Transcript: 'Be the Change': A podcast that aims ‘to remove the mystery of making change'

Listen to Be the Change: A podcast that aims ‘to remove the mystery of making change.’

Savala Nolan: We’re talking about transforming the world and being the change and these very lofty concepts. But I hope what they see is that big, lofty concepts really contain lots of little, teeny, tiny steps that are repeated and built upon over time.

[Music: “Saulsalita Soul” by Mr. RuiZ]

Anne Brice: This is Berkeley Voices. I’m Anne Brice.

In March, we are going to share a special, three-part series of Be the Change. It’s a podcast hosted by Berkeley Law’s Savala Nolan where she interviews changemakers about how they became — and are becoming — the change they want to see in the world. To introduce the series, I talked with Savala about Be the Change and why it has been such a passion project for her.

[Music comes up, then fades out]

Anne Brice: Hi Savala, thanks for joining me today.

Savala Nolan: Oh, it’s my pleasure.

Anne Brice: First, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your connection to UC Berkeley?

Savala Nolan: Well, I direct the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley’s Law School and have been there for, goodness, going on seven years. The time definitely flies. I also teach a class for first-year law students on movement lawyering, which is a particular type of lawyering and identity.

I’m a UC Berkeley alum — Go Bears! I graduated from the law school in 2011 and I am also a writer. I’m an essayist. And that definitely informs my work, including, you know, wanting to do this podcast and how I talk to people. My first book is Don’t Let It Get You Down: A Collection of Essays About Race, Gender and the Body.

Anne Brice: Can you tell me a little bit more about your book? When did it come out and what is it about if people haven’t read it yet?

Savala Nolan: Yeah, it was published by Simon and Schuster in 2021 and was a literal dream come true. And I was very lucky to have tons of support from my colleagues at the law school and at UC Berkeley more broadly in terms of writing the book and also getting it out there.

It’s a collection of essays that form a sort of memoir where I really talk about my own body, but also the bodies of my parents and sometimes celebrities and other people as a way to explore how the personal and the political are often in conflict and collision throughout our lives. And as an attempt at helping folks understand the body as a site of power and knowledge and epiphany.

Anne Brice: In 2017, I had been at Berkeley for about two years, and I came across your summer podcast series called Be the Change. And I was blown away by the conversations that you had with people, all of whom are very public-facing and highly respected in their fields, including people like Judge Thelton Henderson, whom the social justice center is named after, and Virgie Tovar, an activist and an author working to end anti-fat bias. All of your conversations were so candid and personal and just really thoughtful.

And so now, several years later, we’re making season two of the podcast, which I am extremely excited about. And I was wondering, could you talk about why you first started Be the Change and what was and is your goal of the podcast?

Savala Nolan: Well, my very first goal was simply to keep in touch. You know, as you mentioned, it was a summer podcast. So, we recorded in the spring and then played the episodes throughout the summer. And I love Berkeley, you know, I love the law school — that’s like my home base — but I love the whole community. And frankly, I felt like I was going to miss people over the summer and I wanted us to have some kind of shared experience. That was the sort of initial yearning behind the first season of the podcast.

But beyond wanting to keep in touch, I wanted to contribute something to the community that would help folks really be brave and think about their lives and their gifts and their work as things that are full of possibility and as things that are potentially really, really expansive and transformative.

I wanted to have conversations that would help all of us in the community build our capacity to be the change we want and need in the world, to try our hand at living our ideals. Not in a theoretical, daydream pie-in-the-sky sense — although daydreaming is great and important, and I do it all the time — but in a practical, roll-up-your-sleeves, get-in-there-and-go-for-it sense.

Interviewing people who are already doing this kind of go-for-it-work, right? Who were already building the nonprofit from scratch, who were already taking the mic at the conference and voicing their opinion, who were already writing the book. Hearing from people who were already embodying the change that they want to see or we want to see in the world felt like a really terrific, immediate, intimate way to remove some of the mystery around the process of making change.

And, you know, I think it worked. I was able to have conversations with people who, through their work and their personal life, embody a deep and often innovative commitment to justice and fairness and equity. And it was a ton of fun. So, that’s another part of this is, is that it’s really fun to have these conversations and hang out with people and then share them into the community, where hopefully they have an impact.

Anne Brice: Do you find that in this medium of podcasting when you’re talking to these people, many of whom you’ve talked to before and you know on different levels, personal and professional — do you find that having these conversations where you’re sitting down and talking face to face, either in person or on computers, but still looking at each other… are the conversations different than you’ve had with them before?

[Music: “Brer Menuet” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Savala Nolan: Absolutely. I mean, I think there’s something magical about two microphones or a recording booth. It makes me think of, like, not at all in the romantic sense, but it’s the difference between fluorescent light and candlelight. Getting in the recording booth with someone, it just feels special and intimate, in the sense of two people relating to each other with a lot of honesty.

The conversation always goes somewhere unexpected. You know, I always laugh. I always learn something about someone who I thought maybe I knew a ton about, and that, just personally, selfishly, has been really fun for me to get to see a different side of people than I normally see. But also I hope that it’s revelatory and interesting for listeners.

Anne Brice: So, the people that you talk to, they’re all embodying the change that they want to see in the world in all different ways. And they’re at often different points in their careers and in their work that they’ve been doing. And I’m curious how you choose who you interview.

Savala Nolan: Well, I think about people who, through their work or perhaps their personal life or, you know, by dint of their identities, are creating new ripples and waves of transformation, whether big or small — the tangible, appreciable benefits of which redound to the common good and especially to marginalized people and communities.

I guess that’s kind of a poetic way of saying that I look for people who have started something that wasn’t there before, and that makes the world a better place.

Anne Brice: We talked a little bit about who you spoke with during your last season. And I was wondering if you could give us a little preview of this season, maybe who you talk to and a tidbit from each of your conversations.

Savala Nolan: Oh, I would love to.

[Music: “Keeping Up” by Blue Dot Sessions]

I loved all three of these conversations and each was wide-ranging and surprising and fun. But I will try to pluck a personal highlight from the mix for each one.

So, I spoke with Khiara M. Bridges, who is a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law and a brilliant, courageous public intellectual about how she learned to fully embody her Black womanhood in this world of academia without apology or disguise.

[Music fades down]

And, you know, that was a journey. That was a process. She’s been in this game for a long time, and it was validating and interesting and practically useful to hear her talk about her process to being more authentically herself in her professional life.

I spoke with Purvi Shah, who is a celebrated civil rights attorney and an activist who’s been on the ground for years. I mean, for more than a decade doing legal work with and on behalf of grassroots social movements. And she also happens to be the woman who created and now runs Movement Law Lab, a legal nonprofit. She started it from scratch. And I loved hearing her talk about the nuts and bolts of that process and also hearing her thoughts about what she wishes she’d known before she embarked on the process of building a legal nonprofit from the ground up.

Last but not least, I spoke with Nazune Menka who is a Berkeley professor who’s innovating at the undergraduate and graduate level by teaching courses she created through a decolonial lens.

[Music comes up, then fades out]

Anne Brice: March is Women’s History Month — that’s when the first episode of the series will come out. And I was wondering if you could talk about the importance of highlighting and celebrating accomplishments of women, especially women of color, in the work that you do.

Savala Nolan: Let me answer this first by explaining the origin story of the Henderson Center, because it is meaningful here. The center was founded by four female professors at the law school in the wake of Proposition 209. And for listeners who aren’t familiar with 209, it continues to be the law of the land.

It was a voter initiative in the mid-1990s that California voters passed that did a number of things. But for our purposes, most importantly, it made consideration of race and gender illegal at public universities like UC Berkeley. It had a really profound and devastating impact across campus, including at the law school. And it was because of that impact that our founders created the Henderson Center.

So, I mentioned that just to say that we are always interested in how gender impacts our ability to live a full, empowered life as a citizen of the planet. We’re always interested in questions that impact women and women-identified people — I use the term “women” as broadly as I can — and we’re always interested in the barriers that get erected that prevent people of different genders from flourishing. So, you know, for that reason alone, we have a special interest in highlighting and celebrating the accomplishments of women and women of color.

But putting aside our origin story, we uplift the work of women and women of color in particular, as you said, as a corrective to historical and ongoing erasure in a way that we hope will be prophylactic and protective against future erasure.

Fundamentally, it’s a way to engage with the true breadth of the good work that’s going on in the world. And if we ignore the work of women and women of color, it’s to our loss, right? If we ignore the work of women and women of color, that means ignoring intuition and power and truth and ideas and innovation that comes from more than half of the population. That is, and would be, a grave mistake.

So, as it happens, my guests this season are women who are doing brilliant, daring work. It wasn’t planned that this would be released in March, but that’s how the calendar unfolded. And it’s a happy accident because sharing their work with people feels not only important for the reasons I’ve described, but it feels good and celebratory and joyful and, honestly, just right for this time of the year.

Anne Brice: I was wondering, could we go back just for a moment to talk about the Thelton Henderson Center and the work that you do there and what its main goal is at Berkeley Law and at the UC Berkeley campus?

Savala Nolan: Yeah. I think of the main goal of the Henderson Center as being to ensure that sometimes difficult, but always meaningful, conversations about power and privilege and subordination and autonomy are part of law school life.

Our goal is to make sure that no student, if we can possibly help it, leaves Berkeley Law without being conversant in questions of social justice and without being able to bring a social justice lens to their work. Whether they end up being a partner at a law firm or starting their own legal nonprofit like Purvi Shah, that’s up to them, and we acknowledge that people have different paths, right? But we want them to be able to think about questions of power and privilege and equity in their work, no matter where their work takes them.

In order to do that, we do a little bit of everything at the law school. I teach, as I mentioned. We do at least one program a week that’s designed to help students build their capacity around social justice work. Again, regardless of where their career takes them, we want them to be able to think like a so-called social justice lawyer when that’s what’s called for.

We support students with mentorship, with summer fellowships. We administer the Race and Law certificate and the Public Interest and Social Justice certificate at the law school.

So, it’s a mix of community building, intellectual stimulation, mentorship, tangible financial support, and lots and lots and lots of capacity building that is really the heart of what we do at the law school.

Anne Brice: So, the three people that you interviewed for this season of Be the Change — Khiara M. Bridges, Purvi Shah, Nazune Menka — they’re all lawyers working and embodying the change that they want to see in the world. And so, I’m wondering, what do you hope that listeners feel when they hear these conversations and what do you hope they come away with?

Savala Nolan: I hope they feel inspired. And, you know, it’s a cheesy word, but I use it advisedly — I hope that they feel stirred, awakened, like maybe they have a little more faith in the spark inside them that is capable of transforming the world. These are very big words, right? And that’s because the problems are big and our aspirations are big.

But I think when they listen to the conversations, I hope that they’ll hear that even small things add up, right? So we’re talking about transforming the world and being the change and these very lofty concepts. But I hope what they see is that big, lofty concepts really contain lots of little, teeny, tiny steps that are repeated and built upon over time.

I hope they laugh — I laughed in all of these conversations. And I hope that they have fun and get to see and hear a side of maybe familiar faces that they hadn’t before. And really, truly, truly, I hope that they take away practical knowledge, you know, action steps, for lack of a better word, that they can meld and transform and layer onto their own dreams and their own projects.

I hope that they take away not just a sense of having gotten to hang out with some cool people and feel inspired, but tools that they can use in their journey to be a transformative force in the world.

[Music: “Saulsalita Soul” by Mr. RuiZ]

Anne Brice: The first episode of Be the Change will come out on Wednesday, March 8. Savala will talk with Khiara M. Bridges, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Law and a powerful public intellectual who speaks and writes about race, class, reproductive justice and the intersection of the three.

This season of Be the Change is a collaboration between Berkeley Law and the Office of Communications and Public Affairs at UC Berkeley. It was produced by me, Anne Brice.

To hear each episode, follow Berkeley Voices wherever you get your podcasts and look for the special Be the Change series. You can listen to the episodes and read the transcripts on news.berkeley.edu/podcasts. You can also find Be the Change on Berkeley Law’s podcast hub at law.berkeley.edu/podcasts/.

[Music comes up, song ends]