38 Role Transitions & Visible Leadership with Phillip Agnew

Phillip Agnew, former Executive Director of the Dream Defenders and leader in the Movement for Black Lives, joins us to talk about his recent leadership transition and what it's like to evolve in public.

He touches on so much: movement celebrity culture, the limitations of highly visible leadership, what it means to have a clear leftist ideology, what he would have done differently in his own transition, collective responsibility for mental health, and his own name change to Umi Selah and then back to Phillip.

We spend some time talking about:

The Dream Defenders' Freedom Papers - find them & read along here: https://www.dreamdefenders.org/freedompapers
Smoke Signals Studio's Artist Manifesto: http://www.smokesignalsstudio.org/artist-manifesto

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Welcome to Book Club! 📚

Welcome to our new gathering place for our listener community to learn, explore, and practice together. Our first selection is Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Get your copy now from our partners at AK Press with code PODCAST for 15% off! www.akpress.org

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ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Phillip Agnew co-founded the Dream Defenders in 2012 after the murder of Trayvon Martin and has been dubbed “one of this generation’s leading voices” and recognized by both EBONY magazine and The Root as one of the 100 most influential African Americans in the nation. In 2018, he transitioned from his role as co-director of the Dream Defenders and now travels the country training and organizing where “the movement” hasn’t touched.

He is the co-founder of Miami’s Smoke Signals Studio – a community based radical artistic space - with his partner, poet Aja Monet.  Smoke Signals Studio is a space where those invested in using art, sound and music as a meeting place for transformation and liberation can come to create together.www.smokesignalsstudio.org

Find Phillip & Aja Monet's TEDxWomen talk called "A love story about the power of art as organizing" here: https://www.ted.com/talks/aja_monet_and_phillip_agnew_a_love_story_about_the_power_of_art_as_organizing?language=en

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PRACTICE:

In the following episode (publishing next week), we share a practice based on Dream Defenders' Freedom Papers that focuses on Claiming Our Ideology, along with one of Phillip's original poems. Subscribe to this podcast to make sure you don't miss it.

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Thank you to our incredible production volunteers on this episode: Jacob White for audio editing and production, Zach Meyer at the COALROOM for music and mastering, and Josiah Werning for graphic design.