Meet a Nasty Woman: 5 Questions with Desiree Adaway
Meet Desiree Adaway. Desiree is a Nasty Woman, equity and inclusion trainer, and she’s also featured on our Special Limited Bottling 2017 Columbia Valley Grenache. Desiree founded The Adaway Group, a black woman-owned firm that is a proven leader for providing innovative, accessible, high quality consulting and training services in the areas of diversity and inclusion, leadership development and organizational change. Desiree believes that truly inclusive organizations get beyond checking boxes and welcomes, respects, and champions diversity within the organization – invests in programs that build relationships with diverse communities, develops and empowers diverse leadership, invests in staff and community development, and through knowledge and action, systematically changes the culture of the organization so that all individuals and groups are encouraged to fully participate. Learn more about Desiree and her work here.
What makes you a Nasty Woman?
I actually don’t know if I’m a nasty woman. I’m a fierce woman. I am a woman that has real, true conviction and a real moral compass that drives me. So, if that makes me a nasty woman, then yes, that is exactly who I am. I am someone that has a voice and uses it. And I’m very clear that all the work and all that I do is about ultimately getting us free. Free to live lives without chains, without sexism, without racism, without ableism, without the patriarchy. So yeah, I’m a nasty woman who’s about freedom.
Share an experience that shaped your views or helped get you involved in activism.
A couple of things got me invoiced with activism. I’ve always been involved in activism since I was a kid. I was the person who didn’t allow my mom to buy table grapes because we were boycotting Cesar Chavez. We were boycotting farms that weren’t good to migrant workers. I’ve always been that person, but I think really helped push me out, into the activism world was the murder of Trayvon Martin and the evolving of the Black Lives Matter movement. It really got me back out into doing work directly with activists, and I had not done that work in a few years.
I’ve been working directly with activists that are on the ground working in communities all over the world and helping to provide support to them since I am not longer the person who was out on the ground doing the work. I see my role as providing that to other folks. And I think also, the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and watching how spontaneously, hundreds and hundreds of folks came to Ferguson to provide support and help. That inspired me so much. It was the same thing we saw when this administration put out the Muslim ban, how spontaneously, hundreds and hundreds of people showed up at airports across the country. That, on the ground organizing and work, is what helps keep me involved in activism and inspired by it.
What advice do you have for people who want to help enact change and push progress but don’t know how to get involved?
My advice for people who want to help change happen, but don’t know how to do it is to start locally. There are community folks all around you that you may not know, who need support. They need financial support, they need babysitters, they need folks to get coffee, they need people to create websites, to do social media work for them, to just be at meeting spaces. Show up and ask how you can be of service, not lead. How can you be of service? How can you support the work by the folks on the ground? Let the people that are most impacted by the issue, let them lead. Let us learn to follow. We always want to be in charge, we always want to be first. But there is something really beautiful and very holy about serving and following. So, I am always about, how do we serve and how to do we follow those most impacted by the issues. I sit back, and I am quiet, and I do the manual menial work, and I learn.
If you could look into the future, 10 years from now, and see that real progress has been made, what does that look like to you?
If I look into the future, real progress means we’re not as segregated as we are as a country. And actually, real progress looks like black liberation. It looks like reparations. It looks like universal designs so that folks that may have physical disabilities can get easier access to public spaces. It looks like a real connection between women, in terms of a sisterhood that is based around body autonomy. It looks like we are beginning to have difficult conversations around race, class, and gender. And it actually looks like freedom. And this is the thing, we don’t know what freedom looks like in this country. But I do know that it means that some bodies are not policed more than others, and that access is granted to everyone, and that there is an understanding of the hierarchy in the dominant culture and how that dehumanizes all of us. That there are folks working across identities, really putting in the work dismantling these systems that have kept us all small and that have kept us all afraid.
Share with us a favorite wine moment or memory, or pairing.
I love wine. I love big bold reds. One of my favorite memories is when I lived in Chicago. On Sundays, I would invite a lot of friends over to my house and we would grill really big steaks and portabellas and drink bottle after bottle of Cab-Sauv and bold reds and burgundies and laugh and talk and connect. Wine has been a core part of my building community and being with folks in my life that I love. That’s one of my favorite memories. Lots of big, bold laughter, big, bold wines, really big questions that we were wrestling, over these beautiful glasses of wine. One of my favorite memories.
Tell us more about you how you work with organizations to make them more inclusive.
I’m a trainer, a coach, a consultant. I do equity and inclusion work. I do that in a variety of ways. Through customized trainings, through equity audits for organizations and companies. I do this work across sectors with tech companies, with manufacturing companies, with solopreneurs, with non-profits. I’ve done work with everyone from Ultimate Frisbee to private/boutique marketing and consulting firms as well. So, if you want to make sure your culture is inclusive and equitable, and ultimately just, if you want to retain the best talent and the most inclusive staff and customers and clientele possible, I work with companies to make sure that happens.
To work with Desiree and learn more about her, find her at: Desireeadaway.com, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn