Feminist Founders Subscriber-Only Podcast

Becky Mollenkamp (00:01.198)
Hi, this is Becky doing a private podcast recording for paid members of Feminist Founders, which just so you know, we call the paid members of our community, the Feminist Founders Society. We just had our first monthly call and it was so wonderful. If you weren't able to attend and you're interested in catching the replay.

We did some visioning exercises that were really helpful for me getting into a good head space, might be helpful for you. You can just email me, becky at beckymollincamp.com. I'll put that in the show notes and I can send you a link to the replay. But today I'm not here to talk about that. Although I did want to make sure you knew about our community call because it was awesome. And the next one is in February, on February 25th. The link to that is bit.

So bit.ly slash feminist founders and you can go sign up. You don't have to pay extra to come. It's included in your your fee that you already pay as a subscriber and we would love for you to come and you can bring a friend. You can just send them the same link and let them know even though it says it's for our paid community that they can come as your guest and we'd love to have them and have you will be doing some more work around visioning next month with faith taking the lead. OK enough about that. I'm here.

actually to talk about collective goals and collective action. I did not prepare a thing. This is all up off the cuff. As you can tell because I'm tongue tied. It's all off the cuff and in the moment. We just finished that call. I'm feeling really inspired. I'm feeling like I'm in a good headspace and I want to get this out today because one it's due and two I'm feeling ready to talk about it.

And I when Faith and I were brainstorming what we would be talking about in each of our individual private podcast feeds or episodes for this month, I said, I really wanted to talk about the experience I've been having inside of a mastermind, a peer led, not paid mastermind that I'm doing with Faith and then a couple of other folks in my world, one of them being Taina, who you may know from as a co-host of Messy Liberation, which is another podcast I do. So if you haven't heard that, go check out.

Becky Mollenkamp (02:18.606)
And so there's four of us in this mastermind. We get together twice a month and like traditional masterminds, if you don't know what those are, it's just a peer group of folks who get together to work through business problems, to share resources, to brainstorm and share ideas, to share contexts and network access, to talk about ideas for business growth, to work through business challenges.

to just support each other, cheerlead for each other, all of those things. So all of that is our mastermind group, the community that we have together. That's what we just started, I don't know what, two months ago, November. And at first it started normal, as in how most masterminds that I've been a part of work, where you get together on a set schedule, you have a...

hour or more and during that time you can either put one person in the quote-unquote hot seat. I like to use the term love seat. It feels a little less painful. Or you can split the time amongst all of you and everyone gets equal time at trying to talk through their problems or one person gets all the attention from the community per call. That's traditionally how things are done and that's great and it's helpful. But then enter faith and I love faith and this is why faith and I are doing this business together.

because she is amazing and challenges the way I think all the time. And boy, do I love people who challenge the way I think for the better. And she's definitely one of those. And her suggestion or something that she brought up was that she feels most motivated when she's working towards a collective goal. That's different for me and maybe for you, because in America, if you're American, perhaps if you're Canadian or from somewhere else, it's similar.

But certainly in America, we are deeply conditioned to be very individualistic. It is very much about you and not the collective. We don't have collective programs. And when we do, we call them entitlements or services that we are giving, right? This is like, I am giving of myself to you because you can't do it on your own, right? It is not.

Becky Mollenkamp (04:41.838)
looked at as like, the collective cares for each other. It is about individuals helping other individuals. It's how we look at charity. It's how we look at everything in America. We are never conditioned into the collective experience. A lot of places in the world are. It starts even just from how households look in other parts of the world compared to America. In America, it's very much the aim is, how do I get my children out of my house at 18, right?

you're considered a failure as a parent if your kids are still living with you beyond their college years. Families, you know, we put folks as they age into homes into other spaces rather than bringing them into our own homes. So the way households look at America is deeply individualistic and not collective oriented. And because of that, think that that transfers into everything we do. So America's deeply individualistic is certainly how I have been wired.

I'm fighting against that. I'm trying very hard to unlearn that, but it's so baked in that my natural reaction is to look at almost everything through that very individualistic lens. So when I think about goals, I usually in masterminds have always thought about my own goals, right? What am I trying to accomplish in my business? How much money do I need to make? How many customers do I want? How many podcasts can I get on? Blah, blah, blah. It's always about me and my goals. I support other people and their goals inside of my masterminds.

I always have. I'm there to show up. I'm there to share resources. I'm there to, you know, be part of helping you come up with ideas and all of that. I don't help you implement. don't bask in. mean, I'll celebrate, but it's not like your goal doesn't become my goal. That's just never how I've approached things, because it's not how I was taught to show up in the world. But Faith said, and by the way, Faith is an immigrant. She is not from America, so she is probably had

very different conditioning. She's from Jamaica, where I don't know a lot about Jamaican culture, but my guess is that much like a lot of other places in the world, it is probably more collective minded than America, because I think almost everywhere is. And so she comes at everything from a different kind of perspective than I do. And immediately she was saying, I do best when we're working towards collective goals. And my immediate reaction to that was really one of like, what do you mean?

Becky Mollenkamp (07:03.758)
What does that look like? I really didn't understand my thought at first was, so are you saying that you want us all to be like banding money together to raise money for some charity? That's the that's really the most collective minded I've ever been is like participating in some sort of fundraising effort where we all do something for some collective good. And sure, that might be one of the things that she meant. But she really opened my eyes to a new way.

of being in space with others, of being in business with others. And I don't even this was even before we had joined forces with feminist founders. So I don't mean being in business as in partners, but being separate business owners who are like trying to figure out how to do things more collectively. She really meant, I want my goals to be your goals. I want your goals to be my goals. I want to collectively own

each of our goals and work together towards making them happen with me taking as much ownership as you take for your goals and vice versa. I didn't get it. I was like, what, what, what, right? That just is so antithetical to everything that I have been conditioned into. We are taught to be competitive, right? Not to be collective, not to be cooperative, not to share. It's all about gatekeeping and

You know, how can I get mine? There's limited pieces of the pie. I got to make sure I have mine before I give someone else theirs. And if I do get someone else theirs, I'm really giving them some of mine. Right. This was something radically different. It was we're all going to be together working on these goals. My goal becomes your goal. And you're deeply invested in making it happen. And when it happens, we are going to celebrate together. We're going to really own this. And the more I thought about it, the more excited I got.

because really my ambition, my goal is I never want to work for someone else. That I know. I'm unemployable by the traditional standards. I know that. I have to work for myself. I also am very introverted and I like solitude. I like to be alone. I like to be alone in my business. I like to be alone in lot of things. And I crave community. I still want...

Becky Mollenkamp (09:28.824)
co-workers, business partners, I want other people to be involved in my business with me, even if I'm not, and I don't just mean at a like hiring employees and being their boss, I want peers, I want support. I want to be collaborative. But what does that look like when we're solopreneurs? What does that mean beyond bringing on a contractor, hiring a VA, know, getting into a mastermind where we...

brainstorm, but that level of investment and commitment isn't there. So when Faith talked about this, I got excited. I got excited by the idea of someone else being as invested in my success as I am, as committed to my success as I am. And I got excited about being invested and committed to someone else's success.

That was, it's new, but it feels radically freeing and liberating. So exciting to me, especially as I more and more am getting invested in the idea of collective action, of mutual aid, of what does it look like to challenge the systems in which we exist instead of challenging them at the systemic level, meaning instead of saying, I gotta pass new laws, right? I gotta.

get in, I got to run for government or I have to like become a legislator or a, my brain's not working. Here you go. Further reminder that I haven't written any of this down. Lobbyist, right? A person who's lobbying for change. Like what does it look like for me to just say, I'm going to subvert these systems. I'm going to do things differently. So business is supposed to look this way, but why? If I want to be an anti-capitalist in a capitalist system, I can't, I'm not getting rid of capitalism.

Not happening, not in my lifetime I have a feeling. But what can I do to subvert that system from within the system?

Becky Mollenkamp (11:32.28)
To me, this idea of collective goals, collective sharing of those goals, collective efforting in the goal, taking collective action, that's how we do it. We find our people who share that ambition to challenge these systems, who recognize that dismantling the systems will take lifetimes. Yes, we still need to do our part in that. But in the meantime, what does it look like to subvert the systems from within them?

And I know if anyone's listening to this who has more marginalized identities than I do, you may be sitting here going, duh, welcome to the party, as you should. Because I am late to coming to this and I know that because it's been easy for me as somebody who has white skin, right? I'm a white bodied person who has good education. I mean, I've had, there are, I have marginalizations. I'm queer. I'm a woman.

I did not grow up wealthy by any stretch. was lower middle-class, right? But I also have had a lot of privilege. I have two well-educated parents. I'm well-educated myself. I'm now more comfortably middle-class. you know, I have a lot going, I have a lot of privilege, a lot of unearned privilege. That buys me a lot of comfort within the system that makes it easy for me to not really question the systems. It took me longer to get here than it should have.

I don't fault myself because I also know that's how the system's designed to keep itself going. It relies on folks like me to have just enough comfort and privilege to say, the status quo is working. Let's just leave it as is. I'm beyond that now and saying I'm not okay with status quo. And I'm finally getting to the place of saying, then how do I affect it outside of what is expected? Because as somebody who, again, has those privileges,

It's easy for me to also get really indoctrinated into the rules as they are, systems as they are, and to never really be pushed to think outside of that. So this is new for me, but not new for people who have had far more marginalizations for far longer, who have a ancestral line of marginalization, so they've always had to subvert from within these systems.

Becky Mollenkamp (14:00.002)
So I'm welcoming myself into this party, but if you're like me and also have a lot of privilege and maybe have not had to, have not been forced to subvert in this way, it may be new for you too. So that's why I'm sharing it. If it's not new for you, I see you.

It's been a challenge, I know, for you to have to be subverting in this way for so long. And I'm here now, however I got here, however long it took to be a part of that. So what does this look like in subverting these systems in this way? Well, here's what it's looking like inside of our community. And I just want to share this as an example that I hope gets some people thinking about like, how might this look in my own business? How could this look for me? This is one way, it's not the only way.

There's lots of ways to subvert systems from within. And I'll share a couple of other ideas that I'm not actually implementing, but I've been learning about as far as mutual aid and other things. But what we're doing in this group, this mastermind feels like an icky word, it's coined by a white dude, but it's for lack of a better term, this peer group that I'm in. What it looks like for us is every other week, one of us goes into the love seat. We as a collective work through in the same ways.

most folks do inside of masterminds, we work through someone's challenge. They bring to us a specific thing that they're wanting to work on, whether it's an offer, you know, a website that needs to be updated, you know, some pivot in their business, whatever it looks like. And we all come together to work on that vision. And that part's all pretty normal, right? But here's two ways that it can look different. One is

person gets to choose, do you want that? Is that what you're needing right now? Are you needing the collective brain power to ideate? What a corporate word. To come up with ideas, to come up with plans, to come up with strategy. Is that what you're looking for right now? Because we can help with that. And most of the time, that's what we choose. Or the other option is you can use that hour and a half that we have set aside for our community calls to either do that or to use us.

Becky Mollenkamp (16:14.232)
to get business done for you, to get work done for you. That's something we just did recently where the person is working on an offer. They needed new languaging. They needed some emails written and they needed people to send those emails out. So that's what we did. We used our collective time. We divided up some tasks. We worked as that person's VA basically and got the work done for them because that hour and a half

times three other people, which equals what? Four and a half hours of time. If you're paying somebody $50 an hour for that, that just saved that person 200 and something dollars that they could have done, or their own time, which is probably at a value even higher than that. So that's part of what the collective work looks like. means literally collectively doing work for the other person if that's what they need.

And the other piece that's different, so that's one piece that's different and how we're approaching this in a way that feels more like collective action, collectively working together towards goals. Because that also buys in some ownership. If I've now put my time in to write your messaging or to write some emails or whatever, I'm feeling a sense of collective ownership over this thing you're doing and putting out in the world. It is a piece of mine now. The other thing that we're doing differently is we're setting a goal.

And then we are collectively working towards that goal. So as an example, one of us is putting out a new offer, but we are all, she has an overall goal of how many invitations to this offer she wants sent out. And each of us is contributing towards that total number. That goal, that number of total invitations being sent out to that offer, normally that would just be hers and we'd be there cheering her on.

Instead, we are taking ownership of helping her get to that number by doing the work ourselves too. Saying that I'm partly responsible, a quarter responsible for getting that number to the goal number. How am I going to make sure that happens? That gets me so invested in the success of what she's putting out there because I know I have a direct contribution.

Becky Mollenkamp (18:24.472)
to making it happen. So when she reaches that finish line, it's gonna be more than a, yeah, you did it. It's gonna be, we did it. We made it happen. We made this happen for you. I'm so excited about this new way of approaching things. And if you're in a mastermind and if you're thinking more about collective action and mutual aid and things like that in the current climate, as so many of us are, it's something to think about. But also how else can you be doing similar things?

One other thing we're doing inside this group is a mutual aid fund. We're pooling our money. We're basically paying dues to be a part of the group. Each of us gets to choose how much, putting it in. One of us, me, is the keeper of those funds. And then every quarter, because there's four of us, each quarter, one of us gets the total payout of those collected funds. We're each going to get back basically what we put in, although there's some differences there because every group gets to decide how they handle mutual aid.

Some I may take a little less, others may take a little more, but in the end we're all getting this payout as a way to say, $100 a month helps, but how much more helpful would it be to get $1,200 all at once? And if I'm not great at saving and having this community doing it with me and getting to celebrate each other as we get our big payday or $1,200 and spend it on something that makes a dent, like actually paying down some debt or.

getting a car repair or paying a month of a mortgage or whatever it looks like, that is exciting and it feels good to be a part of that. So that's one way that mutual aid can look and that's what we're doing inside of this group and I'm really excited about that as well. A couple of other things though I just wanna share like if you're thinking about something different, Taina on Messy Liberation on a recent episode suggested like a community pantry or community resource sharing. That could look like literally a food pantry.

has cuts to snap and other things are looming or happening, that can become even more critical. So, but not just contributing to your local food bank, that can be great. Food banks are operated in very different ways. It's important to learn about that so that you know what's happening and how they're being operated, how much that food's traveling, how it's being allocated and all of that, especially if you're giving money or food. But looking locally, the more local you can...

Becky Mollenkamp (20:40.728)
go the better usually on for the environment and for the people and to extend your money. But also thinking about just inside of your own community. Is there are there things that you're all using that to help the environment to also help your pocketbooks. It might be just as useful to have one that you all share things like potentially a lawnmower. Maybe your block.

If you have neighbors that you're close with, there's four or five of you, you don't all have to mow the same time. Maybe you have one lawn mower, it's a little nicer and you all share it and your contribution is just gassing it up. Similar to something like a chainsaw or other tools that you don't use that often or that you use regularly but not needing every moment of the day, a KitchenAid mixer. What are the things that you maybe need but don't need that often? A tent.

How often do you camp? Maybe not that often. So maybe you can borrow or you have, you guys can collect a spreadsheet of saying, here's the things I have. And if you go around to the people you feel comfortable with in your community to start creating kind of like we did in those early pandemic times of creating pods, where you can say, here's the resources that we can share, right? So here's what I have, here's what you have. We can check them out like a library system or we can do it all on the honor system, but just knowing that these things are available and that you don't have to spend your money.

You don't have keep it in your space. You don't have to have yet another item that barely gets used that's now wasted, you know, packaging and the resources to make it and all of that. Similarly, with a food pantry in case of need, having some non-perishables that are collected. And if one family suddenly someone loses their job or they're struggling that month where they have a place they can go.

without shame, without judgment, not to be questioned with people who love and care about them to go get access to toiletries, to some non-perishable food, things like that. So that's another way that mutual aid can look. It doesn't have to just look like money. It can look like resources. It can look like time. It could also look like having a spreadsheet or something again that collectively as a community, know, like.

Becky Mollenkamp (22:58.008)
Here's the person who can babysit or the people who can babysit. And in exchange for that, here's the people that can mow the lawns. Here's the people who can clear the driveways. Here's the people who can do painting, home repairs, know, whatever those things are. So thinking about the way you can also split services amongst each other, to be caring for the people in your world, to help other humans get through these times together, that we can help each other when things are hard and they're gonna be.

And thinking about it in your business as well, in your business community, you could do a similar thing with your business community. Here's the services I'm willing to throw into this pot and other people doing the same and being able to pull from those to help each other. But I want to just point out that somebody on Blue Sky also mentioned that mutual aid doesn't have to look like all of these really well organized things. What does mutual aid really mean? It means caring for other humans, right? That's what it means.

So it looks like opening the door for other people. It looks like when you see someone in need and you stop to help them change their tire without expecting money. But it also looks like if somebody stops to help you when your tire's flat, offering them whatever you have in your pocket, five bucks, 10 bucks, 30 bucks, right? Mutual aid is anything that's helping other people outside of all the systems in which we operate, outside of capitalist expectations. So I am leaving this random

rambling episode encouraging you to think about what are the ways that in your business and in your personal life that you can begin to subvert these harmful, toxic, oppressive systems without having to have those systems dismantled. Continuing to fight to dismantle them, yes, but while they remain, what are the ways that you can challenge it in your day-to-day life? One other last quick example as I look at the

books on my shelf. Little libraries, little free libraries, libraries are under threat. First of all, make sure you're a member of your local library. They're a great source of mutual aid. So many things are available there that you don't have to go buy, that you don't have to, you know, harm the environment, lose money over. You can get toys. You can get, there are so many things that people don't even realize are available at their local library. So, but also those little free libraries. If you don't have one in your neighborhood,

Becky Mollenkamp (25:20.61)
Maybe you can make one. If you do have one, remember to stock it. Remember to go check it. That's another example of what mutual aid looks like. It looks like I have an extra book rather than selling it or taking it to goodwill or throwing in the trash. Worst case scenario, I'm gonna go put it in this little library. Someone else can now read that book. Creating a lending library in your neighborhood. So.

Think of the ways that you get to challenge these systems because there are so many things that we can be doing when we're feeling helpless and hopeless and overwhelmed by the state of the world. They seem small. That little library doesn't seem like a big action. But that child who gets to read a book who might not have otherwise, that person who was like, can't afford to get a book, but now I can, or I don't have transportation to the library, but I could walk the block to get it out of this free library, it makes a difference.

It shares knowledge, entertainment, joy. So think about the small things you can be doing and challenge yourself, maybe each month, challenge yourself to say, what's the one new thing I'm gonna integrate into my month? The new way I'm gonna integrate mutual aid, collective action into my business and my life. Let's start thinking outside of the box and those who've always been doing it, thank you for the ways that you're teaching those of us for whom it's new to do this.

And I'm going end this by saying, I'm going end this with an ask, which is we are doing a share the love campaign for feminist founders. If you enjoy this private podcast feed, if you like the weekly newsletter with news through the feminist lens, business news through the feminist lens, if you are able to attend our events and enjoy having community of other feminists, other

free thinkers, other people who are trying to disrupt the systems from within, other people who want to challenge business to be different and better. Please share this newsletter, share Feminist Founders with others. look how off the cuff we are. The dog's barking because somebody knocked on the door. Please share it. That's all we ask is share this with somebody else. And if you share, if you get five people to sign up through your share link, which you can do in the email, there's an easy way to share in the emails.

Becky Mollenkamp (27:38.348)
If they sign up, if you get five people, you'll get a free month of membership in the Feminist Founders Society, and we'd love to have you. So thank you so much for listening to this. Clearly, I need to go check the door because the dog's barking at somebody. And thank you for being a paid subscriber.