Architecting Organizational Change with Alexandra Meda

Alexandra Meda: I know we’re in a brave space when the idea of the majority concept can take space. And when, for me a really good litmus test is how quick to anger are the people in the room. Because if it’s slower to anger and if it’s asking questions for understanding, if it’s saying “Pause,” if it’s saying, “I need to understand this because it’s hitting me, it’s impacting me. But I want to understand what you meant.” I know those are really basic things, but they’re actually hard.

Yura Sapi: You’re listening to Building Our Own Tables, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. I’m your host, Yura Sapi, founder of multiple organizations, including LiberArte, a nonprofit nurturing artists for liberated futures; Protectores de La Tierra, a farm and food sovereignty initiative based out of Colombia; Balistikal, an LGBTQ+ healing and art space for communities in Latin America. And through all my programs, workshops, coaching, and this podcast, I’ve helped countless founders and leaders unleash their brilliance and build thriving movements. In this podcast, we share visionary solutions, stories, and snapshots to support you as a leader on your own journey of creation and transformation.

This fifth season is especially meaningful. I’m recording while eight months pregnant, and this experience of bringing a new life into the world has brought a deeper opportunity for lessons in leadership, in legacy, and in creation, all of which I’m sharing in this season alongside the powerful voices you’ll hear from. You’ll hear extraordinary founders building their own tables for their communities, their lineages, and for the planet in this evolutionary time. You are here for a reason, and I’m honored to be on this journey with you. So, stay tuned and enjoy.

Welcome to the Building Our Own Tables podcast, pulling up a seat to our liberation. Today I’m joined with Alexandra Meda. Thank you so much for being here.

Alexandra: Thank you so much for having me. It is such a pleasure and a treat.

Yura: We have been in community for many years through the theatre world, and it’s just so exciting to hear now about this organization, this consulting company you’ve started. So giving listeners a background, you are a theatre artist, director, divisor, facilitator, architect of immersive theatrical experiences. You’re known for groundbreaking work in collaborative artistry and ensemble practice.

So this offering that transforms this idea of the theatrical space into what you call a sandbox for innovation, an arena for individual driven social change and a sacred vessel for healing. So you’re founder of Culture Change Lab, which is a consulting firm. You offer strategic facilitation, process design, mediation, all around these anti-racist initiatives, creating anti-oppressive curricula, leveraging artistic processes to activate vulnerability, expand collective imagination and foster healing and growth.

And you’ve worked with a few number of theatres and arts organizations already in this capacity. And you talk about the Culture Change Lab as a crew of culture obsessed, change driven humans, artists, facilitators, and architects of transformation, working at the intersection of imagination and liberation. So beautiful. That sounds really exciting to get into. I’d love to go ahead and get started. Can you tell us about what inspired you to build this table?

Alexandra: With anything, it’s probably a series of many events way before it even happened that were like little seeds planted along the way, along my journey. I like to give credit where credit is due. I think the work I’m doing with this organization, with many others, is really standing on the shoulders of those who came before me. And way too many to name, but I will say Diana Rodriguez was a huge foundational inspiration for me, both just her career and her trajectory, but most importantly what I knew of her on the personal basis through twelve years of mentorship, which really goes beyond the art making that she did.

It was really her ethos in holding the door open for others, the moment you get to sneak in through a crack and holding it really wide open. So my experience with getting to see how she did that in so many ways, in so many spaces, I think was a real reason I landed here. I think my work with Teatro Luna, now Studio Luna, for over fifteen, almost eighteen years now, really led me here. I got to do a lot of facilitation work through the organization around the art making, around the ideas and the concepts of change that we were trying to root.

And I also, coming into leadership really young and early at twenty-three, made a lot of mistakes, caused harm, knowingly, unknowingly, intentionally, unintentionally. And that really launched a journey to healing, to understanding what of my childhood, what of my adulthood caused me to act in certain ways that couldn’t hold conflict, that couldn’t hold discomfort. And through that process and then the very sage wisdom of so many amazing other women of color over the last ten years has really brought me here. That was the emotional grounding of why healing, art-making, and organizational process became one thing to me and not these separate silos.

And then 2020 happened and I had historically really tried to focus my work on BITOCs, on BIPOC individuals and theatres of color. But when 2020 happened, when George Floyd was murdered, I became recommended—it’s not something I sought out—to many mainstream theatres and arts institutions. And I needed to find a way to hold this work that I was being recommended for, that I was being invited into with predominantly white institutions. And I needed to do that, not alone.

There were people who have already been working in facilitation and change work before that I had partnered or collaborated in some way and we got together, and we’re like, “What is our methodology that meets this moment that brings in these tools that we’ve all cultivated?” And I was really specific that I really only wanted to be with arts and culture workers doing organizational change work. So in 2020, we started. We had many titles and many names before we landed on Culture Change Lab.

And part of that was like we believe in being in process. So that’s where the laboratory concept is. We’re not aiming for perfection with our clients or with our colleagues, we’re aiming for process. And then the change part is ever-going. And then really being specific about culture change does happen through protocols, through large picture strategy, but it really happens on the individual level. So we have always known our intention is to support people on individual change journeys that impact an organizational structure.

I think grief is a way you’re alive and human. It’s a growth opportunity, but if we ignore it, I think we hide ourselves from that instinct that tells us what’s the path forward.

Yura: Can you take us through a bit of a kind of trajectory or timeline of the work that you do with a client, with an organization?

Alexandra: We all pick the projects where we think our gift sets are most aligned with. But me, I’ll pick the longer-term ones, whether it’s a new strategic plan, I joined the crisis ones. We’re in a crisis with each other or we’re in a crisis, I don’t want to call it a public crisis, but particularly when organizations have been called in by people who work with them or the community. I’m really drawn to that process of what it is to even understand what’s being critiqued, why there’s this kind of fallout, understand the roots of that fallout, and then build a plan to release that tension, navigate that tension, discuss that tension, name it really clearly, and how do we move differently.

Often my work will of course start with listening sessions. “Okay, great. I want to get the EDs calling. Right?” “Great. What do you think has happened? Why do you think you’re here? Why do you think we’re here? And now I need to hear from everybody else.” And so that can take a couple of weeks, even months to actually understand what’s happening. Obviously, the part of that process is centering the most vulnerable and those with least power. Often they’re not listened to or, and it can actually become a weaponization process. Right? You are disrupting, you’re causing challenge.

One of the projects that really helped me understand what my process was when I worked with A.R.T/New York from 2021 to 2022, sometime around there. And it was deep work with the staff, with the leadership, with the board, and then with the community. And so went through listening sessions. We did some workshops and trainings. What’s our vocabulary? What’s our skin in the game? And in that case, we both had to do a lot of mediation, ane-on-one conversations, small group conversations. And then we also did some design sprints around what does a shared leadership process that matches what this organization’s needs are, who they’ve been and who they want to be, and some staff retreats.

So that’s just to give an example of what that might look like. The work often really is both a skill building, a relationship building, and then also this is why it was so important for me to bring artists, predominantly artists, into the process. How are we using our imagination? How are we designing the new world we want to be living in now at this organization? And that requires really high level design and imagination thinking. So we create activities, it’s very immersive. And then of course there’s the official reporting and the education and the workshop around language that really supports and helps.

Yura: Okay. So that’s the external, when you work with other organizations outside. Tell us about the internal of how things work internally with your team, with this kind of community of co-facilitators. Right? How does that work in the leadership and shared power and everything?

Alexandra: Yeah. So it’s ever-emerging. So this is nobody’s full time. Right? So we all are in and out. And I think that’s actually a really important piece of this is that I think we can get stuck when we’re at one place. We’re teaching people how to be better at the thing. It’s really important for us to actually be on the ground at various institutions doing the work, piloting processes and activities. One day when we have a little more money and structure, we’d like to do several retreats a year as a team. Right now, the way we’re doing that, because it’s so important to relationship build, to trust build, is we try to align when we’re going to conferences, convenings, or even adding extra days ahead or behind to spend time together, to know each other.

But this is not a group of people who don’t want to know each other on a personal basis. So my relationship with so many of the facilitators on the team is over a decade old, started professionally, but we’re now rooted in community as people. And so we really share the things we’re learning about our own trainings. We’re consistently training in different capacities and topics and sharing that with each other and showing up for each other when our lives are complicated and falling apart, which allows a kind of trust to take place in the room. So my core partner in this work is Miranda Gonzalez, and we’ve been working together almost twenty years.

And I hate the term like, “This isn’t work,” because it is work. It’s really hard work, but it is also a way in which we get to see each other and celebrate each other in really deep ways. I’ve never been able to give somebody critique or feedback in the way I’m able to give her and receive it from her, both as a facilitator, as a person holding space in the room and as a person. I remember last year we were at an intensive in Cambridge and there was just a little mess-up. One of us said the wrong word and could actually have been really harmful. And we love to have these beautiful facilitator transparency moments where we just talk about it in front of people. I don’t believe in safe spaces, I believe in brave spaces, and we try to cultivate that not just externally, but internally.

Yura: What does that look like for you, a brave space versus a safe space?

Alexandra: Yeah. I know we’re in a brave space when people can speak in draft. I know we’re in a brave space when the idea of the majority concept can take space. And when, for me a really good litmus test is how quick to anger are the people in the room. Because if it’s slower to anger and if it’s asking questions for understanding, if it’s saying “Pause,” if it’s saying, “I need to understand this because it’s hitting me, it’s impacting me. But I want to understand what you meant.” I know those are really basic things, but they’re actually hard to maintain, especially when you’re in a room for five, six hours and you’re getting into it. And the most important, are we laughing? If we’re not breathing and laughing, we’re not doing the work. So sometimes I think productivity takes over, or what was our agenda. And if we can flow, if we can pause, I know that we’re showing up authentically. And it’s a brave thing to do that. I know that sounds really simple, but it’s very brave to show up in your whole self, and I don’t think we’re taught to do that all the time.

Yura: I think you’ve mentioned this, the importance of process, that it’s actually facilitations and gatherings and the way that things are being experienced in the moment is what is really valuable versus the end result of conflict being resolved. Kind of seems like in the moment of it is when you’re really rebuilding that trust and rebuilding a kind of alignment with a group of people.

Alexandra: Absolutely. And staying in it, right? Not needing to disengage because it’s too hard. I also think part of this is how well do you prep people for what they’re about to experience and how well do you debrief? I’ll give an example. So that intensive I was referencing last year. We went to the same institution this year and did it again. And the difference in the energy and the trust. We didn’t change how we showed up.

Probably a little bit, because we grew in a year, but because we were in active virtual engagement for months leading up to the second visit, the trust we were able to cultivate through consistency completely changed how we were received. And so we could show up better and different. I know it’s a lot of people get frustrated when I talk about how long-term this work needs to be. It doesn’t mean it needs to be every day, but it means the difference between one year and three years working together is incomparable.

If everybody’s agreeing with me and there’s no pushback and there’s not this beautiful volley of challenge, my table’s not big enough and I got to add another slab.

Yura: Talk to us more about the evolution of the organization of the Culture Change Lab since 2020. What have been some of those challenges?

Alexandra: When I think about some of the clients I was first working with in the first year compared to now, it’s hard to not be like, “Oh my God, I wish I would’ve known this and done this then.” And mostly those live around slowing down. I’ve built a tolerance to being able to say, “This cannot happen in the time you want, and if you want it to, it will be performative. Here’s my list of recommendations of other people you can work with. But I know better.” And I didn’t used to say that. I’d be like, “Yeah, we’ll figure it out.” Because I’m a creative, I can figure out a faster process. I’ll just keep working harder, and it doesn’t work.

So, I’ve been able to learn to say, “I’m still working on it.” I’m a little bit of a recovering people pleaser and A plus student and just want to get it right. So learning to let go of getting it right is huge. And I think another big evolution in our thinking, both personally and collectively is we’re no longer offering and seeking what people think of as solutions.

So how we frame it right now is we’re coming in, we’re supporting a personal change in individuals, and we’re trying to hold a door open for long enough that the disruption can emerge on its own organically rather than “Here are five tiered solutions that you need to enact that then you’ll have this perfect solved place.” Because you’re not. Because then you’re going to have change over and then you’re going to have to do it again. So, if we can give you some tools that can be used long after we’re gone, that’s better. But I no longer can offer solutions. I can offer enough space and time for something new culturally to emerge.

That’s probably the biggest, most recent learning. Part of that came from working with more organizations over different time horizons with different leaders and working with organizations after and before they worked with other facilitators and teams. Because I don’t see myself in competition with other facilitators and consultancies. How can we work together? There’s work that they have done in an organization before I got there that my work could never take place if they hadn’t built that scaffold. And vice versa, how am I building something that an institution, that the next person can build from?

Yura: I think it is really interesting to consider, like you said, what’s come before in terms of this larger sector of anti-racism, equity, inclusion, diversity, even there. And the progress, especially coming from what we are in also how we’re connected through the theatre space, but also in general in the arts and then also in general of the US and even globally with like you mentioned, Black Lives Matter movement.

So it seems like your work that you’re doing with this consultancy where it’s at in the current moment of what a lot of organizations are seeing that they are investing in, and this is the process that they’re using by hiring some outside facilitators to help work on things like crisis moments, but also strategic plan. I personally prefer strategic planning because I think it does allow for a full kind of wholesome integration into where the organization is going and inputting those values of inclusion. But yeah, I’m curious, what are you dreaming into being for Culture Change Lab, but also for the sector at large, or the kind of influence that you’re looking to make?

Alexandra: Oh, my goodness, this is my favorite and least favorite thing to ever talk about, but I believe in putting the dreams out there. First what I’ll say is I’m hoping to learn. The further and further out I get from previous consultancies, the more and more I can see what really impacts top down, up, down, up. And I’m understanding that what I think CCL is trying to do is help people understand how to build collective power. And so when I think about what is that collective? So if we are doing that, if we’re building collective power across artists, thinkers, culture workers, what does that look like in three to five years?

Now obviously the current political moment is first, I want to say not new, but it feels really new. It feels incredibly disruptive to so many and it is quite literally dangerous to so many. So that has made me rethink what the next five years looks like a little bit. But someone really smart recently said to me, what are the opportunities in chaos and lawlessness that allow change makers to actually try things that are a little more, I don’t even want to use the word innovative, I want to use the word maybe not possible in a time when things were clearer? And with technology, we’re able to maybe try things that don’t have laws around them. Now I sound crazy, but what I’m trying to say is the next five years don’t look clear to me anymore. And the next five years, what I know I’m going to have to dig deeper into is consistently moving from intuition.

So I know that I have to get stronger in listening to my gut. I know that I need to use more ritual practice to ground into that ancestral knowing. And it doesn’t look like each thing that builds on each other as you plan or as you imagine is always going to be linear. So I am leaning into loops right now. I’m looking to build power. I’m looking to deepen relationship. I believe that we can’t make change, cohorts, people, groups, regionally, nationally, unless we’ve built trust in relationship. And that’s really hard to do and it takes time and we’re all tired.

So what I want to do is give people that extra boost of energy that clearer seeing. That’s the work, whether it’s at a gathering, at a convening, at a design sprint, at their all-staff meeting. There’s ways to cultivate that. I believe we have been operating since the pandemic in isolation, and I think the only way forward is through coalition, is through co-production, is through shared resource, and mutual aid. And I think enacting and working through solidarity, economy, ideas and practices. I don’t see my work as my work, I see it as work that we can all borrow from, I borrow and I offer and I gift. So it’s just not trying to build a business. I am trying to build a way and an ethos of architecting together.

Yura: And I love that perspective of the impossible being possible and the potential opportunity that can come from the chaos of everything that we thought was the way it was is now up in arms, up for grabs, up for rewriting.

Alexandra: That’s right.

Yura: So yeah, there’s a new story that we could write and being able to see it from a perspective of an opportunity, of maybe we can actually go really fast into some sort of evolution or shift because of the opportunity of things breaking down a bit. I think that’s a really helpful perspective to go into it with because it also helps to encourage continuing and going for it every day rather than getting stuck in that doomsday side of that chaos, of that everything’s being destroyed.

Alexandra: We’re all carrying grief, we’re encountering grief. I think grief is a way you’re alive and human. It’s a growth opportunity, but if we ignore it, I think we hide ourselves from that instinct that tells us what’s the path forward. There’s an ensemble in Philly called Applied Mechanics, and one of their members is also a facilitator that works with me at CCL and also at the Network of Ensemble Theaters, and they have this workshop called New World Building.

And just to be able to see a practice that offers people from a values-based entry point, what is the new world you’re building for tomorrow today but uses these theatrical tools to get people to understand how interdependent we are, but that new world can start now. That really was a foundational shift in how I understood what this work is and what the future could look like. So yeah, I don’t know. Something in your reflection back to me made me think about that and I just really wanted to shout them out and thank them for that gift of brilliance.

Yura: Yes. I have a mentor, Justin Michael Williams, who talks about the way that we bring the future into the present is all about asking our future selves or that future world, “What did I do today to get to where you are?”

Alexandra: I love that.

Yura: Before we get further into this episode, go ahead and hit subscribe on this podcast. This is the best way to stay updated on new episodes and it helps spread the word to other visionaries who are making a positive impact on the world. So go ahead and hit subscribe and let’s keep this good energy going. What would you say success looks like for your table?

Alexandra: For me, am I able to feed my team abundantly, both in thought, but also I’m literally talking the food. Are we at the table imbibing abundantly and exchanging and telling stories? Do we have the means to do that? That’s what resource provides to me. Are we able to show up for each other? Are we able to keep learning? Are we able to keep innovating and trying and are we able to really talk about what is hard, what nuts we haven’t been able to crack? We have really big dreams about not just working in the arts and culture space. Right?

We’ve already started to think about what does it look like to bring the kind of work and analysis we do around values and bias into the tech space, into the media space. And that sounds like a real focus on growth, but if we stayed small forever and felt a really clear impact, great. One of my biggest markers for success is when people want to bring us back, or when people leave an institution and bring us to their next one. To me, that means you saw an intentionality and an integrity that works. Because we mess up all the time. We’re people. And personally, spreading the gospel of failure is a thing to actually run towards is the only way for me. It comes from my devising practice.

If we are not trying to fail and get the failures out so we can get to the next good thing, the next new thing, the next uncomfortable thing, I feel like we will have fallen into a pattern of stagnancy as an organization. And to be honest, I even struggle with the idea that we’re an organization. We are, we’re a business, but we are mostly a cohort of humans on a journey. And I know some people will be like, “Girl, stop.” But that’s how I see it. Yeah. And we can stay together and keep maintaining that level of integrity and intimacy, I feel like we will have done it right.

One thing I never want to see change, although we’re not formally a co-op, we pay. It doesn’t matter the size of the contract, we’re paying everybody equally. It’s not like I get more and this person who’s elite. There are things about that I really appreciate and enjoy and want to learn how to think about internal business practices just for us, just as much as we try to tell other people how to be equitable. So, continuing to explore what that means even internally is really important to me.

Yura: That’s so interesting. I’m hearing both the kind of wanting to get into other sectors in terms of potential clients and this work that you serve, and that’s I think a big thing to acknowledge the power of creativity, of storytelling, of the artistic mind when it comes to solving challenges, conflict, creating new worlds. I know you had mentioned that you’re a creative, so you can find ways to make things work. But that kind of energy I think is really important to keep sharing with other sectors too.

And then also there’s the inviting of these different business styles or ways of working together, like the co-op model that you shared that I don’t know that we see it too often in the theatre or the arts world as really taught or as an option but definitely considering. For me, I’m getting more into as well the business world of equity and the shared ownership or having percentages of ownership for a business and what that means for when there’s dividends and employees or other people owning parts of the company as they’re founding. So that’s definitely interesting to me as well. And I think it’s been really helpful to release any ideas of judgments around that world to then now be able to say, what are some ways that it actually can be helpful or let me understand it before I’m just saying that’s not what’s needed.

Alexandra: So much of this work has also taught me how many limitations I have around money and my issues with money and thinking that because I have this rejection of capitalism in the way that it’s so oppressive. And yet what can you do when you are resourced? I do think there’s good you can do, but more importantly, a big kind of national conversation I am deeply invested in and thinking about is not just what is labor and how do we organize around labor, of course, but it’s also thought labor and what is the value of it. And more importantly, what is the relationship of what we do at CCL, of what I think we’re doing in the ensemble field specifically at NET is really trying to make people understand.

I think work that is about systems change and people change is actually a civic technology that we’re trying to rebuild an ancient muscle around. And to be able to be in rooms with people that think really differently than you. And not just toxically positively find commonalities but actually connect to be able to think forward together. I don’t know. I think that is something that can never have a monetary value placed on it, but really this connection to what is our civic technology that is facilitation work.

I don’t know. I’m really obsessed with that right now and thinking through ways in which it needs to be given out for free and ways in which it needs to be paid because it is decades of labor and experience and learning. I don’t know. So money is hard and complex and complicated, and sometimes it’s also really simple. So those are things that I’m wrestling with right now. But I know that coming from a nonprofit arts background, my own limitations in thinking about resource are starting to break.

Yura: Would you say that’s an example of something that the theatre industry for example, or the arts industry is asking of us to evolve in terms of mindset shifts or other values?

Alexandra: Both. I’m seeing a real resistance to evolving and then also a real desire by others to move. So one of the things I’m going around as I meet theatres and ensembles, specifically small. We’re not talking about five million and above. I’m talking about smaller. I think that’s where some of the most important work is happening artistically, socially, politically. And yet this belief that some of them hold, and I used to hold it at Luna, that the survival of this organization or institution should precede the needs of its workers.

Because it’s such an important idea or it is giving visibility to a marginalized da, da, da, da, da. I think is preventing us to live our ultimate missions of making things better for marginalized folk. But we have to shake each other right now and say, “Do you understand that you thinking you’re never going to be able to make health benefit payments and just stay fully on 1099s for everybody is the way to live that mission?”

It’s so easy for us to separate those things and just be like, “No, but we have to do these shows because we’re helping people be seen.” So those are some ways of thinking I’m trying to break in myself, and I’m trying to support other people and breaking and thinking what is our center. I do think there are these ideas of what’s important and what matters that seem grounded in social justice or social change but are actually harming us and our movement.

Yura: To me, it sounds like it’s also we want to be able to be more inclusive, be more resourced, abundant for our communities, marginalized communities. But then from what the example you gave, it was like it’s also an internal barrier that it seems like we’re putting to say that, “I actually will never be able to pay healthcare” as opposed to saying “That’s a goal, and here are some ways that we could work on getting there over the next few years.”

Alexandra: And what I don’t want it to sound like is I’m saying that all arts work must be paid, because there are really important things to show. I do free work all the time, but when we expect people who don’t have a means to do it, right, there is a gaslighting that happens. And so what I really appreciate about your example is that it’s like we don’t have to be where we want to be yet, but we need to be thinking about where we want to be, how we grow and evolve.

Yura: Yeah. And I like to always to include that donated work or volunteer work in a budget because I think of it also as support for the organization because in the future maybe we wouldn’t have that person or that donation of that labor. So we should make sure that we acknowledge that is something that that’s where that came in.

And then also in terms of grant writing, we can also say that this is a line item that would need to be filled if we were to have a funder or sponsor or ticket sales to cover the whole project to do it again. I think it makes sense too because it also shows that there are people donating their labor.

Alexandra: And listen, we can’t keep a 501(c)(3) if we don’t have contributions. So it matters. I think, yeah, we’re in deep alignment. I just don’t want to see the next generation of art makers and culture workers think that being out of reach of your material needs makes your cause worthy. I think that that’s an unhealthy internalized narrative that I think a lot of people have been given, and I’m very excited to see that shift.

Yura: Yeah. It’s the starving artist mentality idea. Yeah, limiting belief. That is what it is, and that’s the only way. Yeah. What other advice would you give someone who is just beginning to build their own table, like taking it back to 2020 when you decided you were going to incorporate?

Alexandra: Stay in the forgiving place with yourself. Remember that that negative voice in your head is actually not you, it’s a lifetime of socialization, it’s a lifetime of big T trauma. And that you can find other ways to talk to yourself. You can find other people in your life that will talk to you better. My number one thing is keep doing real assessments about who’s in your life. There’ve been so many periods in my life where I loved who I was around, but we were not nutritious for each other. And when you find nutritious people that you can show up for and they show up for you, the world changes, the world opens, it breaks open.

Having people who hold me, hold my worst self, still in love is so important. I think staying in the uncomfortable place is really powerful, but really coming from grace and understanding you don’t need to prove anything to be worthwhile of that grace, to be worthy of that grace. And to keep assessing in what ways are you staying comfortable, in what ways do you need to stretch, what ways do you need to cocoon? I think it’s really important. And this is not for everybody. We all have different rhythms and practices, but for me, it really serves me to get out to other places, internationally, nationally, even if it’s another neighborhood that I don’t go to.

I need access to the different ways that people are existing and being, and it cleans my slate. And I think that’s just so important. And then to also, everything cannot be about this ultimate success goal. For me, I have to, am I living? Am I living or am I working to live? And to me, they’re very blurry places. And then I think the last thing is have you stopped inviting people to your table? Luis Alfaro once said, it’s not his words, but this is who I remember who told it to me was like, “If everybody at your table in your coalition,” is really the quote, “is in agreement, the coalition isn’t big enough.” And my version of that is my table’s not big enough if everybody’s agreeing with me and there’s no pushback and there’s not this beautiful volley of challenge, my table’s not big enough and I got to add another slab.

Yura: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Thank you so much for all that medicine and support. What does liberation look like or feel like to you in this moment?

Alexandra: Oh, I appreciate that question and I’ll share a story as I answer it. So just a few weeks ago, I was in a two-day intensive with a group of people and we offered the question, or the prompt, that was like, “Liberatory cultures require change. What might you be willing to shift?” And there was a lot of response around, “Why are you asking me to sacrifice for this large institution?” And we listened and we heard, and we were like, “Okay, nothing about our intention in that prompt was about seeking sacrifice.”

And we were like, “Is there something in the term liberatory or liberation that feels like there is inherent sacrifice required? What about that language landed that way?” Maybe it was something we said and had nothing to do with the term liberation or liberatory. But what it allowed us to do the next day was to talk about freedom. And there are costs to freedom. Freedom isn’t everything “I want can happen.” We got to have this expansive, deep conversation. And it’s pretty common to talk about when you’re addressing racism or oppression, it might feel to the person with more majority or privilege status, they’re sacrificing something.

But I don’t try to come from it from that perspective. So first of all, I want us to all build our comfort with what is sacrificing for the larger good that isn’t about a pain point. But it got me thinking about what does a liberatory space look and feel like to me? And what is freedom for me? And fundamentally, it’s the ability to be independent. It’s a deep gratitude and respect and understanding of the privilege I have of mobility, of freedom to... The privileges I hold aren’t my freedom, but being grateful for them, seeing them, naming them, and using them for good is a freedom.

Yura: Amazing. So where can we find out more about you, about Culture Change Lab?

Alexandra: Culture Change Lab is at www.cultrachangelab.com, and then you can follow me on Instagram at Alexandra Meda and you can also see my work at Hola Studio Luna for the Network of Ensemble Theaters.

Yura: Amazing. Alexandra Meda, thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Alexandra: Thank you so much.

Yura: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and any HowlRound show wherever you find podcasts, including non-commercial open source apps like Anytime Podcast Player for iPhone and AntennaPod for Android. If you loved this podcast, please share it with your friends. You can find a transcript for this episode along with lots of other progressive and disruptive content on HowlRound.com. Have an idea for a meaningful podcast, essay or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your ideas to this knowledge Commons. Thanks for pulling up a seat to liberation with us at Building Our Own Tables. Catch you next time.