Raise Your Voice Blog | Nicole Clark Consulting

1 Jun, 2022

Ask Nicole: Pros & Cons of Naming Your Business After Yourself

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2022-06-01T10:39:36-04:00June 1st, 2022|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting, Reflections|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

Today marks 6 years since leaving my employer to run my business full time.

While I no longer talk about the ins and outs of running a business anymore, today is an exception.

Six years ago, I was more excited, more hopeful, less secure in whether this will work out, and restless.

Today, I’m more confident, more stable, pleased with how things have worked out, and still restless.

The restlessness comes in large part due to thinking about the future, what comes next, and how I want my business to live beyond me.

One of the most important tasks of starting a business is coming up with your business name. Since I wanted to focus more on what services I wanted to offer, I kept it simple: Nicole Clark Consulting.

Six years later, I’m considering changing my business name.

Much like a newborn baby, coming up with a name that resonates and speaks to your business’ mission can be daunting.

But what’s in a name? Here are my pros and cons for naming a business after yourself:

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4 May, 2022

How to Support Your Local Abortion Fund

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2022-05-04T10:27:24-04:00May 4th, 2022|Categories: Equity & Justice|Tags: Abortion, Abortion Funds, reproductive justice|0 Comments

Late Monday night, a leaked draft decision from the United States Supreme Court confirmed what many in the reproductive justice and abortion rights movement have known: Roe v Wade (1973) will be overturned, making abortion care extremely restricted and in some cases, illegal throughout the U.S.

While this was anticipated by many reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations, it doesn’t take away the worry of how this will disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and low-income people, youth, queer people, and others that live at the margins. And not just from a health care perspective.

The decision isn’t final yet, and most likely won’t be until Summer 2022. Presently, 26 states have laws in place that are poised to ban abortion procedures. Called “trigger laws” , these states will move to outlaw abortion the second Roe falls.

Until then, access to abortion care is still a constitutional right in the United States. Depending on where you are in the States, access has been dwindling for some time now. Instead of supporting paid family leave, universal health care, subsidized child care, and other economic and financial safety nets, legislators continue to restrict our right to access. And there’s no coincidence that states with the most restrictive abortion policies also have fewer policies supporting pregnancy, children, and families.

My consulting business began as a blog for me to share my thoughts about feminism and reproductive justice. At the core of the work remains the fundamental belief that everyone has the right to access whatever health care they need, and to determine their sexual and reproductive lives.

Do your part to raise your voice anyone that needs an abortion by supporting your local abortion fund.

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6 Apr, 2022

Ask Nicole: Applying Reproductive Justice Beyond Programs & Services

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2022-04-05T09:26:50-04:00April 6th, 2022|Categories: Equity & Justice|Tags: Ask Nicole, Capacity Building, reproductive justice|0 Comments

Reproductive Justice presents an added layer to how organizations engage and hold themselves accountable to the communities they work with. While program design, monitoring and evaluation go hand in hand, it can be difficult to envision how this framework looks beyond programs and services.

From program feedback to developing leadership opportunities, it’s easier to see how to apply RJ to your programming, services, and data driven processes like research and evaluation.

But not everyone in your organization works in these departments.

If Reproductive Justice is an organizing framework that centers the leadership, perspectives and voices of people typically at the margins, how can this be applied in every area of your organization?

Let’s look at one example: Health insurance coverage.

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23 Mar, 2022

Try This: Reproductive Justice & Program Design

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2022-03-23T13:02:14-04:00March 23rd, 2022|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: Monitoring and Evaluation, program design, reproductive justice, Try This|0 Comments

Try this activity, and let me know how it goes for you.

I partnered with a client organization to engage staff and board of directors in understanding the Reproductive Justice framework, and its application to organizational programming and other areas respective areas.

We started with a RJ 101 session in December 2021, followed by a more advanced training for staff in January 2022.

During the January training, each program was presented, and we discussed, using the insights from the RJ 101 training, how each program currently embodies RJ values and principles OR how the program can apply these values and principles.

In comparison to the Reproductive Health and Rights models, Reproductive Justice is an organizing framework, prioritizing intersectionality and the leadership of communities of color and other marginalized identities to challenge and change structural inequities (Forward Together, 2005).

While the RJ framework is easy to understand and more relevant compared to the “pro choice” vs “pro life” debate, strategizing how to apply the framework outside of traditional community organizing contexts can be a challenge.

So, how can your programs prioritize the voices and leadership of the communities your organization supports?

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone responsible for developing programs and services
Anyone responsible for leading and participating in program evaluation activities

Here’s what you need:

Set aside a full day (or several days) for strategizing, where you and your staff can work uninterrupted (as we’re still in a pandemic, determine how this will work for an in-person setting or a virtual setting) Make sure to schedule breaks
Whatever setup you use to capture your process (laptop, pen and paper, whiteboard, etc.) but make sure it’s kept in a place that you can refer back to

The steps:

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9 Mar, 2022

Self Care Corner: Representation Burnout

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-09-28T14:57:45-04:00March 9th, 2022|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: Burnout, DEI, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Self Care Corner|0 Comments

I’ve been putting off writing this blog post for nearly 2 years. Mostly because it’s complicated to talk about.

Representation burnout.

I first came across this term via Shine’s article “Why We Need to Talk About – and Recognize – Representation Burnout” by Martha Tesema.

The article was posted a year before George Floyd was murdered in May 2020. The day after his murder, I facilitated a partnership meeting for a client organization. I joined the Zoom meeting several minutes early with the partnership co-leads, after spending the day looking at news coverage of George’s murder.

I admitted to them that I wasn’t fully present, yet I still wanted to fully show up. I also admitted it at the start of the meeting with the partners.

In Nonprofit Quarterly article “The Hidden Cost of DEI Work –And What to Do About It,” , co-author Tiloma Jayasinghe asks questions that perfectly sums up how I often feel:

What if I, the professional facilitator, break down in tears in front of a full Zoom room of clients because this work, and the stakes if it fails, feels like I am letting BIPOC people down and ruining this small opening for workplace liberation?

How am I supposed to cope with race equity work when another Black trans woman was murdered today, and/or last night another Asian elder was hit and painfully injured on the Lower East Side of New York City, and/or how many hundreds of Black people have been murdered since brother George Floyd took his last breath? Where is the outrage for them?

When and how do I just pause and stop so that I can rest, recharge, so that I can be on this journey for the long haul?

“The Hidden Cost of DEI Work–And What to Do About It” by Andrea J. Rogers and Tiloma Jayasinghe (Nonprofit Quarterly, 2021)

When people see me, they see a Black woman, because we’re visual. Getting to know me, you’ll discover that I’m a Black cisgender heterosexual woman. Going deeper, you’ll discover that I’m a Black cisgender heterosexual woman, from the south, an identical twin, has a bachelors degree from a HBCU and a masters degree from an Ivy League, became motherless at age 17, grew up in Christianity, full time self employed for 6 years, a New York City transplant for 11 years, now resides in Washington, DC, and so on.

Like you, I have multiple identities and lived experiences. Also like you, the identity that gets the most prominence largely depends on the space I walk into.

And sometimes, these identities are the only reasons we’re allowed into spaces in the first place.

How do we deal with this?

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Ask Nicole: Pros & Cons of Naming Your Business After Yourself

How to Support Your Local Abortion Fund

Ask Nicole: Applying Reproductive Justice Beyond Programs & Services

Try This: Reproductive Justice & Program Design

Self Care Corner: Representation Burnout

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