodiversities, and if they are also black and indigenous and have that intersectionality, they're not included in those communities. They're not lifted up in those communities. They're still dealing with racism in those communities, our LGBTQ communities. Those are communities where black and indigenous folks and global majority folks do not get to sit in those same spaces as many of their peers and say like, “This is a part of our community.” They're still dealing with racism in those communities, and they're still ostracized and oppressed in those spaces.

So DEI work is not anti-racist work. A lot of folks don't really understand that, and so they want to like coin things and make things seem a certain kind of way, not understanding that realistically black and indigenous communities have forever been held down by our country and have never been given rights and have never actually been recognized. The brilliance in the work that they do has never been glorified, but instead appropriated in spaces. So all of our spaces that we create, when we talk about anti-racist work actually needs to be built upon for black and indigenous communities first.

When I say black communities, it's also important to name that like those are black descendants of the enslaved, which is very different than some of our other communities who also identify as black who haven't possibly come over and haven't necessarily had to deal with all of the trauma that has been being a black American. So I think that's one of the biggest things that I see folks do. I also think that because of this, a lot of folks are writing their DEI or anti-racist statements, and I put air quotes around that because sometimes I feel like even that's a bit of a joke. But folks are writing these statements, and they're putting things on social media, and they're so ingrained in social justice, etc.

But the reality of it is, is that they're beginning to also insulate themselves and insulate racism with black and brown faces. That is one thing that folks aren't recognizing. We have these organizations that have been historically racist and have done very racist and harmful things to communities. They throw up a statement or they say, “This is what we're doing,” or they begin to coin phrases like decolonized or anti-racist or pro-black or pro-indigenous and all these different things. The reality of it is that all they’ve continued to do is tokenize those very communities that they continue to harm by making everybody think that something has changed them. You still have the systems that are inherently racist, and you still have folks in those positions who are inherently racist who are over those organizations.

The policies don't actually protect black and indigenous individuals or global majority individuals, but that's the reality of it. But if I go to these pages and I look at these websites, then I begin to see all these different things. All of a sudden, you think, “Oh. Well, this is real change.” But the question is, is it really real change? I think that's one of it and I think a lot of folks – This is the time for folks to really move out of the way. This is time for CEOs of organizations and executive directors and leadership to actually say, “Let me actually cultivate this genius that lives within these spaces and put these folks into these spaces so that we can actually see transformational change.” You cannot change authority and power and actually express that you're really about anti-racist work and not put black, indigenous, and global majority leaders into those spaces to actually create that safety for the other folks who are a part of those organizations and actually create true anti-racist environments for folks.

I think that's another piece and I think a lot of folks are also giving lip service and saying, “I read this book. I took this course. I'm now anti-racist. I'm now an ally, etc.” I'm like, “No, this is a continuous thing that actually has to be done. This is a daily journey. This is like social-emotional learning. This is not something that you can just say, like, ‘I've arrived.’ You haven't arrived.” As a black woman, I still have to deal with the internalized racism that I've had to swim in all my entire life and like shed those things to make sure that I don't continue to perpetuate those things that folks have put on me, right?

Our white peers, they have to also understand like what that looks like for them, and they have to understand that there's always going to be privilege in those spaces. Even for some of our global majority communities who assimilate into white culture much more easily, they also have to understand those privileges that have been allowed to be given to them through this false identity of white supremacy in our country. I think that that's very real and I think that folks really have to kind of attune to that. But you can't just say like, “Oh, yeah. I'm anti-racist.” I think there's just so much that goes into that. A lot of folks are given a lot of lip service, but they're not actually doing something. I always identify that as the difference between an ally and an abolitionist.

An ally is someone who’s like, “Yes, I'm going to the march. Yes, I have black friends. Yes all these different things, etc. I'm about this work. I'm about this life. This is important to me.” But when the rubber actually hits the road, what sacrifices are you actually going to make? When we talk about George Floyd, who jumped on that officer to make him stop and risk their own lives to make him, to just allow him to get a breath to actually say, “I really can't breathe.”? Instead, folks stood on the side and recorded and said, “He can't breathe. Please stop. Please stop.” But no one actually took action. So we have to decide. If you're really going to be about this work, are you going to be an abolition, actually sacrifice yourself to make sure that somebody else can breathe? Or are you going to step back and just record and say, “I was there and I was telling them to stop,” because those are two different things.

[00:18:20] SM: Right, yeah. I mean, the breakdown that you're giving of the difference between diversity, equity, and inclusion work versus really having a focus on being anti-racist is huge, right? They're both exhausting but in different ways. To be anti-racist, it's a journey. To your point, you're not going to get a medal. You are not going to be complete after six months, a year, 10 years. Not everyone understands that, and that can lead to some of the challenges in the work, right? A lot of this goes back to the idea of intent versus impact, right? How are you thinking about these two concepts, and how would you like others to think about them?

[00:19:04] BM: When I think of intent versus impact, I think about language as one of the first pieces. When I say I think about languages in schools and in our communities, when we talk about anti-racist work, we actually don't call things what they are, right? We don't call racism murder. Instead, it's a mindset that folks have to shift from, etc. But when it comes to sexual predators and pedophilia, we don't say like, “This is something they're going to be able to overcome, right?” Like this is just a mindset, right? So we don't make those stark comparisons to things and we don't really understand the weight that racism actually has in our country and what it actually does.

Languages are so important because when we talk about slaves, you have to talk about the fact that they were hostages. When you talk about slave owners, you have to talk about the fact that they're human traffickers. When you talk about slave catchers, you have to talk about the fact that they were policing. They were police. When you talk about plantations, we don't call them concentration camps or death camps, like we talked about with our Holocaust. When we talk about mistresses, when we're talking about black women and indigenous women who were held hostage, we don't talk about the fact that they were actually rape victims. This idea of discipline is actually torture and murder.

When we begin to talk about things for what they actually are, and we began to have those conversations within history and within the context of actually talking about racism, I don't call folks minorities and BIPOC. I call our black indigenous and brown folks global majority folks because then it's not coming from a deficit-based approach, but it's coming from a strength-based approach that's actually factual. We know that black indigenous and brown folks are the majority of our globe. Those are the majority of the people who are in these spaces that so often we've been called minorities here in America especially, which also comes from a very deficit-based approach.

I think that that's one piece of it. I don't allow for our employees of our school to call me their boss. I'm not your boss. I'm not a master. I'm not your boss. I’m your supervisor. I don't own you in any kind of way. Language is very important so that we can begin to shift how folks think about things and to support our scholars with critically analyzing things. I appreciate our elder, Don Mason, who really steps into the space, and Dr. Mims, who really steps into the space to really support this work that I do to really help us identify some of these pieces around language.

I think another interesting thing is I think about my daughter, and she's brilliant. When she was in preschool, the teachers did not want her to have or any of the scholars to have muddy paintings, right? So they didn't want them to use a lot of like blacks and browns because they wanted their paintings to be vibrant and bright and pretty to how they expressed it. So what they would do is they would take tape and put it over the black and the brown paint so that they couldn't use those colors when they were doing their rainbows or doing different things. That was intentionally trying to make sure that their pictures were bright and pretty and vibrant. What it actually impacted was that my daughter no longer thought of black and browns as pretty colors. So she internalized that and then felt that her skin was not beautiful. When she began to paint herself, she began to paint herself with peach or apricot skin and blond hair because those are vibrant colors. We don't understand, like when we talk about intent versus impact, we have to be very cautious of that.

Another example is my daughter's current school, they, with George Floyd and everything, thought we need to teach kids about Black Lives Matters movement, etc. They thought they were doing something good, but you have a lot of folks in the school who are actually white teachers and really don't understand the impact of Black Lives Matters. So what ended up happening was they taught a lesson, and my daughter was traumatized. I went and saw a picture that my daughter drew and had to ask her about it to really understand that this lesson was being taught at her school, and they didn't communicate to families or putting anything in front of them to say, “How should we teach this to your children of majority global majority black and indigenous children who are elementary children?”

What ended up happening was my daughter then began to draw pictures of Tamir Rice being shot and killed. She drew a picture of a woman being taken away by the police from her children with their mask on. She had a picture of dogs going and biting people because of the civil rights movement. She really didn't understand that. So when my son and my husband went to go to a march, she broke down and had literally like a nervous breakdown. That was weeks to try to get through. She was concerned they were going to a march and they were going to be murdered. They were going to be bit by dogs. They were going to be shot and killed. At the least they were going to be arrested.

Not understanding what you're actually teaching and how you're teaching it and how you're affecting children, my daughter would have been scared to stand up for herself for the rest of her life, if we would have never known that that was actually what she was taught. So when we talk about that, I think that's important. I think like just even on a very lesser level, like we have a lot of folks who go to marches, and they want to participate, and they want to be in those spaces, and they bring their dogs. For a lot of folks, folks don't think about that. I'm bringing my dog to a march. But historically, dogs have been used against anybody during those marches to actually like rip their bodies apart and pull them back.

When you think about folks who have been enslaved, the history of dogs on enslaved peoples and the stories that you hear about their bodies being – Like just the dogs being put out on them, basically. You know what I mean? Those are different things where it's like folks don't necessarily take a minute to actually think about, “I'm intending to go to this march and support, but I want to bring my dog with me because I can't leave my dog at home.” But how does that actually impact the community members who are there and have this history of dogs actually being used as weapons against them? When folks think about intent versus impact, you have to take a pause. You actually have to know some history to actually be able to make sure that you're making the right impact. A lot of folks have good intentions, and everybody is going to have an impact. But is that impact going to actually be beneficial to those folks that you're hoping to support?

[00:25:39] SM: Absolutely. You're so right. Sometimes, as a black person, you're so accustomed to trauma, and it's just the norm that you keep moving as best you can and don't always think about the fact that it is the role of others to think through the difference between intent versus impact. For something that might seem as simple as not bringing your dog to a march to actually, to your point, understand the history of that and make a decision based on – A knowledge-based decision. You're absolutely right.

What role do you think SEL, social-emotional learning, plays in all of this? Can our listeners use social-emotional learning to better align their intentions with impact? If so, how do you see that happening? If not, why not?

[00:26:31] BM: I do think that folks have to use social-emotional learning as a part of anti-racist work. I don't believe that the two are separate. I think in order to do this work, like our communities have to begin to have very tough and honest conversations that most folks are not willing to have. I think we have to understand how folks have been privileged off of black descendants of the enslaved, and we have to talk about how indigenous communities have been harmed and how they have also been appropriated and how culture has been ripped from folks in our communities. What that really means is, is that we have to do a lot of self-reflection. We have to do a lot of self-reflection as a nation. We have to do a lot of self-reflection as individuals. We have to have empathy and we have to be in to see folks as humans that historically in our country have never been allowed to be humanized.

When we talk about social-emotional learning work in order to sometimes address what we need to do as far as anti-racism, it starts with empathy. It starts with self-regulation. It starts with self-reflection. It starts with advocating for others. When we talk about the difference between an ally and an abolitionist, that sacrifice comes from understanding privilege and also understanding self and being able to say, “I'm going to make this sacrifice for somebody else for the greater good.” I think like they go hand in hand, and I think it's kind of like when we think about a lot of folks have this idea that this isn't my fault. I wasn't there, or this happened 400 years ago. I wasn't the person who did this. The reality of it is, is that it may not have directly been that person's fault, but folks are still privileging from the years of terrorism, and people have to own that. Because when you don't own it, then you begin to say, “Well, that really sucks that that happened. I'm really sorry that that happened.” But no change ever happens.

It's kind of like following somebody in a car, and you guys are trying to get to the same destination, and you see that the people that you know in front of you have thrown literally out the car, and so you're like, “Well, they should have picked that up. They shouldn't have did that.” But you don't pull over and pick it up, and so it's actually still harming us. That’s really what that is. We need folks to actually take responsibility, and the only way that folks can actually take responsibility and create to change is through some of the social-emotional learning work that has to be done first to actually understand how privilege continues to perpetuate the issue.

[00:29:08] SM: Right. Privilege is such a – It’s nuanced and complicated. So many of our listeners at Grow Kinder are educators, and I am going to take a guess that some of them might listen to this conversation, and they might be scared. They might be scared. They might be exhausted, worried, not wanting to get it wrong, do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, want to help, be part of the movement but worried about causing harm. What do you say to those people?

[00:29:46] BM: I say don't be paralyzed by fear. Our country is in a really tough place right now where folks are going to need to jump in and start figuring this out and making moves to move forward. Sometimes, that's messy and sometimes you don't necessarily know what you're doing. But I think the biggest thing that we can do is actually understand that when you make a mistake or you recognize that something hasn't been done properly, that you not only apologize but you actually make amends as well. So you take responsibility for the mistake that has been made. Rectify it. You make sure that it doesn't happen again. You put policies in place to ensure that those things don't happen again, all of that.

But I don't think that folks should just be stuck and paralyzed because of fear. Folks have continued to stand by and allow for all of these different things to happen in our country over and over again, and that's why we're where we're at now because folks have not been willing to step in and to say, “I don't know what I'm doing but I know what should not be happening. If I make a mistake, I'm going to apologize. I'm going to make it right. I'm going to take responsibility for it. Then I'm going to figure out how to do it right.” I think we don't have time for folks to be paralyzed. We don't have time for folks to be concerned about am I going to do this right or not?

There's Internet searches that give you a plethora of information. There are organizations that support in Washington State. My husband and I created our nonprofit, the Global Majority Consortium, to support with folks actually understanding how do I go out and do this work. So I think that there's all types of different organizations, and I think that folks need to actually pick global majority and black and indigenous organizations, first and foremost, to do this work to actually do it correctly, so that there are less mistakes actually being made.

[00:31:31] SM: You said something that I love, and I've been saying a lot myself. This work is messy. This is all real messy, and you just have to acknowledge that, right? But you got to keep doing it. It's as we tell children, when they fall down, to get back up, to keep going. Day in and day out, how do you keep going through this work, even when it's messy?

[00:31:53] BM: My husband and my children is how I do it. My mom fought fiercely for my 12 siblings and I to be able to be in a better place. She made a lot of sacrifices. She sacrificed a lot of generational wealth to be able to put us through schooling, to make sure that we got the right types of education, and that's not something that should happen. So I sit in a space where I look at my children, and I look at what my family has done before me, my ancestors, my mother specifically. I understand that this is the work that I'm supposed to do, and this is the way that I'm supposed to do it. I think we're all called to do it in different ways.

But I want something better for my children. I want something better for my grandchildren that I don't have yet. I want something better for the 56 nieces and nephews that I have and for my great nieces and nephews. So if I don't begin to do this work, if I don't get into the good trouble, as John Lewis says, then who is going to? That's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make. It's hard. It's not easy. But the reality of it is, is that I'm going to deal with racism every single day of my life, until the day that I die. So I can either sit by and allow it to continue to happen to me, or I can actively fight against it to try to ensure that it doesn't continue to harm our communities.

[00:33:06] SM: Baionne, thank you for getting into the good trouble, as the late great John Lewis said. So important. You are doing really important work, good work. I can't thank you enough for your time today for connecting with our audience, our listeners. Where can folks go to find out more about you and the work that you're doing?

[00:33:28] BM: Yeah. I have my LinkedIn, which is out there. Like I said before, my husband and I have a nonprofit that we have founded with some very near and dear folks who are advisors and also founders, and that’s the globalmajorityconsortium.com. They can go there directly. Then in addition, they can also look at the work that we're doing with Rainier Valley Leadership Academy, which also has a LinkedIn page, and our website is also myrvla.org. So they can also go there and find out more about what we're doing as a school.

[00:34:00] SM: Wonderful. Thank you for your time to –

[00:34:03] BM: Thank you.

[00:34:03] SM: Fighting the good fight. Appreciate it.

[00:34:05] BM: Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[00:34:07] ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed the show. For more episodes and information, visit growkinderpodcast.org. While you're there, we'd love to hear more about you and what you think of the Grow Kinder Podcast. Until next time, be sure to rate and follow us on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.

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