Miki Agrawal
speaker
182 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Miki Agrawal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, I mean, we also just launched our nonprofit this year, Belong Center, to end loneliness. But I think really, you know, that's our biggest pandemic of our time, is that we are a lonely population. We, you know, the foundations of our society are pushing us to be in our, you know, alone homes, in our alone cities, in our alone offices, in our work-at-home alone spaces.
And, you know, we are less and less sort of meeting in social spaces. And so... to me, these third spaces like Daybreaker, you know, where you get to go and you get to just, like, dress up and meet people all ages. We've had Jane Goodall come to Daybreaker, you know, studying a new type of human or infant, you know, down to, you know, lots of pregnant women or little toddlers in their carriers.
And it's just, it's an intergenerational community. And I really believe that, you know, when we silo, the reason why people don't belong is I think we often silo you know, people based on age groups. You're millennials, you're Gen Zs, you're, you know, Gen X, you're a boomer.
It's when you actually mix all the groups and the humans together, when you have, you know, all these generations learning and supporting and modeling and sort of teaching each other in that way. It just makes for just a much more cohesive, rich community experience.
Yeah, and just kind of like off that, when I think about the way we built Things versus the way we built TUSHY is a very, very stark difference where I think it was like all young white women, you know, mostly. And while it was obviously a period product, so it was a certain way, but it did create a bit of a siloed experience and expression versus when TUSHY was built,
we made a very, very clear point to make it age diverse, race diverse, gender diverse, like just super, super diverse across all three race, gender, and age. And the level of cohesiveness, the ideation, the camaraderie, the respect, it's just a different, much more beautiful thing.
And so... When things are homogenous, when things are one way homogenous, it's hard to feel a sense of belonging because there's going to be competition, there's going to be jealousy.
If they're the same age, they look the same, they dress the same, then eventually going to be like, you know, someone's going to, oh, her eyelashes are longer than mine. Or she got a promotion, I didn't, or she does, or whatever.
versus like, there's a much more rich, cohesive, you bring this perspective, that perspective, there's, you know, a wisdom from the age, or there's like new wisdom for the youth, like, and it's a learning from each other constantly.
And, you know, like, as we build all the next future things, it's like age, there is something about diversity of inclusion, like there is actually, there's a reason it works.
And it's not because it's like, check the box. It actually works better. Makes for a more rich, a better, creative, collaborative experience.
And I wrote a book called Belong. And really, I just think that we know why belonging is so important, but we don't know how. How do you belong? Like, what is, you know, what are the best ways, you know, to belong?
And to me, it's like the moments that are the happiest in our lives are when weddings, you know, parties, like birthdays, like all these moments we get to dance, we get to dress up, we get to celebrate life. And so that's sort of, you know, to me, Daybreaker is sort of that wedding birthday, you know, kind of gathering, we get to dress up and have fun with the sun and tuck you in by 10 p.m. Yeah.
Yeah. So Belong Center, you know, it's a national nonprofit where we launched a program across all 50 states already. I mean, just in the last year alone. And we're a brand new nonprofit, but we've been, you know, I think press and media love us because...
Again, everyone talks about why ending loneliness is important, but no one is actually boots on the ground building centers, creating the programs, doing the work to actually end loneliness. And so we've launched programs including Belong Circles.
So it's a curriculum-based, facilitator-led Belong Circle where it's a 75-minute circle where you meet once a month in whatever city or state that you're in.
And in that 75-minute circle, you're getting to know one another, you're meeting each other, you're working on different strategies on how to make friends, how to connect with one another, you're bonding with each other, you're doing somatic practices. And by the end of it, you walk out of a belong circle and you're like, I don't feel lonely, I feel more connected, I feel more hopeful.
I feel like I can actually go out and learn. I know how to make new friends now. I know exactly what to do. I'm going to throw my first dinner party. I'm going to create an event experience to go and do that in my little community where I live. And so I'm just really excited about this nonprofit because we get to teach people in so many ways. There's not one silver bullet to ending loneliness.
There's so many ways that we need to approach this topic. But we have the Circles program. We have a... a block party challenge that we're launching next year. We're inviting America to revitalize a block party. I love the block party. A block party in your neighborhood with a sprinkler and a thing to get to know your neighbors. So we're building a whole block party challenge next year.
We have a belong bench, these yellow circular benches, where you see just benches that are straight and you're linearly sitting. I sponsored one in Austin. Nikki's a sponsor of one of these. But imagine like when you sit on a bench at a park, you're just sitting straight looking forward, not looking at each other. So we built these yellow benches that are circular.
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