Tell us about a time when a woman challenged your thinking, leadership, or perspective. What did you learn, and how has it changed the way you lead today?
I have been extremely fortunate to have had close relationships with women who have had the patience and grace to try to convey color to someone who is, metaphorically, colorblind.
In thinking about how to answer this question, I reached out to one of these women, who has asked not to be named, for permission to describe a moment from a conversation we once had. I proceed with her consent.
What she said was almost offhand: just how nice it would be to walk through a park at night. Just walk, not having to think about anything in particular. She had never once been able to do that. Instead, every route, every parking lot, every dark stretch of path came with an inner calculation that my own brain has never had to run.
Though prior to this moment, I had cognitively grasped this difference of experience, it was the first time the truth of it landed in my body instead of just my head. To really take it in, I had to sit with the discomfort of my own ease. That discomfort swelled the reflexive urge to compare or explain or fix. But after years of conversations with her, it felt like maybe I was finally learning what it meant to actually listen.
There is an old vision of a healed world: the lion lies down with the lamb. Ever since this moment, my version has become more local: a woman walks through a park at night, unhurried and unafraid.
So long as we are not there yet, there is still work to do.
This moment changed how I lead in that I carry with me the awareness that my experience of a place or situation does not determine whether that place or situation is safe or the way it should be. So it is essential to me that I ask the people whose senses are calibrated differently due to their embodied reality and lived experience. And after asking, my listening has to be deliberate, and my ego defenses need to be quieted, or I will not be able to hear the description of the things I cannot see.
And so, for example, in a school district, the measure of a safe building is never in the comfort of those with the most standing in it, but in the honest answer of those with the least.
Many women carry the responsibilities of careers, caregiving, and community leadership simultaneously, yet those experiences are not always reflected in public decision making. How will you ensure the realities women face are considered when making decisions that affect our community?
I would not have become more active in local politics, and I would not be running for school board, if I hadn’t first become more active in my union. And what caused me to start becoming more active in my union was fighting to protect partially-benefited part-time positions. These positions are, in many cases, the way that load-bearing mothers are able to stay in the workforce. While I lost that fight, I learned that people navigating the pressures of many responsibilities don’t need anyone to speak for them. Instead, they need decision-makers who arrange the room so that they can be heard and who actually listen to what they are saying and who treat that testimony as data.
On the school board, that will mean three things to me. When we deliberate on safety, budgets, or buildings, we must actively seek testimony from the district’s frontline. That means the teachers, paras, health office and support staff, who hold the most direct knowledge of students. These roles are overwhelmingly filled by women, and it’s a frontline I worked on for nine years in the district. Second, it means designing engagement for people carrying a career, caregiving, and community work. I never want to miss hearing from essential voices during public input due to us designing feedback opportunities to fit the lives of the people with the fewest constraints on their time. And third, it means asking, of every cut and every change, whose unpaid labor absorbs this? Whatever is dropped by the district has to be picked up by someone at home.
My wife, Ally, carries all three of the things this question names at once: she has a full-time career, she’s a mother, and she serves on local boards and commissions. I see daily what carrying so much costs and what it takes, and I saw it across twenty years in Rochester’s classrooms, libraries, and workplaces. So I do not ever want to see the realities women navigate treated as a special perspective that requires accommodation. The default needs to be built to receive that perspective because those realities of carried responsibilities are foundational to what’s possible in this district. If we want to make the best decisions possible, it is my responsibility to make sure that testimony is heard and that the room is arranged accordingly.
Website:
www.joshkoestler.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/koestlerforschoolboard/
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