Author: Parlay House

Want to make a difference in the world but don’t know how to start?

While all transformation happens by taking a small step, very few people have walked the miles and impacted lives as deeply and broadly as civil rights icon and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, Dolores Huerta. She was the inspiration for Obama’s ‘Yes we can’ campaign battle cry and is known for her tireless and fierce commitment to improving deplorable working conditions for California farmworkers in the 1960s. She worked side by side with Cesar Chavez and organized a 17 million person grape strike which resulted in the first-ever farmworker contract.

At 90 years old, Dolores is still fighting. Through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, she continues to build a better quality of life for agricultural communities and beyond.

Come stand with us in the shadow of greatness to meet and be inspired by this national hero.

 

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.

Growing up in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, Shabana Basij-Rasikh and her family risked their lives to send her and her sister to underground schools. At that time, educating women was a crime punishable by death.

Shabana not only became college-educated (a privilege of just 6% of women in Afghanistan at the time) but she went on to found SOLA, School of Leadership Afghanistan, her country’s first boarding school for girls which is breaking the cycle of female oppression and building up a new generation of confident female leaders.

Shabana still operates with huge constraints and needs to be constantly on guard to keep her school alive, not only in these times of COVID, but as a female leader in a country where the gap in power and privilege is still vast.

 

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.

 

Let’s talk about Divorce – and more specifically, how to manage our finances before, during, and after this difficult life transition.

We welcomed financial superstar and two-time Parlay House speaker, Laurie Fried of Lumina Financial back to our safe space to talk all things divorce and money. Tune in to learn and feel with us.

 

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.

There are many privileges beyond skin color – access to resources, wealth, geography, age, religion, attractiveness, body type, and more. Sometimes we openly accept certain privileges to cope with more hurtful ones as a way to protect ourselves from pain and feeling insignificant. Over time, we begin to believe that our assumed privileges are proof that we are special, unique, or merely different from the damaging labels that society wants to impose on us to have the world make sense.

Tune in with one of our very own Local-Instigators, Tanum Davis Bohen, who walks us through her journey as a woman who had innate privileges afforded to her except one: her skin color.

Her story begins as an oblivious girl who inadvertently navigates life’s painful realities by socially “code-switching” – burying her feelings of insecurity deep within her unconscious mind. She emerges as a strong, successful leader whose own racial awakening took place during the recent protests against systemic racial inequities. This jolt of reality led Tanum to unearth her life’s real mission: to make people comfortable being uncomfortable when talking about race. Herself included because, really, this is about us all.

Her perspective is a vulnerable, powerful, and unique one that we’re thrilled to help amplify.

 

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.

When we gathered for this talk, many of us were reeling from the death of someone who we likely didn’t even know: #NotoriousRBG. Because she was an icon, a champion of women’s rights, and a fierce legal mind who was appointed to the highest position in her profession.

But how do we begin to anticipate and process the aging (and eventual death) of the people we know and love? And how do we think about our own mortality?

We sat down with a CA couple who founded their own safe space to have important conversations on all things aging, illness, and death (while living through them in real-time). Their goal is to create support around a subject that we all will experience at some point and yet rarely discuss with each other.

They have seen these conversations help people cope with the many complicated emotions related to the aging process and provide guidance for younger generations to learn how to cope as well.

As we know at Parlay House, when we share a personal truth, we free others to do the same. Let’s talk about what it’s like to be open about getting older, getting sick, dying, and supporting others through it all. Whether the conversation is about you, your parents or people you love, talking about what’s hard to talk about takes practice. So let’s get started.

 

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.

 

When we learned that only 36% of women say they feel like they’re following their dreams, and over 60% of women are rethinking their lives during the pandemic, we knew who to call to help us explore making meaningful transitions for a more fulfilling life.

Enter fellow Parlay House member Kim Newton, who after two decades left her top executive role at Hallmark during the peak of her corporate career and decided to follow her dream of being a professional quilt artist and guide for other women wishing to change course but not knowing how to start.

Though she’d always created space to process and capture important moments in life through modern quilting, Kim couldn’t have imagined that less than a year after leaving Corporate America she’d be working full time as an artist, launching her own business – The Intentional Pause Project – and have the first quilt she ever sold hanging on Oprah Winfrey’s wall.

Kim’s transition came after taking a very intentional pause herself to listen to her heart and now she’s on a mission to teach more women how to do the same so that it’s not just 36% of us living our dreams.

 

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.

Let’s talk about JUSTICE.

Imagine a world in which a single mistake could cost you everything and continue following you like a dark cloud, for the rest of your life. Imagine not being able to move forward, no matter how much you change or hard you try.

This is the reality for millions of people who find themselves impacted by the criminal legal system each year – no matter the reality of their own actions.

Tune in to hear from Emily Galvin Almanza, an award-winning public defender, Harvard and Stanford alum, and fierce leader of accompliceship in disrupting the cycle of poverty and incarceration. As the Founder and CEO of Partners for Justice, she is on a mission to improve the lives of low-income people by empowering and supporting them to maintain homes, livelihoods, family bonds, property, and access to the social safety net.

Her “magic sauce” for making change is not to go it alone, but to train recent college graduates to become advocates, thereby multiplying her organization’s impact on an exponential level and helping groom the next generation of change-makers.

She walks us through this challenging but fascinating work, and opens up about how her team is changing the detrimental attitudes, biases, and practices within the existing legal system and society in general. We invite you to explore how true justice can be achieved for all.

 

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.

**TRIGGER WARNING**

The following Parlay From Away conversation discusses sexual child abuse, incest, and other related potentially triggering subjects. Please put your mental safety and comfort first before moving on. For immediate support, call the RAINN hotline for free at 800.656.4673.

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You never know what experiences life has in store for you, nor what kind of life raft it will throw your way when you’re struggling to stay afloat. We’ve all had moments when we needed something to pull us out of the dark. For some people, that’s a loved one, therapy, medication, or meditation. For our speaker, Lisa Foster, it was a personality test.

After surviving sexual violation as a child, an emotionally abusive marriage as a young woman, and a disconnect with her son as a mother, Lisa had lost herself. These experiences left her feeling voiceless and unworthy of authentic love and connection. Then, in an effort to better understand her and her son’s differences, she began exploring their personality test results.

The more she dove in, the more she felt like she had finally found herself. Though she worked through many modalities for her own healing over the years, the power of personality became her most significant life raft in lifting her out of unthinkably hard times and building the bridges she needed to overcome her personal trauma, connect with her son, and rebuild a life of her own at 42.

By integrating insights from tests like CliftonStrengths, Myers Briggs, and the Enneagram, Lisa rediscovered her voice, her worth, and her personal mission. Embracing this most unexpected life raft was so transformative on her own journey that she later launched Parillume, a business on a mission to harness personality tests to create more authentic, connected, and fulfilling lives for other survivors, families, and corporate teams.

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.

It’s a time when “doing it all” feels harder than ever.

While there is no right answer for everyone, our speaker, Shellye Archambeau, has written a highly-acclaimed new book on unapologetic ambition. She has a strong point of view about taking risks, breaking barriers, and creating success on our own terms.

As a longtime leader at IBM, an experienced CEO, and Board Member for brands like Nordstrom, Verizon, Okta, and Roper Technologies, Shellye is an expert when it comes to thinking big. As one of the first Black executive leaders in Silicon Valley, she knows how to find success no matter what odds are stacked against her.

We invite you to tune in as we learn from Shellye’s incredibly dynamic experience building an impressive career AND the lifestyle she desired including a marriage and a family.

 

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.

 

We all have mountains in life that seem impossible to climb. The longer we avoid taking our first step, the higher each peak seems to become. This week’s speaker Kara Richardson Whitely knows all about facing, in her case, a literal mountain.

Mt. Kilimanjaro to be exact, aka the highest free-standing mountain in the world. She weighed 300lbs and most people told her this goal was impossible / dangerous / stupid. But she went for it.

Tune in as we talk about the grueling process of facing the “impossible” and fighting against the things that tear us down – especially ourselves. We’ll learn about Kara’s journey battling food addiction, naysayers, and her own overwhelming negative thoughts. It’s never too late to start moving mountains and there’s nothing worth waiting for when it comes to living your most happy life.

 

See ALL Parlay From Away conversations here.