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I Am Because You Are: Renée Ọmọladé on Mothers, Children, and the Economy
Renée Ọmọladé, a Christian leader, co-founder of consulting group Listen to Your Mothers, former director of Boston Community Hub Schools, and current Program Officer of Educational Opportunities and Community Schools at United Way, is also a lifelong Boston student constantly learning from the city and outlines what is possible through engaging community members in schools, in the workplace, and in families to support economic mobility. Her holistic approach to community development involves working across systems, levels, and interpersonal exchanges. Ujima Editorial Manager Alula Hunsen spoke with Renée to learn more about why it matters to her to work across these levels, and how supporting our families means supporting our economies.
How do you feel like your background and how you show up as a person have developed over time, alongside your career in service?
I stand on the shoulders of giants: I come from a family of activists, innovators, architects, and musicians. My grandfather, Alan Glover, is a jazz musician and author from Brooklyn, NY. He was a freedom rider and did a lot of organizing in the South during the Black Arts Movement. He and I are working on a book together that is an intergenerational conversation on activism, politics, and African-American history, in my free time. My great-grandmother, Benona Bradford, was the first chairwoman of the NAACP in New York, and she actually was the founder of Club 100 for the NAACP.
I grew up in Boston, in Castle Square, in the South End. While our community is often framed as poor or violent, I learned so much just growing up in the hood about community, loyalty, honesty, respect, and looking out for other people -- these things shape the leader I am today. I also grew up going to Union Baptist church in Cambridge; going to Boston Latin School was my first time being in a predominantly white space. That was my first time really reflecting on where I was because I grew up in an environment where I thought certain things were normal: gunshots, interactions with the police—that's just a part of many people's daily experiences, and were a part of mine. At BLS is where I realized that wasn’t “normal”.
Based on what I saw in my community, I always wanted to be a lawyer, but in college I failed my first political science class and switched to sociology because I enjoyed the study of society and how societies work. I remember learning about the creation of what we called the projects, why they were even called the projects, the development of the New Deal, and all of these things that shaped our society and that I benefited from. I learned about labeling theory and how others label us impact who we become. Throughout my career, I've found myself consistently at the intersection of systems change and the everyday: the interpersonal, the human level. When I got my first job, I had a blonde-tipped afro-mohawk, and someone told me I couldn’t get a job like that; I said, “Well, I don’t want that job then.” My career has been about being authentic and redefining professionalism so that the little brown girls just like me can show up in a space because I've done that, right?
I'd love to hear more about your decision to work with mothers and with children, specifically and simultaneously, in your work with Listen to Your Mothers and your work with Community Schools.
If we think about the trajectory of life, I come back to Ubuntu: I am because you are. The child becomes the adult: you have to address both at the same time to build an ecosystem that will be successful in the future. As I work to support students in being able to thrive academically and be ready for a career in life through community schools, my Listen to Your Mother’s work addresses supporting working environments that are ready for the next generation of leaders.
This integrated approach is really present in your work with the Boston Community Hub Schools, and now your work supporting Community Schools at the United Way. What’s the approach behind this model for education, and how did this project get started?
There are multiple roots for the idea behind Community Schools. One is the Hull House Model, which comes from Jane Addams and reformers out in Chicago: producing the neighborhood as a hub for education, social reform, childcare. Freedom Schools are another root: the Freedom Stay-Outs and Freedom Schools organized in Roxbury, where parents and teachers designed curricula and classrooms in a way that worked for students across race, building in community accountability and decision-making.
With the Community Schools movement now, we’re asking: how can we better integrate our community members and resources into our schools, to make the schools stronger? There are a lot of other education reform movements that have been implemented over the last several decades but the latent effect of those were that they deepened inequities. Take school desegregation: when we desegregated schools, white kids didn't go to the black schools. The black kids went to the white schools. Majority-Black schools shut down. Black teachers were laid off. And Black kids were educated in schools that they were never welcomed into, they were reassigned into. They were educated by people who often don't understand their experience or how to teach them. The Garrity decision to desegregate schools was supposed to diversify the teacher's workforce, and never did. Data shows students of color actually perform better when they're taught by educators that look like them, right? Immigration has had an impact in public education, too: there are many districts in gateway cities, urban districts, with a teaching workforce that is predominantly white and cannot fully support the diversity of perspectives coming from their immigrant communities.
The No Child Left Behind Act was designed to incentivize schools that performed well, but you need more resources to do better [editor’s note: No Child Left Behind re-applied and updated school funding legislation from Lyndon B. Johnson, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), requiring that schools perform well via standardized testing to unlock access to federal funding]. So the incentivization rewarded schools that already had resources to do well [perform well on tests]; some schools tried to cream the crop, removing students who do not perform highly. The goals of desegregation and No Child Left Behind were both to better resource our students. Community Hub Schools take a different approach, addressing the whole community, the whole child, and the whole family, understanding that an individual's ability to learn is more than just academic instruction. It is also about the social conditions in which they learn. The instruction at Boston Public Schools, the curricula, are very rigorous. But a rigorous curriculum without students who are able to absorb it because they need to meet their basic needs doesn’t work.
Community Hub Schools help create better conditions for learning: making learning more culturally affirming, making sure that young people have access to integrated supports, food access, clothing access, language access. Making sure that families are empowered as decision-makers, is key, too–and leveraging resources in our communities. Not just what administrators in a building may see as a resource, but listening to the community members themselves to identify what resources are needed. While I was at BPS, my colleague from the Greater Boston YMCA, Claire Kaiser, and I developed an Assets and Opportunities Assessment (AOOA), to identify gaps and resources in the school community and then work with their Community School Coordinator to address their needs. The Community Schools all have Community School Coordinators: teachers handle classroom instruction, social workers work at the student level, family liaisons work at the family level, but the coordinators work across all levels to identify resources that meet students’, families’, and neighborhoods’ needs.
Now that I work at the United Way, I’m working on Community Schools to support our overall mission to increase economic mobility across the Commonwealth—you can’t increase economic mobility without better preparing young people for their futures, to be able to thrive in their economies.
I'm curious about how you're seeing schools develop relationships with community partners and with other institutions to facilitate some of that resource generation and those relationships that extend beyond the school building.
Each local economy is so unique, so schools form their own relationships based on what makes sense for them. At Mario Umana, they're working with the East Boston Social Centers, but they're also working with local parents who are DJing events at the school, bringing in food for events. In Mattapan, schools have barbers coming in to cut hair, or another school is bringing a skating rink to the school to celebrate attendance. We have partnerships with universities, too; for example, UMass Boston is the lead partner for the Ruth Batson Academy, another Boston Community Hub School. It's really about what each school community wants and needs.
One thing I really appreciate about your work is you seem to be balancing working with statistical data and evidence, with an approach that goes against that way of abstracting us into numbers and figures who things happen to. Particularly with schools and workforces, it often feels like the only policy conversation we can have is through numbers, and not through addressing people, families, communities—your approach is really refreshing in this way across your work with schools and mothers, intentionally addressing students and mothers.
The reality is, one hundred percent of human beings in this world come from their mother, right? <laughs> You came from a womb, period point blank. So we actually must protect mothers and children, there is no path to life or to growth or to any of those things without the mother. We have to honor that [relationship]. The mother should be so sacred to our society because of that.
Through COVID, we’ve seen a shift where people recognize and see life as so fragile, as a collective. Everybody's looking at everything differently. And if we are pretending we're not, we're failing. So the perspective of the mother across these two spheres really, I guess comes from that.
Mothers are essential to the workforce. They are essential to our economies. And when we get rid of them from our economies, our economies suffer and fail. Data actually shows that: when we get rid of mothers from the C-Suite, we lose a particular perspective that's important. So we need to turn to mothers to understand how we create conditions and spaces and environments where mothers can thrive. Data and personal perspectives, data and supporting people as people, are not mutually exclusive. In fact, if we ground ourselves in data, we actually find that supporting moms improves our KPIs. If we actually truly were who we say we were in terms of being data informed <laughs>, we would do things a lot differently.
Let’s talk more about your work with mothers and supporting them with data: what is the founding story of Listen to Your Mothers?
My co-founder, Miriam, and I worked together in Boston Public Schools in the partnerships office. In her experience as a new working mom, leading the budget office in Boston Public Schools, she found that their workplace policies were not at all accommodating what she needed to be there for her family, so she left. And a lot of people said to her, “why didn't you stay? I thought if anyone could figure it out, it’d be you—if you couldn't figure it out, then who can?”
I remember her saying, “Renée, I have this idea. I left the workforce. I got all these questions. I wanna do a survey. We should ask people what their experiences have been as working moms, and share the data.” And I'm like, “absolutely. We should do a survey, let's do it.” Miriam connected me with the rest of the team, and we launched the survey; we still use it to inform our work. We surveyed more than 300 moms and asked them questions about their experiences, their challenges, and what they would hope for. And we published our first report in 2023, our Working Mothers Speak report. Now, we’re finding ways to use the data to shift workplaces to better serve mothers and employers, simultaneously, and we consult.
How can we as employees and employers better listen to our mothers, and turn this active listening into support for mothers in the workplace?
We work with employers to actually survey the parents they have on staff, and we ask: what do your mothers want and need? The number one thing that comes up is having a flexible work policy: being able to pick up children when needed, having an adaptive schedule to accommodate changing needs during the work week. Mothers also really felt connected to managers who supported them—the manager-employee relationship is so important. Most mothers in the report said if their manager supported them, they would stay in the workplace, but if their manager was unsupportive or if they left, then mothers will leave, too.
Sometimes we’ll run into misperceptions: folks will think that a flexible work environment means a lack of results, or a lack of accountability, but we think a lack of results actually comes from a lack of clear expectations, and we use the ladder of inference model to make clear why employers shouldn’t jump to conclusions about their employees. For instance, say Sally’s late to work. An employer might say “oh, Sally’s late, that’s why she’s not performing, and I’m gonna put her on a performance improvement plan.” But that’s not necessarily true; it might not even be true that Sally isn’t performing well! Maybe Sally has kids and their bus picks up at 9am, so she can’t possibly get to work at nine. We need more data, and we need to interpret it fairly to support parents. Especially with more and more employees working virtually; a lot of managers are uncomfortable with not knowing what their employees are doing.
If we want workplaces to be better for everyone, we can think about targeted universalism: if we design for working mothers, then we also design for working dads or other people who are caring for others or have responsibilities outside of their job, right? If we design those workplaces today, then the young people who go into the workplaces 15, 20 years later, they'll have a better experience than where we are now. So it’s future planning, for the young people who will become adults, and present planning for the adults taking care of young ones. You can work on them both at the same time.
What else are you working on?
I'm the chair of the board at Mothers for Justice and Equality. I've been working with them for ten years, with seven of those being on the board—we ensure the sustainability of the organization, and help steward the finances and growth. The CEO, Monalisa Smith, is a powerhouse. She has such a clear vision for the organization in terms of how we support mothers who may have lost a child to gun violence, supporting them in working through their trauma while also adding financial empowerment and workforce development to make sure that they can be whole and have access to opportunities. As a mother myself, and having grown up in a neighborhood with parents who have had this experience, I try to lean on my personal experiences to understand how I can support them. As a non-profit leader, I think about shifts in our landscape and how to diversify our funding sources; and we all work with Monalisa to make sure the board is reflective of multiple thoughts and perspectives that are important for us to have for the organization.
I'm also coming up with a model that I call High Grace High Accountability: it's a leadership mindset that argues that if we have high grace for individuals, but also high accountability, we will have the best results. I’ll be releasing that over the next year or so!
And then I also, in my spare time, <laughs>, developed a card deck for celebrating Kwanzaa. It's called Kwanzaa for Everybody—it’s a website for now, and soon I’ll develop it into a physical card deck to help people learn how to celebrate Kwanzaa.
Renée, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much, Alula. And tell Nia I said “what's up!” I'm going to text her right now.
Renée Ọmọladé (she/her) is a Christian leader and a lifelong Boston student constantly learning from the city. She is a mother of three boys, a partner, a sister, a daughter, and a friend to many. She is an alumna of Boston Latin School, earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, with a double minor in Africana Studies and Gender & Women's Studies, from Emmanuel College and is a candidate for her Master's in Public Policy at Northeastern University.
Committed to investing in the next generation of leaders, she is currently the Senior Director of Community Schools, at the United Way of Massachusetts Bay. Helping to expand a strategy that aims to organize the assets and resources of school communities to improve academic achievement. She is committed to inspiring the next generation of leaders having worked for organizations such as Boston Public Schools, Black Girls Rock!, Crittenton Women’s Union, and the Lewis Family Foundation having launched their Bigger Than My Block initiative, which aims to guide young people from “The Spine” (Dorchester, Roxbury & Mattapan) to positive college choices. Renée is also co-founder and Chief of Strategy & Impact for Listen to Your Mothers, a consulting firm that draws on the insights of working mothers to collaborate with business leaders to shift culture and implement practices that retain and grow talent. Through public policy, her ultimate goal is to impact how we structure systems to be anti-racist and to mitigate the perpetuation of societal norms that negatively impact communities of color. Renée is guided by two simple mottos, “I do not want to be a product of my environment; I want my environment to be a product of me,” & “reach as you climb.”
