YouSaid · the spoken record

Alexis McGill Johnson

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28
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2022-01-27
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2022-01-27
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  1. “Yeah. It is. I mean, I'm, yeah, I'm furious. I'm furious. And I know a lot of leaders talk about resilience and the need to find a way to reset and regenerate and self-care is such an important component, particularly given the moment that we're in and just the relentlessness going into the third year of COVID. And I keep thinking about it's always the people who are most marginalized who are the most affected by these kinds of policies. And so I am sad. I am definitely angry and I have to practice every day to find that hope, that hope to be fearless and to model that so that my team feels fearless. My team feels unapologetic. My team feels like they can lay it on the line without penalty because we have to be just as relentless and just as strategic as the opposition has been in order to build back for the next 30.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Families on so many mothers who are the largest group of majority who have abortions already understand what's at stake. The impact on their communities. It's unconscionable. And that's really who we have to center in this conversation.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I think It's not about what's at stake for Planned Parenthood. It's about what's at stake for the millions of people, almost 36 million people living in 26 states that are poised to further restrict access to abortion, other sexual and reproductive health care. Those are the people that we think about every day and literally every single person in the organization across the federation. They're here because of mission. We get some of the most passionate brightest folks who want to deliver the best care without judgment. And I think about going into this next year with the impact that we could see from the Supreme Court with the number of states that are starting their legislative sessions right now with an intent to take away freedom, to take away rights. And the impact that that will have on so many people, on so many”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Many corporate citizens in the same way. There have been a lot of corporate leaders who've fought for access to birth control because they have a self-interest in making sure that they're employees and their consumers have access to these basic rights and to make sure that they're able to support their folks through their tenure and their career”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “First of all, the voter engagement work that's happening across the country is incredibly important and valuable. And I think the turnout actually has stayed consistent and strong in the last decade that I have been, or maybe two decades that I've been involved in some of this work. What we've seen, unfortunately, is also an increase in the number of voting restrictions, the ways in which people's ability to exercise and participate also depends by state. And I think that it's not a coincidence that the same states where we're seeing these incredible restrictions around access to abortion, we're also seeing increased restrictions around voting rights. And I think that tells you something, right? It tells you something about how a set of lawmakers state by state have decided to control and weaponize the rules of power in a way that really is undermining democracy. I know there has been a strong corporate effort around access to democracy.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Direction in conversation. But every level of a corporation has to be involved in that. It's not just the executives or the frontline workers. It's the boards. It's the shareholders. It's so important for everyone to be engaged and really have a shared language and understanding of how it impacts society and their role in it.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I mean, look, I worked on not just with Starbucks, but I worked with a number of large multinational corporations and banks places where there isn't a significant amount of diversity within their kind of corporate and leadership structure. And what my job was, was to always get them to have some of the uncomfortable conversations around race, but in ways where they could separate out, they could really understand that wasn't about making people bad people. It was about helping them understand how the system impacted their colleagues. And I think that when you help people hear the experiences of their colleagues differently, when you help people understand and play out the scenarios, as I said, we're like professional scenario planners, when you help people play out the scenarios of what it actually looks like in real time, it does create a level of empathy that I think can help shift.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “They may be fortunate enough to get on a plane and fly to LA and back in a day. But there are a lot of people, a lot of workers, a lot of frontline workers right now who are getting in cars and they're driving 18 hours to Colorado or Oklahoma and they are taking off work and they may be fired because they don't want to give the reason as to why they need to make this emergency trip. And they may be putting their kids in the cars because they don't have caregiving. At home. So like these are the calculations that their workers are making just to get access to a constitutional right and to be a corporate citizen, which they now are and a citizen of the democracy which they have privileges to be, they need to actually take that citizenship responsibility seriously in ways that help us really drive a different conversation.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I think businesses have to center their engagement on their staff and the people that they serve. Like this is not something you can pull test. And even if you did pull test, you'd actually find out that the majority of people are with you. You actually have to think about what is right in this moment and who should be involved in these decisions. We don't want lawmakers making decisions about what we can do with our bodies, nor do we want corporations to make those decisions. We want to leave them in the privacy of individuals. And I think seeing more courage and strength from corporations to really stay in line with where their teams are, their teams who are going to be affected. I think about the companies in Texas all the time over the last six months. Like what are those people doing? What are their employees doing right now when they find out two weeks after a missed period that they have an unintended pregnancy and they've got to leave?”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “When we are rethinking who do we want to be, when we are no longer defending a law that quite frankly was Are literally in the darkness, but on the other side while we are processing that, like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill in the piece by Camus, the myth of Sisyphus, we have to imagine him happy, right? And I think that's the moment we are in. And that's the fire that I'm trying to bring into the team.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “My favorite quote by Alice Walker is a poem called Hope is a woman who has lost her fear. And I think about that a lot. I've meditated. It's sitting up on my wall right now because I think that's who we have to be right now. We have to be fearless. We have to be unapologetic. And we have to hold, I think, two really important things. We have to hold both the notion that we will be the leadership of Planned Parenthood when Roe is likely overturned or gutted irrevocably. So what does it mean to preside over some version of the end of Rowe? How do you kind of address that from a heart space while you were fighting feverishly to do everything you can to leave it all in the field? And then how do you create the container for people to process those feelings while also saying, you know what? But on the day after, we are also going to be in leadership.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yeah, I mean, again, it's all a work in progress, right? There have been missteps, but at the same time, like just opening up every day to say, okay, what can I be doing differently? Who can I call that's different and even on my own teams, leadership of color and really paying attention to how they're growing and evolving, paying attention not just to retention and attrition, but you're saying, okay, how many people is this person managing? What is their budget? Are we actually growing the skill sets if we want to get to a place where these leaders are actually driving us into the future of the movement?”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “The FDA lifting the restrictions on REMs, I think, is a really important game changer for the provision of care, particularly at a time when, you know, obviously when we see increasing restrictions and when you see where the court is poised to do, it wasn't quite a silver lining, but I do have to say that the race reckoning in 2020 really did create an opening. Obviously, it was horrific how we got there. And yet it's opened up, I think, really important conversations around what does it really mean to center equity in our work. I've made a huge bet on centering and resourcing leadership of color and believing that letting the people who are most impacted lead. And so it wasn't quite a silver lining, but I think where we are on the other side of it is having a language and a praxis that is deeply.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “So it's in our interest to actually speak to the intersection of how gender, gender identity, access to sexual and reproductive health care, and yes, race are really foundational to understanding the core of freedom. I think that's really at the intersection of all the movements that I care about.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Well, first of all, abortion isn't as controversial as people think it is. The great majority of Americans believe that abortion should be safe and legal and available within their zip code. But I think you can't have a conversation around freedom and access for all people who could become pregnant unless you understand the particular experiences of all people. And so I think that one of the really important shifts that I've made around centering the patient in our experience as our North Star is that it allows us to actually take on the conversations that impact the patients. So it's not just that people are coming to us for access to birth control and abortion and STD screenings. When they leave, they may be stopped because ICE has come to their job. They may be pulled over by police officers on their way to school. They may be criminalized because now they are traveling from Texas to Oklahoma and a rent a car and maybe deemed suspicious.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I would say internal to the national office, but really internal to the movement. It was just a kind of throw the gauntlet down and actually create a space for accountability. You have to continue to be intentional. You have to really use equity as a way to prioritize resources and decision making, not just talk about it in beautiful words. But I also know that there will be a lot of pushback, right? There will be a lot of stakeholders who won't maybe not see themselves in a space when you start.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “The work and the movement. And so Karen was a nod to the next generation, to my staff, to say, like, I see you and we're going to actually take this work on internally inside of the movement, but also to signal broadly to the community that we are truly going to lean into equity in that very real work that we need to do there and really lean into leadership. We need to have a practice that actually helps us decenter whiteness, that helps us actually in some ways become more expansive and more inclusive. That was the needle I was trying to throw.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “So, there's never been a moment in my time with Planned Parenthood where Margaret Sanger's history has not been in question. I think that we've had to strike a balance of really wanting to honor her badassery, quite frankly, right? She was relentless about fighting for women's reproduction and freedom to decide when and if to become parents, like she is the foundation of so many of the rights that we sit on today. And yet we know she grew up in an era that was more than a hundred years ago. And people on one side who were like, you know, she's just outright racist and other people who didn't want to touch the legacy at all. Just like most things, right? The truth is somewhere in between. I don't feel that naming her racist would have been completely accurate and also wouldn't have been an easy way for us to distance ourselves from hundred years of her life without actually interrogating how those behaviors have continued to be perpetuated.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I think it's about resizing in strategy conversations and decision making, right? Because we carry so many resources and because we have obviously such a strong national footprint, we're a really important engine, but it doesn't mean we always have to drive. How do you actually create confidence with a kind of movement confidence at a table without feeling like you have to direct every single conversation?”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Certainly resetting the relationship between the national office and our affiliate colleagues. We're in a network of organizations that you don't control. They're all run by their individual boards, which is incredibly important, which means that you have to lead by inference, right? And there was a lot of work that we had to do just in terms of rebuilding after a succession of transitions. There was a lot of work that I felt we needed to do to resize ourselves inside of the ecosystem of reproductive rights, health, and justice. is obviously a significant provider of sexual and reproductive health care, but we're not the only provider. There are independent providers. There are reproductive justice groups that are largely groups that have been led by women of color. I think finding opportunities to really demonstrate key points of leadership that would signal to those broader constituents and communities that I could create a space for healing, that I could use.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “It's like you are the president right now. And don't wait for permission to make the transformations that you need to see. And there was just a moment that it clicked for me.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I came in July 2019. We had a quite tumultuous leadership transition. And the staff really were demoralized. A lot was happening internally, but as a board member, you're supposed to be nose in, fingers out, right? So you don't have a sense of all the things that are going on. And so I was really, I would say surprised and concerned about where the staff were. And I felt like my immediate leadership instinct was to become like a weighted blanket, you know, just to calm down the anxiety and the staff because we really needed to do was get focused on 2020, get through the election, and then kind of rebuild. and reimagine and rebuild was something that i almost didn't give myself i would say permission to do to different colleagues in my affiliate community came to me and said you really need to drive it like you stole it”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I was in the courtroom March 2020 during the oral arguments for a case around admitting privileges in the Supreme Court. I got to see Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her last year on the bench. Obviously the oral arguments are now live streamed. So I was able to watch and listen to the arguments with my colleagues in real time so that we could really parse through some of the questions in advance of doing media just afterwards. We also use this as an opportunity to rally standing outside of the Supreme Court with my colleagues from the Center for Reproductive Rights who are arguing the case and many other folks and supporters who had come precisely to let folks understand that they knew what was at stake.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Is more fraught. No, I think even for those of us who have been planning scenarios for the last decade, there's no question that listening to the oral arguments on December 1st, when you hear a clear majority of justices willing to uphold the Mississippi 15-weight ban, which in itself is unraveling row, but to hear a simple majority of justices willing to take up whether or not Rose should be overturned. For someone who has been involved in fighting for justice of all kinds for so long that reality really set in when you just feel like the last levers that you have to defend this critical right is on the line. There's no question. It just, it feels like the shoe is dropped.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Say that we've always been at the state level, right? Planned parenthood as a federation is a network of currently 49 affiliates. We have over 600 health centers across the country. We see more than 2.4 million patients a year, a couple hundred million come to our website every year for information around sexual and reproductive education. We span the globe, actually. We do work in a number of countries, Africa and Latin America as well.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “I was a board member for 10 years, and I think to understand what is happening right now, we have to go back at least that decade to see how the political landscape shifted so significantly in so many states that created the foundation for the number of bands and restrictions that we have. Our efforts over the last decade have been really to rely on the courts. The courts have been our backstop and we have seen the judiciary get remade in the last four years. For many people, it may feel like this moment just happened out of thin air and we have this court that is now acting in a way completely inconsistent with where the majority of American people are, but they have actually been building for over a decade to this moment. And I think that that is really the lesson here. It is the long game that it takes not just to win a right, but also to”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Look, the foundation of the organization, indeed the very foundation of the mission, is about fighting for and protecting the fundamental right to control your body as a basis for self-determination, as a basis for determining who you will be, your freedom, your right when, and if you want to become a parent. And I think that because it is literally baked into the core of everything we do, everything we do for our patients, it's daunting, but it's how we've been preparing for over 105 years.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Our interest to actually speak to the intersection of how gender, gender identity, access to sexual and reproductive health care, and yes, race are really foundational to understanding the core of freedom. My favorite quote by Alice Walker is a poem called Hope is a woman who has lost her fear. Am sad. I am definitely angry, and I have to practice every day to find that hope, that hope to be fearless and to model that so that my team feels fearless. My team feels unapologetic, my team feels like they can lay it all in the line without penalty.”

    2022-01-27 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT