Dr. Adriane Johnson-Williams

I'm not gonna work with you if I don't believe that you are ready to do the work.

And so we have to have a lot of conversations about the sacrifices it's gonna make, the sacrifices you're gonna have to make, the challenges you're gonna confront.

I'm doing well.

You did a great job with that intro.

I'm going to have to hire you to like, you know, lead everything I do whenever I show up.

I knew you were going to ask this question.

I did my research too.

I did my homework.

I'm a scholar.

And I've been thinking about it really deeply.

And I struggle to answer it.

I think at the core of it, I really fundamentally believe that every single human being has something beautiful and wonderful to offer.

And that the systems that we create as people, sometimes because we are tribal in some ways, because we are

threatened by all the different things, all the different isms that we have, we actually diminish our collective power.

We diminish what we can become as an entire human society because we don't value human beings.

And so I think that's my why.

I think that there should be nothing standing between any individual human being and their absolute best potential, selfishly, because I think that we would all benefit from it.

So I think my very first inkling was when I went away to boarding school.

So I went away to boarding school when I was 14 years old and I'm from Memphis, Tennessee, South Memphis.

And I had friends all in elementary school and junior high school, and I went to boarding school for the ninth grade.